U.S. Senator Larry Craig was arrested last June. He was in a men’s restroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport trying to solicit an undercover cop for a tryst inside a stall.

What’s with the restrooms and rest areas on highways, anyway?

According to airport police, the Idaho Republican appeared to understand and know how to go about using signs to seek a bathroom stall rendezvous. He used under-the-divider hand motions and tried to play footsie with the cop.

At one point, the cop could see Craig staring at him through a crack in the stall door. In this creepy retelling, the police report said, “I could see Craig look through the crack in the door from his position. Craig would look down at his hands, fidget with his fingers, and then look through the crack into my stall again. Craig would repeat this cycle for about two minutes. I was able to see Craig’s blue eyes as he looked into the stall at me.”

Do you feel like you need a shower?

Craig denies “engaging in lewd conduct and contends that the plainclothes officer misconstrued his actions.”

Whatever.

Craig pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge and was fined $1,000 and sentenced to ten days in the Hennepin County lockup. He never served a day, under the terms that he keeps his ass—perhaps literally—out of trouble.

Just yesterday, Craig stood in front of a throng of reporters and, among other things, said, “I am not gay. Nor was I ever gay.”

Wonder if he was giving any hand signals while he spoke? Like the univresal “thumbs down” for his career?

When it’s confirmed that he has a compulsion, do you think it will be rehab or Jesus Christ for the senator?

[CR Note: This is an except from an interview with retired FBI Agent, Jon Hersley, that our friend Michelle Gray has done for Crime Rant. Jon was the FBI’s Lead Case Agent for the Oklahoma City bombing.  He was responsible for bringing the government’s case against Timothy McVeigh and it was his testimony before the Grand Jury that was instrumental in leading to McVeigh’s indictment. According to Michelle, Jon routinely turns down interview requests from the media and patently refuses to address any conspiracy theories. “It is unheard of to have an FBI Agent, retired or otherwise, and especially one of Jon’s standing, agree to talk to a blogger about any investigation,” Michelle told us, “let alone one as high profile and as important to American history as the Oklahoma City bombing is. In agreeing to speak with me, Jon went beyond his usual boundaries. Some of what he says has never appeared anywhere else before. And he not only discussed his book SIMPLE TRUTHS and the investigation, he also addressed conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists, explains who John Doe #2 is, comments on the use of insiders in investigations and eye-witness testimony, why Michael Fortier should have spent the rest of his life in prison, what kind of men and women are in the FBI, the glamorization by the entertainment industry and what it takes to be an agent. I hope that readers will come away with an interest in reading the book. I think they will leave being able to put a more human face on the FBI.”]

Guest Interview by Michelle Gray

On April 19, 1995 the people of Oklahoma City fell victim to the worst case of domestic terrorism in United States history, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building. 

Around the country we watched in stunned horror as rescue workers feverishly dug through the debris for survivors.  Hearts broke as we all bore witness to the most helpless of victims being pulled from the rubble.  The broken bodies of children; mere babies were among the dead.  And as we watched we all wondered the same thing, “Who could commit such an atrocious, unforgivable act – and why?”

Then the answer came.  This mass murder, this mass execution of innocents, was perpetrated by two home grown, military veterans from Middle America whose sole motivation was an irrational deep seated hatred for the United States government.  But with Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh being too cowardly to speak on their own behalf, and explain their unfathomable actions, some individuals became reluctant to accept the government’s answer as being the truth.

In order to set an accurate record of the investigation and dispel the inaccurate and erroneous information being circulated regarding the bombing of the Murrah building and the subsequent FBI investigation, retired FBI Special Agents Jon Hersley and Larry Tongate teamed up with Bob Burke, a local Oklahoma author, and wrote a book entitled Simple Truths.  It is considered to be the definitive book on the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing.  The authors have declined any financial interest in the book, it was strictly a non-profit project, and it is the only accounting told by the two FBI agents who were the closest to the investigation.  The two individuals who were assigned as the lead case agents responsible for bringing the government’s case against Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, and who worked the case from start to finish.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jon Hersley about the book, the investigation, conspiracy theorists and law enforcement in general.  Jon’s position within the investigation was as the Lead Case Agent, responsible for the United States government’s case against Timothy McVeigh.  Agent Hersley was involved in the investigation for its entire duration, from beginning to end, and it was his testimony before the Grand Jury that was instrumental in leading to McVeigh’s indictment. 

