August 15, 2024 • 37 mins
And just like that, as soon as the suspect is identified... he vanishes, evading authorities and disappearing into the woods.
But now that we have a name, it's time to start figuring out who he is, where he came from, and what made him into the person he is.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:17):
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Speaker 3 (00:40):
Can't wait for.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
So roodles?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
First.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I'm in the car with my producer, Doug Mattica and
Paul Wolf, our local guide for the weekend. Doug and
I just drove through the night to meet up with Paul.
We're clearly outsiders here, so we need a local to
show us around. We wanted to spend some real time
in this part of Appalachia where Rudolph grew up, explore
the region and talk with people who might have known him,
(01:13):
and with Paul's help, try to understand where and how
he hid from authorities.
Speaker 5 (01:19):
That's a fascinating landscape, Gesso. Where we're going to be
heading up to the Upper Nanahala is remote even by
local standards.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
We're driving through a town called Topton. It's just outside Murphy,
North Carolina. Paul fell in love with this area and
moved here more than thirty years ago. Since then, he's
been a backpacking guide and a shaman of sorts to
series hikers exploring Appalachia. Likely to historically speaking, this is
in fact where people go to hye.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
And even some of those encounters where people might see you,
most soaks here aren't going to pay much attention for
that if you didn't want to be found. This is
a great spot, and especially knowing a bit about it.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
We passed by a tiny church that has maybe six
recipes inside, then a few homes, and then a few
dogs emerge from those homes and chase after our car.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
Just keep driving, just keep driving, Just keep.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
On his nail.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Weirdly, nobody comes outside to hear what the commotion is
all about.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
Here Partridge Creek, Yal, there's a no trustbus must take
a pause here for a second.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
A single lane gravel road called Partridge Creek dead ends
with a ranch style home with a wood frame and
aluminum siding.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
So imagine this twenty years ago folks.
Speaker 6 (02:33):
I wonder who lives there now.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
This was Eric Rudolph's home in nineteen eighty two, when
he was just sixteen years old. He and his family
moved here from Florida. Next Door is Tom Brandham's home,
a family friend of the Rudolph's. Tom met the family
at their church in Florida, and after he moved to Topton,
the family eventually followed. They bought the seven acre lot
next to Tom's and Eric Rudolph and his brother Dan
(02:59):
built out the existence trailer on the property to be
the family home.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
Boy, that's all homesteaded. Looks like you played on the
block for that place himself.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Tom still lives here. His home looks like it's in
the middle of a junkyard. There are half a dozen
cars in scrap metal lining the property. It almost looks
like a paintball course.
Speaker 5 (03:17):
See the karate target practice dummy in the garden.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
This part of North Carolina is extremely remote. Access to
cell service, let alone internet is limited. It's isolated. An
isolation like that breeds distrust. If you're not around people
that are different from you on a regular basis, they
become other, something to be suspicious of, even feared you.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
Gotta think if you bought property up a cove like this,
you didn't really want to have neighbors.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
After hiking and driving around for the better part of
the day, we stumbled upon a trash depository. That's where
you take your trash when you don't have a garbage
truck coming to your house every week. A woman was
posted up behind glass and a tiny little nook monitoring
the facility here. How long have you worked here?
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Three years?
Speaker 7 (04:09):
How far here do you live?
Speaker 6 (04:11):
Just took the.
Speaker 8 (04:11):
Road, Yeah, been living here for forty eight years, same place.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
It's a small community.
Speaker 8 (04:18):
Everybody knows everybody what they do when they're going to
do it, and they just keep their mouth shut.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
About twenty years ago during all the manhat when the
FBI had staged over here, and we're just kind of
we're looking around and seeing if anybody was around and
had any stories around that.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Stuff about Rudolph.
Speaker 7 (04:40):
Yeah, oh yeah, you were around.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Yeah live here.
Speaker 8 (04:44):
I was in school. This is a big deal, Eh,
just another day.
Speaker 6 (04:53):
Do you know the family? Yes? How well?
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Mhmm.
Speaker 8 (04:59):
When they say you mean, they'd say hi, And you know,
when all this I spoke back and that was it
to me. It was funny.
Speaker 6 (05:06):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 8 (05:08):
It's just funny because I couldn't catch one man, I said, what,
excuse my language, what dumb ice is correct?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 8 (05:17):
That fb I come to my dad's house and asked
him where the caves was. My dad said, I ain't
gonna tell you a damn thing.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Right, and they said.
Speaker 8 (05:30):
He said, if Rudolf comes to my portrait now, I
had feed him.
Speaker 7 (05:34):
Everybody helped him.
Speaker 8 (05:37):
To me.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
He didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
What do you mean he didn't blow up that place?
Speaker 9 (05:42):
Who didn't I don't know, but not him, not him.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Episode five murmurations Alabama abortion clinic bombing suspect Eric Rudolph
is still on the loops. Investigators think he's taken refuge
in caves and old mines in a densely forested part
of North Carolina. It's early spring, nineteen ninety eight. Eric
(06:25):
Rudolph has been on the run since the bombing at
the Birmingham abortion clinic in January of ninety eight.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
You know, he dreamed about this as a young man.
He am against the world, and now it's come true,
and hey, he's enjoying him.
Speaker 10 (06:37):
It's a nineteen nineties man.
Speaker 11 (06:39):
I'm looking for an eighteen nineties man.
Speaker 12 (06:42):
We were trying to be very systematic about our search,
and as with any search, there's a start point, right,
so there was his trailer.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Rick Schwine was an FBI supervisor in the nineteen nineties
at the Western North Carolina Branch and was assigned to
the search for Eric Rudolph. He was one of the
few who was somewhat familiar with this territory in North Carolina.
Speaker 12 (07:03):
And it's like throwing a pebble into a pond and
you see the rings, right, So you start with the
closest rings first and then you work your way out.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
This first ring for investigators was around Rudolph's trailer, the
one he fled from when his name was released to
the public. The second ring included the Partridge Creek home
that we drove past earlier, next to Tom Brandham's property.
Speaker 12 (07:28):
And we used a lot of different techniques, whether it
was you know, helicopters with infrared capability at night looking
for heat signatures, or it was use of man trackers,
you know, people that had specialty skills in tracking human beings,
whether it was scent dogs, especially trained dogs. But Rudolph
had some training, so he knew how to avoid those techniques.
(07:53):
There was an instant where we just missed him and
Andrews he had forded a river and he was foraging
and he was close to the man post and agents
came upon him. He could hear us, he could see us.
It's plausible that tackle teams walked right by him and
didn't see him. That's the nature of that environment. And
it's not because of lack of trying or lack of skill.
(08:16):
It's hide and seek on a whole different level.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
And for most of the investigators on the ground, especially
the FEDS, this region was foreign territory. This was not
their home, this was not their land.
Speaker 7 (08:31):
It's rugged.
Speaker 12 (08:32):
There are lots of vast tracks of land that's not improved,
no roads, very few trails overgrown. The rhododendrum slicks are
really tough. There's a lot of elevation change. You know,
you'll be walking along and then there'll be a sheer cliff.
