Timothy McVeigh of explosives and eight counts of first-degree murder. On February 20, 1996, the Court granted a change of venue and ordered that the case be transferred from Oklahoma City to the U.S. District Court in Denver, Colorado, to be presided over by U.S. District Judge Richard Paul Matsch. McVeigh instructed his lawyers to use a necessity defense, but they ended up not doing so, because they would have had to prove that McVeigh was in "imminent danger" from the government. (McVeigh himself argued that "imminent" did not necessarily mean "immediate.") They would have argued that his bombing of the Murrah
Timothy McVeigh goes around, comes around". McVeigh later considered putting aside his plan to target the Murrah Building to target Horiuchi or a member of his family instead. McVeigh became a fixture on the gun show circuit, traveling to forty states and visiting about eighty gun shows. McVeigh found that the further west he went, the more anti-government sentiment he encountered, at least until he got to what he called "The People's Socialist Republic of California." McVeigh sold survival items and copies of "The Turner Diaries". One author said: McVeigh had a road atlas with hand-drawn designations of the most likely places