Eric Rudolph

• 1. Introduction

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  Eric Robert Rudolph was picking through a dumpster behind a Save-A-Lot store in Murphy, North Carolina, at about four in the morning on the 31st of May 2003. A rookie officer named Jeffrey Scott Postell, on routine patrol, assumed he was watching a burglary. He was wrong. The man in the dumpster was unarmed and did not resist. His hair was dyed black, his mustache was trimmed, and his sneakers were new. Under the camouflage jacket was one of the most hunted people in America. Rudolph, born in 1966, was known to the public as the Olympic Park Bomber. How did a former soldier from the North Carolina mountains end up on the FBI's most wanted list? What did he say he was fighting for, and why do people who write about him still disagree about the faith he claimed? And how does a man vanish into a national forest for years while search teams comb it?

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• 2. Before the Bombs

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  Robert Rudolph died in 1981, and that loss pushed his family to a new home in Nantahala, in Macon County, western North Carolina. His son Eric finished ninth grade at the Nantahala School and then left for good. He went to work as a carpenter alongside his older brother Daniel.

  At 18, Rudolph accompanied his mother to a compound in Schell City, Missouri, called the Church of Israel. It was a Christian Identity community, a detail that would haunt arguments about his beliefs for decades.

  After earning a GED, he enlisted in the Army and did basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia. He later served with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and attended the Air Assault School there in 1988. He reached the rank of Specialist, pay grade E-4. In January 1989 the Army discharged him for marijuana use.

  Civilian life took a darker direction. In the years that followed, he joined several white supremacist groups. Eventually he turned to the Army of God and began carrying out bombings. By 1996 he was 29, and Atlanta was preparing to host the Summer Olympics.

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• 3. Centennial Olympic Park

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  On the 27th of July 1996, a bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park during the Atlanta Games. Rudolph had placed two anonymous calls to 911 beforehand, warning that it was coming. The warnings did not prevent the casualties. One spectator was killed and 111 people were wounded. A 40-year-old Turkish news cameraman also died of a heart attack while running toward the scene.

  Later, in a written statement released in 2005, Rudolph explained his reasoning in political terms. He described the crowds that gathered in Atlanta as people celebrating what he called "the ideals of global socialism" under the protection of Washington. In his telling, the Olympic movement itself embodied those ideals. He pointed to the song "Imagine" by John Lennon, which was the theme of the 1996 Games, as their perfect expression.

  His stated aim was to embarrass the government in the eyes of the world over what he called its "abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand." He also had a practical plan. He hoped to force the cancellation of the Games, or at least to frighten people away from the venues and drain money from the huge investment made in them.

  The man blamed in the first days after the blast, however, was someone else entirely.

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• 4. The Wrong Suspect

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  Richard Jewell was a security guard working at Centennial Olympic Park. He was the first to notice the device, and he helped clear people from the area. For a short time he was celebrated as a hero.

  Then the FBI turned its attention to him. In the days after the attack he became the prime suspect, and his name and face drew international media attention. The man who actually built the bomb stayed out of sight.

  Rudolph's own statement, years later, cleared Jewell of any involvement. By then the guard's reputation had passed through a spectacular rise and fall that had nothing to do with the real bomber.

  Meanwhile, the real bomber was not finished. The next target was in the Atlanta suburbs, and it was a medical clinic.

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• 5. Three More Targets

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  On the 16th of January 1997, a bomb went off at an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs, a suburb of Atlanta. Rudolph later confessed to it.

  The next attack came on the 21st of February 1997 at the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian bar in Atlanta. Five people were injured. Rudolph confessed to this one as well.

  The third was in Birmingham, Alabama, on the 29th of January 1998, at another abortion clinic. Robert Sanderson, a Birmingham police officer, was working there as security in uniform while off duty. The blast killed him. Emily Lyons, a nurse at the clinic, was critically injured.

  The bombs in these attacks were packed with nails, which flew outward as shrapnel. Across the whole series of bombings, two people died and more than 100 were injured.

  In Birmingham, though, two bystanders had seen the man leaving the scene. Their observations would give investigators their first real lead.

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• 6. Five Years in the Mountains

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  Jeffrey Tickal and Jermaine Hughes saw a man leave the Birmingham scene, and they took note of his appearance and his truck's license plate. Their tips led the Department of Justice to name Rudolph as a suspect in the Alabama bombing in February 1998. In October of that year he was linked to the other Atlanta and Alabama attacks.

