Timothy McVeigh inmates awaiting the death penalty; most convicts on death row in the United States spend an average of fifteen years there. Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier were also convicted as conspirators in the plot. Nichols was sentenced to eight life terms for the deaths of eight federal agents, and to 161 life terms without parole by the state of Oklahoma for the deaths of the others (including one fetus). Fortier was sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment and has since been released. Timothy McVeigh was born on April 23, 1968 in Lockport, New York, the only son and the second of
Timothy McVeigh Methodist University who was writing for the school paper. McVeigh expressed his objections over what was happening there. McVeigh frequently quoted and alluded to the white supremacist novel "The Turner Diaries"; he claimed to appreciate its interest in firearms. Photocopies of pages sixty-one and sixty-two of "The Turner Diaries" were found in an envelope inside McVeigh's car. These pages depicted a fictitious mortar attack upon the U.S. Capitol in Washington. In a 1,200-word essay dated March 1998, from the federal maximum-security prison at Florence, Colorado, McVeigh claimed that the terrorist bombing was "morally equivalent" to U.S. military actions against Iraq