Word: fortier
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Hartzler's skills were well displayed in his handling of Michael Fortier. All along Fortier was going to be a problematic witness. After McVeigh's arrest, he had lied repeatedly; he had bragged in telephone calls--taped by the FBI--about how he was going to make money off the case; and he was generally an unsavory character, unemployed and an admitted drug abuser. When he showed up in court, though, he looked very different from the way he did two years ago. His hair was cut; his face was clean-shaven; his ears were without earrings. He wore...
This kind of makeover of an unsympathetic witness is standard, but Fortier had been groomed in other ways. Hartzler spent 100 hours preparing him for his time on the stand. As a result, Fortier responded forthrightly to Hartzler's questions, and to Jones' too. He described how McVeigh served as best man at his wedding, held at a Las Vegas casino in July 1994. Soon afterward, Fortier said, McVeigh began to talk about taking "positive, offensive action" against the government. A plan began to take shape. By October, McVeigh and Terry Nichols had chosen a target: the federal building...
...Fortier's testimony provided details about McVeigh's preparations that had never been heard before. He said, for example, that when he and McVeigh traveled to Oklahoma City from Arizona in December 1994 to case the Murrah building, McVeigh saw a Ryder truck on the road, pointed at it and said it was the kind of truck he wanted to use in the bombing. Fortier also said that McVeigh considered a suicide mission, driving the truck into the building and remaining at the wheel when it exploded. Then came the strangest moment of the trial, when Fortier remarked...
Hartzler's questioning was so effective that Matsch instructed the jurors to keep an open mind during the cross-examination. When his turn came, Jones went after Fortier using transcripts of the telephone calls the FBI had taped. "[D]idn't you say, 'I want to wait until after the trial and do a book and movie rights...Something that's worth the Enquirer?'...You talked about a million dollars, and it just rolled off your tongue, didn't it?" Fortier quietly answered, "Yes." Sarcastic and sneering, Jones made cracks in Fortier's character, but he did not shake...
...other people close to McVeigh testified for the prosecution. One was Lori Fortier, Michael's wife, who described how McVeigh used soup cans to illustrate how he would arrange the barrels of explosives in the truck. She also testified that she helped make a false driver's license for McVeigh in the name of Robert Kling, the name the prosecution says McVeigh used when he rented the Ryder truck. McVeigh's sister Jennifer corroborated the accounts of other witnesses who said that McVeigh harbored a deep hatred of the Federal Government and believed it had not atoned...