  On the 5th of May 1998, he became the 454th fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. The Bureau described him as armed and extremely dangerous and offered a reward of $1 million for information leading directly to his arrest. He stayed on the list for five years.

  His family stood by him and believed he was innocent. Agents questioned them and kept them under surveillance. On the 7th of March 1998, his older brother Daniel filmed himself cutting off his own left hand with a radial arm saw. He said he wanted to "send a message to the FBI and the media." Surgeons were able to reattach the hand.

  Rudolph spent more than five years in the Appalachian wilderness while federal and amateur search teams combed the hills without finding him. By his own account, he camped in the Nantahala National Forest, near Cherokee and Graham Counties in North Carolina. He ate acorns and salamanders, took vegetables from gardens, stole grain from a silo, and raided dumpsters in Murphy.

  That last habit would be his undoing.

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• 7. Plea and Sentence

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  On the 14th of October 2003, federal authorities formally charged Rudolph. His first lawyer was Richard S. Jaffe. After Jaffe withdrew from the case, Judy Clarke took over his defense.

  In April 2005, the Department of Justice announced a deal. Rudolph would plead guilty to every charge in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. A condition of the deal was that he reveal where he had hidden dynamite in the North Carolina forests. The FBI recovered 250 pounds of it, and the agreement was confirmed. On the 13th of April, he entered his pleas in person in courtrooms in Birmingham and Atlanta.

  He released a statement that insisted the arrangement was no concession. He claimed to have "deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death." He also called the agreement "purely a tactical choice on my part" that did not legitimate the government's moral authority to judge him.

  On the 18th of July 2005, he received two consecutive life terms without parole for the killing of the Birmingham police officer. On the 22nd of August 2005, he received two more consecutive life terms for the Atlanta bombings. That same day he was sent to the ADX Florence supermax prison near Florence, Colorado.

  There he spends 23 hours of each day alone in a concrete cell of about 80 square feet. In 2021 he tried to have part of his sentence vacated, and the attempt failed.

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• 8. A Contested Creed

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  After the arrest, The Washington Post reported that the FBI saw a long association between Rudolph and the Christian Identity movement. That movement teaches that Northern European whites descend from the lost tribes of Israel and that people who are not white Christians cannot be saved. The Post also reported that some investigators believed he wrote letters claiming the nightclub and clinic bombings on behalf of the Army of God. That group endorses force against abortion and has ties to Christian Identity.

  Rudolph rejected that label. In his statement after pleading guilty, he said his involvement had amounted to a brief association with the daughter of a Christian Identity follower, later identified as Daniel Gayman. Asked about religion, he answered, "I was born a Catholic, and with forgiveness I hope to die one." He has also said, "The truth is I am a Christian."

  Outlets and authors have described him in varied ways. The radio program On Point called him a "Christian Identity extremist," and Harper's Magazine used the phrase "Christian terrorist." Voice of America said he could be seen as part of an attempt to use Christian faith to forge a kind of racial and social purity. In 2004, the authors Michael Shermer and Dennis McFarland offered him as an example of "religious extremism in America."

  In court, Rudolph showed no remorse. He called his acts against abortion providers a "moral duty" and quoted scripture: "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

  The Anti-Defamation League noted in 2003 that extremist chatter online had praised him as a hero, and that some followers of hate groups were urging further violence modeled on his bombings.

  In a letter to his mother, Rudolph described the money and books that strangers sent him. Most of the senders, he wrote, were born-again Christians hoping to save his soul. He said he could "really do without the condescension" and added that he "really preferred Nietzsche to the Bible." His mother read the letter as a sign of his intellectual side, not a rejection of his Catholic faith. In another work, titled "White Lies: Abortion, Eugenics, And Racism," he expresses admiration for Catholicism.

  His essays that condone violence and militant action have been posted online by an Army of God anti-abortion activist. Victims say the messages amount to harassment and could incite violence. Alice Martin, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama during his prosecution, said the prison could do little. "An inmate does not lose his freedom of speech," she said.

  In February 2013, with help from his brother, Rudolph published a book called Between the Lines of Drift: The Memoirs of a Militant through Lulu.com. It was later republished and made available on the Army of God website.

  In April 2013, the United States attorney general seized $200 from him. The money went toward the $1 million he owes in restitution to the state of Alabama.

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