Rudolph manhunt called into question
By Don O'Briant / The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When Eric Rudolph disappeared into the Appalachian Mountains in 1998, the FBI embarked on a massive manhunt that lasted more than five years. It was a manhunt that need never have happened, says CNN producer Henry Schuster. In "Hunting Eric Rudolph" (Berkley, $19.95), to be published on Tuesday, Schuster and GBI Agent Charles Stone explain that a miscommunication between the FBI and North Carolina Sheriff Jack Thompson on Jan. 30, 1998, allowed Rudolph to slip away.
"The sheriff and his folks had located Eric Rudolph's trailer and they were ready to go pick him up," Schuster says. "But the FBI never told Sheriff Thompson that Rudolph was anything other than a material witness. Instead, they told him to wait."
The FBI didn't show up at Rudolph's trailer until after the U.S. attorney in Birmingham had a televised news conference naming Rudolph as a suspect in the abortion clinic bombing that killed a security guard, Schuster says. "By the time the FBI went to Rudolph's trailer in North Carolina, he had stocked up with supplies at Bi-Lo and disappeared."
He would not be captured until 2003, when a rookie police officer caught him foraging for food behind a grocery store. During those years, Schuster and Stone interviewed family members and friends to learn everything they could about the man suspected in four lethal bombings, including the one in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park in 1996.
In 2001, Schuster produced a CNN documentary, "The Hunt for Eric Rudolph," that portrayed the suspect as a right-wing extremist in a bizarre family no fiction writer would dare invent. Much of the documentary, along with additional material gathered since then, became the basis for the book.
"His mother had been a nun who quit the Catholic church and went on a search for the 'true' church," Schuster says. "She became involved with Christian Identity, which preaches the most extreme, distorted version of Christianity. They believe that Jews and blacks are the demon seed of Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden, that the Bible is the history of the white race, and that whites are the lost tribe of Israel."
Rudolph apparently absorbed the lessons well. Before he dropped out of public school, he wrote a paper in which he said the Holocaust never happened, Schuster says. "He has one brother who amputated his hand and videotaped it as a protest against the manhunt, and another brother who's a gay musician in Greenwich Village."
A self-proclaimed survivalist, Rudolph is described as a marijuana grower who traveled to Amsterdam to find the right seeds for his cash crop. His former sister-in-law, Deborah Givens, told Schuster and Stone that Rudolph regularly smoked joints and loved to watch Cheech and Chong videos, particularly "Up in Smoke."
One of the nagging questions that remains is how Rudolph managed to survive for more than five years in the wild, supposedly living off the land.
"It doesn't completely add up," Schuster says. "I talked with a Navy Reserve guy who had been through a survival and escape school. He was skeptical of Eric's story. He said Eric looked in far too good a condition for someone who had been on a five-year camping trip."
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/living/0205/25bookbuzz.ht
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Posted by Editor at February 25, 2005 09:12 PM