One of the guys on my team slipped and fortunately
(08:54):
got his weapon up and caught between two trees and
it prevented him from going off a forty foot drip off.
Speaker 7 (09:01):
You know, people would get stung by.
Speaker 12 (09:02):
Bees or these ground, duelling wasps, there were poisonous snakes
that we would run across. We would occasionally walk across
the black bear, So just a lot of hazards. On
the other hand, it's an easy place to sustain yourself
right There are a lot of people that have sustenance gardens.
There's a lot of stuff that you can forage and eat,
(09:25):
you can hunt, there's lots of shelter out there. So
not an impossible place to sustain yourself, but a difficult
place to search.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
He has the edge.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
They may have the helicopters, they've got the technology, but.
Speaker 11 (09:40):
He's got to know how and the experience in the
area that they're totally inapting.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
So he learned to stay between the lines of drift,
which in this area is pretty easy.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Between the lines of drift is really just another way
of saying off the beaten path. Paul Wolf has hiked
these trails countless times. He's a professor who teaches at
Southwestern Community College in western North Carolina, where he's the
Outdoor Leadership Program director. The Eric Rudolph story is one
that he's very familiar with, one that he saw unfold
(10:27):
as a local and now decades later he likes to
retrace those steps that Rudolph took.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
I've been hiking leading groups in this area for over
twenty five years now, and I still discover stuff that
I didn't know was there. You can be close, you
just have to be several steps off because people are
going to take the path of least resistance so they
can just go around you. How many times do you
think he just sat there and watched folks He'd had
those Clowes encounters with hunters, same thing, Keep still lie down.
(10:58):
If you're not looking for someone, you're not going.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
To see it.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
There is a home field advantage to having grown up
and lived hunted, And if he really was out there
looking for clandestine spots to grow weed, he would know
of the back of that stuff more than anybody.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
He grew up here.
Speaker 6 (11:19):
This is home to him.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
This is his playground.
Speaker 10 (11:21):
It's tough, it's rugged, and it's vast, and right now
he's got the upper hand because he knows these woods.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
And he also knew these people.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
But folks here a good folks in general, fiercely independent, proud,
you know, God fearing, church going, conservative in general, but
people in general are nice and friendly. Anyone will help
you out. That's one of my first experiences here with
my car broken down. A person came out in a
snowstorm and helped get me going. And when I asked
what I could do for him, he said, just help
(11:54):
return the favor to somebody something. Zoning and regulations are
drowned upon. People like to do what they want with
their land, and you know, don't like government and other
folks telling you.
Speaker 12 (12:05):
I think there were a small group of people in
western North Carolina that empathized with him. A lot of
the federal land out there was taken from people to
create those national forests, the Pisken and Anhala National Forests,
So there are families out there that lost their farmland
or lost their homesteads, so there is sort of a mistrust.
(12:30):
And then there were anti government groups out there. There
were you know, supremacist groups and Christian identity groups that
were active in the search area. Rudolph had kind of
bounced around some of those groups, knew some of those people,
you know, I think there was that balancing act of, hey,
we need to gain the trust of people in that area.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Rick connected us with a very good friend he worked
with during the search, a former at THEIE agent named
Terry Turci. Before the Rudolph case, Terry was the leader
of the FBI's task force for the unibomber Ted Kazinski.
Terry spent four years building that case for trial, but
ultimately the unibomber pled guilty to avoid the death sentence
(13:14):
and was sent to eighty X Florence, a maximum security
prison in Florence, Colorado. Terry returned home very much, looking
forward to spending time with his wife and kids back
in San Francisco. However, two days later he was told
to get on a plane and was designated the inspector
in charge of the Eric Rudolph manhunt.
Speaker 11 (13:31):
One of the very first things we did, take off
the camouflage, get rid of the FBI caps, and let
these people know who you are, and give them your
card and say, look, don't think that you're calling the
great Big government.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
If you see something, If you go out one morning and.
Speaker 11 (13:48):
You see somebody out in your pasture that doesn't belong there,
call us. These are our names. Call us, and we
will come out here. And that made it personal, and
that helped us to start getting the information we needed.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
On May fifth, nineteen ninety eight, nearly four months into
the search, a press conference was held announcing that Eric
Rudolf had been added to the FBI's ten Most Wanted
list with a one million dollar reward.
Speaker 12 (14:18):
You know, there's a flood of people, and then over time,
you know, that gets scaled back because it's expensive. And
while there were a lot of sightings, there wasn't anything
that was so credible and so actionable that you could
throw that kind of resource behind it and have a
successful outcome. Just kept getting whittled back and whittled back
(14:39):
and whittled back.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
And at the same time, investigators in Birmingham and Atlanta
were working hard to pull together all the physical evidence
to make a criminal case against Rudolph so that he
could be charged and convicted.
Speaker 12 (14:51):
As time passed, there were a group of us, myself included,
that thought he was still alive. He was probably spending
a lot of time in western North Carolin, if not
all of his time, and that you spent a lot
of time in.
Speaker 7 (15:02):
The woods, but not everybody believed that.
Speaker 10 (15:07):
It's hard to find something that ain't there probably some
more drinking drinks than little umbrellas on top, and he
could be somewhere six foot down.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
Everything that we know about him leads just to believe
that he will not leave this area.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
You sit there and you wonder where could he be?
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Is he dead now? Is he still around here?
Speaker 1 (15:24):
He has been able to get out.
Speaker 12 (15:26):
There were people that thought he went overseas. A lot
of people thought that he had died. And you know,
every time we found human remains in the search area,
we made sure they weren't Eric Rudolph's. I thought there
were enough indicators, enough sightings, enough odd things. For example,
a house gets broken into the stereo equipment and the
(15:49):
television is left, but clothing, a big wash, fasing, you know,
things that you would need to survive outside. Those are
the things that were taken. And oddly there were no fingerprints.
All the prints had been white. So there were things
like that that we investigated that led me to believe
that he was probably still alive.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And Rick was right. As law enforcement was beginning to
experience investigation fatigue, Eric Rudolph was often just a stone's
throw away, laughing at them. Then, in July of nineteen
ninety eight, two months after Eric Rudolph landed on the
FBI's ten most Wanted List, FBI agent Terry Turci gets
(16:32):
a call. A local resident named George Nordman contacted a
deputy and asked for law enforcement to come to his
home for a visit.
Speaker 11 (16:40):
Nordman did not like, did not trust the US government.
He just was one of those people who just had
a lot of reasons.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
He felt.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
For weeks, Nordman noticed that things were just off around
his house. There were fewer eggs being laid by his hens,
some of his food was missing, things were out of
place inside his home, not quite where he put them.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Last he said, I'm.
Speaker 11 (17:04):
Here to tell you that I got home from work
the other day. Eric Rudolph was in my house. He
was having.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Something to eat.
Speaker 11 (17:14):
She knew I had a lot of supplies there from
the health boot store. And here's what he said to me.
He said, what I want to do, George, is I
need a truck. And Norman happened to have every car
or truck that he'd ever bought for his kids or
anybody else.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
You know, once it wore out, he just left it
in the driveway.
