TIMOTHY McVEIGH has spent the past week listening to maimed survivors of the Oklahoma bombing and relatives of the 168 victims tell their harrowing stories. He listens impassively with his hands clasped in front of his long thin face as he has for most of the two month trial, while some jurors weep and even the judge at times shows emotion.

Already found guilty of 11 charges of murder, MacVeigh is virtually a dead man walking", as condemned prisoners are called, as he waits to see if the jury calls for his death or life imprisonment without parole.

It is hard to see how he can escape the death penalty in a country where record numbers this year are going to the lethal injection chamber and the electric chair for the murders of just one person. President Clinton himself said soon after the bombing that "justice will be swift, certain and severe".

As McVeigh has been convicted for capital crimes under federal law, any reprieve from a death sentence would rest with the President, who as governor of Arkansas did not interfere with the execution of a mentally defective man.

How Timothy McVeigh at 29 has found himself in the ante chamber of the death house and branded as the greatest mass murderer in US history is a chilling tale of how a bright young man with a distinguished army record in the Gulf War swallowed the rantings of extremist groups against the government he once upheld on the field of battle.

How and why McVeigh went wrong may never be known if he continues to claim he is innocent of the violent deaths of the 168 men, women and children in the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma on April 19th, 1995. Some 850 people were injured.

At first Americans were sure that such an atrocity could only be the work of foreign terrorists. When a few days later the 27 year old army veteran and former scholarship boy from upstate New York was charged with the bombing, there was disbelief.

How could a patriotic American do such a thing? What kind of hatred could have driven him to such an appalling deed? Where could such a rage to kill have come from?

SOME have sought the answer in McVeigh's boy hood years when, like so many others, he "lived the divorce revolution". At 10 his mother, Mildred, had walked out on hardworking but unexciting Bill McVeigh, who worked the night shift in the car plant near Buffalo across the river from Niagara Falls and ran bingo nights for his local Catholic church.

To the neighbours, young Timothy seemed to take the separation well. "He never showed any troubled side to me. He never seemed to be affected by it. He was always smiling, always polite," the mother of one his friends says.

McVeigh's older sister, Patty, bossed him around a bit. But he in turn was loving and protective towards his four year old younger sister, Jennifer.

Now Jennifer, along with her father, is one of those pleading for her brother's life to the jury which will decide his fate some time next week. But it was also her evidence - under duress from the prosecutors about his hatred for the government expressed in letters to her and on her computer which helped to convict McVeigh.

His mother, who had remarried, is now too ill to be involved in the pleadings. Army friends recall that he never had a kind word for his mother and even called her "that no good whore, a slut".

Soon after his arrest, she wrote to a local Florida paper: Sounds like he could be any of our children, right? People who live in glasshouses should not throw stones. It could happen to your family just as it has to this one."

MCVEIGH worked hard in high school and won a scholarship which he did not take up. He got bored after a while in a business college studying computers and worked for a security truck company.

He told a friend he was attracted by the uniform and carrying a gun. Guns and explosives had become a hobby if not an obsession while at school, and he owned a .22 rifle and later a semi automatic weapon.

As a boy he was also a "survivalist" and used to stockpile food, camping equipment and guns in case of a nuclear attack or the communists took over the country", a neighbour recalls.

In his high school yearbook McVeigh recorded activities such as staying away from school, losing sleep, finding it in school". Under future plans he wrote: "Take it as it comes, buy a Lamborghini, California girls."

His guidance counsellor, Hugh Smith, told the Washington Post he was struck by the alienated tone of McVeigh's entry. The boy who celebrated "staying away from school" had not missed a day in six years.

With frustration at lack of job prospects and low pay, McVeigh suddenly decided to join the army. Here he was in his element with weapons and explosives and became such a model soldier that he was soon promoted to sergeant.

His superiors noted his racist attitude towards black soldiers who complained about him. His buddies noticed his awkwardness with women and lack of interest in them.

He maintained his survivalist obsession and continued to stockpile guns and supplies in a rented locker. He applied to join the elite Green Berets but the Gulf War intervened and he was sent to Saudi Arabia.

McVeigh saw action as the driver of an armoured personnel carrier and he destroyed an Iraqi tank. He was awarded several medals and seemed destined for a successful army career when he dropped out of the Green Beret testing course, saying that he had lost his fitness.

It was a fatal step. He returned home to live with his father and sister and worked as a security guard, but his frustration used to boil over in rages, startling his workmates.

He looked up former army colleagues like Terry Nichols, who will also go on trial for the Oklahoma bombing later this year. McVeigh moved between Michigan and Arizona which were centres for the growing armed militia and Patriot groups noted for their virulent antigovernment views.

McVeigh soon got caught up in these movements. In a letter to a local newspaper he denounced what he saw as the rot in modern society with crime and politicians "out of control". The "American Dream of the middle class has all but disappeared," he wrote. America is in serious decline.

Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that, but it might."

McVeigh plunged deeper into the murky world of the extremist rightwing groups and sold them guns under an assumed name. He also sold copies of the book, The Turner Diaries, that became his bible and from which he had extracts when arrested.

The Turner Diaries is a novel written in 1978 by William Pierce, a former professor of physics who became leader of the virulently racist and antiSemitic National Alliance. It describes how a group of white supremacists uses a truck bomb to blow up the FBI headquarters in Washington.

The bombing leaves more than 700 people dead and signals the start of a guerrilla war against ZOG which stands for Zionist Occupied Government, a term used by racists and neo Nazis to reflect their belief that the country is controlled by Jews.

If innocent people have to die in the war against ZOG, so be it. In the Diaries it is written: "There is no way we can destroy the system without hurting innocent people. It is a heavy burden of responsibility for us to bear since most of the victims of our bomb were only pawns, who were no more committed to the sick philosophy ... of the System than we are.

The siege of the Branch Davidian cult by federal agents at Waco, Texas, on April 19th, 1993, in which 81 people died including 17 children, enraged McVeigh. In a jail interview he said it made him see "a localised police state".

This week, McVeigh listened impassively to the voices which told of the havoc another bomb wrought on innocent people on the second anniversary of Waco. Would remorse save his life? So far he has shown none.