. . . is how ABC News explained how garage mechanic Tim Kessenger mistakenly reported that Tim McVeigh had an accomplice when he rented the Ryder truck.
The mechanic, Tom Kessinger, had been very specific, saying the man wore a baseball cap and a T-shirt, and had a tattoo above the elbow on his left arm. The FBI investigated hundreds of tips and even arrested some lookalikes, only to release them after questioning.
The agency eventually concluded that Kessinger had made a classic memory error: "memory misattribution."
It turned out that the day after McVeigh's visit, two men had shown up at the body shop. One of them had looked like McVeigh, and the other, an off-duty soldier named Todd Bunting, matched Kessinger's description of John Doe No. 2.
"He had the baseball cap, he had the build, he looked just like the fellow who Kessenger had described," says Schacter.
They had nothing to do with the bombing, but Bunting told the FBI he had worn the same clothes as the man Kessinger described. And, just above the elbow on his left arm, he had the tattoo, a Playboy bunny.
The FBI says what happened was this: Tom took his memory of Bunting from one day, and mistakenly attached it to his memory of McVeigh from the previous day.
This is a very common error. "People can often be confident in their memories, but still wrong," says Daniel Schacter, chairman of the psychology department at Harvard University.
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