Speaker 11 (17:34):
So, you know, Eric wanted one of these cars, and
he wanted George to give.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Him a lot of food.
Speaker 11 (17:41):
And he said, well, I'll do is when I leave
here in the truck, I'll tie you up, put a
gag in your mouth, and I'll do all these things,
and then you could tell the authorities that you had
no choice. And Nordonman said, I don't. I don't think
I want to do that. So they went back and forth.
Finally Rudolph said, well, okay, I'll get rested up here
(18:03):
and then i'll leave again.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
But I've got to get out of here. I know
I can't stay very long.
Speaker 11 (18:07):
Well, Nortman got up the next day and he went
to work, and before he left, he said, yeah, I
want you to leave.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
You got to leave. I don't want any part of this.
Speaker 11 (18:17):
And while he was at work that day Friday, Nortman
made up his mind that looked, you know, I thought
Rudolph was innocent, but now I don't think so. And
regardless of how I feel politically, I got to tell
somebody when he came back Rudolf had left that Rudolph
took a truck.
Speaker 12 (18:35):
Anyway, Rudolph had been pressured by the army of federal
agents out there that were searching for him. He was
burning more calories than he could intake. He had been
(18:56):
running out of food, and he was pretty successful evading us.
He was very successful in evading us, but I think
the pressure that we put on him had put him
in an unhealthy deficit from a calorie standpoint, and he
made a decision to break cover that reinvigorated the manhunt.
I was part of a tactical team swat team that
(19:20):
scouted the area around Norman's place, and we actually found
the spot that Rudolph had surveiled. He sat there for
a couple of days and watched Norman's place before he
approached him, and he buried some trash to conceal that
he had been there, and we were able to obtain
his fingerprint up.
Speaker 7 (19:39):
The rappers, the food rappers that he buried.
Speaker 12 (19:42):
So it gave us a new start point, if you will,
and allowed us to get back on his trail.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Two days after Nordman spoke to federal authorities, his truck
that Eric Rudolf had stolen was found. There was a
note inside the windshield that read truck broke down trouble
Please contact George Nordman at better Way Health food Store Andrews,
North Carolina. The handwriting was not Nordman's and dynamite residue
was found on the steering wheel. The task force felt vindicated.
(20:14):
Their belief that Eric Rudolph was still in those woods
was confirmed. Following the Nordman tip, over two hundred federal
agents descended on the area. They now had a scent
to follow, and around this time, the FBI also officially
charged Eric Robert Rudolph with all four bombings to date.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
How far out could this possibly give?
Speaker 5 (20:38):
We will continue until we find it, but.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
That's a large footprint to make in an area that
doesn't always take kindly to outsiders.
Speaker 9 (20:46):
How long can the residents of this area be expected
to be patient with what they have to go with.
Speaker 7 (20:50):
We're going to have to be here until we find him.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
They just got people to leave.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
They're ready for their small town to be back to
the small town.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
They're tired of it.
Speaker 7 (21:01):
The presence was massive.
Speaker 12 (21:03):
It was you know, SWAT teams from the southeast, the
FBI's hostage Rescue Team, there were Georgia Bureau of Investigation
agents that came up, and it really was several hundred
law enforcement officers working out of National Guard armories and
camp sites physically hunting for him.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
Here at Apple Tree Group Camp. This was a National
Forest Group campground. There are four designated sites here. Two
of the sites hold up to twenty five people. Two
of the sites hold up to fifty.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Apple Tree Group camp housed over two hundred agents during
the height of the search, eighty of whom were sent
into the mountains every day to actively search for Rudolph.
Our guide Paul, showed us around the site.
Speaker 5 (21:55):
The FBI was spending over sixteen thousand dollars a night
and andrews for lodging and meals because most of the
folks drove in then came back out here to the
base of operations in the daytime. We are three miles
from Nordman's house. We're half a mile from one of
Eric's on the move campsites where they did track dogs
(22:15):
back to Eric was intentional tried to lead him over here,
to keep him on this side of the gap. So
it was a very smart move.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Hundreds of investigators, infrared, helicopters, dogs. How much more was
needed to find one man and we.
Speaker 7 (22:32):
Want to leave no stone unturned.
Speaker 8 (22:35):
I encourage anyone who has information regarding mister Rudolph's whereabouts
to come forward.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
It's a my street. They have an impossible job by like.
At this point, Rudolph had likely been watching the base
camp for months. He might have even known some of
the investigators by name. This is eerily similar to the
bombing at the clinic in Birmingham. Rudolph sat at a distance,
watching and waiting, and then eventually pressed the button. In
(23:08):
this case, he was fully immersed in a long term
game of hide and seek, of cat and mouse, and
later we would learn it was a game that he
lived for.
Speaker 12 (23:23):
I personally believe he got assistance. I don't think it
was consistent. I think it was here and there. But
he has a unique personality type where you know, he
didn't really need a lot of human interaction. But I
do think that he had people that periodically assisted him.
You know, you can sustain yourself for a while, but
(23:44):
we had some really severe winners during that time period.
It's just hard for me to believe that he didn't
have some help.
Speaker 8 (23:52):
You can look at something and find the beauty, or
you can look at something and find the bad. There
are two sides to every story, of course, there's two
sides to Eric Rudolph.
Speaker 5 (24:03):
Good and bad.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
It boils down to good and bad.
Speaker 12 (24:07):
You would see the signs you'd see the Run Rudolph
run signs and T shirts and bumper stickers, see the
marquees and some of the business.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
You know, pray for.
Speaker 12 (24:17):
Eric Rudolf, Eric Rudolf Heid and Steek champion. You know,
fill in the blank number of days Rudolph had a
little bit of a full hero status.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Folks have long assumed that Eric Rudolf had to help,
that the locals were somehow in league with him. Earlier
in this episode, we talked to a random stranger who
empathized with him nearly thirty years later. That says a lot.
He has not been proven guilty. I don't even begin
to speculate on it.
Speaker 10 (24:47):
If he was to come down out of these woods, yeah,
hungry Alpheed and my meal, I'll never tell on him.
They got to prove something to me more than that.
Wore I turn a man in at my age. I'll
guarantee I wouldn't turn him into reward. That's not right.
He's going to have something to prove a man's done
something wrong.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
I'm spun upside down and sideways standing here.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
With you, and you explain it as we walk through it,
drive through it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
As the sun began to set on the Nana Hla Forest.
We felt a chill in the November air. We said
goodbye to Paul and headed back to our cabin, back
toward Murphy for the night. That evening, I decided to
give Tom Brandham a call. Tom was friends with the
Rudolph family back in Florida, and later the family followed
his path to North Carolina, where they moved in right
(25:43):
next door. Tom was very much a father figure to
Eric Rudolf. He still lives in the same home. He's
the one with the scrapyard homestead that we drove past earlier. Surprisingly,
he answered.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
What kind of color vehicle do you have?
Speaker 6 (26:01):
Why is that?
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Well? I'm asking because one came up here and I
was wondering if it was you.
