History Daily - Saturday Matinee: American Shrapnel

Episode Date: October 4, 2025

On today’s Saturday Matinee, we are told the story of Eric Robert Rudolph, a serial bomber who set off the largest pipe bomb in American history at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Link to The American Shrapnel: https://www.alabamamediagroup.com/american-shrapnel-podcast/ Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more. History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.

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Edulisia. I'm having a hard time writing this little intro. Normally, I try to introduce our Saturday Matinee podcast in the context of my life or our shared history

or something that links yesterday with today, and I'm going to try and do the same thing here, but today's topic is centered on political violence. And here in the United States lately, we've seen recent and horrible acts of ideologically motivated killings that has me and probably many of you wondering what is going on. I have no answer. Except the crooked consolation that political violence has always been with us, sometimes reaching heights that far eclipse our current tragedies. We have the assassinations and violence of 1968, leaving Maritime. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy murdered and the Chicago streets stained with blood.

Following that, in an 18-month period from 1971 to 1972, there were more than 2,500 bombings in the United States, almost five a day. Another spade of bombings throughout the World War I era gave way to the Red Summer in 1919, a fever of racial massacres in dozens of cities that likely left hundreds dead. And we've had four U.S. presidents assassinated, making the American chief executive the most dangerous job in the country purely in terms of the percent who survive it. So yeah, American political violence is not new, and what we're seeing now, inconceivably to us today, perhaps, is not extraordinary by comparison. Still, it's reprehensible and shocking because thankfully political violence is still rare. On today's Saturday matinee, we're bringing you another example of politically motivated violence, another rash of bombings that began

and in July 1996 with a pipe bomb that shattered the mood of celebration at the Atlanta Olympics. American Shrapnel tells the story of these bombings, the misidentification of the culprit, and the multi-year manhunt for the real person responsible. I hope you enjoy. While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow American Shrapnel. We put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you. and E. E. E.TUILA, ETHUMPLAINN EADUILINN ON.

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This podcast contains some gruesome descriptions of violence. Listener discretion is advised. It's hard to

describe the magic of that Southern summer night in 1996 when Muhammad Ali hobled on stage to

captivate the world. He was weakened by Parkinson's, diminished in a lot of ways, but still the greatest. He struggled, but lit the cauldron to open Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Games. Sports Illustrated would call it one of the top moments in all of sports history. It was even bigger down here where I am. It was supposed to be a chance to welcome the world to a new South to show what this region was and what it wasn't. the Centennial Olympic Games started with a, well, they couldn't have started any better than they did.

The games were everything Atlanta dreamed they would be. And then, a few days later, the unthinkable happened. A little after 1 a.m. on July 27, 1996, Atlanta police got a phone call. A warning. There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes. That phone call was a lie. They would, in fact, get only 20 minutes.

As a band called Jack Mack and the heart attack jammed in a Centennial Park packed with people, it really happened. It was a huge pipe bomb, unprecedented, 40 pounds, detonated by a wind-up clock and built to kill hundreds. Alice Hawthorne died instantly when a nail, an inch and a half long, hit her like a bullet. in the head. Her 14-year-old daughter stood beside her, as shrapnel ripped through Alice's body in six places. A hundred and eleven people in that park were hurt. The games had changed. The spell was broken. Bill Clinton in the White House was quick to call it what it was. Terrorism. Good morning. The bombing at Centennial Olympic Park this morning was an evil act of terror.

It was aimed at the innocent people who were participating. in the Olympic Games and in the spirit of the Olympics. An act of cowardice that stands in sharp contrast to the courage of the Olympic athletes. It was only the beginning. And that's when the bomb blast went off, and it hit me. And the blood was still on the wall. It never came off. He would either be famous or infamous.

