Domestic Terror: The Hunt for Eric Rudolph | The Bombing of Atlanta | 2

It's a little after 7 p.m. on August 19th, 1993 in Wichita, Kansas. As usual, there's a group of protesters gathered outside Women's Healthcare Services, one of only three facilities in the country that perform late-term abortions. That's made it a key target for America's anti-abortion crusaders.

Seven years ago, the clinic was firebombed. No one was hurt in the attack, and the owner, Dr. George Teller, rebuilt. Two years ago, Fundamentalist Christian Group Operation Rescue staged two months of coordinated protests outside the clinic.

They called it their summer of mercy. But none of this has dissuaded the medical staff from doing their jobs. They've continued providing abortion care for the people of Kansas.

That defiance infuriates 37-year-old Rachelle Shannon, a born-again Christian with fluffy brown curls and glasses that cover half her face. Shelly feels it's her duty to save the lives of the unborn children of America. But over the years, she's become more frustrated that the anti-abortion movement has failed to gain any traction in either the courts or legislation.

She can't understand it. God's position on this is abundantly clear to her. And so, she's adamant that everyone should fall in line.
In Shelly's mind, abortion is wrong and the people who perform the procedures are murderers. And she's proven over and over that she's willing to put her money where her mouth is. Pulling off several attacks at nine abortion clinics in California, Nevada and her home state of Oregon.
She set fire to some, and at others, she used this foul-smelling acid to disrupt operations for a day. Every one of her attacks has felt like a victory to Shelly. Not least because she's never been caught.

But now, Shelly's ready to take her fight against abortion to the next level. Five months ago, Michael Griffin shot and killed Dr. David Gunn outside an abortion clinic in Florida. Shelly found that inspiring.

Griffin is a hero to her. A man who stepped up in defense of the unborn. She won't let him stand alone.

Around her, protesters mill about on the grass in front of the clinic. They hold their placards and pray, flyers always at the ready to hand to any patients who pass by them on their way inside. But the day is winding down.
The clinic is closed, and all that's left now is to make one final appeal to Dr. Tiller as he leaves. Across the parking lot, George steps out of the building and climbs into his car. Shelly listens as the shouts from her fellow anti-abortionists get louder.
But she knows they won't get through to this doctor. Nothing has yet. She's certain there's only one way to get their message across.

As George's car glides along the driveway, Shelly steps forward, raises a gun, and fires five times through the window. Shattered glass goes flying, spraying some of the protesters, as George struggles to remain in control of his car. But Shelly doesn't stick around to take stock of what she's done.

She turns on her heel and runs down the street, disappearing before anyone can stop her. So she doesn't realize that she's failed. She injured George tiller, yes, he's got bullet wounds in both arms.

He'll be back at work tomorrow, though. As for Shelly Shannon, she won't get away this time. She'll be arrested in about four hours and charged with attempted first degree murder.
She'll eventually be convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison. And during their investigation, authorities will find evidence connecting Shelly to her earlier attacks, which will land her a further 20 years behind bars. Shelly Shannon will stay defiant, though her cause is righteous.
She knows it in her heart. And, like Michael Griffin before her, her violent actions will inspire others to follow in her footsteps.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

By the mid-1990s, Eric Rudolph was fed up. From his perspective, Western civilization was in freefall, and he put the blame squarely on, well, a lot of things. The concepts of multiculturalism and diversity for a start, and gun control, the counterculture, affirmative action, and anti-Christian rhetoric.

Feminism, Marxism, pacifism, socialism, liberalism, the destruction of the family unit, the disappearance of the small family farm. That's a long list, and all of those things were contributing to what Eric saw as a rapid backslide for America. But above all these problems sat two others that were causing the most harm, the so-called homosexual agenda and abortions.

Eric had been thinking about both these issues for years. He believed that ever since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, American women had been killing their unborn children with impunity, without remorse.

And the government was allowing it to happen, encouraging it even. To make matters worse, the Atlanta Summer Olympics were approaching. The thought curdled Eric's blood.
The eyes of the world would be on America, giving its ruling powers the perfect propaganda opportunity. He decided he wouldn't stand for it. He wouldn't allow the world to think that gay people loving each other was acceptable, or that women should be allowed to choose what happened to their own bodies.

