Post by SoulTrainOz on Jul 28, 2006 6:54:50 GMT -5
The untold story of Eric Robert Rudolph
By Scott Freeman, Creative Loafing
THE OWLS GATHERED in the trees around the silos because of the mice, which came because of the loose grain scattered on the ground. There were five silos, each 30 feet tall, standing together in the valley next to the Snowbird Mountain range. Nestled halfway between Murphy and Andrews in the very western corner of North Carolina, the area around the silos is a rich floodplain, thanks to the creeks and streams that feed into the Valley River, and the farmers there grow corn, soybeans and wheat.
Like the owls and the mice, a gaunt and weary man emerged from the woods in the fall of 1999 and went to the silos on a quest for food. In the months leading up to the harvest, he'd methodically scavenged 170 trash bags from the Dumpster behind the McDonald's in Andrews, and cleaned each one of them
in the Valley River. He figured if he double-bagged them, he could haul five gallons of grain, about 50 pounds, in each one.
The issue of how to protect his stash of grain from vermin was more problematic, but once he discovered the solution it seemed almost laughably simple. Of course. Where do trash bags go? Into herbie-curbies. Why? Because they have lids that close. Even better, they have wheels. Once the harvest was finished and the silos were bulging with grain and beans, he stole four
herbie-curbies and carried them across the Valley River -- one at a time on his back as he trudged through the cold, groin-high water. He cleaned them out in the river, using leaves to scrub out the gunk, and rolled them a mile-and-a-half at night, past the little airport and down to his staging area. He stashed them in the bramble next to Oak Grove Baptist Church, across the road from the silos. During the day, he camouflaged them with white pine branches.
His camp was set up on the ridge above the silos, and he'd come down late at night, when traffic on Airport Road was almost nonexistent. Occasionally, a state trooper would park at the church and wait to catch speeders. And sometimes kids would park behind the silos to smoke pot or make out. One night he was trapped, lying face down on the ground, as a teenage couple had sex in a car parked barely 10 feet from him. It was the closest he'd come to being caught since he'd vanished 18 months earlier.
Every night for two weeks following the harvest, he climbed the silos using the steel ladder on the side. At the top was a small trap door that opened and gave him access to the fruits of the harvest. He would steady himself on the dew-covered metal, reach in and fill a bag with as much beans or corn or wheat as he could carry, and haul it on his back down to the ground. Then
back up for more. Once he'd accumulated 50 pounds on the ground, he'd put the food into a doubled bag and lug it over to the herbie-curbies.
In the deep of the night, he liked to sit on top of the silo and rest,
firing up the half-smoked Marlboro Lights he dug out of the trash behind the Gibson Furniture store in downtown Andrews. These were some of the best times -- sitting in the crisp autumn air, smelling the sweetly sour rotting corn stalks and getting so lost in himself that he could almost forget he was the most wanted man in the United States. In those moments, it was just him and the owls and the mice.
Eric Robert Rudolph was fascinated by the owls. Every night, he could hear their hoots in the distance. In the harvest moon, his eyes could pick up the round-faced birds as they gracefully flew from the trees and swooped down from the sky. He was so close to their killing field that he could see the cloud of dust the owls kicked up as they attacked their prey. Once the owl secured the mouse in its clutches, it would fly back to the tree line and celebrate its warm feast by hooting a little tune.
It seemed a perfectly natural synergy: The mouse got its food, the owl got its food and Rudolph got his. When he was finally finished, on Halloween, he stole a black Chevrolet Silverado truck from a used car lot and hauled the grain-filled herbie-curbies to a hiding place up in the Snowbird Mountains. With just two weeks' work, he had guaranteed his ability to survive in the wild: He had amassed a stash of food that would sustain him for years.
IN MANY NATIVE American cultures, the owl is the symbol of death. In statues and artwork, Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of death, is depicted with owls, and Native American lore says an appearance by an owl is a harbinger of death.