Speaker 6 (26:07):
Do you get a lot of people up there?
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Not really. Yeah, it's very quiet here. It's always I've
been here fifty years, fifty years, and it's always been
this way. I haven't talked with him or anyone in
the family at all all these years. They never contacted me,
and I haven't contacted them. We had a falling out
back in those days for different reasons, but it was
(26:32):
good for me because otherwise the FBI would have really
put me through the Wringer figure. And I was totally
involved with everything that he was doing.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
In nineteen eighty four, federal agents rated Branham's house and
found illegal weapons in explosives in eighteen year old Eric
Rudolf was at Tom's house when it happened.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
I was protected by the Lord, actually that the Holy
Spirit protected me from they trying to put me away
for like thirty years, having some something that seemed gotten dynamite.
All those years, different stuff I've collected, done, shows, restored
plea market, just the case of war. That's what I
was doing. And Eric was all involved with, you know,
(27:15):
war games and all that kind of stuff, and the
teenage years here, you know, we were figuring, you know,
we're gonna have to do something to resist whatever whoever
the Russians or whoever it would be. Ideas is what
it amounted to.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
The weapons conviction was later overturned, but Tom says Eric
saw something that day.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
There's a whole lot more hidden outside that could ever found,
and it was all in case of war. But Eric
after that, after Eric saw what these government people were
doing here in his house, I think that really tweaked
Derek him hate the government. He was more. He always
(28:03):
wanted to be somebody famous. Eric wanted to be like
a famous officer, famous general, or something that he could be.
You knew that he was very very knowledgeable about the
board between the States, the Confederates and all that, very
knowledgeable about it. They were heroes to him, the Confederates.
(28:25):
He wanted to be somebody famous like that. But when
he went in the military, Eric told me himself, the
black officers or sergeants whoever, they realized just looking at
him he was a white racist. So they made him
do all kinds of crap work. And Eric told me
himself the only way get out of was just keep
smoking dope right there openly, and they finally got rid
(28:48):
of him because of it. He wouldn't stop. There's one
way of getting out, you know. He fantasized it was
going to be in the military and all, but it's
been taking over at this point, but perverted people in
homosexual monsters and running the whole operation in the military.
Now we're just we're being destroyed as a nation that way.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Of course, Tom Brandham is overtly homophobic, racist, in anti government,
and he had no reservations expressing those sentiments to me,
he owns that shit with pride. I'm not sure why
he'd think I might share his thinking, or maybe he
just doesn't care.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
There's a whole lot more I could tell him. There's
only like one or two people I've told other things
about Danny's page for whatever the hell he hated God.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Brandam told me that Eric Rudolf's older brother Dan was
always a troublemaker. Dan currently lives down in Bradenton, Florida
with his mother Pat and I sent him a few letters,
tried call him the house, but he didn't respond, and
during the manhunt for his brother, Dan did something pretty extreme.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
Danny goes into Roge and he had a try a
camera set up on a tripod and Mary's got his
radio arms saw he's got the video going. He rolls
up to sleep, puts his arm under the machine and
says this is for the FBI and the media and
(30:22):
cuts his left hand off at the wrist right there
here and go, oh, you have a terrible moan, but
clean off immediately put a tourniquet on. He had all
this figured out ahead of time. Stop the bleeding. He
went out to his vehicle and drove to the hospital,
left his hand there on the table where the saw was,
(30:46):
and they sent someone back to retrieve the hand, which
they did, and they reattached it.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
Why do you think Dan cut off his hand?
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Why would you cut off your hand for who? For what?
Because the media was on the road with cameras looking
and the FBI was asking you questions. That isn't a
reason to cut off her hand. The reason he cut
off his hand was because, well, yeah, it says in
the Bible it's the right hand offend he cut it off. Well,
(31:20):
Danny was raised that way biblically. Any cut off his
hand because he was so involved with it all. And
I think the FBI knows it, because the FBI isn't
that's they didn't know Danny was involved. But I'm sure
they got they got word from higher up to leave
that guy alone, because if they started trying to prosecute
(31:41):
Danny for being involved, the public would just rise up
and say, look what you do to look what you
made this boy do. Cut off his hand.
Speaker 6 (31:52):
So you think Dan was involved in the bombs, He's.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Involved with everything Danny was involved with. I mean, why
would you tell off your hand for one thing? I
mean there's some good dude evidence right there. You might
say your inclination like he was involved, I think for
sure anyway, So there's a whole lot more about Danny
and not going to bring it up. Wouldn't tell you
(32:17):
or Atpi or Meaty or anybody just because cutting off
his hand he paid for. He's gone. He doesn't need
to be going to Dan prison.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Was Dan involved? I don't know, but it's possible. Tom
Brandham is the first person we've met who actually knew
Eric Rudolph for years, very formative years. The two of
them were close. Brandon was like a father to him,
and Rudolph was always very close with his brother Dan.
(32:52):
They were best friends. They did nearly everything together. The
people in our immediate orbit, they strongly and who we
are and what we think, whether they want to or not,
for better or worse. Have you ever seen a murmuration
of starlings. It's this massive flock of birds that huddle
(33:15):
together in flight and swirl in the air like a blanket.
They're mesmerizing to watch, and when you get a little closer,
when you start to hear the murmuring sound they get
their name from. They're also haunting, but The thing about
starling murmurations is that in these flocks of sometimes thousands
and thousands of birds, no individual bird in the group
(33:38):
is ever taking its cues from more than six or
seven other birds in their immediate vicinity. Ever, there's no leader,
there's no organizing principle or directive at work beyond stay
warm and survive. But they move with such fluidity that
from a distance they appear to be a single organism.
(34:00):
But here's the other thing. These murmurations are blind. They're
a hive mind, let loose and flying free. They wreak
havoc on nature, on cities, on technology. They cause car wrecks,
sometimes massive pile ups. They completely ravage the foliage and
the trees. If you're underneath the swarm, it feels like
(34:23):
an air invasion. It is an air invasion because they
shit everywhere, and I mean everywhere, and sometimes with the
really giant murmurations, like the one that shuts down the
city of Rome every summer, they can even block out
the sun, the whole world going black next time on flashpoint.
Speaker 4 (34:56):
So I was assigned to the overnight shift, So I
worked from ten at night to six in the morning.
Then it was a pain in the butt of a shift,
and I will tell you I hated it, and frankly,
be honest, we didn't nothing ever happened. And this night
I went into the Valley Village shopping center and as
I came around the left side of the building, I
activated my right alley spotlight. I observed a silhouette of
(35:18):
somebody kind of crouched down in the road, and I
immediately recognized that there appeared to be some type of
a large object that was kind of slung over the
individual's upper torso, but it looked like a weapon, and
I exited my patrol car, took cover behind my door
with my weapon drawn, and began giving commands to who
(35:40):
this individual was.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Flashpoint as a production Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeartMedia.