It is my hope that you, the reader, will take from this interview a renewed interest in what was the largest criminal investigation ever conducted in American history.  A desire to read Simple Truths and find out what the individuals who actually investigated the Oklahoma City bombing have to say, even if all you do is borrow the book from your local library.  And, I also hope that you will leave being able to put a more human face on the FBI, and the individuals who work tirelessly to investigate, and solve, the crimes you read about every day.

Michelle Gray:  What happened?

Jon Hersley:  It had been a clear day, you could see all the way down to the Oklahoma City area from the windows of our building.  I was on the drug squad in Oklahoma City at the time.  I was actually in the FBI office up on the 16th floor, where my squad was, when the bomb exploded.

Our building was probably four or five miles from downtown Oklahoma City and I remember hearing this sound, this tremendous noise.  I went and looked out the window and saw this tremendous cloud of dark, black smoke coming from the downtown Oklahoma City area.  Of course, we didn’t know it was a bomb then.  We didn’t know what had happened.  I remember, we were talking in the office that there must have been a gas explosion or something.  But then it was just a matter of minutes before we started hearing on the news that something terrible had happened in downtown Oklahoma City, and that the Alfred P. Murrah Building had blown-up down there.

Once we found out what happened we knew we were going to have an investigation that we were going to have to coordinate.  We knew we were going to have people and supplies coming in from out of state, responders and rescuers, and such.  I was initially tasked with staying at the office to begin coordinating everything, so it was about two days before I went down to the building site. 

When I got down to Oklahoma City my first reaction was that it looked like a war zone.  I was very upset and angry that someone did this.  I thought, “Who could do such a thing?”  It was just terrible.  There was debris all over the place, the whole façade of the Murrah Building was blown off, and the buildings around the Murrah Building were also seriously damaged.  Windows were blown out all over, and the structural parts of those buildings were all damaged. It was horrible, just horrible.  I remember thinking, you know, “this is not the Middle East, what is going on here?  What happened here?”

Michelle Gray:  Is it true that as a result of the investigation Michael and Lori Fortier were discovered to have had prior knowledge that Timothy McVeigh was not only going to blow up the Murrah Building specifically, but also on what day it was going to occur and exactly how he was going to do it, all the way down to the rental of the truck and use of fertilizer and fuel? 

Jon Hersley:  McVeigh had described in detail, to the Fortiers, what he was going to do and how he was going to do it.  He told them that he was going to use a Ryder truck, that he had acquired the bomb components and described to them how he was going to configure the bomb making materials in the back of the Ryder truck. 

He had pointed the Murrah Building out to Michael Fortier in mid-December, and told him that it was the building he was going to blow-up.  After McVeigh had pulled off the highway and pointed the building out to Fortier, they discussed the best place for McVeigh to leave his car so he could get away quickly.

Michelle Gray:  Did either Michael or Lori Fortier make any attempt to stop the bombing?

Jon Hersley:  No, they did not make any attempt to stop it from taking place.

The Fortiers say that they didn’t think that McVeigh would actually go through with it.  But he had acquired all of the bomb components, he had picked out the building he was going to blow-up, he picked out the type of vehicle he was going to use.  He had everything.  And he was trying to get Michael Fortier to help him.  However, Fortier would not help him so to me that puts Fortier in a little bit of a different light than Terry Nichols. 

So yes, you have to surmise, and I have no doubt, that the Fortiers knew exactly what McVeigh was going to do.  And they could have stopped the whole thing with a phone call, and they didn’t.  It could have been an anonymous phone call. 

Michelle Gray:  Do you think that Michel Fortier should have gotten life in prison?

Jon Hersley:   Well, you know, I have to go by what the laws in our country are.  And I think that those laws were followed and Fortier was sentenced accordingly.  But, do I think he deserves life in prison for what he did, and what he didn’t do?  Yes, I do.

Michelle Gray:   What about Lori Fortier?  Is she an innocent bystander?

Jon Hersley:  Well, you can’t really say that someone is an innocent bystander if they’ve been told everything that is going to happen, and they do nothing to try to stop it, can you?  But as part of the deal with Michael Fortier, we agreed not to prosecute Lori.

Michelle Gray:   What was Michael Fortier convicted of?