Three people died at the hands of Rudolph, and many more were maimed and injured, in a frightening bombing spree that began 10 years ago at Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympic Games. Six months later, Rudolph set off two bombs outside of an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs. Five weeks after that, he placed two bombs in the rear of the Otherside Lounge, a gay/lesbian bar on Piedmont Road. He then laid low for almost a year. Finally, on Jan. 29, 1998, Rudolph used a remote control to detonate a bomb containing dynamite and 5-and-a-half pounds of nails in the face of off-duty police officer Robert "Sandy" Sanderson outside a Birmingham abortion clinic. Sanderson was instantly killed.
The fact that more people didn't die from Rudolph's bombs is a mere fluke, according to Jack Killorin, who was the special agent in charge of the Atlanta office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms during most of Rudolph's reign of terror. Killorin is intimately familiar with the prodigious amount of thought and planning that went into the bombings. "He's one of the most successful serial bombers in history," Killorin says. "I do
not respect Eric Robert Rudolph. But I do respect his capability as an opponent."
Rudolph very carefully set into place his plan to bomb the Olympic Games. He placed a bag under a bench by the AT&T tower in Centennial Park that contained smokeless gunpowder and was packed with more than 5 pounds of 3-inch cut masonry nails. The bomb was connected to a Westclox Baby Ben alarm clock and set to detonate in an hour, and it was situated so that the shrapnel would shoot out parallel to the terrain. But the bag was accidentally knocked over and was lying on the ground when the bomb went off. "It served to allow a lot of the explosion to go up and out instead of spreading straight into the crowd," says Killorin, now retired from the ATF. Two people died, but had things gone according to Rudolph's plan, there could have been dozens of deaths.
In Sandy Springs, Rudolph placed his first bomb at a wall outside the clinic's operating room. A second bomb was placed to spray shrapnel into the parking lot on the other side of the building, where Rudolph correctly assumed law enforcement personnel would gather. It was timed to go off about an hour after the first bomb. But again, fate intervened. "There was a substance abuse treatment center in the building and a couple came in that morning driving a 1985 Nissan Pulsar," says Killorin. "After the first explosion, they moved the car and happened to park it in front of the bomb. It absorbed huge amounts of the explosive."
Like at the Sandy Springs clinic, Rudolph placed a second bomb at the Otherside Lounge, also targeted at law enforcement. However, an officer spotted it, and it was detonated with a robot. "His bombs hadn't killed or maimed a lot of people because of events that were out of his control," Killorin says of Rudolph's attacks prior to the one in Birmingham. "That frustrated him. To solve the problem, he went to the remote control so he could make sure they killed and maimed."
After he was identified as the suspect in the Birmingham bombing, Rudolph fled into the mountains of western North Carolina, where he stayed for more than five years. The largest manhunt in U.S. history was launched to find him. Hundreds of law enforcement personnel fanned the woods of North Carolina looking for the fugitive. But when they couldn't find him, they
scaled back. Four years later -- when many thought he either was dead or living in a foreign country -- Rudolph was captured by a rookie cop who found him Dumpster-diving in Murphy.
Rudolph has never spoken to the press and didn't respond to Creative Loafing's written request for an interview, mailed to him at the Supermax prison where he is housed in Florence, Colo. But during his two-year stay in the Birmingham jail, Rudolph wrote more than 100 pages of letters that, for the first time, detail his life on the run, his motives for the bombings, and how he pulled them off. Those letters, combined with federal court documents, offer fresh information and insights into Rudolph, his crimes and
the investigation that ultimately led him to plead guilty to the bombings.
The letters and essays were posted on the hardcore anti-abortion website ArmyOfGod.com after Rudolph's April 2005 guilty plea. (Warning: The site includes extremely graphic images of aborted fetuses.) The letters are articulate and detailed, and have gone virtually unnoticed by a mainstream media that had long ago moved on to the next big story. They offer a rare
window into the mind of a man who considers himself morally justified in his killing, even a hero.
To law enforcement, however, Rudolph stands out as a "lone wolf -- a singular figure, not associated with any group, who rises up from nowhere, strikes, and then vanishes without a trace.