Those were the values of the federal government. He wanted his values imposed on the world instead. And he thought he had the perfect way to make his message heard.

This is episode 2 in our 5-part series on Eric Rudolph, The Bombing of Atlanta.

It's the spring of 1996 and topped in North Carolina. Patricia Rudolph is getting her family home ready to put on the market. She moved to the area with her sons in the wake of her husband's death 15 years ago.

But with her kids all grown, Pat's looking to make a move. Only she's been distracted for the last couple of days. A few mornings back, she went out to check for eggs in the chicken coop, only to find it full of blood, feathers, and the shredded remains of her beloved hens.

Must have been one of the bobcats that live in the forest behind their house. When she told her son Eric, his eyes went cold, his lips pressed into a thin line. Within minutes, the 29-year-old had grabbed his rifle and stormed out the front door, disappearing into the woods.
It's been two full days and nights since then, with no sign of Eric. Pat tries not to worry. After all, her son's been spending stretches of time alone in the woods since he was a teenager.

Hell, in high school, he'd sometimes spend entire weekends camping out there by himself. Still, she's a mother, so she can't help but worry. She's washing up her coffee mug when she sees Eric striding across the stretch of grass between the woods and their house.
He's carrying something large in his arms. It almost looks like a coat. Pat hurries out the front door to greet him, but Eric doesn't come inside.

He's at the garage door, a hammer already in his hand. Turns out it wasn't a coat in his arms, it's a bloody bobcat pelt. He drives several nails into the fur hanging it on the wall where anyone can see it.

When he's done, he puts a hand on Pat's shoulder, nods, and heads inside the house like nothing ever happened. By the time the Rudolphs put their home on the market, Eric has been out of the army for almost eight years. And for most of that time, he's been making his living selling cannabis.

Some of the people he does business with guess that he's pulling in around 70 grand each year. But people closer to him will later say that's a stretch. He couldn't possibly be making that much money.

For context, 70 grand in 1996 would equate to about 150,000 today. And Eric Rudolph isn't living the life of someone making that much money. Then again, not a lot of people feel like they really know Eric.

Some who do can see a change though. The Rudolph's longtime friend and neighbor Tom Branham has noticed that Eric has an air of bitterness around him these days. Ever since he came home from the army, he's been more secretive and saying more radical things about the government.

The secretive thing makes sense for a guy who's making his living dealing drugs, and the part about being radical, that's really not surprising either. Just a continuation of the journey he's been on since he was a teenager. But what is concerning, at least to Tom, is how casually violent Eric has become.

At one stage, the Rudolph's had some dogs, pit bulls, and Eric was annoyed by one of them. It was barking too much, he said, so he shot it. Not long after that, he killed Tom's daughter's cat.
When Tom confronted him about it, Eric explained that the cat was killing rabbits in the woods, rabbits that he might need to eat to survive someday. And most recently, there was the incident with the bobcat. To anyone paying close enough attention, a pattern has emerged in Eric's behavior.

When confronted with an animal acting in a way he doesn't like, his immediate response is to violently eliminate the creature. Like he's making an example of it. But here's the thing, few people are paying close attention to Eric.

So although Tom becomes uneasy about having him over for dinner with his family, no one else spends much time thinking about Eric at all. Eric, though, all he does is think. And his thoughts have been getting darker by the year.

Shocking, right? A man who'd shoot his own dog for barking is dark thoughts. But Eric's got plenty of stuff on his mind that's got nothing to do with animals.

Mostly, he thinks about the government and how corrupt he believes it is. Illegitimate, really. He looks at the 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge and the US citizens who were killed there.
He watches news stories about anti-abortion activists shooting doctors outside of health clinics. And he thinks, here are the heroes. The weavers who refused to bow down to the government at Ruby Ridge, and the abortion protesters who swapped placards for guns.

These are the people taking a stand for themselves. And he's inspired. It's just after midnight on July 27th, 1996 at Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta.

Just a few years ago, this space was a sprawling mess of empty lots and abandoned buildings. Now it's a humming, thriving hub pulsing at the heart of the Olympic Games. The event is just beginning its second week.

