BOMB SUSPECT MCVEIGH WAS A HUNTER
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1995:
OKLAHOMA CITY––Tim McVeigh, charged
with the April 19 Oklahoma City truck bombing that killed 168
people, was a hunter––and his alleged accomplice, Steven
Garrett Colbern, arrested on May 12 in Oatman, Arizona,
was reputedly a hunter, a reptile breeder, and may have been
involved in animal-based biomedical research.
McVeigh defended hunting in a letter published on
March 10, 1992 in the Lockport (N.Y.) Union-Sun & Journal.
Contrasting hunting with slaughtering, McVeigh wrote that
he’d seen cattle killed with chainsaws and machetes, without
prestunning, methods not legal in U.S. slaughterhouses within
his lifetime but perhaps practiced by survivalist associates.
McVeigh’s first toy, he often claimed, was a pellet
gun. Inclined toward frequent shooting as his only visible
emotional release, McVeigh reputedly became fixated on guns
at age 16, after his father, who had encouraged him to hunt,
left the family. Though age 28, McVeigh closely fits the psy-
chological profile of the typical teenaged hunter, as defined in
1977 by University of Wisconsin sociologists Robert Jackson
and Robert Norton, after interviewing 1,600 hunters.
McVeigh’s heavily repressed sexuality––he is not known to
have ever had a female companion––and loud homophobia
suggest a man who, secretly terrified he might be gay, seeks
refuge in the all-male guns-and-hunting subculture, a common
behavioral pattern outlined in ANIMAL PEOPLE e d i t o r
Merritt Clifton’s 1990 article Killing The Female.
As ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, the FBI
believed Colbern, 34, to be the suspect sought for almost a
month as “John Doe #2,” who was McVeigh’s frequent com-
panion during the weeks before the bombing. Colbern was a
research biochemist at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los
Angeles from June 1993 until November 1994, where he did
“routine molecular biology,” according to Cedars-Sinai vice
president Marilyn Sharpe. He quit without notice shortly after
a warrant was issued for his arrest in October 1994, when he
failed to appear in court on charges of possessing unregistered
firearms including an illegal silencer-equipped assault weapon.
Colbern apparently was not directly involved in
Cedars-Sinai projects which have often drawn anti-vivisection
protest, and had not yet been hired in 1991, when Barbara
Ruggiero, Frederick Spero, and Ralf Jacobsen were convicted
of selling to Cedars-Sinai at least 106 dogs and cats who were
fraudulently obtained by answering free-to-good-home ads.
Colbern studied biochemistry at UCLA from 1979 to
1985, received a B.S. there in 1989, and returned briefly to do
postgraduate work in 1991. Former neighbors described him
as “a mama’s boy,” whose father kicked him out of a mobile
home they once shared in Bullhead City, Arizona, because of
the mess and stench from his snakes and lizards. Colbern was
at one point married, but the marriage failed in 1991.
