Margaret Roberts, author of the foreword to Secrets Worth Dying For: Timothy James McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing, discusses the security lockdown on David Paul Hammer since his recent death row radio interviews, Hammer’s concern about being murdered or “suicided” in custody and the history of suspicious deaths of other inmates associated with the Oklahoma City Bombing.
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Alright y'all, welcome to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Of course we're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com every Tuesday through Friday from 11 to 1 Texas time.
I miss you Texas, but at least my voice is there, right?
Really loud!
We have a ton of interviews today, six interviews, two hours.
See if we can get this going here.
Our first guest is Margaret Roberts.
Now I'm sure you guys remember a couple of weeks ago we talked with a guy named David Paul Hammer from Death Row.
He was on Death Row with Timothy McVeigh in Terre Haute, Indiana and then I think also at Colorado Springs and anyway, supposedly Timothy McVeigh told him everything about what really happened in the Oklahoma City bombing and he's put out two books, the latest of which is called Deadly Secrets, Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing.
And Margaret Roberts is the journalist that wrote the foreword to this book and she's got news of developments in this story to talk about real quick on the show this morning.
So welcome to the show, how are you doing Margaret?
Thanks Scott, I'm well, good to talk to you.
And likewise and I really appreciate you joining us today.
Before we get into this story, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I know that you're a journalist and that at one point a man on Death Row was sprung from Death Row due to your journalism, is that right?
That's right Scott.
When I wrote the foreword to David's book, my reason for doing so was that a good while ago in Chicago, I broke a story about an innocent man on Death Row and my reporting led to his getting a new trial and then other people actually eventually completely exonerated him.
He was innocent, the real killers were identified and as I say in my preface, the lesson to me was, you know, the truth is still the truth when it comes from Death Row.
I'm not saying that I know that David Hammer is telling the truth and I'm not saying certainly that I know that Timothy McVeigh was telling the truth, but I know that sometimes it happens that the truth does come off Death Row and this book of Hammer's is fact and evidence based because Hammer knows very well that no one is going to take David Paul Hammer at his word.
Yeah, well, and that's an important point, in fact, somebody wrote a comment on the post of my recent interview of him saying, how dare you say that this guy's not credible because he's on Death Row?
Well, it's not just that, although I think once you're a murderer, the rest of us who aren't murderers really are not bound to take your word seriously after that.
I'm sorry.
But secondly, the guy in his bio admits and maybe this is a lie.
He says he's a master lifelong con artist.
So all I know, Timothy McVeigh never said a word to this guy and he's used the newspaper and gone back and and cut out old copies of the McCurtain County Gazette and put together this story.
And it's and it's wholly false.
Now, I don't really believe that.
I think that he's actually being honest.
And in fact, I think I already knew for a fact a lot of the things that he says McVeigh told him in there.about the involvement of the Aryan Republican Army bank robbery ring, if not these mysterious government agents that go by the name of the Major and Poindexter and right, right.
But I agree with you about the credibility issue.
That's why, based on the work that I had come to know that Hammer had done, you know, I agreed to write this preface because I think the book is important and I think it should be taken on the merits of the facts that have been gathered and examined by Hammer.
Right.
Well, sounds like honesty to me.
I'm down for that.
All right.
Now, so apparently nobody noticed that I interviewed David Paul Hammer for an hour and a half a few weeks ago, but somebody else did.
And that got him in trouble with the Bureau of Prisons.
Am I right?
That's right, Scott.
The only two interviews that have been broadcast are yours.
And may I name the other host?
Oh, yeah.
Go ahead.
And Alex Jones, who who interviewed Hammer on Friday and subsequently.
And this is why I'm I'm here to report.
Subsequently the prison at Terre Haute, where Hammer is on death row, has locked him down and is now investigating him for security breach at the institution following the interview on Friday.
And the email that I received yesterday from from Hammer was very disturbing because it reports that he was that the prison attempted to take him out of his cell for an unscheduled medical visit.
I can only report that Hammer suspected he might not have returned from this visit.
He refused to go.
He's been.
Well, let me stop you there.
He says in this email here they came to me and said, all right, Hammer, no food or drink for a while because you got that medical thing.
And he said, wait, what medical thing?
And I said, you know, the medical thing.
And he got scared and refused to go, he says in this email.
He thought they were going to kill him.
How hard is it to say I tried to escape?
So we put a bullet in him.
Exactly.
So that's why that's why I say this is disturbing news.
I was hoping, Scott, that when I came on the air with you this morning, I would have news, you know, of another email from David Hammer.
But I don't.
I've heard nothing since this email.
All right, well, and he does say in here, hey, if I turn up dead, I promise you now it's not because I'm suicidal.
It's because I'm not.
And, you know, I don't know.
Maybe it's a bit hyperbolic.
But then again, he's completely under the control of the government of the United States on death row there.
And not everybody in prison dies from the actual lethal injection at the end.
Absolutely.
I think one of the more disturbing aspects of this story is that in the book, and if I may mention that this book is only available one place, which is www.authorhouse.com.
That's the only place at the moment that it's possible to get this book.
That's authorhouse.com.
Authorhouse, all one word, www.authorhouse.com.
Hammer, you know, really pulls together an enormous amount of material.