And he almost got away with it.
THE 1996 OLYMPIC GAMES were intended to be Atlanta's coronation as the "International City" it had always aspired to be. The eyes of the world were on the Olympics, and Atlanta hoped to showcase itself as the jewel of the South.
Rudolph, a right-wing extremist who lived near the Georgia border in North Carolina, had other ideas. "The Olympic temptation, he could not resist it," says Killorin. "It was too big a stage."
Rudolph's goal was to force the cancellation of the Games or, at the least, create such a state of anxiety that he would empty the streets around the venues. "The purpose of the attack was to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand," Rudolph wrote. His original plan was to knock out the power grid surrounding Atlanta and, in effect, pull the plug
on the Games. When he couldn't acquire the high explosives necessary to do that, he went to his back-up plan.
He built five low-tech timed devices, propelled by smokeless gunpowder and covered with 3-inch masonry nails; the biggest bomb contained 5 pounds of them. He put each of the bombs into army backpacks, and planned to explode one per day. Rudolph described his targets as law enforcement personnel, not
civilians. "Each [explosion would be] preceded by a 40- to 50-minute warning given to 911," Rudolph wrote. "The location and time of detonation was to be given, and the intent was to thereby clear each of the areas, leaving only uniformed arms-carrying government personnel exposed to potential injury.
.... I knew the weapons used (highly uncontrollable timed explosives) and the choice of tactics (placing them in areas frequented by large numbers of civilians) could potentially lead to a disaster."
Rudolph fell behind schedule and had to wait until the eighth day of the Olympics to execute his plan. When he reached the Atlanta area, he set up a staging area east of the city off I-20, where crews were moving dirt and bulldozing land for what appeared to be a mall. He stashed four bombs there and took the biggest one with him.
Shortly after midnight on July 27, 1996, Rudolph walked through the throngs celebrating the Olympics in Centennial Park and carefully placed a backpack containing the bomb on the ground under a bench. He set the timer and walked 10 minutes to a nearby bank of phone booths. He dialed 911 and claims to have launched into his "there's a bomb in Centennial Park" speech when the most amazing thing happened: The 911 operator hung up on him. Officials have confirmed the existence of a call to 911 during which the line went dead.
Rudolph realized the call would be traced and panicked. He quickly disappeared into the crowd, and spent several minutes gathering himself before he tried to find another phone booth. He wandered around downtown until he saw a pay phone by the Days Inn at Spring and Baker streets, where he held his nose to disguise his voice and called the 911 operator at 12:58 a.m. "The crowd was pushing in and after the first couple sentences, I was
eyeballed closely by at least two individuals," he wrote. "This caused me to leave off the last sentence, which indicated the exact location of the device. The result of all this was to produce a disaster -- a disaster of my making for which I do apologize to the victims and their families."
Word of Rudolph's 911 call never reached the park. A security guard named Richard Jewell became the hero of the Olympic Games when he spotted the bag and informed his supervisor, who summoned two bomb experts. They crawled under the bench. One of them carefully opened a flap. He focused his
flashlight, then leaned forward to peer inside. Almost simultaneously, both bomb experts scrambled backward, away from the backpack. When they stood up, they didn't even take the time to turn around; they kept walking backward.
"What have we got?" the supervisor asked.
"It's big," one of the bomb experts replied.
"How big?"
"Real big."
The security team was frantically trying to move people out of the area when the bomb exploded 10 minutes later, at 1:20 a.m. The supervisor later described it as the eeriest thing he's ever heard. After the bomb went off, the park was suddenly deathly silent; the only thing he could hear was the swooshing sound of shrapnel cutting through the air.
After the catastrophe of his first bomb, which caused the death of two civilians and injured more than 100 people, Rudolph got skittish. He returned to his staging area off I-20, detonated the remaining four bombs and went back home to Murphy, N.C. But he wasn't deterred. While the FBI spent the next three months on the Richard Jewell wild-goose chase, Rudolph spent his time preparing for his next move. He broke into an explosives
storehouse in Asheville and stole more than 300 pounds of nitroglycerin dynamite.
