John Doe No. 2 isn't the only riddle the FBI has failed to adequately explain. No one has apparently been able to explain, for example, the bombing's rarely acknowledged 169th victim.

When sifting through the debris of the Murrah Building, workers encountered numerous body parts, including nine severed legs. Only eight of those legs, however, were eventually matched up with bodies.

The owner of the ninth leg -- apparently a dark-skinned person, according to the medical examiner's testimony in the McVeigh trial -- has never been found, leading investigators to conclude that its owner was very near the blast when it occurred, and other body parts were obliterated by the explosion. There is the possibility that it belonged to a random passerby, but there are no missing person records relevant to the Oklahoma blast, and even extensive searches among homeless service agencies in the area failed to turn up any likely subjects.

There's also confusion around the question of how the bomb was constructed. McVeigh claims in "American Terrorist" that he and Nichols alone managed to load several tons of liquid jet fuel and ammonium nitrate into the Ryder truck and mix it into lethal explosive all in the span of three hours. Considering the difficulty of such work -- particularly that of mixing the chemicals -- McVeigh's account stretches the limits of credulity.

A more reasonable explanation for the construction of the bomb can be found in the testimony at Terry Nichols' trial. Charles Farley, a local sporting-goods rental shop worker, told the courtroom that he passed by Geary Lake at the time the bomb was being built, and saw not only the Ryder truck, a two-ton farm truck loaded with white bags of fertilizer and a car similar to McVeigh's getaway car, but at least five men working around the scene.

"Initially, when I got to the gate, there was one individual standing at the back of the farm truck, at the back left corner of the farm truck," Farley testified. "I seen three individuals standing down between the Ryder truck and the brown car, one of them standing in the -- in the road just a little bit, one of them leaning against the front of the Ryder truck and the other one just kind of standing between them."

Farley said he made to drive out of the area, pulling just beyond a gate nearby. "As soon as I was out, I seen an individual walking alongside of the farm truck. He was probably at the cab when I first seen him. And I was really going slow. I mean, I was just creeping. And I was going to roll the window down and ask him if he needed some help. And -- [he] give me kind of a dirty look and I decided, well, if you're going to be that way, me too, and I'm just going to leave; so I just drove away."

Farley said he couldn't identify any of the other men, but he got a clear view of the man who shot him a look. Nichols' defense attorneys handed him a photo of a gray-bearded man, and Farley said it was the man. The Rocky Mountain News later tracked down the identity of the man in the photo and found it was a 60-something member of a local Kansas citizens' militia group named Morris Wilson.

Strangely, prosecutors did not attempt to rebut much of Farley's testimony, which came on the last full day of defense testimony. It proved a crucial error in judgment. The jury convicted Nichols, but only of the lesser crime of taking part in the conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter, eschewing the murder and bombing charges that would have brought him the death penalty. Several of the jurors later said that Farley's testimony had convinced them that there was a wider conspiracy.

The jurors were not alone. In the sentencing phase of the trial, Judge Matsch himself indicated he was not convinced that everyone involved in the bombing had been brought to justice when he offered to lighten Nichols' life sentence in exchange for information about other participants. He said many questions about the case remained unanswered, adding: "If the defendant in this case, Mr. Nichols, comes forward with answers or information leading to answers to some of these questions, it would be something that the court can consider in imposing final sentence," Matsch said.

But defense attorney Michael Tigar demurred, explaining that Nichols couldn't discuss the bombing without jeopardizing his chances in the face of a near-certain second trial on state murder charges in Oklahoma. "We will consider your honor's words carefully," Tigar said, "but I hope it's understood that we don't labor here without those constraints."

There were other indications that Nichols was apparently prepared to start naming co-conspirators. And therein lies the most compelling evidence that there was a John Doe No. 2 -- as well, perhaps, as a John Doe No. 3 and even a John Doe No. 4 -- involved in the Oklahoma bombing.

But any chance of that went out the window when Oklahoma officials, eager to hand him the death penalty, decided to pursue their own case against Nichols. His murder trial -- which had been scheduled to begin this month -- is now on hold, as his new defense team sifts through the FBI's withheld documents.

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