Jon Hersley:   Primarily weapons charges.  He helped McVeigh transport weapons from Kansas to Kingman, Arizona, to help put money back in the coffer that Nichols used.  I don’t know that Fortier knew exactly what all that was going to be used for, but he helped.  So, he was convicted of weapons charges.

We didn’t have enough evidence to convict him of the bombing, absent the things coming out of his own mouth. 

I think it’s important to understand that in a case of this magnitude you need an insider, and you need an insider for two reasons.  One is you need the insider testifying in the courtroom, so the jury will have confidence in their verdict.  And, I think you also need an insider for the sake of the public, so that the public will have confidence in the investigation and the outcome of the trials. 

In cases of this magnitude, sometimes you have to make a deal with the Devil.  That’s what we did.  We needed an insider in the case, and Michael Fortier was that insider.  Was it pleasant making a deal with Michael Fortier?  Absolutely not, but I would still make the same decision today. 

I will also say this, once Michael Fortier made the agreement with us, and agreed to testify, he definitely lived up to his end of the bargain.  He did, I think, as good a job as he could have done testifying.  And, I do think he regretted the fact that he had not picked up the phone and made a call.  Now he has to live the rest of his life knowing that he could have stopped it all.

[CR Note: Read more of Michelle's interview here.]

Most people know the story from Ann Rule’s bestseller, SMALL SACRIFICES, (and the Farrah Fawcett TV miniseries based on the book), but Wesley Frederickson, 76, knows it from another angle.

He’s Diane Downs’s father.

Diane was a rural mail carrier in Springfield, Oregon, and was thrust in to the national spotlight when she was charged with shooting her three children more than two decades ago. Cheryl Downs died, Danny was paralyzed and Christie, seriously wounded. Diane blamed the shooting on a shaggy haired stranger. The police didn’t agree. After the murder trial, prosecutor Fred Hugi adopted the children.

Like a lot of family members of those who are convicted of serious crimes, Wes Frederickson has created a web site he hopes will prove his daughter is innocent.

We chatted by email over the weekend. Among the more interesting bits here is the revelation that the daughter Diane had in jail has contacted the Fredericksons, his desire to see his grandchildren (whom he feels were brainwashed against him and their mother) and how he doubts she’ll ever get out of prison despite the fact that she’s been before the parole board already.

Crime Rant: The elephant in the room when it comes to you and your daughter are the allegations of sexual molestation. They’ve followed you since Ann Rule’s Small Sacrifices. What’s the truth?

Wes Frederickson: Ann knew she shouldn’t publish some things.  She’s pretty smart and a pretty good writer if you like fiction.  The funny thing about fiction is you can weave in a some truth and make the whole thing sound authentic. Diane has publicly — on a Portland Oregon TV station — denied the allegations and the false charges and I haven’t changed my answer from day one.

Crime Rant:  You’ve devoted your life to presenting the facts that speak to Diane’s innocence. You wrote the book, Best Kept Secrets, and now the web site. Why are you doing this?

Wes Frederickson: Actually, I didn’t write the book, “Best Kept Secrets.”  I formed a corporation to publish the book because I figured no publishing company would touch it because of the negative publicity Diane received.  The whole purpose in my doing this is to help educate people to what really happened.  Diane was not the shooter of the gun that hurt her family. Our new web site has only a little of what you feel proves she didn’t shoot her children.

Crime Rant:  What is the single most compelling piece of evidence that supports Diane’s innocence?

Wes Frederickson: Putting a web site together was a totally new experience for me.  I am a rank amateur and have made a lot of mistakes in putting it together and that has concerned me.  The most compelling evidence that supports Diane’s innocence is threefold, but if you take the spray they put on her hands that night, it should have shown she held a gun.  Gun shot residue should have been all over her clothing and in her hair. It wasn’t.  She should have had blood spatter on her clothes and in her hair.  She didn’t.  There’s more, but that’s a start.
 
Crime Rant:  Do you think the public’s perception of her had any role in convicting her?

Wes Frederickson: After the shooting, when they had taken the children and made them wards of the State, Diane came to live with us.  She went to the grocery store to make a purchase.  While in the store, a small boy ran to tell his mother: “Mom, that lady who shot her kids in the store.”  I tried to get a change of venue for Diane, but all to no avail.  Public perception was everything.
 
Crime Rant: Why did you move to Texas?

