April 13, 2005: Olympic Park bomber pleads guilty
Eric Robert Rudolph. (AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain)
It was 3:30 a.m. on May 31, 2003, when Officer Jeff Postell turned his patrol car behind a strip mall in Murphy, North Carolina, and noticed a man foraging in the dumpster behind a Save A Lot grocery store. The man turned to run, carrying something the rookie cop thought might be a gun.
Postell cornered the man behind some milk crates, wrestled him to the ground and cuffed him. It was only after questioning at the police station that the man identified himself as the person they now suspected him to be: “I’m Eric Robert Rudolph, and you’ve got me,” he said.
Rudolph, then 36, had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list since May 1998, identified as a prime suspect in a string of bombings that began in July 1996 at the Atlanta Olympics with a blast that killed one person, Alice Hawthorne, and injured 100 others.
After the attack, FBI investigators—famously and futilely—had focused their investigation on the Centennial Olympic Park security guard who first noticed the bomb-bearing backpack. An embarrassed FBI cleared the guard, Richard Jewell, months later. But Rudolph had only just begun.
He followed that bombing with three more.
In January 1997, he planted two bombs at Northside Family Planning Services in Sandy Springs, Georgia; one just outside an operating room; another, placed near a parking lot, was timed to target first responders. More than 50 were injured, including two FBI agents.
Five weeks later, he placed two bombs at a gay nightclub in Atlanta, the Otherside Lounge. The first blast injured five patrons; the second was discovered and detonated without further harm.
After these bombings, Rudolph sent letters to Atlanta news outlets warning of more to come while claiming responsibility on behalf of the “Army of God.” And in January 1998, he detonated a bomb at the New Woman All Women Health Clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, this time in a gruesome and personal attack. He hid a bomb armed with more than five pounds of nails behind shrubs at the entrance of the clinic and waited until Birmingham police officer Robert Sanderson arrived to inspect it. When he did, Rudolph detonated the device, killing Sanderson and seriously injuring the clinic’s head nurse, Emily Lyons.
Two witnesses, however, saw Rudolph fleeing the scene to a truck parked a mile away.
When he learned the next day that he had been identified through his license plate, he disappeared into the 830 square miles of the Nantahala National Forest outside Murphy where he lived as a fugitive until he was cuffed by Postell 2,499 days after the Olympic Park blast.
Confession
On April 13, 2005, Rudolph pleaded guilty to all four bombings, accepting multiple life sentences in federal prison without possibility of parole. As part of the agreement, Rudolph disclosed the whereabouts of more than 250 pounds of dynamite, including a bomb and its detached detonator planted near homes and businesses in Murphy.
In an 11-page statement released through his attorneys, Rudolph detailed his part in the attacks and the anti-abortion motive he claimed was behind them. The far-flung harangue, however, was anything but contrite. He dismissed Sanderson as a “security guard” and Lyons as a “killer.” He claimed the evidence against him was circumstantial, denounced the physical evidence against him as “junk science” and described his decision to plead guilty a “tactical choice” on his part—a choice that had “deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death.”
But Rudolph also revealed that he had been planning another attack—this one on the National Guard armory in Murphy where the FBI had based its five-year search for him. On the day he had planned to detonate the bomb, he decided against doing so as an act of generosity. “Even though they served a morally bankrupt government, underneath their FBI rags, they were essentially fellow countrymen,” he wrote.
Rudolph, now 58, is currently confined at the supermax Federal Correctional Complex Florence in Colorado.
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