"I am sorry these people had to lose their lives," Timothy McVeigh wrote to his hometown newspaper, the Buffalo News, in a statement published yesterday, on the eve of his execution. "But that's the nature of the beast. It's understood going in what the human toll will be."
The April 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma in which 168 died was "a legit tactic" in his war against an "out-of-control" government.
In a series of letters written from his death row prison cell before and after the postponement of his original execution date, the condemned mass murderer declared that his bombing was in defence of the right of Americans to personal freedom and a reaction to government atrocities at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
Acknowledging that millions of Americans despise him, the decorated Gulf War veteran said he hopes his countrymen eventually will come to view him as a "freedom fighter" who died for his cause. He compares his bombing to the actions of John Brown, who fought slavery in the mid-1800s by leading raids that killed men, women and children.
Unrepentant, still in his own eyes a righteous soldier, his victims the hapless casualties of war, McVeigh last night prepared for the certainty of his own death this morning.
At 7 a.m. local time (1 p.m. Irish time) he will be strapped to a table in the federal prison of Terre Haute, Indiana, and receive his first of three injections, sodium pentathol, to make him unconscious. Then follows pancuronium bromide, to paralyse the lungs and muscles. Finally, potassium chloride will be administered to stop his heart - the subject usually dies in 10 miunutes. McVeigh will be the first person to be put to death by the federal government since 1963.
Last night, McVeigh was confined to the 9 ft by 14 ft isolation cell in the execution building only a few yards from the room where he will be killed, with a few books, a black-and-white television set and the prospects of a $20 last meal from the restaurant of his choice. He made final calls to friends and his father, who will not attend the execution.
His death will be witnessed at the prison by 10 victims or survivors of victims, 10 media representatives and four people McVeigh had invited, including two of his lawyers. The fifth of McVeigh's guests, the novelist Gore Vidal, said he could not attend. About 300 victims of the blast or family members of those killed are due to watch by closed-circuit television in Oklahoma City.
McVeigh has turned down hundreds of reporters' requests for interviews in recent weeks. He told the Buffalo News he had also turned down a request from the FBI for a "final debriefing".
And he told the paper that he might have chosen another tactic for expressing his hatred of the federal government. Mc Veigh said he sometimes wishes that, instead of a bombing, he had used his gunnery skills for a series of assassinations against police and government officials who crack down on the rights of gun owners.
He has made clear that after his death he is to be cremated and his ashes will be scattered at a secret location. "I don't want to create a draw for people who hate me, or for people who love me," McVeigh wrote.
He continues to get letters in prison from people who admire his political stance, though most do not condone the bombing. Some of the letters are bizarre. "Timmy even got a letter from a woman who said she would have his baby if he could somehow get his sperm smuggled out of prison," his father, Mr Bill McVeigh, told the News. "She even said her boyfriend told her it was OK."
Protests for and against the execution started last night and prison officials gave both sides separate but equal sites on the green meadows surrounding the US Penitentiary just south of Terre Haute, fenced-in areas with portable floodlights and temporary toilets where they could begin to gather at midnight, seven hours before the execution. Prior to that, they could assemble at two city parks. Some 1,500 journalists have gathered.
In this Indiana college town, some regular Sunday church services were devoted to the execution. The First Unitarian church brought in a speaker to discuss capital punishment.
At St Margaret Mary Catholic Church, a centre for those opposed to capital punishment, protesters planned a late afternoon march to the prison just outside town.
At nearby St Mary of the Woods College, nuns from the Sisters of Providence order planned a silent prayer vigil for the victims of the bombing and the man who brought it about.
The latter has few plans to prepare to meet his maker. An agnostic, he wrote to the News that he will "improvise, adapt and overcome" if it turns out that there is an afterlife, and he winds up in heaven or hell.
"If I am going to hell," he said, "I'm gonna have a lot of company."
He should know this morning.