When Kathy Sanders’ two grandson, Chase and Colton, died in the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, her world was defined by grief and tragedy.
But Kathy and her late husband Glen Wilburn, initially suspicious of inconsistent stories by federal authorities, including lies told by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, started looking into the bombing and found major irregularities.
“We saw things that didn’t add up,” Kathy tells the Populist Sentinel. “This was a bombing that targeted the ATF, and all but one of the agents were out of the building that morning. We found out they had been warned on their pagers not to come in because of a bomb threat, but they didn’t give that warning to me or my two grandbabies who were on the second floor,” Sanders said.
And in the words of Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, who has spent 30 years litigating against federal agencies to release records related to the bombing, and who is currently litigating two federal FOIA cases, Kathy and her husband managed to solve the case in a week.
“It’s amazing when you think about it, Kathy and Glen just started looking at the evidence, comparing the statements and timelines, and realized none of this made any sense,” Trentadue told the Populist Sentinel. “These two grandparents turned their grief into documenting what happened, and today she and her late husband are the reason we know so much about the bombing, so much of what crimes federal authorities have been committing for a generation.”
Interest in the Oklahoma City bombing, 30 years in the past, has been rekindled recently by investigative journalist Margaret Roberts’ book “Blowback” which has laid out a great deal of the evidence that federal authorities, at a minimum, had significant advance warning of the bombing and were on some level involved with the many other people than Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols involved with the bombing.
Sanders has also recently published her own third book about the bombing, “Shadows of Conspiracy: The Untold Story of the Oklahoma City Bombing” where, Sanders alleges, major evidence and threads from the bombing were not pursued in the trials against Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who were being prosecuted by future Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Sanders has gone out and met with dozens of witnesses and criminals in order to figure out the real story behind the crime that killed her grandsons. Sanders befriended convicted McVeigh accomplice Terry Nichols, currently serving life at the Supermax federal prison in Colorado. Sanders even had the Nichols family over to her house, in addition to meeting with the McVeigh family. Sanders connected with Neo-Nazi groups who are alleged bank robbers and drug dealers, to try and put the pieces together of how the Alfred P. Murrah building was bombed and who was behind it.
What she uncovered, along with attorney Trentadue, was a long-term federal operation to infiltrate and lead extremist groups, a program known as “PATCON.” This federal program, utilizing informants and undercover operatives, started a Neo-Nazi bank robbery gang whose funds are alleged to be part of McVeigh’s funding sources, and whose funds were used to finance the bombing.
Trentadue has amassed an incredible 2 million pages of documents from the bombing and related investigations, and yet Trentadue says that without Kathy Sanders, he would never have gotten started on this path. By contrast, the voluminous ‘assassination archive’ related to former President John F. Kennedy at the National Archives has 6 million documents.
Sanders doesn’t have as many documents, but she has personally met many of the key figures in the bombing and her interviews have revealed systemic federal crimes. Many, she notes, say certain things in private to her and very different things in public.
“FBI Agent Jon Hershey told the assembled families during the Nichols trial in Colorado that they were going to get all the others who were involved in the bombing, he sat in the courthouse and told us all that,” Sanders says. “Now he denies saying it, now he says we’re just liars.”
Sanders also talks about meeting FBI Agent Danny O. Coulson, who helped found the HRT division, and who initially oversaw the bombing investigation. Coulson, says Sanders, explained to her that he had been inexplicably placed on 10 years administrative leave with pay after the bombing, and when Sanders showed him the various interviews, documents, and evidence she had collected over a decade by that point, Coulson said that “everything now made sense” and intimated that Sanders should be afraid that those still within the federal government who stood to be prosecuted, would likely kill her if they knew what she had collected.
Coulson now denies the meeting ever happened.
Sanders also met repeatedly with ATF undercover informant Carol Howe, who gave repeated advance warning to the ATF in the months prior to the bombing, that the Murrah Building was specifically going to be bombed by this domestic terror group. Howe’s warnings were ignored by the ATF.
Sanders has shared her entire document archive with the Populist Sentinel.
Trentadue says that Kathy’s work, her mission, has been the backbone of several key researchers who have kept this effort going for a generation. Even though many of the victim’s families are reluctant to ask the extent to which federal authorities knew about the bombing in advance, and also the extent to which they had a hand in the bombing itself, she feels an obligation not only to her two grandsons but also to the 166 others who died, possible additional death due to a solitary leg that was found in the rubble, and the over 600 others who were injured in the blast.
Trentadue said that the most difficult thing about investigating his brother Kenneth ’s death was the lack of a motive. According to Trentadue, people would ask him: “Why would the government torture and murder your brother?” And he had no answer until 2003 when he received a telephone call from Kathy alerting him to the fact that his Kenneth had apparently killed because he resembled John Doe #2. Prior to that call, Trentadue said “my family had no idea why all of these strange and suspicious things were happening with my brother’s death. Kathy helped to put it all together, she’s these rogue federal agents’ worst nightmare.”
“I’m very concerned that this will all fade into being a small historical footnote, and that the people involved will ultimately get away with it. We were all encouraged by President Trump’s promise of accountability, but we also know that these people are very powerful.”
Trentadue also gives Sanders credit for starting him on a legal journey that has saw him uncover evidence of a major, long-term effort to infiltrate, coerce, and covertly lead violent far-right criminal organizations, an operation known as “PATCON” which is short for “Patriot Conspiracy.”
Trentadue told the Populist Sentinel, “I’ve long realized that justice for the feds killing my brother Kenneth, and leaving his son fatherless, will be revealing the dirty deeds done as part of PATCON.” If that’s the case, it was because one Okie grandmother was solving prison murders on her own simply with her powers of analysis and her charm in meeting with hostile parties and getting them to talk with her.
“Kathy was visiting with me, sitting with me, explaining that there were suspicions about my brother’s death being linked to Oklahoma City when I received a phone call confirming her suspicions. At the time, my family had no idea why all of these strange and suspicious things were happening with my brother’s death. She put it all together, she’s these rogue federal agents’ worst nightmare.”
Sanders credits the federal government for training her in how to organize information and make presentations as part of a brief stint with the Internal Revenue Service, for aiding her ability to put it all together. “They trained me in how to explain complex concepts to new employees, and how to do employee retrainings. It was about collecting documents, organizing them, and having a system. It was the perfect training for what I’ve been forced to do: use it against the government in order to track down their criminality.”
One bombing researcher has described Trentadue as a man on a “one man hillbilly jihad against federal authorities” because he now knows that three federal agents in riot gear tortured his brother Kenneth to death in August 1995, suspecting that he was “John Doe #2” in the bombing. The Department of Justice in internal memos referred to Trentadue as “Jesse Bin Laden” for his dogged pursuit of documents and answers about his brother and the bombing.
The witness who says he saw Trentadue’s murderers, Alden Gillis Baker, was also found hanging in his cell a day before he was supposed to testify. Richard Lee Guthrie, who is suspected of being John Doe #2, was also found hanging in his cell a year after the bombing the day before he was to give an interview to a Los Angeles Times reporter that he said would literally blow the lid off the Oklahoma City bombing.
The tenacity and temerity of this grandmother and Utah attorney continues to bring out revelations as to what happened at Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 and the context surrounding the attack.
Sanders was featured in the 2024 HBO Documentary, “An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th.” Sanders says these days, she spends all of her free time in her retirement community in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas doing three things: baking cookies for a local non-profit, volunteering with another non-profit that helps low-income children get access to high-quality education, and continuing her work solving the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