Some 30,000 local, state, and federal law enforcement personnel and private security guards have been mobilized to watch over every venue, every sport, every aspect of the Games. But Centennial Park is different. It isn't designated as an official event space, so the city's leaders didn't want to crowd it with security.

Instead, there's temporary fencing around the park perimeter, with guards stationed at each entrance. That way, locals and visitors alike should feel free to come and enjoy the nightly concerts without much hassle. And it's worked.
Tens of thousands of people have been showing up to the park every night, bringing lawn chairs and picnic baskets and celebrating with friends. Tonight, though, there's someone in the crowd who's not interested in celebrating. Eric Rudolph weaves his way through the horde of revelers, a backpack weighing heavy on his shoulders.

He heads towards a three-story sound tower and sits on a bench, slipping the bag carefully off and placing it gently on the ground. He looks at the people around him. His plan is that they'll all be gone before the homemade bomb inside his backpack detonates.

They're not his targets. Eric has a very specific goal in mind for tonight. He built this bomb to embarrass the US government in front of the world.
While they celebrate American culture and achievement, he'll underline their moral and technical failings. He's hoping that the explosion will force the cancellation of the rest of the Olympics, or at least make people so scared to attend events that spending in the local economy dries up, eating into the huge financial investment. That'll show him, he thinks.

Initially, he wanted to use bombs to knock out Atlanta's entire power grid, which would have definitely made running the games impossible. But he wasn't able to get his hands on the explosives he needed to pull off a job like that. So he settled for the smaller device instead.

Actually, there are three bombs inside Eric's backpack. They're pipe bombs, each one a foot long by two inches in diameter. They hold just over a pound of smokeless gunpowder and are each wrapped in rows of masonry nails.

On one side of the pipes is a heavy steel plate, which is designed to turn the whole device into an improvised claymore mine, meaning the blast should be directed out in the opposite direction to the plate for maximum damage. Eric opens the bag and carefully sets the detonator. It's on a 55-minute timer, which he believes will give him plenty of time to carry out the next crucial step of his plan.

He stands up from the bench and walks away, leaving the bag there on the ground. He moves quickly to the nearest exit. Then it takes him about 10 minutes to find a payphone where he dials 911.

He fixes a small plastic device over the mouthpiece to disguise his voice. When the operator picks up, he asks if she can understand him. When she confirms that she can, he starts speaking.

You defy the order of the militia. The operator terminates the call. Eric stares at the receiver in shock for a moment, then slams it down.
He needs to call in a bomb threat so that the park can be cleared before time runs out. He wants the bomb to explode when the park is full of law enforcement officers. In his mind, they're fair game in the war he's about to wage.

But as desperately as he wants to avoid harming civilians, he also doesn't want to stay at this phone. He's worried that the first call will be traced. Cops could be on him any minute, so he jogs about a block until he finds another phone outside a motel.
This time, he doesn't use the voice modulator and just pinches his nose to make himself sound different. He tells the operator that there's a bomb in Centennial Park and that it will explode within 30 minutes. He's grateful that the line stays open this time.

But as he's talking, he notices two passers-by look at him. Paranoid, he stammers through the rest of his message, completely forgetting to mention the exact location of the bomb. Then, considering his task over, Eric hangs up and hurries off into the night.
Inside the 911 call center, the dispatcher is having difficulty doing her job. After receiving the bomb threat, it takes her three minutes to finally reach the command center for the Atlanta PD.

That delay is bad enough, but it gets worse.
Because Centennial Park is so new, it's not in the 911 dispatch system yet. Which means, essentially, they can't find an address for where to send first responders. And there's no direct line from the Atlanta PD to the park command hub.

So, despite Eric's warning, no one in the line of danger knows there's a bomb about to explode in the middle of the crowded park. Luckily, though, security guard Richard Jewell is good at his job. He's on duty near the sound tower where Eric planted his device.

And although he didn't notice that, he did spot some underage kids drinking beer. So he went to find a colleague to help him handle the situation. He gets back to the tower with an agent from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Only now the teens are gone. Looking around for them, Richard spots Eric's abandoned backpack near the bench. While Richard was looking for help, some people walking through the park spotted the bag and tried to pick it up.

