One of America's Own

S2 E2: He seemed the quintessential, hometown American, with a childhood of little league baseball, Santa Claus, and cowboys. But on a bright spring morning in April 1995, Timothy James McVeigh shattered the image and took his place among the pantheon of mass murderers. His homemade bomb blew the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 of his fellow citizens – 19 of them children. When it went off the bomb became the worst peacetime atrocity on United States soil. The event shocked America – and the rest of the world – because the perpetrator was not, as was first assumed, an Islamic terrorist, but a self-styled American patriot and Gulf-war hero. One of America’s own.Using court records and other published sources, including interviews with the killer himself, Zero Hour 2 – One of America’s Own tells the story of the minute-by-minute build up to this terrible tragedy. It seeks not only to understand the mind and motives of Timothy McVeigh, but also the unseemly and dangerous subculture of guns, racism, and perverted patriotism that turned the American dream into a nightmare at 9:02 a.m. on April 19th 1995.