Wes Frederickson: We live in Texas by choice.  The State sued us for publishing the book.  They won the first round after which the assistant to the Attorney General advised me he was going to pierce the corporate armor of Danmark Publishing and bankrupt the corporation and then bankrupt us.  We won the second round under appeal and were awarded damages of $250.00.  That made a down payment on the attorney fees.   I checked the laws in Texas and decided to fight the State of Oregon from here.

Crime Rant:  If you could speak to your grandchildren, what would you tell them about their mother that they might not know?

Wes Frederickson: First things first.  Thank you for recognizing that Christie and Danny are our grandchildren.  Fred Hugi sent us a letter saying they were not our grandchildren.  My wife and I love our grandchildren and their mother loves them, too.  That’s what I would tell them.

Crime Rant:  Why do you think Christie and Danny haven’t contacted you?

Wes Frederickson: Christie and Danny lived in a controlled environment.  Like Christie said when she was talking to Dena Reinhardt, “Joanne [Hugi, their adoptive mother] had a cow after the Oprah Winfrey show when Christie said she wasn’t sure her mom shot her.”  More therapy.

Crime Rant:  Who is Dena?

Wes Frederickson: Dena Reinhardt is a woman who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. Dena called Christie when she was going to Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon.  On the first phone call she did not record the conversation, but found Christie willing to talk.  She called Christie again and recorded the conversation.  One of the things Christie said on that tape was, “I really don’t know who shot me.  I just said what they wanted me to say.”
 
There’s much more that went on behind the scenes the world hasn’t heard about yet, but they can wait till the time is right.

Crime Rant:  What did you and Diane think of Small Sacrifices by Ann Rule?

Wes Frederickson: A well written book of fiction.

Crime Rant:  Forgive me if I have this wrong, but I remember that Diane had a baby after the trial. Did you ever get to meet her? Does she know that she had grandparents out here?

Wes Frederickson: Diane had a baby while she was in jail in Eugene.  She named it Amy, but that’s not the name she goes by.  She lives in Oregon and has given me my first known great-grandson.

Crime Rant:  So you’re in touch with her?

Wes Frederickson: “Amy” just contacted me in the last few months.  I still haven’t met her personally yet, but expect to soon.  Until then she will just have to remain “Amy” We expect to see our granddaughter for the first time very soon. 

Crime Rant:  How often do you see your daughter?

Wes Frederickson: We make it a point to try and visit Diane every year.  Whenever the mood hits us we visit with her.

Crime Rant: So how is Diane holding up these days?

Wes Frederickson: Not good in my opinion.  Diane keeps hoping that someone will come and rescue her, but I’m concerned she doesn’t realize the brutality of the system.  She recently received a letter from the parole board asking to fill out forms for parole.  She did that, but once again reaffirmed that she did not shoot her children, which will just keep her in prison.

[CR Note: Be sure to pop over to www.dianedowns.com and see what Wes has to share, then come back here and weigh in].

No one has ever distilled the John F. Kennedy assassination down to what former Charles Manson “super” prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi—author of HELTER SKELTER, OUTRAGE, AND THE SEA WILL TELL, among others—has done in his new 1612-page (plus an additional 958 pages of Endnotes and 170 pages of Source Notes on an accompanying CD-ROM) magnum opus, RECLAIMING HISTORY: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which was just published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Bugliosi told me recently that the Kennedy assassination is, put simply, “a murder case.” One man murdered the president of the United States. No CIA/Mafia conspiracy. No harebrain theory of an additional shooter hiding somewhere in the grassy knoll. One man. One lunatic: Lee Harvey Oswald, who, acting alone, put a bullet in the president’s head and, in turn, changed the world.

Talking to Bugliosi about the JFK assassination, you get the sense he is speaking from experience and authority when he says Oswald acted alone. After all, he spent 21 years with the material, researching RECLAIMING HISTORY, eight of which he sat in his office seven days a week, between 12 to 14 hours a day, working on the narrative alone, writing page after page by hand on legal pads, then dictating those pages into a tape recorder so his secretary could type them into double-spaced manuscript pages and send them back to him and he could insert additional pages of new research and begin the rewriting process over again.

One might ask, as I did, “Why the heft?” Why publish well over 1.5 million words to correct the record in a 44-year-old murder case?

