DEADLY SECRETS

About the Book

Beyond the thousand-yard stare, beneath the buzz cut, there was another Timothy McVeigh.  Now America finally gets to meet the real Oklahoma City Bomber, and hear his shocking account of his crime, as reported by McVeigh’s fellow death row inmate, David Paul Hammer.

The Timothy McVeigh whom readers meet here is a disturbed, insecure man, obsessed with his sexual identity almost as much as with his celebrity. He is a ticking time bomb of vulnerablity in a prison setting, living every day in fear of his fellow inmates.  Hammer has something McVeigh, the prison newcomer, needs: survival skills from a lifetime on the inside.  McVeigh has something Hammer wants: the truth about the Oklahoma City Bombing. The astonishing result is a book that punctures the myth of Timothy McVeigh, the lone-wolf mastermind.

Government prosecutors told juries that McVeigh acted virtually alone, aided only by his convicted co-conspirator Terry Nichols. McVeigh tells Hammer a strikingly different story:  that he had multiple accomplices, members of a bank robbery gang with skinhead politics known as the Aryan Republican Army. He names names.  He also names other men he says helped plan the bombing at an Oklahoma religious compound, and paramilitary training camp, known as Elohim City.  Most amazingly, McVeigh says he wasn’t the mastermind of the conspiracy at all. He says he was an undercover agent, working for the federal government, in a sting operation that apparently went terribly wrong.

After McVeigh’s execution, Hammer undertook a Houdini-like feat: to check out McVeigh’s story while locked behind bars.  Hammer turned up a wealth of fresh and compelling evidence. It’s all here in this book, for readers to join the investigation of what really went down in the greatest cold case of them all.

About the Author

Death row inmate David Paul Hammer is a criminal legend.  After a childhood in Oklahoma marked by poverty and abuse, Hammer left home at age 14. He worked odd jobs, became addicted to drugs, got married, fathered a child, and wound up in prison at 19 for robbery and a violent hostage-taking incident. Except for two escapes, he has been incarcerated ever since.

In prison, Hammer developed into a master con artist, using a brilliant mind to conduct lucrative, imaginative scams from his prison cell. But he also furthered his education by earning his GED and collegiate associate degrees in criminal justice, psychology and paralegal studies. He is a skilled jailhouse lawyer and social activist.

By 1984, Hammer had accumulated a 1,230-year sentence for various crimes. In 1996, he killed a cellmate and received the death penalty. That set the stage for a strange twist of fate. David Paul Hammer of Oklahoma and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber, would soon become fellow inmates on Federal Death Row in Indiana.

During the two years leading up to McVeigh’s execution in 2001, Hammer observed McVeigh closely, talked to him in depth about his crime, and took notes.  Hammer was ready to put his considerable talents to use in the writing of this book.

Hammer has written two previous books: The Final Escape, his autobiography, and Secrets Worth Dying For: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing. In 2004, Hammer came within three days of death by lethal injection, before an appeals court granted him a stay of execution. His case is still pending.

The Final Escape …. Secrets Worth Dying For:  Timothy James McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing