This Day in History

 Jun 2, 1997:
McVeigh convicted for Oklahoma City bombing



Timothy McVeigh, a former U.S. Army soldier, is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

On April 19, 1995, just after 9 a.m., a massive truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The blast collapsed the north face of the nine-story building, instantly killing more than 100 people and trapping dozens more in the rubble. Emergency crews raced to Oklahoma City from across the country, and when the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later, the death toll stood at 168 people, including 19 young children who were in the building's day-care center at the time of the blast.

On April 21, the massive manhunt for suspects in the worst terrorist attack ever committed on U.S. soil resulted in the capture of Timothy McVeigh, a 27-year-old former U.S. Army soldier who matched an eyewitness description of a man seen at the scene of the crime. On the same day, Terry Nichols, an associate of McVeigh's, surrendered at Herington, Kansas, after learning that the police were looking for him. Both men were found to be members of a radical right-wing survivalist group based in Michigan, and on August 8, John Fortier, who knew of McVeigh's plan to bomb the federal building, agreed to testify against McVeigh and Nichols in exchange for a reduced sentence. Two days later, a grand jury indicted McVeigh and Nichols on murder and conspiracy charges.

While still in his teens, Timothy McVeigh acquired a penchant for guns and began honing survivalist skills he believed would be necessary in the event of a Cold War showdown with the Soviet Union. Lacking direction after high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and proved a disciplined and meticulous soldier. It was during this time that he befriended Terry Nichols, a fellow soldier who, though 13 years his senior, shared his survivalist interests.

In early 1991, McVeigh served in the Persian Gulf War and was decorated with several medals for a brief combat mission. Despite these honors, he was discharged from the army at the end of the year, one of many casualties of the U.S. military downsizing that came after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps also because of the end of the Cold War, McVeigh shifted his ideology from a hatred of foreign communist governments to a suspicion of the U.S. federal government, especially as its new elected leader, Democrat Bill Clinton, had successfully campaigned for the presidency on a platform of gun control.

The August 1992 shoot-out between federal agents and survivalist Randy Weaver at his cabin in Idaho, in which Weaver's wife and son were killed, followed by the April 19, 1993, inferno near Waco, Texas, which killed some 80 Branch Davidians, deeply radicalized McVeigh, Nichols, and their associates. In early 1995, Nichols and McVeigh planned an attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, which housed, among other federal agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF)--the agency that had launched the initial raid on the Branch Davidian compound in 1993.

On April 19, 1995, the two-year anniversary of the disastrous end to the Waco standoff, McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck loaded with a diesel-fuel-fertilizer bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and fled. Minutes later, the massive bomb exploded, killing 168 people.

On June 2, 1997, McVeigh was convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy, and on August 14, under the unanimous recommendation of the jury, he was sentenced to die by lethal injection. In December 2000, McVeigh asked a federal judge to stop all appeals of his convictions and to set a date for his execution by lethal injection at the U.S. Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana. McVeigh's execution, in June 2001, was the first federal death penalty to be carried out since 1963.

Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $200,000 for failing to warn authorities about McVeigh's bombing plans. In a federal trial, Terry Nichols was found guilty on one count of conspiracy and eight counts of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to life in prison. In a later Oklahoma state trial, he was charged with 160 counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree manslaughter for the death of an unborn child, and one count of aiding in the placement of a bomb near a public building. On May 26, 2004, he was convicted of all charges and sentenced to 160 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

This Day in History

 Jun 1, 1871:
John Wesley Hardin arrives in Abilene



John Wesley Hardin, one of the deadliest men in the history of the Old West, arrives in Abilene, Kansas, where he briefly becomes friends with Marshal Wild Bill Hickok.

Hardin revealed a tendency toward violent rages at an early age. When he was 14, he nearly killed another boy in a fight over a girl, stabbing his victim twice with a knife. A year later, he shot a black man to death after the two tangled in a wrestling match. By the time he finally went to prison in 1878, Hardin claimed to have killed 44 men. The outlaw may have been exaggerating, though historians have positively confirmed about half that number.