I'm Your Host. Cole Lcassio, Donald Albright, and Payne Lindsay
are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV. Flashpoint was created, written,
and executive produced by Doug Mattica and myself on behalf
of seven nine ninety seven. Lead producer is Alex Espastadt,
(36:23):
along with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stadman. Our associate
producer is witt Lukassio, Editing by Alex Espastad with additional
editing by Liam Luxon and Sidney Evans. Supervising producer is
Tracy Kaplan. Artwork by Station sixteen. Original music by Jay
(36:44):
Ragsdale mixed by Dayton Cole. Thank you to Orrin Rosenbaum
and the team at Uta Beck Media and Marketing and
the Nord Group. Special thanks to Angela Kew, Tyleie Revied,
Mattica and Tim Livingston. Special thanks to Matthew D. Taylor
for his discussion with us about Starling murmerations from his
(37:06):
first book, Scripture. People. For more podcasts like Flashpoint, search
Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app, or visit us
at tenderfoot dot tv. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening
(37:27):
to this episode of Flashpoint. This series is released weekly
absolutely free, but for ad free listening, early access and
exclusive bonuses, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple
Podcasts or at tenderfootplus dot com
Flashpoint is released weekly and brought to you absolutely free,
but for ad free listening, early access and exclusive bonuses,
subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus dot com or on
Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
You're listening to Flashpoint, a production of tenderfoot TV and
association with iHeartMedia. The views and opinions expressed in this
podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast.
This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be
suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Can't wait for.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
So roodles?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
First.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I'm in the car with my producer, Doug Mattica and
Paul Wolf, our local guide for the weekend. Doug and
I just drove through the night to meet up with Paul.
We're clearly outsiders here, so we need a local to
show us around. We wanted to spend some real time
in this part of Appalachia where Rudolph grew up, explore
the region and talk with people who might have known him,
(01:13):
and with Paul's help, try to understand where and how
he hid from authorities.
Speaker 5 (01:19):
That's a fascinating landscape, Gesso. Where we're going to be
heading up to the Upper Nanahala is remote even by
local standards.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
We're driving through a town called Topton. It's just outside Murphy,
North Carolina. Paul fell in love with this area and
moved here more than thirty years ago. Since then, he's
been a backpacking guide and a shaman of sorts to
series hikers exploring Appalachia. Likely to historically speaking, this is
in fact where people go to hye.
Speaker 5 (01:49):
And even some of those encounters where people might see you,
most soaks here aren't going to pay much attention for
that if you didn't want to be found. This is
a great spot, and especially knowing a bit about it.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
We passed by a tiny church that has maybe six
recipes inside, then a few homes, and then a few
dogs emerge from those homes and chase after our car.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
Just keep driving, just keep driving, Just keep.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
On his nail.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Weirdly, nobody comes outside to hear what the commotion is
all about.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
Here Partridge Creek, Yal, there's a no trustbus must take
a pause here for a second.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
A single lane gravel road called Partridge Creek dead ends
with a ranch style home with a wood frame and
aluminum siding.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
So imagine this twenty years ago folks.
Speaker 6 (02:33):
I wonder who lives there now.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
This was Eric Rudolph's home in nineteen eighty two, when
he was just sixteen years old. He and his family
moved here from Florida. Next Door is Tom Brandham's home,
a family friend of the Rudolph's. Tom met the family
at their church in Florida, and after he moved to Topton,
the family eventually followed. They bought the seven acre lot
next to Tom's and Eric Rudolph and his brother Dan
(02:59):
built out the existence trailer on the property to be
the family home.
Speaker 5 (03:02):
Boy, that's all homesteaded. Looks like you played on the
block for that place himself.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Tom still lives here. His home looks like it's in
the middle of a junkyard. There are half a dozen
cars in scrap metal lining the property. It almost looks
like a paintball course.
Speaker 5 (03:17):
See the karate target practice dummy in the garden.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
This part of North Carolina is extremely remote. Access to
cell service, let alone internet is limited. It's isolated. An
isolation like that breeds distrust. If you're not around people
that are different from you on a regular basis, they
become other, something to be suspicious of, even feared you.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
Gotta think if you bought property up a cove like this,
you didn't really want to have neighbors.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
After hiking and driving around for the better part of
the day, we stumbled upon a trash depository. That's where
you take your trash when you don't have a garbage
truck coming to your house every week. A woman was
posted up behind glass and a tiny little nook monitoring
the facility here. How long have you worked here?
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Three years?
Speaker 7 (04:09):
How far here do you live?
Speaker 6 (04:11):
Just took the.
Speaker 8 (04:11):
Road, Yeah, been living here for forty eight years, same place.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
It's a small community.
Speaker 8 (04:18):
Everybody knows everybody what they do when they're going to
do it, and they just keep their mouth shut.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
About twenty years ago during all the manhat when the
FBI had staged over here, and we're just kind of
we're looking around and seeing if anybody was around and
had any stories around that.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Stuff about Rudolph.
Speaker 7 (04:40):
Yeah, oh yeah, you were around.
Speaker 4 (04:42):
Yeah live here.
Speaker 8 (04:44):
I was in school. This is a big deal, Eh,
just another day.
Speaker 6 (04:53):
Do you know the family? Yes? How well?
Speaker 4 (04:58):
Mhmm.
Speaker 8 (04:59):
When they say you mean, they'd say hi, And you know,
when all this I spoke back and that was it
to me. It was funny.
Speaker 6 (05:06):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 8 (05:08):
It's just funny because I couldn't catch one man, I said, what,
excuse my language, what dumb ice is correct?
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Yeah?
Speaker 8 (05:17):
That fb I come to my dad's house and asked
him where the caves was. My dad said, I ain't
gonna tell you a damn thing.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Right, and they said.
Speaker 8 (05:30):
He said, if Rudolf comes to my portrait now, I
had feed him.
Speaker 7 (05:34):
Everybody helped him.
Speaker 8 (05:37):
To me.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
He didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
What do you mean he didn't blow up that place?
Speaker 9 (05:42):
Who didn't I don't know, but not him, not him.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Episode five murmurations Alabama abortion clinic bombing suspect Eric Rudolph
is still on the loops. Investigators think he's taken refuge
in caves and old mines in a densely forested part
of North Carolina. It's early spring, nineteen ninety eight. Eric
(06:25):
Rudolph has been on the run since the bombing at
the Birmingham abortion clinic in January of ninety eight.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
You know, he dreamed about this as a young man.
He am against the world, and now it's come true,
and hey, he's enjoying him.
Speaker 10 (06:37):
It's a nineteen nineties man.
Speaker 11 (06:39):
I'm looking for an eighteen nineties man.
Speaker 12 (06:42):
We were trying to be very systematic about our search,
and as with any search, there's a start point, right,
so there was his trailer.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Rick Schwine was an FBI supervisor in the nineteen nineties
at the Western North Carolina Branch and was assigned to
the search for Eric Rudolph. He was one of the
few who was somewhat familiar with this territory in North Carolina.
Speaker 12 (07:03):
And it's like throwing a pebble into a pond and
you see the rings, right, So you start with the
closest rings first and then you work your way out.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
This first ring for investigators was around Rudolph's trailer, the
one he fled from when his name was released to
the public. The second ring included the Partridge Creek home
that we drove past earlier, next to Tom Brandham's property.