And with that, he was back in business.
TWO BASIC BELIEFS were at the core of Rudolph's mission: Abortion is murder, and the "homosexual agenda" is an assault upon the integrity of American society.
To him, the abortion issue is simple. An unborn baby is a child. Thus, abortion kills children. And if abortion kills children, that is murder. It is the duty of anyone truly against abortion to do whatever it takes, including violence, to stop the wholesale slaughter of unborn children. For that reason, Rudolph didn't suffer the pro-life movement easily. "For these people I have nothing to say other than you are liars, hypocrites and cowards," he wrote. "You have the right, the responsibility and the duty to
come to the defense of the innocent when the innocent are under assault."
His outrage over homosexuality was a little more complicated: Rudolph's younger brother is gay. Rudolph writes that he believes there is nothing wrong with consenting adults who practice homosexuality in private. "Homosexuality is an aberrant sexual behavior, and as such I have complete sympathy and understanding for those who are suffering from this condition,"
he wrote. "But when the attempt is made to drag this practice out of the closet ... in an 'in your face' attempt to force society to accept and recognize this behavior as being just as legitimate and normal as the natural man/woman relationship, every effort should be made, including force if necessary, to halt this effort."
The difference between Rudolph and other extremists who oppose abortion and homosexuality is that Rudolph was ready to act. And he was known for immersing himself in whatever caught his interest.
He gave the fight against abortion and homosexuality the same kind of devotion he'd given to marijuana when he was a grower and dealer. Despite his right-wing views, Rudolph smoked pot and didn't believe the government had the right to regulate something God put on the earth. After he left the Army in 1989 and returned to North Carolina, Rudolph supported himself
growing and selling high-grade weed. He even traveled to Amsterdam, where pot and hashish are openly sold in cafes. "The story is he went to Europe to find seeds, and he studied ways to develop a really high-quality strain of marijuana," says Killorin. "That's him: 'I'm the person who's the expert, I'm in control here.'"
Source: Creative Loafing
By Scott Freeman, Creative Loafing
THE OWLS GATHERED in the trees around the silos because of the mice, which came because of the loose grain scattered on the ground. There were five silos, each 30 feet tall, standing together in the valley next to the Snowbird Mountain range. Nestled halfway between Murphy and Andrews in the very western corner of North Carolina, the area around the silos is a rich floodplain, thanks to the creeks and streams that feed into the Valley River, and the farmers there grow corn, soybeans and wheat.
Like the owls and the mice, a gaunt and weary man emerged from the woods in the fall of 1999 and went to the silos on a quest for food. In the months leading up to the harvest, he'd methodically scavenged 170 trash bags from the Dumpster behind the McDonald's in Andrews, and cleaned each one of them
in the Valley River. He figured if he double-bagged them, he could haul five gallons of grain, about 50 pounds, in each one.
The issue of how to protect his stash of grain from vermin was more problematic, but once he discovered the solution it seemed almost laughably simple. Of course. Where do trash bags go? Into herbie-curbies. Why? Because they have lids that close. Even better, they have wheels. Once the harvest was finished and the silos were bulging with grain and beans, he stole four
herbie-curbies and carried them across the Valley River -- one at a time on his back as he trudged through the cold, groin-high water. He cleaned them out in the river, using leaves to scrub out the gunk, and rolled them a mile-and-a-half at night, past the little airport and down to his staging area. He stashed them in the bramble next to Oak Grove Baptist Church, across the road from the silos. During the day, he camouflaged them with white pine branches.
His camp was set up on the ridge above the silos, and he'd come down late at night, when traffic on Airport Road was almost nonexistent. Occasionally, a state trooper would park at the church and wait to catch speeders. And sometimes kids would park behind the silos to smoke pot or make out. One night he was trapped, lying face down on the ground, as a teenage couple had sex in a car parked barely 10 feet from him. It was the closest he'd come to being caught since he'd vanished 18 months earlier.
