I first met Timothy McVeigh in the federal correctional facility in El Reno, Oklahoma, in November 1995, about seven months after the Oklahoma City bombing. The lead attorney for McVeigh's defense team, Stephen Jones, phoned me in early September after reading a book I published on the Branch Davidian tragedy that same year. I surmised that he had purchased a copy of the book in Kansas City and read it on the plane while flying back to Oklahoma City the day before. Jones wanted to gain a better understanding of the Waco incident because the government was claiming that McVeigh engineered the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in retaliation for the federal assault on the Branch Davidians two years earlier. Initially, I had some reservations about taking on any kind of role that would cast me as an apologist for the alleged perpetrator of such a heinous crime. A few weeks after my telephone conversation with Jones, one of the attorneys assigned to the case, Dick Burr, a death penalty specialist, drove over from Houston, and we met for about an hour in my office. I remember thinking he was dressed very casually for an attorney: He showed up wearing an old pair of corduroys and a shirt badly in need of ironing, and his hair was uncombed. But he had a demeanor that was disarming and genuine. As I later learned, Dick Burr was a '60s political activist and labor organizer before attending law school at Vanderbilt.