Speaker 12 (07:28):
And we used a lot of different techniques, whether it
was you know, helicopters with infrared capability at night looking
for heat signatures, or it was use of man trackers,
you know, people that had specialty skills in tracking human beings,
whether it was scent dogs, especially trained dogs. But Rudolph
had some training, so he knew how to avoid those techniques.
(07:53):
There was an instant where we just missed him and
Andrews he had forded a river and he was foraging
and he was close to the man post and agents
came upon him. He could hear us, he could see us.
It's plausible that tackle teams walked right by him and
didn't see him. That's the nature of that environment. And
it's not because of lack of trying or lack of skill.
(08:16):
It's hide and seek on a whole different level.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
And for most of the investigators on the ground, especially
the FEDS, this region was foreign territory. This was not
their home, this was not their land.
Speaker 7 (08:31):
It's rugged.
Speaker 12 (08:32):
There are lots of vast tracks of land that's not improved,
no roads, very few trails overgrown. The rhododendrum slicks are
really tough. There's a lot of elevation change. You know,
you'll be walking along and then there'll be a sheer cliff.
One of the guys on my team slipped and fortunately
(08:54):
got his weapon up and caught between two trees and
it prevented him from going off a forty foot drip off.
Speaker 7 (09:01):
You know, people would get stung by.
Speaker 12 (09:02):
Bees or these ground, duelling wasps, there were poisonous snakes
that we would run across. We would occasionally walk across
the black bear, So just a lot of hazards. On
the other hand, it's an easy place to sustain yourself
right There are a lot of people that have sustenance gardens.
There's a lot of stuff that you can forage and eat,
(09:25):
you can hunt, there's lots of shelter out there. So
not an impossible place to sustain yourself, but a difficult
place to search.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
He has the edge.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
They may have the helicopters, they've got the technology, but.
Speaker 11 (09:40):
He's got to know how and the experience in the
area that they're totally inapting.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
So he learned to stay between the lines of drift,
which in this area is pretty easy.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Between the lines of drift is really just another way
of saying off the beaten path. Paul Wolf has hiked
these trails countless times. He's a professor who teaches at
Southwestern Community College in western North Carolina, where he's the
Outdoor Leadership Program director. The Eric Rudolph story is one
that he's very familiar with, one that he saw unfold
(10:27):
as a local and now decades later he likes to
retrace those steps that Rudolph took.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
I've been hiking leading groups in this area for over
twenty five years now, and I still discover stuff that
I didn't know was there. You can be close, you
just have to be several steps off because people are
going to take the path of least resistance so they
can just go around you. How many times do you
think he just sat there and watched folks He'd had
those Clowes encounters with hunters, same thing, Keep still lie down.
(10:58):
If you're not looking for someone, you're not going.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
To see it.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
There is a home field advantage to having grown up
and lived hunted, And if he really was out there
looking for clandestine spots to grow weed, he would know
of the back of that stuff more than anybody.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
He grew up here.
Speaker 6 (11:19):
This is home to him.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
This is his playground.
Speaker 10 (11:21):
It's tough, it's rugged, and it's vast, and right now
he's got the upper hand because he knows these woods.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
And he also knew these people.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
But folks here a good folks in general, fiercely independent, proud,
you know, God fearing, church going, conservative in general, but
people in general are nice and friendly. Anyone will help
you out. That's one of my first experiences here with
my car broken down. A person came out in a
snowstorm and helped get me going. And when I asked
what I could do for him, he said, just help
(11:54):
return the favor to somebody something. Zoning and regulations are
drowned upon. People like to do what they want with
their land, and you know, don't like government and other
folks telling you.
Speaker 12 (12:05):
I think there were a small group of people in
western North Carolina that empathized with him. A lot of
the federal land out there was taken from people to
create those national forests, the Pisken and Anhala National Forests,
So there are families out there that lost their farmland
or lost their homesteads, so there is sort of a mistrust.
(12:30):
And then there were anti government groups out there. There
were you know, supremacist groups and Christian identity groups that
were active in the search area. Rudolph had kind of
bounced around some of those groups, knew some of those people,
you know, I think there was that balancing act of, hey,
we need to gain the trust of people in that area.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Rick connected us with a very good friend he worked
with during the search, a former at THEIE agent named
Terry Turci. Before the Rudolph case, Terry was the leader
of the FBI's task force for the unibomber Ted Kazinski.
Terry spent four years building that case for trial, but
ultimately the unibomber pled guilty to avoid the death sentence
(13:14):
and was sent to eighty X Florence, a maximum security
prison in Florence, Colorado. Terry returned home very much, looking
forward to spending time with his wife and kids back
in San Francisco. However, two days later he was told
to get on a plane and was designated the inspector
in charge of the Eric Rudolph manhunt.
Speaker 11 (13:31):
One of the very first things we did, take off
the camouflage, get rid of the FBI caps, and let
these people know who you are, and give them your
card and say, look, don't think that you're calling the
great Big government.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
If you see something, If you go out one morning and.
Speaker 11 (13:48):
You see somebody out in your pasture that doesn't belong there,
call us. These are our names. Call us, and we
will come out here. And that made it personal, and
that helped us to start getting the information we needed.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
On May fifth, nineteen ninety eight, nearly four months into
the search, a press conference was held announcing that Eric
Rudolf had been added to the FBI's ten Most Wanted
list with a one million dollar reward.
Speaker 12 (14:18):
You know, there's a flood of people, and then over time,
you know, that gets scaled back because it's expensive. And
while there were a lot of sightings, there wasn't anything
that was so credible and so actionable that you could
throw that kind of resource behind it and have a
successful outcome. Just kept getting whittled back and whittled back
(14:39):
and whittled back.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
And at the same time, investigators in Birmingham and Atlanta
were working hard to pull together all the physical evidence
to make a criminal case against Rudolph so that he
could be charged and convicted.
Speaker 12 (14:51):
As time passed, there were a group of us, myself included,
that thought he was still alive. He was probably spending
a lot of time in western North Carolin, if not
all of his time, and that you spent a lot
of time in.
Speaker 7 (15:02):
The woods, but not everybody believed that.
Speaker 10 (15:07):
It's hard to find something that ain't there probably some
more drinking drinks than little umbrellas on top, and he
could be somewhere six foot down.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
Everything that we know about him leads just to believe
that he will not leave this area.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
You sit there and you wonder where could he be?
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Is he dead now? Is he still around here?
Speaker 1 (15:24):
He has been able to get out.
Speaker 12 (15:26):
There were people that thought he went overseas. A lot
of people thought that he had died. And you know,
every time we found human remains in the search area,
we made sure they weren't Eric Rudolph's. I thought there
were enough indicators, enough sightings, enough odd things. For example,
a house gets broken into the stereo equipment and the
(15:49):
television is left, but clothing, a big wash, fasing, you know,
things that you would need to survive outside. Those are
the things that were taken. And oddly there were no fingerprints.
