Bud Welch has every reason to want Timothy McVeigh dead. "I used to want to kill him," he admits. And few could reproach him for that. McVeigh murdered his daughter, one of the 168 to die in the Oklahoma bombing whom the killer talks of as "collateral damage".
And yet a small-time, politically uninvolved garage owner from this deeply conservative Bible-thumping state, which executes more prisoners for its size than any other state - 10 so far this year - has spent the last few years campaigning to save McVeigh's life.
On radio and TV, on Amnesty platforms, across the country, a member of the group Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation. Testifying to pardon boards, state legislatures, to Congress, on college campuses, and in churches . . .
He is convinced he is winning the argument, slowly, even among the families of Oklahoma victims, despite becoming a hate figure among some of them. "We are all on a different timetable," he says. "It took me almost a year and others will take even longer to realise that killing Tim McVeigh is not part of the healing process." That elusive sense of "closure", of being able to put behind them their tragedy, not to forget, he insists, cannot be the product of vengeance.
After the bombing Mr Welch admits he was floored, almost unable to function. He went down to the scene every day. "I felt a special closeness down there because that's where she was last alive and we were supposed to have lunch," he told the Washington Post. "I finally said to myself, Bud you are sick. What does Bud Welch need to get better, to move forward? Do we need trials to begin? Do we need an execution?
"It took me three weeks of asking that. I finally realised it was an act of vengeance and rage if we killed either one of those guys. And that was why Julie and 167 other people were dead - because of vengeance and rage. It has to stop somewhere. I'm not going to find any healing by taking Tim McVeigh out of his cage to kill him. It will not bring my little girl back," Mr Welch says.
"I don't know exactly how I will feel the day that McVeigh dies. But I'm satisfied that I have done everything humanly possible that I can to stop his execution. I'll feel good that I tried but that I just fell short." About eight months after Julie's death, a reporter approached him during one of his daily visits to what was the Murrah building. After a lengthy conversation, the reporter suggested that he would probably be relieved once Tim McVeigh was executed. Mr Welch amazed her by saying no, and her story set him off on the campaign trail.
Part of the sense of outrage of many of the victims' families is their perception that while McVeigh's name will live on, the names of the victims will be remembered only by their family and friends. For Mr Welch, part of the healing process is to talk about who his daughter was and his sense that she would approve of what he is doing. And be amused at his role of social activist and media celebrity.
Julie Marie Welch (23), his friend, his confidante, his "buddy", and his only daughter, was working for Social Security in the Murrah Building, her first job out of university. She was a talented linguist who had done well in Marquette University, Milwaukee, where her friends remembered her for her association with conservative Catholic causes and charities, the fight against the death penalty among them. Back in Oklahoma she had met a soldier at a prayer meeting and they were talking about becoming engaged.
On that April morning in 1995, before her weekly lunch with her father across the street, she had gone down to the lobby to meet a claimant who spoke only Spanish. Her body would only be found three days later.
Mr Welch's remarkable personal voyage to "closure" would go further, breaking more victimhood taboos. Speaking in Yale he described later how it appeared so straightforward: "I saw Bill McVeigh, Tim's father, on television a few weeks after the bombing. He's a very quiet type of person, did not grant hardly any television interviews. There was a crew out at his house in rural New York, just outside of Buffalo. "He was working in his flowerbed. The reporter asked him a question - I don't know what the question was or the answer. But I saw him look into the television camera for a short two or three seconds, and I saw a deep pain in a father's eye that probably none of you could have even recognised. I could because I was living that pain. And I knew that some day I had to go tell that man that I truly cared about how he felt, I did not blame him or his family for what his son had done."
A few weeks later, with the help of Church intermediaries and a neighbour of Mr McVeigh's, the two men met and talked about their gardens and then their pain. Since then friendship has flourished.