And one thread of this book, which I know you've read carefully, because I listened to your interview, Scott, is the dead prisoners along the way of this mystery unraveling.
And there have been at least three, the first being Kenneth Trinidadu, the second being a witness to the death of Kenneth Trinidadu inside, and the third being this member of the Aryan Republican Army that McVeigh allegedly fingered as being his support squad on the ground in Oklahoma City on April 19th.
Richard Guthrie, also dead by a mysterious suicide in prison.
If I can follow up just that last point, I'm fairly certain that that is now a fact because, or that that is a fact, because that's the statement of Jesse Trinidadu, whose credibility is not in question.
That somebody, long before J.D.
Cash ever contacted Jesse Trinidadu, somebody got a message from McVeigh to him saying, I know who killed your brother and why.
It was the cops.
It's because they thought he was Richard Lee Guthrie, who they suspected was my John Doe number two.
That's right.
So there had been that connection, if what you're saying is apart from coming from Hammer, coming from elsewhere.
Right.
It's not just that J.D.
Cash went, oh, geez, you know, this guy, Kenny Trinidadu, could have been mistaken for Guthrie.
It's that before McVeigh died, McVeigh contacted Kenny Trinidadu's brother, Jesse, and said this is what happened.
And it was only years later when all the documents came out and everything else that Jesse was able to really basically prove that fact.
That's right.
And, you know, you pointed something very important in this story, Scott, which is that it is all unfolded very slowly, pieces falling together in this jigsaw puzzle over 15 years.
Yeah.
The name of my frustration.
Believe me.
So really only a couple of people, Jesse Trinidadu being one now that J.D.
Cash is gone.
David Hammer being another one.
And if I could mention this, you know, Hammer, again, it's totally appropriate to question Hammer's credibility.
But at the same time, it is verified back through Jesse Trinidadu that in the process of writing his first book published in the early, you know, years of the 2000s, Hammer was already reporting on these interviews that he was conducting with Timothy McVeigh.
In other words, Hammer knew Jesse at that time, because already, because Hammer got into Jesse's investigation to kind of help uncover what had really happened to Kenneth Trinidadu.
As you can imagine, the Kenneth Trinidadu death became a cause celebre inside prisons.
And Hammer is a fairly, you know, well-known prisoner advocate.
So Jesse knew what Hammer was reporting about the McVeigh interviews, you know, long before now.
This is not something that has been created, you know, for this book, Deadly Secrets.
Again, I'm not saying I know that it's true, but I know that it's not, you know, that it was developed years ago, begun years ago.
Well, in fact, as long as you bring it up, I tried to find the PDF file of the whole first book.
It used to be online somewhere.
Maybe it still is, but I couldn't find it.
But I seem to remember in there the involvement of the Kehoe brothers, who it's an absolute fact that they knew, at least one of those Kehoe brothers knew that the attack was going to happen that morning.
Prosecution witness at his bank robbery trial said that he was at the motel at 6 o'clock in the morning saying, you know, something big's going to happen today.
I think, hey, I forget if it was Roger Charles or Jesse Trinidadu that actually knew the name.
I think it was Roger Charles actually knows the name of the hotel owner and everything from that anecdote.
Yeah, I think it's the Shadows Motel up in the state of Washington, as I recall.
Right, right.
But then there was a question about, it seemed like Hammer had changed his view, and I'm not sure why, from one of these Kehoe brothers brought the second truck from Arizona to, it must have come from Wisconsin because there was a federal grand jury in Wisconsin.
And so that must be, you know, has something to do with it or something.
And he completely dropped, you know, it makes me question, he doesn't say in the book, you know, I used to think the Kehoes brought the truck from Arizona, but now I think this.
Instead, the first version of the story is just gone, and the second version replaces it, where the second version doesn't seem any more credible.
I mean, so what?
There was a federal grand jury, doesn't prove anything, you know?
Anyway.
I guess you'd have to, you know, examine the two accounts.
I know that Hammer has done more research into this issue of multiple trucks.
And I think, by the way, that second grand jury may have been in Minnesota.
Oh, Minnesota.
That's right.
But anyway.
You know, it's a minor point.
I'm sorry.
It's just something I thought of.
And the real problem is here is I've got to go.
I'd love to interview you for hours and hours and hours about the Oklahoma City bombing sometime.
I really appreciate your time on the show.
My pleasure.
But there's an Iranian nuclear deal I got to get covered here.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, everybody.
That's Margaret Roberts.
She wrote the introduction to Deadly Secrets, Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing by David Paul Hammer, who knew Timothy McVeigh on death row, who supposedly, apparently, was on the receiving end of McVeigh's spilled guts before he was executed in the year 2001.
And the news is that he's on lockdown for doing a couple of radio interviews, including on this show, maybe.
So, I don't know.
Write a letter to the Bureau of Prisons and tell them you're watching them and that David Paul Hammer better not end up dead other than his, you know, execution date that he's awaiting anyway.
All right.
Which, in fact, I think he's had a stay of execution.
So, you know, he better die of nothing but natural causes in there or suicide, you know, like Kenny Trinidad, something convenient like that.
All right.
Now I got to go.
I'm with Saheemi on the Iranian nuclear deal right after this.
Anti-war radio chaos in Austin.