All the prints had been white. So there were things
like that that we investigated that led me to believe
that he was probably still alive.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And Rick was right. As law enforcement was beginning to
experience investigation fatigue, Eric Rudolph was often just a stone's
throw away, laughing at them. Then, in July of nineteen
ninety eight, two months after Eric Rudolph landed on the
FBI's ten most Wanted List, FBI agent Terry Turci gets
(16:32):
a call. A local resident named George Nordman contacted a
deputy and asked for law enforcement to come to his
home for a visit.
Speaker 11 (16:40):
Nordman did not like, did not trust the US government.
He just was one of those people who just had
a lot of reasons.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
He felt.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
For weeks, Nordman noticed that things were just off around
his house. There were fewer eggs being laid by his hens,
some of his food was missing, things were out of
place inside his home, not quite where he put them.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Last he said, I'm.
Speaker 11 (17:04):
Here to tell you that I got home from work
the other day. Eric Rudolph was in my house. He
was having.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Something to eat.
Speaker 11 (17:14):
She knew I had a lot of supplies there from
the health boot store. And here's what he said to me.
He said, what I want to do, George, is I
need a truck. And Norman happened to have every car
or truck that he'd ever bought for his kids or
anybody else.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
You know, once it wore out, he just left it
in the driveway.
Speaker 11 (17:34):
So, you know, Eric wanted one of these cars, and
he wanted George to give.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Him a lot of food.
Speaker 11 (17:41):
And he said, well, I'll do is when I leave
here in the truck, I'll tie you up, put a
gag in your mouth, and I'll do all these things,
and then you could tell the authorities that you had
no choice. And Nordonman said, I don't. I don't think
I want to do that. So they went back and forth.
Finally Rudolph said, well, okay, I'll get rested up here
(18:03):
and then i'll leave again.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
But I've got to get out of here. I know
I can't stay very long.
Speaker 11 (18:07):
Well, Nortman got up the next day and he went
to work, and before he left, he said, yeah, I
want you to leave.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
You got to leave. I don't want any part of this.
Speaker 11 (18:17):
And while he was at work that day Friday, Nortman
made up his mind that looked, you know, I thought
Rudolph was innocent, but now I don't think so. And
regardless of how I feel politically, I got to tell
somebody when he came back Rudolf had left that Rudolph
took a truck.
Speaker 12 (18:35):
Anyway, Rudolph had been pressured by the army of federal
agents out there that were searching for him. He was
burning more calories than he could intake. He had been
(18:56):
running out of food, and he was pretty successful evading us.
He was very successful in evading us, but I think
the pressure that we put on him had put him
in an unhealthy deficit from a calorie standpoint, and he
made a decision to break cover that reinvigorated the manhunt.
I was part of a tactical team swat team that
(19:20):
scouted the area around Norman's place, and we actually found
the spot that Rudolph had surveiled. He sat there for
a couple of days and watched Norman's place before he
approached him, and he buried some trash to conceal that
he had been there, and we were able to obtain
his fingerprint up.
Speaker 7 (19:39):
The rappers, the food rappers that he buried.
Speaker 12 (19:42):
So it gave us a new start point, if you will,
and allowed us to get back on his trail.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Two days after Nordman spoke to federal authorities, his truck
that Eric Rudolf had stolen was found. There was a
note inside the windshield that read truck broke down trouble
Please contact George Nordman at better Way Health food Store Andrews,
North Carolina. The handwriting was not Nordman's and dynamite residue
was found on the steering wheel. The task force felt vindicated.
(20:14):
Their belief that Eric Rudolph was still in those woods
was confirmed. Following the Nordman tip, over two hundred federal
agents descended on the area. They now had a scent
to follow, and around this time, the FBI also officially
charged Eric Robert Rudolph with all four bombings to date.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
How far out could this possibly give?
Speaker 5 (20:38):
We will continue until we find it, but.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
That's a large footprint to make in an area that
doesn't always take kindly to outsiders.
Speaker 9 (20:46):
How long can the residents of this area be expected
to be patient with what they have to go with.
Speaker 7 (20:50):
We're going to have to be here until we find him.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
They just got people to leave.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
They're ready for their small town to be back to
the small town.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
They're tired of it.
Speaker 7 (21:01):
The presence was massive.
Speaker 12 (21:03):
It was you know, SWAT teams from the southeast, the
FBI's hostage Rescue Team, there were Georgia Bureau of Investigation
agents that came up, and it really was several hundred
law enforcement officers working out of National Guard armories and
camp sites physically hunting for him.
Speaker 5 (21:34):
Here at Apple Tree Group Camp. This was a National
Forest Group campground. There are four designated sites here. Two
of the sites hold up to twenty five people. Two
of the sites hold up to fifty.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Apple Tree Group camp housed over two hundred agents during
the height of the search, eighty of whom were sent
into the mountains every day to actively search for Rudolph.
Our guide Paul, showed us around the site.
Speaker 5 (21:55):
The FBI was spending over sixteen thousand dollars a night
and andrews for lodging and meals because most of the
folks drove in then came back out here to the
base of operations in the daytime. We are three miles
from Nordman's house. We're half a mile from one of
Eric's on the move campsites where they did track dogs
(22:15):
back to Eric was intentional tried to lead him over here,
to keep him on this side of the gap. So
it was a very smart move.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Hundreds of investigators, infrared, helicopters, dogs. How much more was
needed to find one man and we.
Speaker 7 (22:32):
Want to leave no stone unturned.
Speaker 8 (22:35):
I encourage anyone who has information regarding mister Rudolph's whereabouts
to come forward.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
It's a my street. They have an impossible job by like.
At this point, Rudolph had likely been watching the base
camp for months. He might have even known some of
the investigators by name. This is eerily similar to the
bombing at the clinic in Birmingham. Rudolph sat at a distance,
watching and waiting, and then eventually pressed the button. In
(23:08):
this case, he was fully immersed in a long term
game of hide and seek, of cat and mouse, and
later we would learn it was a game that he
lived for.
Speaker 12 (23:23):
I personally believe he got assistance. I don't think it
was consistent. I think it was here and there. But
he has a unique personality type where you know, he
didn't really need a lot of human interaction. But I
do think that he had people that periodically assisted him.
You know, you can sustain yourself for a while, but
(23:44):
we had some really severe winners during that time period.
It's just hard for me to believe that he didn't
have some help.
Speaker 8 (23:52):
You can look at something and find the beauty, or
you can look at something and find the bad. There
are two sides to every story, of course, there's two
sides to Eric Rudolph.
Speaker 5 (24:03):
Good and bad.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
It boils down to good and bad.
Speaker 12 (24:07):
You would see the signs you'd see the Run Rudolph
run signs and T shirts and bumper stickers, see the
marquees and some of the business.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
You know, pray for.
Speaker 12 (24:17):
Eric Rudolf, Eric Rudolf Heid and Steek champion. You know,
fill in the blank number of days Rudolph had a
little bit of a full hero status.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Folks have long assumed that Eric Rudolf had to help,
that the locals were somehow in league with him. Earlier
in this episode, we talked to a random stranger who
empathized with him nearly thirty years later. That says a lot.
