Dr. Paul Heath, a survivor of the bombing in Oklahoma City, doesn't like to speak the name of the condemned bomber Timothy McVeigh, and hopes it will soon fade into obscurity. Chris Dyer of Las Vegas owns a piece of the same name and is hoping to capitalize on it.

        The 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building claimed 168 lives. Next month, McVeigh is scheduled to be executed at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.

        But the question of how the bombing will be remembered on the Internet remains. Domain names, including timothymcveigh.com, oklahomacitybombing.com and murrahbuilding.com, have been registered by people driven by profit or altruism.

        Late last year, Dyer, a 28-year-old city bus driver and Army reservist from Las Vegas, stumbled on a new hobby. He would scout the news for proper names and then go online to see whether they had been registered as “.com” domain names.

        In January, Dyer used directNIC (www.directnic.com) to inquire about McVeigh. He was surprised to find that timothymcveigh.com wasn't registered. He bought it immediately for $15. He calls it “the Holy Grail” of all the Oklahoma City bombing-related domain names.

        Now Dyer, a self described “conspiracy theorist,” thinks he may be able to turn a profit on the notorious name, especially in the days leading up to McVeigh's execution.

        Dyer sees nothing wrong with selling the domain name to the highest bidder, no questions asked. “It's none of my business what someone wants it for,” he said. “That's their First Amendment right to buy it. If they want to put "Hail Timothy McVeigh' or "Martyr for the Cause,' that's fine, I don't care.”

        Dyer has no idea how to actually develop a Web site. At present, timothymcveigh.com is an empty shell. But he is confident that McVeigh's name will not fade. He believes that timothymcveigh.com could be worth in the tens of thousands of dollars, although he has so far received only four inquiries from people interested in buying the name.

        “It could be worth something to someone,” said Herbey Bernadez of GreatDomains.com, a domain name brokerage and auction site. “The general rule of thumb with these things is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

        C.J. Lovik of Spokane, Wash., has owned both oklahomacitybombing.com and oklahomabombing.com since July of last year, according to records available at www.whois.net, a domain name registry.

        Lovik said that he owns some 35,000 domain names and that he wasn't aware that he held the Oklahoma City bombing names. Later he said he uses the domain names simply to generate traffic for his Web site: if either is entered, it redirects an Internet user to www.dotzup.com, his advertiser-based search engine.

        “It only has value to me if it gets traffic, it has no intrinsic value,” Lovik said. “I bought it thinking that if Oklahoma City wanted it, I'd give it to them.”

        Jean Ainsworth, a 50-year-old Oklahoma City resident, was surprised to discover last summer that oklahomacitynationalmemorial.com and oklahomacitymemorial.com hadn't been registered.

        “I couldn't believe it,” said Ainsworth, whose friend lost a daughter in the blast. “I was very irritated. I thought that was the first thing somebody should have done. I bought them basically to keep someone else from getting them.” She had always planned on giving the names to organizers of the memorial site, but they opted for a different domain name, www.oklahomacitynationalmemorial.org.

        Ainsworth objected to anyone seeking to profit from timothymcveigh.com.

        “Somebody should buy it and dig a hole and bury it where nobody can get to it for the next 200 years — make the payments on it and put it in a dead file somewhere,” she said.

        The owner of murrahbuilding.com, a 32-year-old truck driver and photographer from Victoria, British Columbia, who would allow himself to be identified only as Mik, said in an e-mail that he originally bought the domain name and two variations of it, murrahfederalbuilding.com and alfredpmurraybuilding.com, though he let the last two expire. He said he attempted to sell murrahbuilding.com, which he has owned since January 2000, for several thousand dollars in an online auction but eventually withdrew it without getting any bids.

        “I received some very disturbing comments from the people of the community of Oklahoma,” who said he “was trying to capitalize on tragedy,” Mik said. “I reasoned that CNN sells tragedy 24 hours a day.”

        Mik now says he would turn over the Web site “without thought of profit” if he were approached by a group interested in creating a legitimate memorial site. He said he wants to ensure that the site does not fall into the hands of a group with ill motives.

        “A place where anyone in the world could visit to either look at the names on the victim list, or post a comment of sorrow,” he said. “Not everybody that the tragedy affected will be able to travel to Oklahoma City.”

        Heath, 64, a psychologist who was working on the fifth floor of the Murrah Building at the time of the explosion, is concerned that the Web sites could fall into the wrong hands.

        “Sure, we worry about it but the Constitution gives people the right to freedom of speech, the right to express their opinions,” Heath said. “The worth of those guarantees is too valuable to give them up simply to silence delusional Web sites.”

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