I just think the son of a bitch was mean. I think he was evil. He was either going to do something great or he was going to do something that was just going to shock the hell out of everybody. There's no way he was not somehow assisted in his years on the run a little bit. We were looking around for people with military training, anti-government views, and we had easily, you know, a dozen suspects who fit all those things. Hi, I'm John Archibald. I'm Becca Andrews, and this is American Shrapnel. the story of a homegrown serial bomber and the influences, the philosophers and preachers,

the terrorists and thieves that radicalized him. And God knows how many others. I have some pretty strong feelings about that time. I was a reporter in what I thought was my prime in the age of newspapers. I was a news guy, but got to cover the Olympic soccer prelims in Birmingham, Alabama, about two hours from Atlanta. I remember that bomb like a lot of people remember 9-11. We all know that sense of anger and heartbreak when something we think beautiful is sullied or destroyed.

I was wrecked, but I had no idea how this bombing, this bomber, would come to affect my life and my work for the next decade. I was five, so the Olympics couldn't compete with whatever mischief I was up to. But weirdly, what took place that morning would come to affect my life and my work. Because what happened in Atlanta wasn't just the first in a string of bombings across the south. It was not just the start of a terrorism spree that would trigger the largest manhunt in American history. It was a critical moment in the rise of anti-abortion violence and the kind of Christian nationalism that's gone mainstream. I've been covering it for years now. It all started down in Atlanta with that blast in that crowded park.

This is David Namius, former U.S. attorney in Atlanta and former Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. He set his bomb, which was a bit of. biggest pipe bomb the FBI had ever seen. And it had a steel plate like all his bombs did to direct the blast. And it was packed with shrapnel. He actually put the nails end to end so that he could get more on there. It could have been a lot worse. A lot more people would have died if not for dumb luck, drunk kids, and a slander security guard named Richard Jewell. I think there were about 10,000 in that pit area in front of the stage. And so, you know, the clear design was to shoot shrapnel kind of through a crowd of people.

But between the time he left the bag and the time Richard Jewell spotted it, this group of kids who were working at the Speedo Temp came by. They had been drinking. And they saw the backpack. Some of them thought it might have something they could steal or some alcohol in it. And one of them kind of kicked it and it tipped over. And so it tipped on its back and most of the shrobinol shot up instead of out. But for that, you might have had a thousand people injured and a hundred killed.

People don't even realize they could have been saved from death or dismemberment by the Speedo boys. And we have to talk a little about Richard Jewell here. He was a former cop working the Olympics as a security guard. He spotted a suspicious bag and called it in. At first, he was hailed as a hero. But, man, it turned quickly. Jule had some squirly things about his past.

I mean, he had been in law enforcement. He was clearly kind of a wannabe officer. He was over-aggressive in places. He had been fired, I think, from a job at Piedmont. college and had ended up and then kind of posed or presented himself as a cop in an incident where he was living. He had asked some questions about the tower, about whether or not, you know, it could withstand an explosion, as I recall. So there were some things that were unusual. Investigators seized on all that. It reminded them of a case at the 84 Olympics. A disgruntled

L.A. cop planted a pipe bomb so that he could be the hero that found it. But at the end of the day, Richard Juhl was not the bomber. He really was a hero. And his reward was that he lost his job and reputation. Richard Jule, the man the FBI and the media, zeroed in on as the principal suspect in the Atlanta Olympic bombing says, it's all a lie. He later ended up getting settlements from news agencies that had called him a bomber, including CNN and NBC. It's a sad story.

He died really young. They put a memorial to him in Centennial Park, near the one for Alice Hawthorne. But as investigators focused on Jewel, the real bomber slipped away. The feds started out looking for people with extremist views that might hate cops or the so-called New World Order.