Every night for two weeks following the harvest, he climbed the silos using the steel ladder on the side. At the top was a small trap door that opened and gave him access to the fruits of the harvest. He would steady himself on the dew-covered metal, reach in and fill a bag with as much beans or corn or wheat as he could carry, and haul it on his back down to the ground. Then
back up for more. Once he'd accumulated 50 pounds on the ground, he'd put the food into a doubled bag and lug it over to the herbie-curbies.
In the deep of the night, he liked to sit on top of the silo and rest,
firing up the half-smoked Marlboro Lights he dug out of the trash behind the Gibson Furniture store in downtown Andrews. These were some of the best times -- sitting in the crisp autumn air, smelling the sweetly sour rotting corn stalks and getting so lost in himself that he could almost forget he was the most wanted man in the United States. In those moments, it was just him and the owls and the mice.
Eric Robert Rudolph was fascinated by the owls. Every night, he could hear their hoots in the distance. In the harvest moon, his eyes could pick up the round-faced birds as they gracefully flew from the trees and swooped down from the sky. He was so close to their killing field that he could see the cloud of dust the owls kicked up as they attacked their prey. Once the owl secured the mouse in its clutches, it would fly back to the tree line and celebrate its warm feast by hooting a little tune.
It seemed a perfectly natural synergy: The mouse got its food, the owl got its food and Rudolph got his. When he was finally finished, on Halloween, he stole a black Chevrolet Silverado truck from a used car lot and hauled the grain-filled herbie-curbies to a hiding place up in the Snowbird Mountains. With just two weeks' work, he had guaranteed his ability to survive in the wild: He had amassed a stash of food that would sustain him for years.
IN MANY NATIVE American cultures, the owl is the symbol of death. In statues and artwork, Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of death, is depicted with owls, and Native American lore says an appearance by an owl is a harbinger of death.
Three people died at the hands of Rudolph, and many more were maimed and injured, in a frightening bombing spree that began 10 years ago at Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympic Games. Six months later, Rudolph set off two bombs outside of an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs. Five weeks after that, he placed two bombs in the rear of the Otherside Lounge, a gay/lesbian bar on Piedmont Road. He then laid low for almost a year. Finally, on Jan. 29, 1998, Rudolph used a remote control to detonate a bomb containing dynamite and 5-and-a-half pounds of nails in the face of off-duty police officer Robert "Sandy" Sanderson outside a Birmingham abortion clinic. Sanderson was instantly killed.
The fact that more people didn't die from Rudolph's bombs is a mere fluke, according to Jack Killorin, who was the special agent in charge of the Atlanta office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms during most of Rudolph's reign of terror. Killorin is intimately familiar with the prodigious amount of thought and planning that went into the bombings. "He's one of the most successful serial bombers in history," Killorin says. "I do
not respect Eric Robert Rudolph. But I do respect his capability as an opponent."
Rudolph very carefully set into place his plan to bomb the Olympic Games. He placed a bag under a bench by the AT&T tower in Centennial Park that contained smokeless gunpowder and was packed with more than 5 pounds of 3-inch cut masonry nails. The bomb was connected to a Westclox Baby Ben alarm clock and set to detonate in an hour, and it was situated so that the shrapnel would shoot out parallel to the terrain. But the bag was accidentally knocked over and was lying on the ground when the bomb went off. "It served to allow a lot of the explosion to go up and out instead of spreading straight into the crowd," says Killorin, now retired from the ATF. Two people died, but had things gone according to Rudolph's plan, there could have been dozens of deaths.
In Sandy Springs, Rudolph placed his first bomb at a wall outside the clinic's operating room. A second bomb was placed to spray shrapnel into the parking lot on the other side of the building, where Rudolph correctly assumed law enforcement personnel would gather. It was timed to go off about an hour after the first bomb. But again, fate intervened. "There was a substance abuse treatment center in the building and a couple came in that morning driving a 1985 Nissan Pulsar," says Killorin. "After the first explosion, they moved the car and happened to park it in front of the bomb. It absorbed huge amounts of the explosive."
