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Your thoughts
Witness to the execution
What will the survivors, relatives of victims — and America — gain from watching Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh die?

Steven Kronheim

By Chip Cassano

It has been more than five years since the April 19, 1995, morning when Timothy McVeigh parked a truck filled with 4,000 pounds of fertilizer and fuel oil in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and set a fuse. The resultant blast killed 168 people, including 19 children, and permanently shattered an American illusion of security. While we had been keeping a wary eye on threats from Baghdad and Beirut, one of our own — a bright, articulate young man from upstate New York who ran track in high school — had carried out the most deadly terrorist act ever committed on U.S. soil.

In the intervening years, America learned a good deal about Timothy McVeigh. He was a lonely child, the product of a broken home, obsessed with guns and perceived threats to his freedom. After a failed military career, he faced a bleak economic future. More memorable, perhaps, was what he was not — not guided by the voices in his head; not a victim or even mentally ill by many common standards; not physically abused as a child; not hungry or poverty-stricken; not any more alienated or tormented than tens of millions of other young Americans.

In short, Timothy McVeigh was not a candidate for America's sympathy, and even as support for capital punishment waned in the United States, an ABC News poll found that almost 80 percent of Americans favored the death penalty for McVeigh. When U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft approved a closed-circuit telecast of the execution, almost 300 survivors and relatives of the victims asked to watch McVeigh die.

Psychologists at UMUC, however, have expressed reservations about the public nature of the execution and its effects, both on those whose lives were touched directly by the violence and on the public at large.

"My personal sense is that Timothy McVeigh really wants to be executed, and it seems that he favors making it public — as if to say, 'The government is evil and look what the government is going to do to me,'" said Lara Frumkin, a newcomer to UMUC's faculty with degrees in social and community psychology and an interest in forensic psychology.

"I think that it's going to add fuel to the fire for those who support McVeigh and believe the way he does. For them, Timothy McVeigh will be a martyr." Frumkin added that the recent revelation of the FBI's mishandling of evidence was likely only to make matters worse.

"On a more professional level, while it might be of some benefit to families of victims, I question whether this will help the survivors," Frumkin said, "many of whom are probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I don't think watching this execution or knowing that [McVeigh] has been executed will bring any real closure. It will just be one more detail."

Diane Bartoo, program director of health care administration in UMUC's Graduate School and a licensed psychologist with experience in grief counseling, voiced related concerns.

"It used to be thought that the grief and mourning process was linear; when one stage ended, another began," Bartoo said. "What we know now from the research is that grief and mourning are more often cyclical, with an ebb and flow that can be piqued by birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries — including the anniversary of a death."

Bartoo pointed out that, in the past, when a criminal was apprehended, the victim or victim's family would negotiate some sort of punishment or restitution suitable to the crime. Legal and sociopolitical evolution led to that bond being broken, and the government now, in effect, "settles the score" between victim and assailant.

"Some of the desire to watch the execution," Bartoo said, "is, I believe, an effort to once again be involved with the resolution. Some people may feel that that is necessary for the resolution of their grief and mourning.

"In my professional opinion, however, while the execution marks the end of the legal case and perhaps the end of a chapter in the process of grief resolution, it doesn't necessarily finish the grief process at all."

Steven Kronheim, academic director of UMUC's psychology program, agreed, and questioned whether the public nature of the execution might only offer another opportunity for McVeigh — who, though admitting his guilt, has never expressed remorse for the bombing — to inflict one more scar on the American psyche and on his victims.

"If there is a camera on him, I think it's very probable that those images will become public, by one means or another. If they show his face or eyes clearly, or even another part of his body, he could in effect freeze himself in such a way that an expression or gesture could convey a lasting impression — an image of rebelliousness or intolerance, perhaps, or even victory. For a victim's family that is looking for closure, for example, I think an experience like that could produce the opposite of the expected effect."

In the end, of course, some will wish to witness the execution only to reassure themselves that a monster like Timothy McVeigh no longer walks among us. But they too may find little comfort, because the monster that McVeigh represents to the American public may not be one that is so easily killed.

"There's nothing alarming about him — nothing," an anonymous source who knew McVeigh told the Washington Post in a July 1995 feature. "He's respectful of his elders, he's polite. . . .That's what's incredibly frightening. If he is what he appears to be, there must be other people out there like him. You look at him and you think: This isn't the end of something; this is the beginning of something."