They found hundreds who fit that bill in Georgia alone. They were looking for a needle and a stack full of needles. They issued a call for photographs and videos taken in Centennial Park before and during the bombing. I think we had like 12 or 13,000 sets of photos and videos that you had to try to piece together to figure out who was where. And there was this room where they had kind of created a printed stuff out and created a 3D background, you know, where you'd get one family's pictures here and you'd see some people in the background. and then realize, you know, who are those people

and identify them from another set of pictures. I mean, it was great work. Didn't actually produce too much. All that effort produced was one blurry image of a man sitting on a bench on the spot where the bomb was placed. NASA enhanced it, and the feds estimated the man's height and weight and took note of his clothes. Cargo shorts, hiking boots with socks, and a T-shirt.

They were pretty sure it was the bomber, but it didn't much matter. He was unrecognizable. The feds didn't know his name, so they gave him one. We had a wanted poster that just said, you know, looking for blob man because it was just the black blob. The blob man, unknown, dangerous, and still out there. Things were dark, and the search was going nowhere. And then two more bombs went off. One, at an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburbs,

and another at a lesbian bar. Was it the same bomber? A copycat? Things were similar but different. These bombs were evolving. Investigators were no closer to solving any of them than they were that morning in Centennial Park. Until...

Until Birmingham. January 29th, 1998, a year and a half after the Olympics. 1998, Chris Edson was in grad school at UAB. the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He was newly married, studying occupational therapy, and he had a routine. Each day he dropped his wife off at the VA

and parked on the hill above campus. Each day he made the trek down to class passing the new woman, all-women clinic, and protesters he had come to recognize. I mean, this was part of my routine every day. I mean, so I looked back over my shoulder, checked for traffic when I was

essentially off the intersection of 10th Avenue and 17th and that's when the blast happened and it the shock of it blew my clothes back I mean like a hurricane strength wind gust

I mean it was like I was that startled me and then all that's like time seemed to slow down at that point I heard glass crashing to my left, split second after that. So I turned and looked, and the Ronald McDonald house was across the street at the time,

and I guess shrapnel from the explosion had hit glass and had knocked out a window. And then immediately I looked back to the right. It's a big plume of smoke rising. I mean, I knew, I mean, it hit me instantly what had happened. We are, perhaps, getting a little ahead of ourselves. Maybe we should back up and set the stage just a bit. The geography and the context will be important here. Absolutely.

Birmingham is a rusty old steel town, and its downtown sits in a bowl of a valley on the north side of Red Mountain, where they used to dig for iron ore. On the mountain stands Vulcan, the city's symbol, the world's largest cast iron statue. He is the Roman god of the forge, and he looks over the city. At the foothills of Red Mountain, between UAB and Vulcan, is a quirky neighborhood known as Southside.

Back then, it was home to several women's clinics. In 1988, the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue targeted Birmingham for protest. Greg Garrison covered years of conflict as a reporter for the Birmingham News. It was hundreds of arrests, and it took hundreds of police officers to handle. So it's a huge story. There were a cadre of people who picketed every day. They would be, sometimes they rotated, sometimes they would be at summit. Sometimes they would be a new woman, all woman.

The owner of the new woman all women clinic was Diane Derses, who became the local face of abortion rights and a lightning ride. They had picketed us. They had gone to doctors' homes. They'd sent things in the mail. They'd, you know, we were going to die. We should die for killing babies. She was really tough as now. She was, she was really a tough lady.

The anti-abortion protesters called her Dragon Lady. You know, that was her nickname. And yet they kind of had this almost friendly rapport, but it was like poison rhetoric all the time. You know, they would say mean things. her and she would say mean things right back. So there was always that tension going on between her and the protesters. And yet, she knew them all. They all knew her. Dersus was out of town the morning of January 29th, but the clinic was preparing to open as usual. A regular protester named Menzer Chadwick was already there by 7.30. He said hi to Robert Sandy Sanderson, an off-duty police

officer making rounds as the security guard. Chadwick saw Nurse Emily Lyons arrive, though he didn't know her by name. A regular day, a routine. Remember, this is when Edson walked by on his way to class. Just froze. Like, you know, you never really know what you're going to do in a situation like that until you're in a situation like that. and I just froze. I mean, I just stood there and had no idea what to do.

