The scene and the people lost
The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killed 168 people, including 19 children. Emergency personnel were searching the damaged building while investigators worked to determine what had happened. The FBI’s account describes a large crime scene where even an object thrown away from the building could carry useful information.
One early lead came from a piece of the vehicle involved. Investigators used identifying information from the recovered part to trace the truck. That moved the search from the immediate scene to rental records and people who had seen the customer.
How the records came together
The FBI history traces the vehicle to a rental business in Kansas. Information from that business gave investigators a basis for describing the person associated with the rental. The vehicle record and the witness account were useful for different reasons. One narrowed the object and its history. The other supplied information about the person who obtained it.
Investigators then learned that Timothy McVeigh had already been stopped in Oklahoma and was in custody on unrelated matters. The chronology shows how a local traffic stop and a federal investigation could become connected once agents had enough information to compare records.
What a lead establishes
A recovered part can help identify a vehicle. Rental information can help establish who obtained it and when. The rest of an investigation has to establish how a person and the vehicle relate to the crime. The FBI’s history is useful because it allows those steps to be followed separately. It also shows how quickly an ordinary business record can matter in the aftermath of a disaster.