But it weighs about 45 pounds, so they ended up just leaving it where they found it. Only now it's sitting at an angle instead of upright. Richard points out the backpack to the Bureau agent, and they move through the crowd for a few minutes, asking if it belongs to anyone nearby.
When no one claims the bag, the agent radios for the bomb disposal team to come take a look. Richard stands guard over the bag until the bomb tech arrives, then watches him slide on his stomach underneath the bench. The guy carefully opens the bag, shining a flashlight inside.

That's when he freezes. He takes his hand off the bag, rolls out from under the bench, and starts running away from the bomb. The next few moments unfold in a blur.
Members of the bomb squad and the various guards and law enforcement officers scatter through the area, ordering bystanders to move away as quickly as they can. The trick is trying to keep everyone calm so they don't start a stampede. But there's not enough time.
Eric Rudolph's first bomb is about to explode, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.

It's 1:18 a.m. at Atlanta's Centennial Park. It's been about 30 minutes since Eric Rudolph made a second call to 911 to let authorities know he'd planted a bomb in the park. On the stage, the band Jack Mack and the Heart Attack have just started another song, which is met by excited cheers from the audience.

Meanwhile, authorities are hurriedly trying to clear the area around Eric's backpack, which security guard Richard Jewell spotted by chance. But despite their best efforts, they're too late. With tens of thousands of people still in the park, the three pipe bombs inside the bag detonate, the sound closer to a loud crack than a boom.
The force of the blast reverberates through people's chests and knocks them to the ground. At first, some people close to the stage think that the explosion is just some kind of pyrotechnic effect, but in the area closest to the blast site, there's no mistaking what's happened. It's a horrific site.

Dozens of people have been hit with shrapnel flying at speeds of 3,000 feet per second. Masonry nails, shredded fragments of pipe, and pieces of the backpack. Alice Hawthorne and her teenage daughter Fallon are two of the people hit by the shrapnel.

Alice is 44, a hard-working mother who couldn't get tickets to any of the Olympic events but wanted to do something special for her daughter's birthday anyway. This free concert felt like a perfect way to celebrate together. Alice has dedicated huge amounts of her time to volunteering for good causes and is beloved in her community.

Now she lies dead on the bloody ground. A flying nail has penetrated her head. As people help Fallon up off the pavement, she screams for someone to help her mother.
In further reaches of the park, a ripple of terror builds into a wave as everyone realizes what's happened. News teams from around the world hurried towards the explosion to report on what's just taken place. Among them is 40-year-old Mela Yuzenyal, a cameraman with the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation.

He's there to do his job, to report on the Olympic Games for his country. It's been a relatively relaxing assignment for Mela after covering wars in three different countries during his career. But as he runs across the park, he goes into cardiac arrest.
When they arrive at the bomb site, slipping on the blood-slick ground, paramedics aren't able to revive him. In addition to the deaths of Alice and Melit, 110 people are injured in the blast. But it could have been so much worse.

Remember those people who stopped to inspect Eric's backpack and even tried to lift it? They left it slightly tilted, which redirected the angle of the explosion. Eric's device included a steel plate 1 eighth of an inch thick.

This was supposed to direct the bulk of the shrapnel out towards where the crowd were standing, something he learned during his army training years ago. Instead, though, most of the shrapnel went up, not out. If the bag had stayed undisturbed, as Eric intended, dozens more people likely would have died.

Maybe hundreds. So in that respect, it's good that his plan would arrive. But in other ways, it's a catastrophe.

According to Eric's account of the bombing, his intention was for the park to be cleared of civilians before the bomb exploded, leaving only law enforcement in the line of fire. But because his message never made it to the park's communication hub, security personnel didn't have enough time to clear the area. So it was fortunate that Richard Jewell was scheduled to work tonight, though he won't feel that way for too long.

In the aftermath of the Centennial Park bombing, Richard Jewell's hailed as a hero. He's interviewed on camera about his experiences that night and credited with saving countless lives. But the fanfare stops just a few days later, when the Atlanta Journal Constitution runs a story naming Richard as a suspect in the bombing.

It turns out that a former employer had seen him on TV and decided to call the FBI to tell them that Richard was a wannabe cop who exaggerated and sought attention. The timing of this call isn't clear, but either because of it or separate from it, the agency started looking into Richard. The suspicion is that he's a so-called hero bomber and was perhaps inspired by an incident at the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984.