And then a few seconds later, someone, I mean, seconds, I mean, it could have been almost instantly, but there was someone running down the hill, 17th Street, saying, call 911, and that kind of jogged me out of the whole thing. I didn't have a cell phone at the time. I was like, oh, yeah, that's always the thing. the first step. Call 911. So I'm, it's like I can at least

sound the alarm for that. So I ran around screaming, you know, call 911 and I don't even know who I was saying it to or, I mean, anybody that would listen. He watched a protester, probably Chadwick, pack up his placards

and go. He remembers things he'd like to forget. It's hard to describe. The wilderness shock. and that's when really it started to fully set in. I saw Emily Lyons at that point. She's curled up with her, she's facing the door, so her back was to the street.

She's fetal position. I mean, I could see that her legs were burnt and that her clothes had been blown off at her legs. and I realized like the debris, like part of the debris was clothing, like blown into like almost like confetti everywhere. Mixed in with, you know, rock and dirt and metal. We don't mean to be grisly and neither does Edson. He describes things that disturb him, even a quarter of a century later. But it's important to know how horrific.

and indiscriminate these bombs could be. And then I saw Sandy Sanderson. I mean, it was gruesome. I mean, he had, I couldn't tell. It took me a second to realize it was a person. And I didn't know. I couldn't tell it was a man or a woman. I mean, like, chest, seeping chest wounds.

Like, his face was just, like, recognizable bloody mess. And at one point he sat up, too, and spewed up blood. He did not, you know, he did not appear to die to me right away. Or, I mean, it was almost instant. I mean, I don't know. He sat up. And I, I... You're still very affected by this, is it?

Yeah. I feel like it's important. Otherwise, you know, otherwise it wouldn't be here. Edson can describe what happened after the blast. But what happened before? How did it get there? The bomb, we now know, was hidden in monkey grass near the clinic door. It was built in a tackle box and camouflaged with plastic leaves,

but it still caught Sanderson's attention. Ders and Scott Morrow, then the head of clinic security, piece it together. The reason Sandy, he got out of his car, is to protect Emily. He was waiting for somebody to get there, and he got out of his car, and he walked up the sidewalk, and, you know, there's a side stairs there that Emily came up the side stairs, and then Sandy walked up from the front and saw the plant. She parked her car, and she was walking to the door to key it in, and at that time, he evidently saw the potted something. that wasn't there before and leaned down with the stick.

She comes in the driveway, comes up the stairs, and is looking at turning the key and looking at Sandy who's poking the bomb. But that's when the game was up. This bomb was packed with nails and directed by a sheet of steel, like the Atlanta bombs, to blast the waiting room of the new woman-all-women clinic. It was aimed at the very spot where women and families would soon arrive. Could it have been the blob man? Maybe.

But it was different from those bombs, too. It didn't have a clock timer. It was detonated by remote control. We know now that a man stood behind a tree just up the street. He watched Emily arrive. He watched Sandy walk toward the tackle box. He watched him poke at it with his stick. And then that man pushed a button on a homemade remote control device.

He blew them up in cold blood. They'd find bits of Sandy's uniform in the dirt for years to come. His blood stained the walls of the building until it was eventually torn down. Emily Lyons was shredded beyond recognition. They'd pull shrapnel from her body for years too. Lyons survived thanks to some amazing emergency room work at UAB and more than 50 other surgeries since. Bomb-sniffing dogs searched for explosives, but the residue from the bullet coated everything, sending those dogs into a frenzy.

Police immediately looked to the protesters. Within hours, Minzer Chadwick sat in an interview room at the Birmingham Police Department, writing his statement by hand with a pen and pad and a big magnifying glass to help him see. Police Detective John Ennis interviewed him. The audio is really rough, but when Chadwick learns Sanderson is dead, he begins to cry. Ennis closes in. He asks if Chadwick put anything in front. of the clinic.

