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leaving the Murrah Building in the pick-up truck at just after 8 a.m., before returning in the yellow Ryder truck. At 8.45 a.m. the Ryder truck stopped at a convenience store and McVeigh was seen to buy two cokes and a packet of cigarettes, even though he was a non-smoker. Another eyewitness claimed to have seen McVeigh get into the Mercury along with another man. In all, at least ten different eyewitness statements suggested that there was at least one other person with McVeigh on the morning of the bombing.
    All of that explains why the FBI spent the next year looking for a mystery second man, but it does not explain why, after a year's fruitless searching, they decided instead to promote the lone bomber theory in court. The idea that McVeigh did not act alone was awarded further credence when he was put through a polygraph test by his defence team. He passed on all questions concerning his own role but he failed when he denied that anybody else was involved.
    It may well be that the FBI did not change their approach because of any sinister conspiracy but for the simple reason that they had a case against McVeigh and they were worried that the trial might collapse if the existence of an unknown second man was brought into the equation. It would have been easy for McVeigh to attempt to shift the responsibility onto this unknown man. If that was the case, the tactic was successful: McVeigh was found guilty. However, it did lead to unusual anomalies during the trial, such as the FBI's refusal to call any witnesses to McVeigh's movements (because they would all have mentioned that there was another man with him). Privately, the FBI appear to have suspected that the second man died in the blast. There was one gruesome piece of evidence remaining after the bombing – a left leg whose owner had never been identified. Might the leg have belonged to the second man?
    Whatever the case, no one identified the mystery man and the story that McVeigh was a lone bomber became the generally accepted truth.
    Two of McVeigh's friends, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, were subsequently arrested. Both of them had sheltered McVeigh. Michael Fortier, who had sheltered and aided McVeigh before the bombing, but had then become a key FBI informant, was sentenced to twelve years in prison on 27 May 1998 on the charge of failing to warn the authorities about the attack.
    The role played by Terry Nichols was harder to assess. At his federal trial, alongside McVeigh, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2004 he was tried again, this time on state murder charges in Oklahoma, and was convicted of 160 counts of first-degree murder. The jury, however, were deadlocked on the question of whether or not this should result in a death sentence. As a result, the judge sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole.
    F AR-RIGHT MILITIAS
That should have been the end of the story. The FBI would certainly have been happy to have drawn a line under this terrible incident. However, it was hardly likely that the conspiracy aficionados would let things rest there. After all, there had been any number of rumours floating around from the very start. Some of the rumours came from those sympathetic to the far right. They were so accustomed to blaming the Federal Government for everything that they were not prepared to stop now. According to these obsessives, the Oklahoma bombing was actually carried out by the government in order to discredit the far right. There were unfounded allegations that federal employees had been warned not to go into work on the day of the bombing. Similar rumours circulated in the days following the events of September 11.
    Rather more plausible is the suggestion that the far right militia movement was actually much more involved in the bombing than the FBI were prepared to admit. Following McVeigh's confession and subsequent conviction, this was the direction in which most conspiracy theorists started to look. In particular some