There, a police officer placed a bomb on a team bus so that he could discover it and be hailed as a hero. Luckily, no one was injured and the guy eventually pleaded guilty. Now, Richard is being eyed as some kind of copycat.

Some agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the ATF, well, they don't buy the theory. Hero bombers never want to risk actually getting hurt themselves, and Richard was very much in danger that night. But profilers from the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, like Richard as the culprit.

They watch footage of his interviews, and his demeanor sets off alarm bells for them. His deadpan delivery is sprinkled with police lingo, and he mentions that he'd like to work in law enforcement. To them, these things all make him look guilty as sin.
As the FBI digs into 33-year-old Richard's past, the strikes against him start to add up. He's had trouble at work over the years, and received some complaints against him when he worked as campus police for a college. He's also a single man living with his mother, which some investigators and journalists decide is a red flag on its own.

No one really mentions that Richard's only staying with his mom to help her around the house while she recovers from surgery. I guess that part doesn't really fit the narrative they're building. With news crews watching, FBI agents show up at Richard's mother's apartment to invite him to the local headquarters for an interview.

He's not surprised to see them and is only too happy to chat, but the agency doesn't want Richard to know he's an official suspect yet. If he understands what's happening, he might not be so keen to talk. So once they get him into an interrogation room, they tell him that they're taping their conversation so it can be used to train agents on how to interview first responders.
This little piece of skullduggery might have worked too, but then the agents start reading Richard as Miranda writes. That tips him off that this is more serious than it seems, and he asked for a lawyer. After that, the gloves come off.

The FBI searches Richard's mother's apartment, seizing Tupperware, electrical tape, and nails, though none of them match the pieces of the bomb investigators have found so far. While the search takes place, Richard sits on the building stoop, his head in his hands, wondering how long this bizarre nightmare is gonna last. Well, it lasts for three months, and in that time, Richard's name is dragged through the mud, with news anchors and late night hosts speculating about his guilt and what evidence the government has against him.

He's never arrested or formally charged, but he's kept under 24-hour surveillance and questioned multiple times. In the end, the investigators only back off when Richard's lawyer hires a former FBI agent to give him a polygraph test, which Richard passes. In October, Richard Jewell is publicly cleared as a suspect, leaving him to move on with his life as best he can.

To be clear, the authorities haven't focused all of their attention on Richard in the month since the Centennial Park bombing in the days following the blast, the recovery team collected some 600 buckets of rubble to sift through for evidence. They analyzed different components of the bomb from among the mess, sifting through nails, metal shards, dirt. Somewhere in all of that, they find a single grain of unconsumed gunpowder.

It's a tiny clue, but a promising one. After running tests, they identify the exact brand and batch number of the powder. But although they know that the gunpowder came from a manufacturer in Israel, and they know when it entered the US, where it went after that is a mystery.
So the trail goes cold. Still, there are other clues waiting to be examined. One of the biggest is the steel plate that was found in the crater made by the explosion.

It's ripped in three places, but investigators can tell it was a directional plate to improvise a claymore mine. That suggests whoever planted the bomb has a military background, which narrows down the search a little. But even after months, it still feels like they aren't any closer to finding the person behind the bomb.

Agents go through a pool of potential suspects, pulling names from lists of right-wing militia groups, previous offenders, and even known cranks who might have made a leap to all-out violence. But as the year winds down, there's still been very little progress, and investigators are running out of things they can do to keep the hunt moving forward. Each component of the bomb has been catalogued.

Photos of the crowd from the park have been picked over ad nauseam, and witnesses have been questioned about every little detail of that night. So as 1996 comes to an end, there's little the authorities can do, but wait. The hope is that new information will come to light that will help crack the case.
Failing that, there's a nervous anticipation. Will the bomber strike again? If they do, where will they target?

And will they leave more clues behind next time? These are all questions that will be answered soon enough. While the government has spent almost half a year trying to identify him, Eric Rudolph has been keeping a low profile.