The answer is unintelligible. Ennis asks again. And Chadwick says, no, I'm worried about his soul. Ennis, who's ready to end this interview, responds. His soul's fine. It was frustrating.

But it quickly became clear that Chadwick was not the bomber. Not so much because Chadwick was believable, but because something else had happened that morning. Let's go back to the moment of the explosion. to that man hiding behind a tree. He stood in the shadows and executed his victims with a push of a button,

and then he slipped away. That remote trigger made this bombing different from those in Atlanta. It was another big difference. A young man who to this day refuses to acknowledge publicly that he is a hero. Germain Hughes. Germain Hughes. Today's date is 1.29. The time now is 1024 hours.

My name is Detective James Blanton. President with me is Agent Dana Lee. Yes, sir. METF. We're going to conduct an interview with Germain Hughes. He's a witness in the bombing, which occurred over in the 1,600 block of 10th Avenue South this morning.

Mr. Hughes, this morning, can you tell me where you were and what you witnessed this morning? Okay. What I witnessed, suddenly there was a loud boom. I mean, it was loud and distinct of, I was inside my door washing my clothes, and I heard the boom. So, you know, I was like, what was that? Lived out the window. I mean, it sounded like a gunshot. It sounded like a kabloom.

I mean, it would sound like more distinct than a gunshot to me. Jermaine Hughes was more than a witness. He was the witness who changed everything. He may have single-handedly prevented more bombings, more injuries, more death. Now, Hughes has not spoken publicly about this for almost a quarter century. He had not responded to multiple interview requests for this podcast. So the tape you hear is from his interviews with the police. It's remarkable.

He was a UAB student washing his clothes at his dorm when the explosion occurred. He heard the blast and looked up. People were running toward the smoke that curled up from the clinic. One man was walking away. Hughes described a man in a black hat with long, dark hair that might have been a wig. He wore an army jacket and carried a book bag that seemed suspicious. When the man took off in the other direction without ever looking back, Hughes was sure something was wrong. To me, I thought it looked kind of weird because this guy, he never, I mean, he was just walking.

He didn't turn around to see what it happened because it's going on. I know if it was that loud on the inside, how lot it must be on the outside. A lot of people would have just wondered about that, or maybe told the police later. Jermaine did something different. Upon looking out, and I see him, you know, keep on walking. And so I don't know what made me do this, but I was just like, this guy looked strange. That was my first thought. Jermaine left his clothes.

He left his dorm and he followed. At first on foot and then in his car, hoping against hope his leaky transmission would hold up. So this part is really amazing to me. I mean, at that point, I would have just said the hell with it and gone home. Commence myself, I was acting crazy. But he followed the man through the neighborhood of Birmingham Southside, up the mountain by the statue of Vulcan.

Hughes kept his distance, hoping he wouldn't be seen. I don't think he saw me because it was just a way I just never really came up on him and just like, trying to get his face saying like that. I was just like off back in the distance like an observer, just observing and observing. He just kept on walking. It was hard. The guy ducked behind apartments and came out looking different than he went in. He pulled clothes out of a plastic bag.

He lost the wig and put on dark sunglasses. Hughes described a backpack that at times looked empty and at times looked full. Once, not for the last time, Hughes simply lost the guy. This is Mike Wiesnant, who had become lead prosecutor on this case. Jureen Hughes drives by, he sees a guy about the same size walking through the parking lot and going onto the sidewalk and going easterly direction. But he notices that he doesn't have an army jacket on any longer and his hair is shorter, but he's still got a cap on and he's got a black backpack, but he's also got a blue bag. And he, after a moment, he realizes this is the same guy. He can tell by the way he's walking and his height and size.

So by this time, Jureen gets a little head of the guy. And again, fairly narrow streets. And Jureen pulls his car over and gets out and lifts the hood like he's having car trouble. We looked at him to just for a second and then he just kept my walk there. Hughes knew he needed to tell the cops about this. Cell phones were rare then. The world was a different place. So he tried to get help from people in the neighborhood.

