The Boston manhunt is over, and my thoughts continue to be with the victims of the initial blasts, as well as the shootings which followed. I have little to contribute save my sadness. But this tragedy, thanks to social media, does bring to mind another tragedy from exactly 18 years ago …

Assuming we’re not being hoaxed, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, aka suspect #2, had a Twitter account. If real, I’m sure pundits will analyze it the hopes of finding a reason why Tsarnaev took the path he did. I don’t believe they’ll find one there. But what stood out to me (for reasons which will shortly become clear) is that he watched Breaking Bad …

… as well as The Walking Dead …

… plus he both watched and liked Game of Thrones.

Is there any deeper meaning to this? Not really. And I hope I don’t see anyone making more of those tweets than the fact that he just happened to be one of the tens of millions of people who watched those shows. Correlation is not causation, remember?

But those references to TV shows did make me remember another mass murderer, Timothy McVeigh, bomber of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the time I raised eyebrows at my Damascus, Maryland post office by shipping a package to him mere weeks before his execution.

Phil Bacharach published an article in the May 2001 issue of Esquire which quoted from many letters written by the bomber. In one of them, I learned McVeigh was a fan of science fiction.

For example, he wrote to Bacharach:

I don’t know how much of a science fan you are, but such shows take up most of my viewing time these days. I enjoy the combination of a good fantasy story and, many times, excellent reflection on current cultural, social, political trends. I hand The Outer Limits to be exceptional in this regard, but there’s also the old stand-bys: Star Trek: Next Generation and Voyagers, and Stargate comes up with a good episode once in a while (and when they don’t, the action is still good).

This intrigued me, and not just because I’ve lived a life of science fiction—I’d noticed he only mentioned science fiction movies and television, ignoring the written word. And it seemed important to me then to know why. So, even though McVeigh horrified me, I swallowed my anger and wrote the following letter, which as I read it now seems impossibly temperate, considering the addressee.

Maybe it was wrong of me to have written him so calmly and treat him so humanely, considering how he’d treated others … but I wanted to know.

I packaged up the letter with a copy of an anthology that contained one of my stories—Moon Shots, I believe—and drove to my post office, where the package addressed to “Timothy McVeigh/United States Penitentiary Terre Haute/Special Confinement Unit” caused some concern.

I explained why I was doing what I was doing, and they took the package … which I’m sure was examined closely along its trip and at its final destination.

From this distance, I’m no longer sure what kind of answer I expected. I probably assumed that McVeigh, like so many others, didn’t read, so movie and TV science fiction was the only science fiction he knew. But for some reason, because he went on and on about SF in those letters, and seemed to make it an important part of his intellectual evolution, it felt important to know for sure.

I never heard back. And McVeigh was executed less than a month later.

But still … I wonder.

And also wonder … to be honest … whether I should feel shame for having cared.