|
Rebuttal Witnesses Contradict Claims About McVeigh Associate
.... Testifying for the defense Wednesday, Rodney Johnson told jurors that moments before the bombing he had to swerve his catering truck to avoid hitting two men who hurried together away from the building. He identified one of them as McVeigh. But John Hippard, a retired FBI agent who interviewed Johnson two days after the April 19, 1995, bombing, said Johnson could not positively identify either of the figures at the time. His descriptions of their clothing also differed from his testimony, he said. Three days after the bombing, Hippard also interviewed Dena Hunt, a service technician for the Oklahoma City Police Department who said she saw McVeigh and one or two other people in a Ryder truck a few blocks from the federal building about 30 minutes before the explosion. At the time, Hippard said, she could not positively identify McVeigh but said the man she saw resembled him. William Franklin Holdson testified he drove a Ryder truck through downtown Oklahoma City and parked it just one block away from the federal building on the morning of the deadly blast. Holdson, who managed a production crew for a merchandising company at the time, was questioned to help explain why defense witnesses reported seeing a Ryder truck in various parts of the city on the morning of the bombing. Prosecutors also called a defense witness, Joan Rairden, back to the witness stand. Rairden, an assistant manager at a McDonaldâs restaurant in Junction City, Kan., in 1995, testified two weeks ago that McVeigh came into the restaurant on April 13 or 14, 1995, with a group of other people, including a dark-skinned man with slicked-back black hair. On Thursday, Rairden said McVeigh does not appear on security videotapes of the restaurant on those dates, but that she still believes he was there. .... Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-05-22 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=33668 |