DEFENSE SUGGESTS REAL BOMBER DIED ATTORNEYS OFFER UNIDENTIFIED LEG AS

The defense in the Oklahoma City bombing trial opened its case Thursday with suggestions that a left leg recovered from the blast site may have belonged to the real bomber and with testimony from two witnesses who said they saw a Ryder truck at Timothy McVeigh's motel before he allegedly rented the vehicle.

Defense attorneys also presented two other witnesses who said they saw McVeigh's alleged getaway car and noticed that the license plate was firmly attached to the rear - a hint that someone may have removed it in order to make sure McVeigh was arrested after the bombing.

After enduring four weeks of often flawless government evidence, the defense appears to be attempting to show that someone other than McVeigh killed 168 people and injured more than 500 others in the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Or, at the least, McVeigh's attorneys are trying to suggest that he was set up by others to take the fall in what became the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. Lead defense attorney Stephen Jones of Enid, Okla., has promised he will prove his client innocent. On Thursday, Jones called to the witness stand Herta King, a Junction City, Kan., resident whose son, David, was living at the Dreamland Motel where McVeigh was registered. She testified that she had visited her son there on Easter Sunday, April 16, and saw a large Ryder rental truck. This directly conflicts with the government's theory that McVeigh did not rent the Ryder until Monday, April 17. "I saw a yellow Ryder truck sitting right there," she said. "I couldn't see my son's car because the yellow Ryder truck blocked my view." And, she added, "there's no question in my mind it was Easter Sunday." Even under cross-examination by prosecutors, King did not wilt. "It was yellow," she said. "It had `Ryder' on it." Next up was Renda Truong, 19, who also had visited the motel that Sunday and said she, too, saw the Ryder truck. She, too, held up under cross-examination about whether she was absolutely sure it was Sunday and not Monday. Leonard and Diana White, a married couple from Cheney, Kan., testified about staying at the motel and seeing McVeigh's 1977 Mercury Marquis parked there. They both noticed an Arizona license tag. "It wasn't tilted or cocked or anything else," Leonard White said. "It was nice and solid." Added Diana White: "It looked like it was on there perfect." That testimony could prove critical because McVeigh was arrested a little more than an hour after the bombing when a state highway patrol trooper noticed he was driving without a license plate. Also taking the stand for the defense was Dr. Frederick Jordan, the Oklahoma state medical examiner. He testified that a single left leg was recovered from the bomb debris that does not match any of the 168 bodies. The leg was recovered in May 1995 after the blownout building had been imploded by safety workers. Jordan said DNA testing of the leg was inconclusive because of its condition. And he said the leg could have belonged to a short female, although he was not scientifically certain. "We had one left leg and we do not know where it belongs," he said. He was followed by Dr. Thomas Marshall, a prominent pathologist in Great Britain who has done postmortem examinations after dozens of bombings in Northern Ireland. "This is an extra left leg," Marshall said. "Until shown otherwise, this must be an extra victim," one who was disintegrated by the blast, he said. "And to be disintegrated so completely, you have to be near the bomb." Jones was trying to suggest that someone other than McVeigh was killed at the epicenter of the bomb blast after parking the truck in front of the Murrah building. But Pat Ryan, the U.S. attorney in Oklahoma City, asked under cross-examination if it isn't possible that the person was standing somewhere else and that the force of the blast threw the leg to the front of the building. Marshall stuck to his hypothesis, saying if the person was farther from the truck at the time of the explosion, "we would have found more of the body." He also noted that an FBI canvass of homeless shelters and other locations never turned up a missing person after the bombing.

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