“There are two realities,” Bugliosi told me, “one of which is that this is a very, very simple case. Virtually everyone in law enforcement in Dallas knew that Oswald had killed Kennedy and that it appeared he acted alone. … That reality has never changed. But there’s a second reality here. And it’s funny, isn’t it, that you’d have two such contradictory realities about the same event,” adding, “Because of the obsessive fanaticism of literally thousands of assassination researchers, conspiracy theorists and Warren Commission critics, putting this case under a microscope and making hundreds upon hundreds of allegations, this simple case has been transformed into its present state.”

That present state, Bugliosi says, revolves around a thesis that even though the old reality still exists, “This case now is the most complex murder case, by far, in world history. There’s no other case that even remotely comes close to it.”

A murder case like that, argues Bugliosi, deserves the type of lengthy treatment he gave it. In manuscript form, one of his endnotes in the book—an endnote on acoustics, mind you—clocks in at nearly 100 pages long, with about 50 footnotes. “But you see,” Bugliosi explains, that type of verbosity and thoroughness is not his doing, “That’s what has happened to this case.” His job, in other words, as he saw it, was to answer every possible question he could.

Where does the research end when working on a project of this magnitude?

For Bugliosi, “Where it ended was when my editor at Norton said, ‘Vince, we’re going to press.’ If he hadn’t said that, I’d be working on this book at this very moment. In every other area of life, when all of us work on a project, we know, instinctively, without giving it a second thought, that if we work long and hard enough, we’re going to reach the bottom of the pile. In the Kennedy case, I found out there is no bottom to the pile. It’s endless. It’s a bottomless pit. So when my editor said we were going to press, it ended.”

I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by claiming I’ve managed to get through this 1,612-page book within the past few weeks. But that in and of itself is what makes RECLAIMING HISTORY a modern literary achievement and milestone. Bugliosi took the time to structure the book into thirteen “sections.” With 1.5 million words involved, says Bugliosi, “It’s the equivalent to thirteen volumes.” The way it reads is that you can dive into any section of it and come out of with an understanding of that particular piece of the puzzle. For example, I read the first chapter in Book One, which is about 300 pages. Titled “Four Days in November,” it’s a straightforward narrative of the assassination itself—but unlike anything else I have ever read about the JFK assassination. For one, Bugliosi writes in the present tense.

“Why?” I asked him.

“For immediacy,” he told me.

The chapter is broken down into sections, in which the time of the day headlines each section of the chapter. The present tense narrative pulls the reader into it—beckoning one to feel as if he or she is there while the action takes place. It’s a wonderful change of pace.

Another unique aspect of the book is the narrative itself—particularly, its attention to detail.

“In a Fort Worth hotel bathroom, the president can hear the murmur of the crowd awaiting him eight floors below as he drags a razor across his face,” Bugliosi writes. “In the mirror he looks good. He has to. Americans want their president to be the picture of robust health.” Later, he writes, “The president finishes shaving and begins the arduous task of wrapping himself firmly in his back brace. As slips on his shirt, he decides to have a look at the crowd in the parking lot … he can’t see them where he is, so he tiptoes into his wife’s bedroom. ‘Gosh, look at that crowd!’ he beams.”

One has to wonder where Bugliosi was able to dig up such intimate detail to make his narrative nonfiction scream like a novel. “The record is so thorough and rich,” he told me. So many different people were interviewed, that every single nuance of the Kennedy assassination was documented.

There’s a subset of conspiracy theorists a volume as thick and full of facts as RECLAIMING HISTORY won’t ever sway. No matter what you say, how you prove it, a certain amount of people just won’t budge. I asked Bugliosi about this dynamic and how it has affected what he thinks he’s accomplished with the book.

“Some people,” he said smartly, “are allergic to the truth.”

If you ever wanted to know not only everything there is to know about the assassination of JFK, but even more, like why, for instance, all of those conspiracy theories fall apart on the facts alone, pick up RECLAIMING HISTORY, a book that, in the ensuing years will be the one resource for all JFK researchers—the definitive factual account of a cultural phenomenon, written by a writer whose goal is to explore truth, no matter where it leads.

What I loved about our conversation was that near the end of it Bugliosi said, “When you come down to it, I’m a true crime author. I write true crime.”

Music to this journalist’s ears.

For an excerpt from the book, visit http://www.reclaiminghistory.com/