This week in 2001

“Invictus”
By William Ernest Henley

“…It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

— Timothy McVeigh, convicted on eleven charges including murder and use of a weapon of mass destruction, lethal injection, Indiana.
Executed June 11, 2001

McVeigh and two accomplices bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, using a rented truck and a homemade explosive device weighing several thousand pounds. They killed 168 people and injured hundreds more. “I’m sorry these people had to lose their lives,” McVeigh wrote to his hometown newspaper. “But that’s the nature of the beast. It’s understood going in what the human toll will be.” He did not deliver any final words but instead left behind the poem “Invictus,” written in 1875 by the British poet William Ernest Henley.

Invictus means “unconquerable” in Latin.