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On the morning of 19 April 1995, at 9.02am, Bud Welch was getting ready for his shift at the Texaco garage when his entire home shook. To the south, windows as far away as 25 miles cracked.

His brother phoned. He was in his car listening to the radio and could see plumes of smoke in downtown Oklahoma City, eight miles away. The local news suspected there had been an explosion at the courthouse. Welch turned on the TV as a traffic helicopter zoomed in to a familiar-looking building. “Frank, my God, it’s not the courthouse. It’s the Murrah building.” His only daughter, Julie, worked there.

“You could see that on the north side of the building there was nothing there. It was just gone. I pretty much gave up all hope then,” he recalls, sipping on his water in a London hotel lobby, almost 20 years on.

“She was killed on the Wednesday morning. Her body was found on the Saturday. I knew. If she’d been alive the first thing she would have done was call her dad,” he says with a quiet smile. A further 167 people died alongside Jennifer Welch and hundreds more were injured.

The journey that has brought Welch to London has been long one. A few days before being interviewed, he gave a talk on the death penalty at the Amnesty International offices. Perhaps surprisingly for someone in his position, he is vehemently opposed to it.

“You don’t heal by escalating violence and by using the death penalty we escalate violence – and that violence is sponsored by the state,” he says sternly.

He is visiting Amnesty to speak with a non-campaigning group called LifeLines, which writes to prisoners on death row, and to talk about his work on the board of directors for Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights.
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As he puts it, “we’re the ones who can say to people: ‘If it happened to you, you would be against the death penalty.’ If it is good for anyone, it would good for us and we think it is not good for us.”

While his campaigning has been tireless, his personal journey has been even more astonishing.

About twice a year, Welch still takes time to catch up with Bill McVeigh. It’s an unlikely friendship. Bill is the father of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber and the man responsible for the death of his only daughter. They last spoke six weeks ago.

“The year after Julie died was the most miserable I’ve ever been in my life,” says Welch. He began self-medicating with alcohol and went through a long period of “wanting retribution”.

“I went to the bomb site every day after her death. It was about 10 months after, in January. I was watching the people across the street leaving things at the memorial. Crosses, rosaries, you name it. Every muscle in my body ached from alcohol poisoning. I said to myself: ‘You are not moving forward. What you are doing is not working,’” he tells the conference.

His daughter Julie was herself opposed to the death penalty. “She had an imaginary little white flag that she carried, and she can no longer do that, and I am committed to carry that flag for her until the day I die,” he says proudly.

A year after the terrorist attack, Welch began to campaign.
Rescue workers stand in front of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building after the bombing.
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Rescue workers stand in front of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building after the bombing. Photograph: David Longstreath/AP

It wasn’t until September 1998 that he met Bill McVeigh and his daughter Jennifer – Timothy’s sister – in McVeigh’s home in Buffalo. The meeting was proposed by a nun, Sister Rosalyn, who had heard Welch speak. McVeigh had already been sentenced to death.

“I know what happened to me that Saturday morning in western New York is that I met a bigger victim of the Oklahoma City bombing than myself,” says Welch. “Julie would be 43 years old if she were living today. But Julie will always be 23. I have kept her alive by doing this. Bill McVeigh can never say anything positive about Tim,” he says with his eyes to the ground.

The first meeting was “an emotional one”, he says. “When we finished talking, Jennifer got up and walked around the table and she grabbed me around the neck and started hugging me. We both started crying and then that escalated to sobbing. Finally I took her head off my shoulder and said: ‘Look, honey, the three of us are in this for the rest of our lives … I don’t want your brother to die and I will do everything I can to prevent it.”

Nobody could prevent it, as McVeigh dropped all appeals in 2000. “On that Monday morning of 11 June 2001, in Terre Haute, Indiana, we took Tim McVeigh from his cage and we killed him and there was nothing about that process that brought me any peace,” he sighs.

He says while most of his family have been supportive, his own mother was the last to come around, but eventually did so just before she died. Outside of the family, he said, there has been some resistance from other victims’ families, but “many have come to me since his execution and say: ‘You were so right’”.

Himself a Catholic, Welch says many of those who have disagreed with him are “what I like to call, and you can quote me on this, ‘religious zealots’”.

“Julie’s death is a result of war – I firmly believe that,” he says, indicating his belief that Tim McVeigh suffered from PTSD. “He was a proud soldier who became very anti-government,” he says, adding that the government’s handling of the Ruby Ridge confrontation and the Waco siege in Texas also intensified McVeigh’s beliefs.

Welch believes the tide has begun to turn in America against the death penalty and the main factors for this are the increasing number of exonerations and spate of botched executions in recent years. “We’ve been able to get it abolished in six states and there were 12 states that never reinstated it. We were one vote short in Montana last year,” he notes.

At the end of his Amnesty speech, a longtime member of LifeLines, Karen Collett, gets up to speak to Welch. She tells him she was in Oklahoma on the day of the bombing with her children, visiting her pen pal. Collett says in the years following, the inmates heard about him.

“They talked about you and said you were remarkable. I used to send cuttings and they would send cuttings of you back,” she says, trying her best not to cry. “On behalf of myself and the men on death row, I think you’re extraordinary.”

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