In 1871, when Hardin was 18 years old, a Texas rancher hired the young gunman as trail boss for a cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, Texas. Hardin was eager to get out of Texas--a few days earlier, he had murdered a Texas state police guard who was transferring him to Waco for a trial. Hardin needed to lay low, but he proved incapable of keeping his hot temper under control for long. During the cattle drive, a Mexican herd crowded Hardin's animals from behind. Hardin complained to the Mexican in charge of the other herd, and when the exchange grew heated, shot him through the heart.

When Hardin and his herd arrived at Abilene, Kansas, on this day in 1871, the town marshal, Wild Bill Hickok, was apparently unconcerned with prosecuting a murder that had taken place outside of his jurisdiction. To the contrary, he took an almost paternalistic interest in the young gunslinger--Hardin was 16 years his junior--and the two men struck up an uneasy friendship. Like many of the early western lawmen, Wildd Bill Hickok had won a formidable reputation by committing several killings of his own. He may have seen something of himself in Hardin, believing he was a hot-tempered young man who would eventually grow up to be a reasonably useful and law-abiding citizen. For his part, Hardin was simply proud to be associated with the celebrated gunfighter.

For several weeks, Hickok and Hardin drank and womanized together, but the marshal's faith in the basic decency of his young friend was ultimately undermined. During his stay in Abilene, Hardin rented a room at the American House Hotel. One night, a stranger in the next room began to snore loudly. Hardin became so annoyed that he began firing bullets through the wall to quiet him. The first bullet was high, and it merely woke the man. The second bullet silenced the unsuspecting stranger permanently.

Hardin realized that his friendship with Hickok would not save him. "I believed," Hardin later said, "that if Wild Bill found me in a defenseless condition, he would take no explanation, but would kill me to add to his reputation." Wearing only his undershirt, Hardin escaped through the hotel window and jumped down to the street. He spent the night hiding in a haystack, stole a horse at dawn, and returned to the cow camp. The next day he left for Texas, never to set foot in Abilene again.

Years later, after he had become a notorious outlaw, Hardin recalled that the Abilene murder had given rise to an exaggeration. "They tell lots of lies about me," he complained. "They say I killed six or seven men for snoring. Well, it ain't true, I only killed one man for snoring."

Hardin eventually served 15 years in the Huntsville, Texas, state penitentiary. He was pardoned in 1892 and made an unsuccessful attempt to go straight. In August 1895, he died after being shot in the back by an El Paso policeman who was looking to embellish his reputation as a gunman. Hardin was 42 years old.

This Day in History

 May 31, 1889:
The Johnstown Flood



In a river valley in central Pennsylvania, heavy rain and a neglected dam lead to a catastrophe in which 2,209 people die and a prosperous city, Johnstown, is nearly wiped off the face of the earth.

Johnstown, located at the confluence of the Little Conemaugh River and Stony Creek, was 14 miles downstream from Lake Conemaugh, a reservoir turned recreational lake that was owned and maintained by the prestigious South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. The sporting club, which catered to a wealthy clientele from nearby Pittsburgh, included Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick on its membership rolls. Lake Conemaugh was held back by the South Fork Dam, a large earth-fill dam that was completed by the club in 1881. By 1889, the dam was in dire need of repairs.

When several days of heavy rain struck the area in late May 1889, club officials struggled to reinforce the neglected dam, which was under tremendous pressure from the swollen waters of Lake Conemaugh. The dam began to disintegrate, and on May 31 the lake's water level passed over the top of the dam. Realizing that the dam's collapse was imminent, club officials sent riders down the valley to evacuate area residents. However, flooding was a familiar occurrence in the valley, and few Johnstown residents heeded the riders' desperate warnings. Most just took the same simple precautions they did when Little Conemaugh River flooded: They moved their belongings to the second story of their homes and settled down to wait out the storm.