Like at the Sandy Springs clinic, Rudolph placed a second bomb at the Otherside Lounge, also targeted at law enforcement. However, an officer spotted it, and it was detonated with a robot. "His bombs hadn't killed or maimed a lot of people because of events that were out of his control," Killorin says of Rudolph's attacks prior to the one in Birmingham. "That frustrated him. To solve the problem, he went to the remote control so he could make sure they killed and maimed."
After he was identified as the suspect in the Birmingham bombing, Rudolph fled into the mountains of western North Carolina, where he stayed for more than five years. The largest manhunt in U.S. history was launched to find him. Hundreds of law enforcement personnel fanned the woods of North Carolina looking for the fugitive. But when they couldn't find him, they
scaled back. Four years later -- when many thought he either was dead or living in a foreign country -- Rudolph was captured by a rookie cop who found him Dumpster-diving in Murphy.
Rudolph has never spoken to the press and didn't respond to Creative Loafing's written request for an interview, mailed to him at the Supermax prison where he is housed in Florence, Colo. But during his two-year stay in the Birmingham jail, Rudolph wrote more than 100 pages of letters that, for the first time, detail his life on the run, his motives for the bombings, and how he pulled them off. Those letters, combined with federal court documents, offer fresh information and insights into Rudolph, his crimes and
the investigation that ultimately led him to plead guilty to the bombings.
The letters and essays were posted on the hardcore anti-abortion website ArmyOfGod.com after Rudolph's April 2005 guilty plea. (Warning: The site includes extremely graphic images of aborted fetuses.) The letters are articulate and detailed, and have gone virtually unnoticed by a mainstream media that had long ago moved on to the next big story. They offer a rare
window into the mind of a man who considers himself morally justified in his killing, even a hero.
To law enforcement, however, Rudolph stands out as a "lone wolf -- a singular figure, not associated with any group, who rises up from nowhere, strikes, and then vanishes without a trace.
And he almost got away with it.
THE 1996 OLYMPIC GAMES were intended to be Atlanta's coronation as the "International City" it had always aspired to be. The eyes of the world were on the Olympics, and Atlanta hoped to showcase itself as the jewel of the South.
Rudolph, a right-wing extremist who lived near the Georgia border in North Carolina, had other ideas. "The Olympic temptation, he could not resist it," says Killorin. "It was too big a stage."
Rudolph's goal was to force the cancellation of the Games or, at the least, create such a state of anxiety that he would empty the streets around the venues. "The purpose of the attack was to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand," Rudolph wrote. His original plan was to knock out the power grid surrounding Atlanta and, in effect, pull the plug
on the Games. When he couldn't acquire the high explosives necessary to do that, he went to his back-up plan.
He built five low-tech timed devices, propelled by smokeless gunpowder and covered with 3-inch masonry nails; the biggest bomb contained 5 pounds of them. He put each of the bombs into army backpacks, and planned to explode one per day. Rudolph described his targets as law enforcement personnel, not
civilians. "Each [explosion would be] preceded by a 40- to 50-minute warning given to 911," Rudolph wrote. "The location and time of detonation was to be given, and the intent was to thereby clear each of the areas, leaving only uniformed arms-carrying government personnel exposed to potential injury.
.... I knew the weapons used (highly uncontrollable timed explosives) and the choice of tactics (placing them in areas frequented by large numbers of civilians) could potentially lead to a disaster."
Rudolph fell behind schedule and had to wait until the eighth day of the Olympics to execute his plan. When he reached the Atlanta area, he set up a staging area east of the city off I-20, where crews were moving dirt and bulldozing land for what appeared to be a mall. He stashed four bombs there and took the biggest one with him.
Shortly after midnight on July 27, 1996, Rudolph walked through the throngs celebrating the Olympics in Centennial Park and carefully placed a backpack containing the bomb on the ground under a bench. He set the timer and walked 10 minutes to a nearby bank of phone booths. He dialed 911 and claims to have launched into his "there's a bomb in Centennial Park" speech when the most amazing thing happened: The 911 operator hung up on him. Officials have confirmed the existence of a call to 911 during which the line went dead.
