If but for a missing license plate, state police might not have caught Timothy McVeigh, or at least not soon after the crime. At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Ninety minutes later, an Oklahoma State Trooper pulled McVeigh over for driving without a license plate. The trooper found a concealed weapon and arrested McVeigh—without even realizing he’d captured the nation’s public enemy #1, before anyone even knew McVeigh was public enemy #1.
In a museum now standing at the site of the Murrah Building, the infamous 1977 Mercury Marquis with the missing license serves as the centerpiece artifact in a gallery that recounts the story of McVeigh’s capture.
By this point in my visit, I was nearly overwhelmed by the museum’s emotional weight, piled on by an intimately immersive experience and heartbreaking exhibits. Even as I reeled from the story of the attack itself, there was no time to grieve—and I wanted to—as the museum guided me right into the investigation. After all, there had been no time to lose.
And there was McVeigh’s Mercury Marquis. And opposite, there was McVeigh’s mug shot. And there was Abraham Lincoln.
The t-shirt McVeigh was wearing at the time of his arrest—now on display—featured an image of Lincoln along with the words shouted by John Wilkes Booth during Booth’s escape from Ford’s Theater: “sic semper tyrannis.” The back of the shirt, not visible, featured a quote from Jefferson: “The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants.” I noticed that it did not say anything about innocent victims. Or children.
As McVeigh himself indicated, both quotes have become popular slogans for far-right militants and activists, although I prefer the term coined by journalists Dan Herbeck and Lou Michel as the title of their book about the bombing: “American Terrorist.”