He sees two ladies that are coming out of their house to get in their car. And he gets out of his car and he goes up to them and says, I need your help. I need to call the police. They're somewhat skeptical of this young man, this African-American young man who's come up to them. They're Caucasian. And they say, well, we'll call the police when we get to work. It happened over and over. He got a man to roll down the window to talk to him.

And I stopped. I said, hey, man, could you stop for a second? Do you stop for a second? I said, it's important. It's important. I said, and it was an explosion over there, and I'm a falling sky, and I don't know anything about it. I mean, I don't know if this was the right situation or not. But I was like, could you call a copy and tell him, like, just tell him to start, like, you know, like, just look at this area. In this area, he's just like, I got to go to school. I heard of class. He just drove off.

I'm like, oh, come on now. But he kept at it. There's some static on that tape, but you can hear that Hughes was still wired during that interview. just hours after the bombing. He was pumping with adrenaline, as he had been when he again hopped out to ask a woman in a blue car to call the cops.

I put my hands up, you know, so she went down out with a robber, and I was like, ma'am, can I, I mean, can I talk to you like this? And she was like, you know, slow or slowly. And I was like, and I told the situation, like, as fast as I could. I mean, this building globe

and I follow the guy, and I think the guy did it. And then she was like, well, you think he'd follow him if you think he did. And then, I mean, I couldn't, I couldn't find him. It could have ended there. It's crazy it didn't.

After all that, he'd lost the guy. The cops weren't close. He couldn't get anyone to help. He drove to the top of Red Mountain, right above the city limit signs separating Birmingham from the suburb of Homewood. He stopped at a McDonald's and called the police himself. He told the dispatcher a story. As he talked on the phone, a man eating his breakfast, Hughes would later describe him as the man in the suit, began to pay attention. That man was a young law student named Jeff Tickle. He'd ordered hotcakes and sausage and a cup of coffee, and he heard Hughes, still talking on the phone, yell. He has the guy right there, that's the guy right there.

Unbelievably, the man Hughes had been following was walking by the McDonald's as Hughes was on the phone with the cops. In Jermaine's 911 call, the operator begs him to stay on the line to wait at McDonald's for a cop to show up. You can tell he's impatient, until he sees that man again, carrying the blue bag beneath Balkan. As Hughes frantically tried to describe the suspect, Tickle, the man in the suit, jumped in to help. The prosecutor Mike Wizzamant kept a record of it.

As he's on the phone, he looks out there, and he sees the guy walking down the street on the other side. And he says, to the lady down the floor, he said, wait, there he is. I see the guy. He's walking down the street on the other side of that street over. there. And at that time, there was an attorney there named Jeff Tickle. And he overhears the conversation, and he starts trying to help Jermaine describe what the guy's wearing and what he looks like. Tickle is now a Republican circuit judge in Lee County, Alabama, home to Auburn University. He is reluctant to talk about the case. He worries that it could cause problems if his memory

differs from what he told police in 1998. So we're relying here on a transcript. of his statement then. We'll have a colleague read it. All of a sudden I heard him say, that's him, that's him. So I look, and I see a white male walking across the other side of 20th Street, walking south on 20th Street. And he started trying to describe this fellow over the phone, and he was a little bit excited and he was a little bit tongue-tied, so I kind of helped him out with the description. He had on a green and black plaid shirt that he had rolled up to his forearm. And he was wearing like a dark shirt underneath that plaid shirt that went down to his wrist. And it was black. His appearance was very neat.