At 3:10 p.m., the South Fork Dam washed away, drowning several laborers who were struggling to maintain it. Club officials on high ground watched awe-struck as 20 million tons of water went roaring down the valley toward Johnstown. The deluge swept through the communities of South Fork, Mineral Point, Woodvale, and East Conemaugh, accumulating debris, including rocks, trees, houses, barns, railroad cars, animals, and people, both dead and alive. By the time it reached Johnstown, at 4:07 p.m., the flood appeared as a rolling hill of debris more than 30 feet high and nearly half a mile wide. In a terrible swoop, the northern half of the city was swept away, sending some 1,500 demolished Johnstown buildings tumbling down with the roaring torrent.

It took 10 minutes for the waters of Lake Conemaugh to pass through Johnstown, and 2,000 people were drowned or crushed in the torrent. A few survivors were washed up along with numerous corpses several miles down the valley. At the old Stone Bridge in Johnstown, debris piled 40 feet high caught fire, and some 80 huddled survivors of the flood perished in the flames. A total of 2,209 died as a result of the disaster.

Among the survivors of the calamity, there was a scarcely an individual who had not lost a friend or relative in the Johnstown Flood. Despite the great scale of the tragedy, reconstruction of the devastated community began almost immediately, and Clara Barton and the American Red Cross constructed shelters for homeless residents while well-wishers around the country sent tons of relief supplies. The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was widely criticized for its failure to maintain the South Fork Dam, but no successful lawsuits were ever brought against the organization.

This Day in History

 May 30, 1997:
Jonathan Levin is tortured and killed by his former student



Jonathan Levin, a popular 31-year-old English teacher, is stabbed and shot to death in his Upper West Side apartment in New York City. The son of Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, Jonathan was known by many to be wealthy. When he did not show up for work, investigators searched his apartment and found his lifeless body bound to a chair with duct tape. Levin's bankcard was missing from his wallet, and $800 had been removed from his account around the time that he was killed.

Police learned from Levin's answering machine tape that Corey Arthur, a former student in Levin's remedial English class at William H. Taft High School in the Bronx, called Levin on May 30 to arrange a meeting. Apparently, Arthur and his accomplice, Montoun Hart, tortured Levin with a kitchen knife in order to get him to tell them his debit card code. They turned on the vacuum cleaner and stereo to cover up his screams.

Arthur, arrested a week after the murders, first claimed that he had been at Levin's apartment smoking crack when two other men came in and killed him. However, his story lost its credibility at trial when his fingerprints were found on the duct tape. Even still, Arthur denied being the one who pulled the trigger of the fatal shot.

Arthur was found guilty of second-degree murder and received 25 years to life in prison. Hart, despite his 11-page signed confession, was acquitted after convincing jurors that the confession had been coerced out of him when he was drunk.

This Day in History

 May 29, 2005:
Danica Patrick becomes first woman to lead Indy 500

On this day in 2005, 23-year-old Danica Patrick becomes the first female driver to take the lead in the storied Indianapolis 500.

Having previously distinguished herself in the Toyota Atlantic series, Patrick had qualified fourth--another best for a woman--for the 89th Indianapolis 500, only her fifth Indy Racing League event. (Toyota Atlantic served as a feeder system for the Champ Car Series, Indy's rival open-wheel racing circuit. Open-wheel cars are sophisticated vehicles built specifically for racing, with small, open cockpits and wheels located outside the car's main body.) Patrick entered the Indy 500 in a car co-owned by Bobby Rahal, winner of the Indy 500 in 1986, and David Letterman, the late-night talk show host. After a pit stop on the 79th lap of the 200-lap, 500-mile race, Patrick stalled her engine, falling from 4th to 16th place. She spent the next 70 laps climbing back into the top 10, then took the lead with 10 laps left in front of 300,000 screaming fans at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

When her team took a gamble that she could make it to the end without an additional pit stop, Patrick was forced to conserve fuel. With six laps left, British driver Dan Wheldon passed her. With his first Indy 500 win, Wheldon became the first Briton to claim victory at the event since Graham Hill in 1966. Patrick, meanwhile, finished in fourth place, behind Vitor Meira and Bryan Herta. Her stellar performance earned her Rookie of the Year honors and a place in the history books alongside Janet Guthrie, who exactly 28 years before--on May 29, 1977--had become the first woman to drive in the Indy 500. Three women before Patrick had driven in a combined 15 Indy 500 events; Guthrie was the previous top finisher, coming in ninth place in 1978.

