(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Kathy Sanders, who lost two grandchildren in the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing, has filed a lawsuit for records about an unidentified leg found in the rubble more than 31 years ago.
The unidentified leg remains one of the enduring mysteries from the bombing, the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, investigators recovered a severed lower left leg and foot wearing a combat boot. That leg was eventually matched to OKC bombing victim Lakesha Levy, who was an airman at Tinker Air Force Base. However, Levy had already been buried with another left leg in her coffin.
To this day, the leg initially buried with Levy remains unidentified. In Sanders’s lawsuit, filed last Friday against Oklahoma’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, she seeks the state’s complete case file about both Levy’s leg and the unidentified leg—labeled P-54 and P-71, respectively.
Sanders said in her lawsuit that she believes the unidentified leg may belong to an additional co-conspirator to bomber Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, who assisted in the plot.
🚨NEW: Kathy Sanders, who lost her 2 grandsons in the OKC bombing, has filed a lawsuit for records on the unidentified leg found in the rubble after the attack.
Sanders believes the leg may belong to an additional co-conspirator.
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— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) August 27, 2026
To her point, the FBI initially had a manhunt out for a mystery co-conspirator referred to only as John Doe 2—only to later claim that John Doe 2 doesn’t exist and that the 20-plus witnesses who saw him were mistaken. McVeigh received the death penalty and was executed in June 2001, while Nichols is serving life in prison. To this day, the government says those were the only two men involved in the attack.
However, Nichols himself told Sanders in a letter that the leg probably belonged to a co-conspirator of McVeigh.
“What will change things and break the case wide open is to do a genetic DNA geneology [sic] trace on that unidentified leg,” Nichols said in the letter, which Sanders attached to her lawsuit as an exhibit. “I don’t know nor understand why this has not been diligently pursued. If you really want to get to the bottom of the OKC bombing then do a geneology [sic] trace on that leg.”
The state has admitted to having records that would prove Sanders’s theory one way or the other.
For over two decades after the bombing, investigators maintained that they were unable to extract DNA from the leg that was retrieved from Levy’s coffin because it has been embalmed. But in December 2015, Oklahoma Chief Toxicologist Dr. Byron Curtis told the Washington Times that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner did, in fact, have DNA from the mystery leg.
According to the book Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed, and Why it Matters, the FBI later surmised that the missing limb belonged to Cynthia Campbell Brown, a Secret Service agent killed in the bombing. However, the FBI didn’t want to test its theory because “doing so could raise the question of whose leg she was buried with—and perhaps set off an uncontrollable chain reaction of exhumations and mistaken body-part re-identifications,” the book said.
“If the extra leg did belong to a coconspirator, he was never investigated, much less identified,” the book added.
The Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has yet to respond to Sanders’s lawsuit. Headline USA will cover the case as it develops.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
