The Oklahoma City bomber is dead and one mom regrets only that the man who killed her son didn’t suffer.
Peggy Broxterman remembers everything about the day Timothy McVeigh was executed for orchestrating the Oklahoma City blast 20 years ago that killed her son and 167 others.
“He died peacefully. You just wanted to go over and bop him on the nose,” Broxterman, 84, said of the domestic terrorist. “They just should have turned him over to the people, and we would have taken care of it.”
Special Agent Paul Broxterman’s third day at his new assignment with the Department of Housing and Urban Development was April 19, 1995. He was still settling in when McVeigh detonated a truck-sized fertilizer bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
The explosion shredded walls, pulverized concrete and opened a crater that residents of the Midwestern city would call simply “The Pit” in the aftermath. Searchers combing the ruins discovered Paul’s body after 13 days of digging.
His mother didn’t want an apology from McVeigh or his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols. All she wanted was for them to die so she could continue her life.
“I moved on the minute McVeigh was dead,” Broxterman told the Daily News. “That was my main objective.”
Nichols was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Broxterman was one of 10 victims’ relatives and blast survivors selected by lottery to witness McVeigh’s execution on June 11, 2001, at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Ind. An unwavering advocate for the death penalty, she considered the end of the mass murderer’s life as a welcome finish to the endless court battles. She feels the same way today as she prepares for Sunday’s 20th anniversary memorial in Oklahoma City.
“I would have liked to kill him,” Broxterman told The News. “You don’t realize the anger.”
Bud Welch was also there that day in Terre Haute, but remained outside in a small trailer away from the protesters. His 23-year-old daughter Julie was working as a Spanish translator for the Social Security Administration in 1995.
An avid traveler, Julie was fluent in five languages when the bomb ended her life. Bud Welch raged and drank too much for weeks and dreamed of killing McVeigh and Nichols.
One day, he decided that searing hatred is what drove men like McVeigh to kill his daughter. He decided that wouldn’t be him.
“On June 11, 2001, we took Tim McVeigh from his cage, and we killed him,” Welch told The News. “That didn’t bring me any peace. In fact, I felt revictimized.”
McVeigh, a disillusioned ex-soldier, planned the attack with Nichols, another anti-government zealot, for the two-year anniversary of the federal government’s siege of a compound in Waco, Texas.
Nichols was eventually sentenced to 161 life terms for conspiracy and manslaughter, but McVeigh was ordered to die after his 1997 conviction on federal murder charges. He dropped his appeals in late 2000 and requested he be put to death within 120 days.
U.S. Marshals escorted the 10 witnesses in secret to a motel 20 miles outside of Terre Haute the night before the execution to keep them away from the media and protesters who were gearing up for the first federal death in 38 years. Teams of psychiatrists and therapists joined the group at dinner, but the witnesses shrugged them off to keep their own company instead.
The small contingent rose at 5 a.m. the next day and boarded windowless vans bound for the prison. Broxterman had befriended Kay Fulton, whose brother, Paul Ice, was a senior special agent with the Customs Service when he was killed in the bombing.
The two Pauls had a number of things in common. Dark-haired and handsome, the young fathers served in the military and were building impressive careers in federal law enforcement. Paul Broxterman, 43, had grown up less than four hours away in Topeka, Kan. Paul Ice, 42, was a local boy, an Oklahoma City native.
Fulton was working just a few blocks away from the Murrah building in 1995 when the bomb exploded, and she looked out the window to see the smoke. She remembers the horror when someone told her it was the federal building.
“I live with it every day,” Fulton said. “Every day I think of Paul.”
Fulton and Broxterman each carried a picture of their Paul in Terre Haute as their escorts at the prison led them and the other witnesses into a small room with one-way glass. They pressed the pictures against the window as McVeigh, dressed all in white, was led to a chair just feet away. There were reports at the time that the women wanted McVeigh to see his victims as he died.
In reality, Broxterman and Fulton wanted their murdered loved ones to witness the end of the man who had killed them.
McVeigh said nothing but supplied a statement, the defiant 1875 poem by William Ernest Henley, “Invictus.”
“It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll,” the final verse reads. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
A few of the witnesses clapped when he was gone.
“It had been raining that morning, I think,” Fulton said. “We walked out, and it was like the sun had parted the clouds, and it was the biggest relief.”
The death of McVeigh was the end of a chapter for relatives such as Broxterman and Fulton who had spent years pushing for capital punishment in the case. They followed Nichols’ case to an unsatisfying close when he was ultimately spared the death penalty.
Broxterman and her family plan to attend Sunday’s memorial with thousands of others. She only goes every five years, because it’s too traumatic to go every year.
Fulton decided to slip in during the night more than a week before to avoid the crowds.
“I would like to be there for the anniversary,” Fulton said. “I would like to be there for every anniversary, but for me personally, I go there in the middle of the night to spend time with my brother.”
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/oklahoma-city-bombing-pain-intense-victims-kin-article-1.2190526