Three years after Patrick's star-making turn at the Indy 500, she became the first woman to win an Indy Racing League event, defeating the two-time Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves by nearly six seconds in the Indy Japan 300. Having left her previous team a year earlier, Patrick had joined the team owned by Michael Andretti, son of the legendary driver Mario Andretti and a former racer himself. In a statement honoring Patrick's victory, fellow Indy driver Sarah Fisher linked the accomplishment with that of Guthrie and other trailblazing women: "Today marks the celebration for all of us who have chipped away at the barriers that many women have faced in fields that are dominated by men. To finally have a female win an open-wheel race is simply a progression of what Janet Guthrie started.

This Day in History

 May 27, 1941:
Bismarck sunk by Royal Navy



On May 27, 1941, the British navy sinks the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic near France. The German death toll was more than 2,000.

On February 14, 1939, the 823-foot Bismarck was launched at Hamburg. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler hoped that the state-of-the-art battleship would herald the rebirth of the German surface battle fleet. However, after the outbreak of war, Britain closely guarded ocean routes from Germany to the Atlantic Ocean, and only U-boats moved freely through the war zone.

In May 1941, the order was given for the Bismarck to break out into the Atlantic. Once in the safety of the open ocean, the battleship would be almost impossible to track down, all the while wreaking havoc on Allied convoys to Britain. Learning of its movement, Britain sent almost the entire British Home Fleet in pursuit. On May 24, the British battle cruiser Hood and battleship Prince of Wales intercepted it near Iceland. In a ferocious battle, the Hood exploded and sank, and all but three of the 1,421 crewmen were killed. The Bismarck escaped, but because it was leaking fuel it fled for occupied France. On May 26, it was sighted and crippled by British aircraft, and on May 27 three British warships descended on the Bismarck and finished it off.

This Day in History

 May 26, 1897:
Dracula goes on sale in London



The first copies of the classic vampire novel Dracula, by Irish writer Bram Stoker, appear in London bookshops on this day in 1897.

A childhood invalid, Stoker grew up to become a football (soccer) star at Trinity College, Dublin. After graduation, he got a job in civil service at Dublin Castle, where he worked for the next 10 years while writing drama reviews for the Dublin Mail on the side. In this way, Stoker met the well-respected actor Sir Henry Irving, who hired him as his manager. Stoker stayed in the post for most of the next three decades, writing Irving's voluminous correspondence for him and accompanying him on tours in the United States. Over the years, Stoker began writing a number of horror stories for magazines, and in 1890 he published his first novel, The Snake's Pass.

Stoker would go on to publish 17 novels in all, but it was his 1897 novel Dracula that eventually earned him literary fame and became known as a masterpiece of Victorian-era Gothic literature. Written in the form of diaries and journals of its main characters, Dracula is the story of a vampire who makes his way from Transylvania--a region of Eastern Europe now in Romania--to Yorkshire, England, and preys on innocents there to get the blood he needs to live. Stoker had originally named the vampire "Count Wampyr." He found the name Dracula in a book on Wallachia and Moldavia written by retired diplomat William Wilkinson, which he borrowed from a Yorkshire public library during his family's vacations there.

Vampires--who left their burial places at night to drink the blood of humans--were popular figures in folk tales from ancient times, but Stoker's novel catapulted them into the mainstream of 20th-century literature. Upon its release, Dracula enjoyed moderate success, though when Stoker died in 1912 none of his obituaries even mentioned Dracula by name. Sales began to take off in the 1920s, when the novel was adapted for Broadway. Dracula mania kicked into even higher gear with Universal's blockbuster 1931 film, directed by Tod Browning and starring the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi. Dozens of vampire-themed movies, television shows and literature followed, though Lugosi, with his exotic accent, remains the quintessential Count Dracula. Late 20th-century examples of the vampire craze include the bestselling novels of American writer Anne Rice and the cult hit TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.