Following the explosion, he changed his plan significantly. Before July 27th, he had prepared four more bombs that he was intending to detonate across Atlanta on subsequent days. But instead, he took the devices to a huge vacant lot outside the city and detonated them out of sight.
Then he returned home to his trailer in North Carolina. So exactly why Eric decided not to use those four bombs has never been clear, but there are several possible reasons. Perhaps he felt guilty about how many civilian casualties he caused.

Maybe he was disappointed that the Olympics resumed as normal without even a pause in the schedule. And then again, it could have been cold feet. He felt exposed when people looked at him using the payphone.

There's a chance that he decided the Olympics were too crowded for him to keep a low profile, especially after the first bomb. Whatever his reasons, Eric's been regrouping. He wants to continue his campaign against what he thinks of as the evils of modern American society, but he wants to be more direct about it.

So he's going to narrow his focus, figuratively and literally. He spent the second half of 1996 working to improve his bomb building methods, so that he has better control over any future devices. He's also stolen over 300 pounds of dynamite from a supplier in Asheville, which he'll use to power his explosions from now on.

So, as the rest of the world rings in the new year, Eric is hard at work planning his next attacks. And this time, he's going right to the source of his grievances. He's going to target the people he believes are to blame for the state of the world.
And he doesn't care who gets caught in the crossfire anymore.

It's around 9 a.m. on January 16, 1997. Christine Stadler is at an Atlanta courthouse in Georgia. She's a lawyer and is supposed to be trying a case right now, but instead, she's been summoned to the judge's chambers to take a phone call.
Christine walks into the wood-paneled room. The dim lighting gives the space a cozy feel, and under ordinary circumstances, Christine might have stopped to admire some of the art on the walls or to wonder what it would be like to don a judge's robes. But nothing about this is ordinary.
Minutes ago, a clerk interrupted trial proceedings to tell Christine that there was an emergency call for her. The judge insisted that she take it in his office. As she hurried out of the courtroom, Christine's mind raced.

Her twin daughters are only eight months old. Could something have happened to them? Are they sick, or is it her husband Rob?
Did he get into a car accident? Christine walks quickly across to the judge's desk, where a red light is blinking on the phone. She picks up the handset and jabs the button.

She hears the call connect. It's Rob. He doesn't waste any time.
He tells her that everyone is fine, but something has happened. There's been an explosion at her office. A bomb.

Christine feels her heart start to race. Their girls were at the office this morning. There's a small nursery set up there, and Rob was going to pick them up.
She tells herself to stay calm. Rob already said everyone was okay. Now, it's important that they stay that way.

Taking a deep breath, Christine tells Rob to get everyone out of the office as quickly as possible and move them away from the building. There might be a second bomb. Then, she tells him that she's on her way, hangs up the phone and runs out of the study.
Eric Rudolph's second bomb went off on January 16th, 1997 at a three-story building in Sandy Springs, Georgia. It's just 13 miles north of Centennial Park, where his first bomb killed a woman and injured more than 100 bystanders. The Sandy Springs office building he attacked looks almost like a small museum or library, with soaring columns rising up to angled arches.

Inside are an assortment of businesses, including a law practice and Atlanta Northside Family Planning Services, a clinic that performs abortions. That clinic was the target Eric had in mind when he placed the explosives around 6.30 that morning. The bomb was simpler than the device Eric planted in Atlanta, dynamite inside a metal ammunition can with a time detonator attached.
There was no shrapnel, just enough force to rock the entire building, shattering windows and causing parts of the ceiling to collapse. Radio news director Rob Stadler was picking up his infant daughters from his wife's office when the blast hit. By the time Christine arrives less than an hour later, there are already cops, FBI agents and ATF agents on the scene, along with a gaggle of reporters.

Rob's comforting his shaken wife when a second bomb explodes across the parking lot, sending everyone running for cover. Shrapnel rains down and smoke clouds in the air around the building, but there are no life-threatening injuries caused by either of the explosions. But that's purely by chance.

Eric had planted his second bomb beneath a shrub in the parking lot and timed it to explode when law enforcement officers would be nearby. Once again, though, things didn't go according to Eric's plan. After the first bomb, a couple visiting one of the nearby businesses moved their car further away from the building, inadvertently parking it almost on top of the bomb.

