Deadly Secrets

Beyond the thousand-yard stare, beneath the buzz cut, there was another Timothy McVeigh. Now America finally gets to meet the real Oklahoma City Bomber, and hear his shocking account of his crime, as reported by McVeigh's fellow death row inmate, David Paul Hammer.

The Timothy McVeigh whom readers meet here is a disturbed, insecure man, obsessed with his sexual identity almost as much as with his celebrity. He is a ticking time bomb of vulnerablity in a prison setting, living every day in fear of his fellow inmates. Hammer has something McVeigh, the prison newcomer, needs: survival skills from a lifetime on the inside. McVeigh has something Hammer wants: the truth about the Oklahoma City Bombing. The astonishing result is a book that punctures the myth of Timothy McVeigh, the lone-wolf mastermind.

Government prosecutors told juries that McVeigh acted virtually alone, aided only by his convicted co-conspirator Terry Nichols. McVeigh tells Hammer a strikingly different story: that he had multiple accomplices, members of a bank robbery gang with skinhead politics known as the Aryan Republican Army. He names names. He also names other men he says helped plan the bombing at an Oklahoma religious compound, and paramilitary training camp, known as Elohim City. Most amazingly, McVeigh says he wasn't the mastermind of the conspiracy at all. He says he was an undercover agent, working for the federal government, in a sting operation that apparently went terribly wrong.

After McVeigh's execution, Hammer undertook a Houdini-like feat: to check out McVeigh's story while locked behind bars. Hammer turned up a wealth of fresh and compelling evidence. It's all here in this book, for readers to join the investigation of what really went down in the greatest cold case of them all.