In Search of John Doe No. 2: The Story the Feds Never Told About the Oklahoma City Bombing

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See original documents, medical reports, internal FBI memos, and more, at our Primary Sources page. Listen to James Ridgeway and Jesse Trentadue on Democracy Now. TOOLS E-mail article Print article BACKTALK E-mail the editor RELATED ARTICLES In Search of John Doe No. 2: Primary Sources Timothy McVeigh's Lawyer on His Complicated Defense

As late as July 1997, Fred Jordan told a local TV station, "I think it's very likely [Kenney] was murdered. I'm not able to prove it....You see a body covered with blood, removed from the room as Mr. Trentadue was, soaked in blood, covered with bruises, and you try to gain access to the scene, and the government of the United States says no, you can't.... At that point we have no crime scene, so there are still questions about the death of Kenneth Trentadue that will never be answered because of the actions of the U.S. government. Whether those actions were intentional—whether they were incompetence, I don't know.... It was botched. Or, worse, it was planned."

After more than a year of proceedings, in August 1997, the grand jury (which, like all such panels, had heard only evidence selected by the government) concluded its investigation without issuing any criminal indictments. The doj held back the news for two months while staff in Washington met to devise a roll-out plan that a doj aide compared to "coordinating the invasion of Normandy." The plan targeted the media as well as Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), who, thanks to Jesse Trentadue's efforts, had taken an interest in the case. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing a few months earlier, Hatch had quizzed then-Attorney General Janet Reno about Kenney and told her that "it looks like someone in the Bureau of Prisons, or having relations with the Bureau of Prisons, murdered the man."

But Hatch never followed through on his stated intent to hold hearings on the case. Neither did Oklahoma Republican Senator Don Nickles, then the majority whip. In December 1997, Nickles held a press conference lambasting the feds' handling of the case; he said prison officials in Oklahoma had told him they'd been ordered not to talk about it. The next day Nickles got a visit from Thomas Kuker, head of the fbi's Oklahoma City office. According to an internal fbi memo, Kuker assured the senator that he, too, had once been concerned about the case, but had become convinced that there was no foul play. After a second meeting with the fbi two months later, Nickles backed off.

The doj also continued to pressure Medical Examiner Fred Jordan, to the point where Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General Patrick Crawley wrote to a Justice Department attorney that the bop and fbi had "prevented the medical examiner from conducting a thorough and complete investigation into the death, destroyed evidence, and otherwise harassed and harangued Dr. Jordan and his staff. The absurdity of this situation is that your clients outwardly represent law enforcement or at least some arm of licit government.... It appears that your clients, and perhaps others within the Department of Justice, have been abusing the powers of their respective offices. If this is true, all Americans should be very frightened of your clients and the doj."

Four months later, in July 1998, Jordan suddenly changed his conclusion on Kenney's manner of death from "unknown" to "suicide," saying he had been convinced in large part by the identification of the supposed suicide note by a handwriting expert—even though the expert had not been able to see the actual note, and had received what the doj itself considered inadequate samples of Kenney's handwriting. Although he never fully retreated from this determination, Jordan would later say, in a deposition, that he still believed Kenney was beaten, and that he himself had been "harassed by the Department of Justice from the very beginning" of the case.

The last government investigation into the death of Kenney Trentadue, conducted by the doj's Office of the Inspector General (oig), was concluded in November 1999. The report was sealed, and only a brief summary made public. The full report, a copy of which was obtained by Mother Jones, ran to 372 pages and included names and many other crucial details. It also contained material taken from the secret grand jury proceeding, according to its cover page.

The oig report supported the government's position that Kenney's injuries had been self-inflicted. But it did find fault with the prison's response and with the fbi's investigations, concluding that bop and fbi employees had lied about their actions to supervisors, investigators, and the oig itself. (In 2003, Jesse filed a complaint about what he considered shoddy investigative work in the report with the President's Council on Efficiency and Integrity, a White House agency; the council dismissed the complaint, and when Jesse asked why, it sent him 55 pages of evidence the oig had submitted. All but 350 words had been blacked out.)

In late 2000, the civil lawsuit brought by the Trentadue family commenced in federal district court in Oklahoma City. The jury found that Stuart A. Lee, the prison official in charge the night Kenney died, had violated Kenney's civil rights by being "deliberately indifferent to his medical needs." Four months later, the court awarded the family $1.1 million for emotional distress (based not on Kenney's death itself, but on the bop's conduct afterward). The court denounced prison employees for trying to cover up their own misconduct, declaring that, "From the time of Trentadue's death up to and including the trial, these witnesses seemed unable to comprehend the importance of a truthful answer." The government appealed, and the matter remains bogged down in the courts to this day.

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