Rudolph realized the call would be traced and panicked. He quickly disappeared into the crowd, and spent several minutes gathering himself before he tried to find another phone booth. He wandered around downtown until he saw a pay phone by the Days Inn at Spring and Baker streets, where he held his nose to disguise his voice and called the 911 operator at 12:58 a.m. "The crowd was pushing in and after the first couple sentences, I was
eyeballed closely by at least two individuals," he wrote. "This caused me to leave off the last sentence, which indicated the exact location of the device. The result of all this was to produce a disaster -- a disaster of my making for which I do apologize to the victims and their families."
Word of Rudolph's 911 call never reached the park. A security guard named Richard Jewell became the hero of the Olympic Games when he spotted the bag and informed his supervisor, who summoned two bomb experts. They crawled under the bench. One of them carefully opened a flap. He focused his
flashlight, then leaned forward to peer inside. Almost simultaneously, both bomb experts scrambled backward, away from the backpack. When they stood up, they didn't even take the time to turn around; they kept walking backward.
"What have we got?" the supervisor asked.
"It's big," one of the bomb experts replied.
"How big?"
"Real big."
The security team was frantically trying to move people out of the area when the bomb exploded 10 minutes later, at 1:20 a.m. The supervisor later described it as the eeriest thing he's ever heard. After the bomb went off, the park was suddenly deathly silent; the only thing he could hear was the swooshing sound of shrapnel cutting through the air.
After the catastrophe of his first bomb, which caused the death of two civilians and injured more than 100 people, Rudolph got skittish. He returned to his staging area off I-20, detonated the remaining four bombs and went back home to Murphy, N.C. But he wasn't deterred. While the FBI spent the next three months on the Richard Jewell wild-goose chase, Rudolph spent his time preparing for his next move. He broke into an explosives
storehouse in Asheville and stole more than 300 pounds of nitroglycerin dynamite.
And with that, he was back in business.
TWO BASIC BELIEFS were at the core of Rudolph's mission: Abortion is murder, and the "homosexual agenda" is an assault upon the integrity of American society.
To him, the abortion issue is simple. An unborn baby is a child. Thus, abortion kills children. And if abortion kills children, that is murder. It is the duty of anyone truly against abortion to do whatever it takes, including violence, to stop the wholesale slaughter of unborn children. For that reason, Rudolph didn't suffer the pro-life movement easily. "For these people I have nothing to say other than you are liars, hypocrites and cowards," he wrote. "You have the right, the responsibility and the duty to
come to the defense of the innocent when the innocent are under assault."
His outrage over homosexuality was a little more complicated: Rudolph's younger brother is gay. Rudolph writes that he believes there is nothing wrong with consenting adults who practice homosexuality in private. "Homosexuality is an aberrant sexual behavior, and as such I have complete sympathy and understanding for those who are suffering from this condition,"
he wrote. "But when the attempt is made to drag this practice out of the closet ... in an 'in your face' attempt to force society to accept and recognize this behavior as being just as legitimate and normal as the natural man/woman relationship, every effort should be made, including force if necessary, to halt this effort."
The difference between Rudolph and other extremists who oppose abortion and homosexuality is that Rudolph was ready to act. And he was known for immersing himself in whatever caught his interest.
He gave the fight against abortion and homosexuality the same kind of devotion he'd given to marijuana when he was a grower and dealer. Despite his right-wing views, Rudolph smoked pot and didn't believe the government had the right to regulate something God put on the earth. After he left the Army in 1989 and returned to North Carolina, Rudolph supported himself
growing and selling high-grade weed. He even traveled to Amsterdam, where pot and hashish are openly sold in cafes. "The story is he went to Europe to find seeds, and he studied ways to develop a really high-quality strain of marijuana," says Killorin. "That's him: 'I'm the person who's the expert, I'm in control here.'"
Source: Creative Loafing