Joseph Hartzler, who led the successful prosecution of Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and injured hundreds in the deadliest domestic terror attack in American history, died on Dec. 18 at his home in Chicago. He was 75.
The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Lisa Hartzler.
On April 19, 1995, Mr. Hartzler was driving home from his job as an assistant U.S. attorney in Springfield, Ill., listening to reports about the bombing earlier that day on his car radio.
“I was struck by the urge to keep driving, to just keep going right to Oklahoma City,” he later told The Chicago Tribune.
He submitted his name and a month later Attorney General Janet Reno named him to lead the group of prosecutors investigating the bombing.
Merrick Garland, who supervised the prosecution as a high-ranking Justice Department official and was later attorney general under Joe Biden, said in an interview, “We were looking for someone with experience related to bomb investigations, someone who worked well with F.B.I. investigators and someone with a reputation as a trial lawyer.”
By then, Mr. Hartzler had spent over a decade as a federal prosecutor in Chicago and Springfield. In 1985 he won the convictions of four Puerto Rican nationalists who had plotted to bomb military reserve training facilities. In 1988, he successfully prosecuted a Cook County judge as part of the Operation Greylord investigation into corruption in the county court system.
When Mr. McVeigh’s trial began in Denver in April 1997, Mr. Hartzler delivered the opening statement. He told the jurors that Mr. McVeigh, an Army veteran who had become obsessed with anti-government ideas, had parked a rental truck at the federal building — “beneath the plate glass,” he said, “under the day-care center” — and detonated nearly 5,000 pounds of explosives.
The aim, he said, was “to impose the will of Timothy McVeigh on the rest of America and to do so by premeditated violence and terrorism, murdering innocent men, women and children in hopes of seeing blood flow in the streets of America.”
Beth Wilkinson, one of the prosecutors under Mr. Hartzler at the trial, said in an interview that he skillfully streamlined the case by winnowing the number of witnesses and avoided the circuslike atmosphere of another much-publicized trial around the same time.
“The backdrop was the O.J. Simpson case,” Ms. Wilkinson said, “and Joe wasn’t just leading the prosecution but trying to reassure the country about how the justice system should operate.”
Mr. Garland said that Mr. Hartzler “was a brilliant lawyer, a superb strategist and an incredible leader who was empathetic when the victims of the bombing were extraordinarily, and appropriately, distraught.”
After a two-month trial, Mr. McVeigh was convicted of 11 counts of murder and conspiracy. Relatives of the bombing’s victims and spectators lined the streets outside the courthouse after the verdict and cheered Mr. Hartzler.
“We are obviously very pleased with the verdict,” Mr. Hartzler said. “We always had confidence in our evidence. Now everyone else will have confidence in the evidence and the verdict.”
Mr. McVeigh was sentenced to death, and in 2001 he was executed by lethal injection, a punishment Mr. Hartzler felt was justified.
“Just take one of the children or any one of the young people or any one of the old people he killed,” Mr. Hartzler told The Pantagraph, a newspaper in Bloomington, Ill., a few months before the execution. “He’s deprived them of the last nearly six years of their lives.”
Mr. Hartzler returned to Springfield and did not work on the subsequent federal trial of Terry Nichols, Mr. McVeigh’s partner in the bombing plot, who was convicted in December 1997 of conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter, and sentenced to life in prison. (Mr. Nichols was also found guilty at a state trial in Oklahoma and sentenced to 161 consecutive life sentences.)
Joseph Henry Hartzler was born on Sept. 8, 1950, in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in nearby Worthington. His father, Rex, worked in the insurance business, and his mother, Merle (Winter) Hartzler, managed the home.
He graduated from Amherst College with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1972 and taught English at a private school in Ohio. He then attended American University Washington College of Law, where he met Lisa Harms, a fellow law student; on Saturday date nights, they studied in the library until it closed. They married in 1981.
After graduating first in his law school class in 1978, Mr. Hartzler clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and joined the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago in 1979.
After 10 years, including stints as chief of the criminal and civil divisions, he joined a Chicago law firm, where he handled white-collar defense and civil litigation for two years. But he wanted to spend more time with his family, and moved to Springfield for the prosecutor job in 1991.
By then, multiple sclerosis, with which he had been diagnosed in 1988, was stealing the strength that had allowed Mr. Hartzler to play tennis and baseball, and even to once chase a purse snatcher, tackle him and hold him in a headlock until the police arrived. He began to use a motorized scooter in the early 1990s, partly to move around more easily while coaching his sons’ youth baseball teams.
“There’s no doubt it would be easier not to coach,” he told The Associated Press in 1995, after he was chosen as the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s Father of the Year. “There are a lot of things that would be easier not to do. But I’m a great coach. I have tremendous communication skills with children and the ability to transform anything into a good time.”
In 1997, after the McVeigh verdict, Mr. Hartzler was named one of the 25 most intriguing people of the year by People magazine, which quoted a letter he had sent to Newsweek that year: “I do have multiple sclerosis, but I do not ‘suffer’ from it.”
Mr. Hartzler remained with the U.S. attorney’s office in Springfield until 2015 and then worked for four years for Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois as a special counsel on anti-corruption hiring reforms. He was a federal public defender in 2019 before starting a private law practice. He retired in 2023.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hartzler is survived by his sons, Alex, Adam and Matthew; six grandchildren; and his brother Dan.
After a year working on the McVeigh case, Mr. Hartzler was homesick. But he decided not to return early to Illinois.
“I knew if I left, everyone would see multiple sclerosis as the culprit,” he later told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “I knew that it would cast an even darker shadow on those with M.S.”
“I have tried to show people that multiple sclerosis is no cause for celebration but not cause for devastation,” he added. “You should not quit your job and crawl into a cocoon.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
The post Joseph Hartzler Dies at 75; Led Prosecution of Oklahoma City Bomber appeared first on New York Times.