So, their vehicle absorbed much of the force from the second explosive and shielded people from most of the shrapnel Eric had packed into the ammunition can. Some of that shrapnel is a collection of nails similar to the ones used in the Atlanta bombing six months ago, so right away investigators start asking if the two attacks are connected. The nails are the strongest link anyone can see at this stage, though, because Eric's messaging to go along with the bomb so far has been…well, it hasn't been. He's made no attempt to explain his actions, so even as the authorities form a second task force to investigate this latest attack, people wonder if they should expect another. Unfortunately, they don't have to wait long.

Just over a month later, on the night of February 21st, an explosion rattles the other side lounge in northeast Atlanta. The nightclub's clientele are mostly gay women, and at first many of them think what they heard was a gunshot, but then a woman on the patio realizes that a nail has pierced her arm, and the truth sinks in. It was a bomb filled with shrapnel.
When investigators arrive on the scene a short time later, they're wary. Memories of the second bomb at the Northside Clinic in Sandy Springs still echo through everyone's minds. They're right to be worried.

Eric will later claim he didn't design the first bomb with a specific goal of hurting gay men and women. Because while he doesn't particularly like the fact that homosexuality exists, he's okay with it as long as it's behind closed doors. Hell, his younger brother's gay, and by all accounts, Eric's nice enough to him.

What Eric does have a problem with is that the US government is doing nothing to stop queer people from living their lives in the open. Washington continues to tolerate and even support what Eric calls the homosexual political agenda. And agents of Washington, law enforcement, first responders, them he wants to hurt, to send a message.

Luckily for everyone on the scene, Eric's become predictable already. So a uniformed officer looks around the building until he finds a bomb concealed in a backpack beneath a shrub. Agents from the various law enforcement groups clear the area and an ATF bomb handling robot is brought in to defuse the device.

The next 45 minutes are tense as the robot pokes gingerly at the backpack and the device inside. Then the robot's handler deploys a small jet of water, which sets the bomb off. This explosion is much larger than the one that hit the bar earlier that night.

Windows and cars several blocks away are shaken by the blast, which also sends shrapnel flying through the air. One piece is a large fragment of a quarter inch thick steel plate. It's propelled about a quarter mile before it drops to the roof of a vacant house and on to the living room floor.

When it's found there a couple of days later, investigators feel confident that it's part of an improvised directional plate, like the one used in Atlanta, but twice the thickness. Still, though they're now sure that all three attacks are connected, there's nothing to indicate who's behind the bombings. At least they have more components to look into now.

One set of investigators starts looking at the nails used in the other side bombs. They're wire nails this time, different to the masonry nails used at Centennial Park. And the task force wants to know if the nails can be traced to a specific batch, which might be used to narrow down the list of places where they were purchased.

Along the same lines, the steel plate is analyzed to work out its chemical composition in hopes of finding the manufacturer. One investigator, Joe Kennedy, starts combing through the log searching for reports of stolen dynamite in the Southeastern United States. During a search, Joe hears about a suspiciously large theft of nitroglycerin dynamite from the Austin Powder Company in Asheville, North Carolina.

The thief, who you and I know was Eric Rudolph, made off with over 300 pounds of the stuff in November of 1996, leaving behind no clues. Oh, it's a tantalizing lead, and one that brings Joe so close to Eric's trail. But with nothing he can use to trace the dynamite after it was stolen, there's not much he can do with the intel.

Then, just two days after the other side bombing, another piece of evidence appears that clarifies the bomber's intention. Someone will claim responsibility for the bombs that have left Georgians terrified. And it's not Eric Rudolph.

It's a group of people, an entire army in fact. The Army of God.

From Airship, this is Episode 2 in our series on Eric Rudolph. On the next episode, the Army of God promises to wage total war on abortion clinics, and Eric Rudolph selects his next target.
We use many different sources while preparing this episode. One we can particularly recommend is Lone Wolf by Marianne Vollers. We also read Eric Rudolph's autobiography, but we wouldn't go so far as to recommend anyone else do the same.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details, and while in some cases we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research. American Criminal is a co-production of Airship and Evergreen podcasts. It's hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing and sound design by Sean Ruhl-Hoffman. Music by Thrum. This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan, managing producer Emily Burke.
Executive producers are Joel Callan and Lindsey Graham.