His shirt was tucked in. Everything about him was very neat. I roll my sleeves up. I kind of wot him up. His sleeves were folded, rolled up to his forearm. And the operatives just stay right where you are. We're sending cars to your location right now. Hughes waited as long as he could bear it before he took off, and now both he and Tickle were out searching for this guy. Eventually, Tickle turned on a street by the Birmingham landmark called The Club, a sort of country club with a Sinatra vibe, known for its vistas and its orange rolls. The street seemed to run straight into the woods. And there was a truck parked near the end of the street back on the right-hand side of the road facing the intersection. So I saw the front of the truck. I saw him move

from the side of the truck where the woods are to the back of the truck. And I saw him open the camper up and put something in. By this time, Tickle had heard news on the radio of the bombing and figured out why this man might be important. And he sees the camper back is open and he sees the same guy putting stuff in the back of the camper. And he says, oh my God, there he is. He was 10 feet away beside a Nissan pickup truck with a camper show. He was looking right at me. I couldn't see his face because the camper shell blocked the window,

but right as I got past the car, I was looking over my right shoulder, and he was looking over his left right at me when I went by him. The cops asked if he could see his face then. For a very brief second, because I said, uh-oh, and I just turned straight ahead. But I did get a look at him looking at me. Tickle wrote the tag number down on his McDonald's coffee cup,

a coffee cup that is now on display at the FBI office in Birmingham. The numbers matched the ones Hughes had given the police. North Carolina, K&D, 1117. Blanton, the cop who interviewed Hughes on the day of the bombing, had questions. But Hughes took him up the mountain, retracing his steps, convincing him. Then they went together to police headquarters in downtown Birmingham. I kind of didn't believe him. I thought he was just talked. So once Germaine and I finished walking the route, I remember going to the headquarters, and it was so chaotic. And I remember it was attorneys, lawyers, and people there.

And when I got up to homicide, it was a lot of commotion going on. I said, hey, I got a guy that saw everything. Everybody just looked at me. I said, he saw it all. On January 29th, two hours and 11 minutes after Shrapnel tore through Sandy Sanderson and Emily Lyons, Detective James Blanton had another job to do. Blanton put out the alert telling authorities to be on the lookout for a gray pickup truck with a camper top, registered to a man in the North Carolina Mountains.

I put the Bolo out, this means to be on the lookout at 9.44 a.m. That Bolo sent me to Murphy, North Carolina for weeks as a reporter for the Birmingham News. The tag number was enough for us to identify the man. be on the lookout for Eric Robert Rudolph. But there was still so much that nobody knew. This season on American Straton. And I remember when the feds were sitting a robot and through the front door. And I remember they took off Reddit.

It was stuff that like folklore is made of. The setting could not have been more perfect. For this kind of story, you're in the mountains, where his people were like run Rudolph, run. I could count seven mountain ridge lines, and there was no sign of humankind anywhere. There's 500,000 acres here. You know, we have to search all of it.

Do I personally believe that he acted alone? No, I do not. And so everywhere around him, surrounding him, engulfing him, were these radical views that he adopted that became part and parcel of who he became. I see Eric is sort of at the intersection of patriot militia lifestyle, of supremacist ideology, and anti-abortion zealotry. The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up and my knees knocked so hard that I was about

to answer them. That's how nervous I was. Because here I am standing in front of an individual who was responsible for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Park bombings. American Shrapnel is a production of Alabama Media Group. It was written and hosted by me, John Archibald. And me, Becca Andrews. Our co-creator and executive producer and voice actor for this episode is John Hammondry. This episode was engineered by Chris Hoff. Our field producer is Sarah White's Cotechek,

and our social media producers are Caroline Vincent and Mila Oliveira. Our logo and cover art were designed by Jack Brown. Shannon Stevens is our editor-in-chief. Consulting producers Dan Carson and Ashley Rimpus provided valuable feedback. The song you're hearing right now is Birmingham by Beth Thornley and Rob Cairns. Special thanks to David Namius, Chris Edson, Greg Garrison, Diane Derses, James Blanton, Scott Morrow, and Mike Wisnant. Thanks also to Catherine Osayas Champion in the Birmingham Public Library. If you like our show, please leave us a rating and review and follow us on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening.