Reviled but unrepentant, the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh (33), today faces death by lethal injection still convinced that through it he can strike another blow against the federal government he so hates.
Martyrdom comes at 7 a.m. local time this morning (1 p.m. Irish time) but with the support of 80 per cent of the US public, according to a CNN poll.
As satellite TV vans, over a thousand journalists, and protesters began to gather outside, McVeigh was early yesterday morning strip searched, shackled and moved from his cell on death row of the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, to a windowless cell in the "execution facility", "death house" in McVeigh's words. He was described by prison officials as "co-operative".
He is said by those who have seen him to be "stoic" and resolved not to revive his legal appeals at the last minute. "Mr McVeigh has made his final decision," his lawyer Mr Nathan Chambers said on ABC's This Week. Mr Chambers, who will witness the execution, and another lawyer were last night the last non-prison staff to meet him. McVeigh, who was brought up as a Catholic, has spurned spiritual counsel.
The son of a New York state car worker and a travel agent in a dysfunctional marriage, the young McVeigh had become obsessed by guns and mesmerised by the paranoid fantasies of the neo-Nazi, militia and survivalist movements. A talented and decorated soldier who served with distinction in the Gulf, he was bitterly disappointed when he was turned down for service in the elite special forces.
That disappointment, fed by an inability to adjust to civilian life and a conviction that the Federal authorities had committed murder in Waco, Texas, in the assault on the Branch Davidian cult, made him increasingly determined to strike back. His target in 1995 would be the Murrah building in Oklahoma, home of several of the agencies he blamed. He would rope in two old army buddies to help who would later be convicted on lesser charges.
McVeigh was caught almost immediately and convicted at his 1977 trial as the largest mass murderer in US history, but would only finally admit to his guilt - with no remorse - this year in a biography by two journalists.
Yesterday, in a letter published in his hometown paper, the Buffalo News, McVeigh again insisted he had not acted as part of a conspiracy and justified the killings as the inevitable outcome of what he sees as a war, the deaths of children as "collateral damage".
Psychologists have found him clearly sane with a high IQ, well aware of what he was doing. And this morning he has said he will use the words of the 19th Century poem Invictus (Unconquered) as his last words: "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul". He will go to his death convinced that he is the first hero of the second American Revolution.
The Irish Times website will carry full coverage of the execution of Timothy McVeigh this afternoon in the Breaking News section at www.ireland.com
