Bombing sent grandmother on long quest

Bombing sent grandmother on long quest
Loss of two grandsons led Kathy Wilburn to travel country seeking the truth

By John C. Ensslin, News Staff Writer
It was an old-time church. It reminded Kathy Wilburn of the Southern Baptist congregation where she grew up in Del City, Okla.
But this place was different. First, there was the Star of David flag that members wiped their feet on as they entered.

Then there was the big bust of Adolf Hitler. And finally, there was the Nazi salute that ended the Sunday service inside an Aryan Nation compound in Idaho.
Wilburn, the redheaded grandmother of two small boys killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, was a long way from home.
But it was just one more stop for the 47-year-old former Internal Revenue Service worker on a journey that began with the April 19, 1995, blast that killed 168 people inside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
For six years, Wilburn has been on a personal search for the truth behind the bombing that killed her grandsons, Chase and Colton Smith.
The blond-haired boys, ages 3 and 2, were among the 19 children killed in a day-care center on the second floor of the building.

Before the bombing, Wilburn's life had little to do with investigative journalism. She was married to a certified public accountant.
"We were the kind of people who went to work every day, came home, played with our grandchildren and worked in the yard," Wilburn said last week.
"We had no political agenda. We were just average, middle Americans."
"On April 19, 1995, our lives were erased. We were left with new lives, with lives we hadn't chosen."
They quit their jobs. They attended the rials. Their search for answers about the bombing became all-consuming, Wilburn said.

In six years, Wilburn's journey has retraced the paths McVeigh and his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, took in the years and months leading up to the bombing. She's also explored many white-supremacist and anti-government groups -- such as the church in Idaho -- that formed a backdrop to McVeigh's actions.
She slept in the Dreamland Motel in Junction City, Kan., where McVeigh stayed days before the bombing.
She visited Elohim City, a compound in Oklahoma where McVeigh placed a call two weeks before the bombing.
She even walked through Terry Nichols' former home, where she peeked under a mattress.
Wilburn is convinced, as was her late husband, Glen, that the bombing was the work of a broader conspiracy than McVeigh and Nichols.

The couple helped lead a petition drive for an Oklahoma grand jury that looked for evidence of that conspiracy and found none.
Wilburn does not accept McVeigh's account that he acted alone. She was not surprised last week to read about McVeigh's claim that the children he killed were "collateral damage."
"McVeigh views himself like Patrick Henry -- a great patriot," Wilburn said.
"He can't afford to look at it as a murder, because then he would be facing an eternity in hell."

Some of her ideas have made her popular with some conspiracy theorists and unpopular with some families of other bombing victims.
Wilburn sees her work as just staying true to her late husband and her two grandchildren.
"I was willing to dance with the devil to get to the truth," she said.
Some of her research has been done for a LaPorte-based company that is making a documentary tentatively titled, A Cry for Justice: The Untold Story Behind the Oklahoma City Bombing."
The film, being produced by MGA Films, makes the claim that the Murrah Building had been targeted for bombing by a much larger group 12 years earlier.

It's the same film company that produced a video challenging the federal government's account of the deadly siege in Waco, Texas.
The film's director, Jason Van Vleet, says Wilburn has served as an inspiration.
"Kathy has inspired all of us to take a deeper look into the events that surrounded this thing."
Along the way, Wilburn has used some unconventional methods.

While reinterviewing several witnesses that the FBI had questioned, Wilburn wore a hidden wire and secretly recorded their conversations.
She also was not above playing the guilt card, as she did with one reluctant witness.
"Do you have children?" she asked. "I hope they're never murdered, and you're sitting across from someone who has information about their deaths and they won't talk to you."
The next stop on Wilburn's journey will be in Terre Haute, Ind., where McVeigh awaits death by lethal injection on May 16.
She plans to travel there with daughter Edye Smith to witness the execution.
Wilburn has mixed emotions about McVeigh's death, although sympathy is not part of the mix.
"I think McVeigh deserves to die," she said. "But I'm not for killing him, because with him dies the truth."
April 1, 2001

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