Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 3, 1995 TAG: 9505030070
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: CARTHAGE, MO. LENGTH: Medium
A trail of motel receipts indicated that Gary Allan Land and Robert Jacks crossed paths with Timothy James McVeigh before and after the bombing, but federal officials did not present evidence linking them to the crime Tuesday.
Land and Jacks, who has told acquaintances he is Land's uncle, surrendered with their hands on their heads at dawn when federal agents ordered them out of their room in a small motel in the southwest corner of Missouri, about 200 miles from Oklahoma City.
Whether they were involved in the bombing, or just the latest of several people who have been snared briefly and wrongly in the federal dragnet, will be sorted out today.
Although some motel managers said Land resembled the target of the manhunt known only as John Doe 2, much about Land was at odds with the artist's sketch of the suspect. John Doe 2 is depicted as short-haired, clean-shaven and tattooed, while Land wears his dark hair long, has a mustache and no tattoo on his arm.
FBI spokesman Dan Vogel cautioned that Land had not been positively identified as the man seen with McVeigh.
In other developments Tuesday, the number of dead in the explosion reached 140, including 15 children.
The rescue effort was suspended for the night because the southeast corner of the shattered building was so unstable. The cutback in hours and a reduction in the number of people searching the building indicated what authorities have been acknowledging for the last several days: None of the 37 people still believed to be in the rubble are expected to be found alive.
Meanwhile, a federal magistrate judge in Milan, Mich., ordered that James Nichols be held without bond pending trial on a charge of conspiring with McVeigh to make bombs on his 160-acre Michigan farm. Nichols' brother, Terry, is being held on the same charge.
McVeigh's association with Land and Jacks is less clear-cut.
The two men have led peripatetic lives, moving around the country from one cheap motel and trailer park to another, paying their bills with cash despite having no visible source of income and displaying a penchant for drinking cases of beer. But their only known connection to McVeigh is that they often have ended up in the same towns at the same time.
Land and Jacks lived for five months in a Kingman, Ariz., motel across the street from two motels where McVeigh stayed in February and April. The morning of the Oklahoma City bombing, a car with Land's license plate reportedly was videotaped near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building just before the blast. And later that day, the two men checked into two Oklahoma motels about 100 miles apart, including one in the town where McVeigh had been arrested that morning.
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by CNB