He has not been proven guilty. I don't even begin
to speculate on it.
Speaker 10 (24:47):
If he was to come down out of these woods, yeah,
hungry Alpheed and my meal, I'll never tell on him.
They got to prove something to me more than that.
Wore I turn a man in at my age. I'll
guarantee I wouldn't turn him into reward. That's not right.
He's going to have something to prove a man's done
something wrong.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
I'm spun upside down and sideways standing here.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
With you, and you explain it as we walk through it,
drive through it.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
As the sun began to set on the Nana Hla Forest.
We felt a chill in the November air. We said
goodbye to Paul and headed back to our cabin, back
toward Murphy for the night. That evening, I decided to
give Tom Brandham a call. Tom was friends with the
Rudolph family back in Florida, and later the family followed
his path to North Carolina, where they moved in right
(25:43):
next door. Tom was very much a father figure to
Eric Rudolf. He still lives in the same home. He's
the one with the scrapyard homestead that we drove past earlier. Surprisingly,
he answered.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
What kind of color vehicle do you have?
Speaker 6 (26:01):
Why is that?
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Well? I'm asking because one came up here and I
was wondering if it was you.
Speaker 6 (26:07):
Do you get a lot of people up there?
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Not really. Yeah, it's very quiet here. It's always I've
been here fifty years, fifty years, and it's always been
this way. I haven't talked with him or anyone in
the family at all all these years. They never contacted me,
and I haven't contacted them. We had a falling out
back in those days for different reasons, but it was
(26:32):
good for me because otherwise the FBI would have really
put me through the Wringer figure. And I was totally
involved with everything that he was doing.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
In nineteen eighty four, federal agents rated Branham's house and
found illegal weapons in explosives in eighteen year old Eric
Rudolf was at Tom's house when it happened.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
I was protected by the Lord, actually that the Holy
Spirit protected me from they trying to put me away
for like thirty years, having some something that seemed gotten dynamite.
All those years, different stuff I've collected, done, shows, restored
plea market, just the case of war. That's what I
was doing. And Eric was all involved with, you know,
(27:15):
war games and all that kind of stuff, and the
teenage years here, you know, we were figuring, you know,
we're gonna have to do something to resist whatever whoever
the Russians or whoever it would be. Ideas is what
it amounted to.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
The weapons conviction was later overturned, but Tom says Eric
saw something that day.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
There's a whole lot more hidden outside that could ever found,
and it was all in case of war. But Eric
after that, after Eric saw what these government people were
doing here in his house, I think that really tweaked
Derek him hate the government. He was more. He always
(28:03):
wanted to be somebody famous. Eric wanted to be like
a famous officer, famous general, or something that he could be.
You knew that he was very very knowledgeable about the
board between the States, the Confederates and all that, very
knowledgeable about it. They were heroes to him, the Confederates.
(28:25):
He wanted to be somebody famous like that. But when
he went in the military, Eric told me himself, the
black officers or sergeants whoever, they realized just looking at
him he was a white racist. So they made him
do all kinds of crap work. And Eric told me
himself the only way get out of was just keep
smoking dope right there openly, and they finally got rid
(28:48):
of him because of it. He wouldn't stop. There's one
way of getting out, you know. He fantasized it was
going to be in the military and all, but it's
been taking over at this point, but perverted people in
homosexual monsters and running the whole operation in the military.
Now we're just we're being destroyed as a nation that way.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Of course, Tom Brandham is overtly homophobic, racist, in anti government,
and he had no reservations expressing those sentiments to me,
he owns that shit with pride. I'm not sure why
he'd think I might share his thinking, or maybe he
just doesn't care.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
There's a whole lot more I could tell him. There's
only like one or two people I've told other things
about Danny's page for whatever the hell he hated God.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Brandam told me that Eric Rudolf's older brother Dan was
always a troublemaker. Dan currently lives down in Bradenton, Florida
with his mother Pat and I sent him a few letters,
tried call him the house, but he didn't respond, and
during the manhunt for his brother, Dan did something pretty extreme.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
Danny goes into Roge and he had a try a
camera set up on a tripod and Mary's got his
radio arms saw he's got the video going. He rolls
up to sleep, puts his arm under the machine and
says this is for the FBI and the media and
(30:22):
cuts his left hand off at the wrist right there
here and go, oh, you have a terrible moan, but
clean off immediately put a tourniquet on. He had all
this figured out ahead of time. Stop the bleeding. He
went out to his vehicle and drove to the hospital,
left his hand there on the table where the saw was,
(30:46):
and they sent someone back to retrieve the hand, which
they did, and they reattached it.
Speaker 6 (30:54):
Why do you think Dan cut off his hand?
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Why would you cut off your hand for who? For what?
Because the media was on the road with cameras looking
and the FBI was asking you questions. That isn't a
reason to cut off her hand. The reason he cut
off his hand was because, well, yeah, it says in
the Bible it's the right hand offend he cut it off. Well,
(31:20):
Danny was raised that way biblically. Any cut off his
hand because he was so involved with it all. And
I think the FBI knows it, because the FBI isn't
that's they didn't know Danny was involved. But I'm sure
they got they got word from higher up to leave
that guy alone, because if they started trying to prosecute
(31:41):
Danny for being involved, the public would just rise up
and say, look what you do to look what you
made this boy do. Cut off his hand.
Speaker 6 (31:52):
So you think Dan was involved in the bombs, He's.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Involved with everything Danny was involved with. I mean, why
would you tell off your hand for one thing? I
mean there's some good dude evidence right there. You might
say your inclination like he was involved, I think for
sure anyway, So there's a whole lot more about Danny
and not going to bring it up. Wouldn't tell you
(32:17):
or Atpi or Meaty or anybody just because cutting off
his hand he paid for. He's gone. He doesn't need
to be going to Dan prison.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Was Dan involved? I don't know, but it's possible. Tom
Brandham is the first person we've met who actually knew
Eric Rudolph for years, very formative years. The two of
them were close. Brandon was like a father to him,
and Rudolph was always very close with his brother Dan.
(32:52):
They were best friends. They did nearly everything together. The
people in our immediate orbit, they strongly and who we
are and what we think, whether they want to or not,
for better or worse. Have you ever seen a murmuration
of starlings. It's this massive flock of birds that huddle
(33:15):
together in flight and swirl in the air like a blanket.
They're mesmerizing to watch, and when you get a little closer,
when you start to hear the murmuring sound they get
their name from. They're also haunting, but The thing about
starling murmurations is that in these flocks of sometimes thousands
and thousands of birds, no individual bird in the group
(33:38):
is ever taking its cues from more than six or
seven other birds in their immediate vicinity. Ever, there's no leader,
there's no organizing principle or directive at work beyond stay
warm and survive. But they move with such fluidity that
from a distance they appear to be a single organism.
(34:00):
But here's the other thing. These murmurations are blind. They're
a hive mind, let loose and flying free. They wreak
havoc on nature, on cities, on technology. They cause car wrecks,
sometimes massive pile ups. They completely ravage the foliage and
the trees. If you're underneath the swarm, it feels like
(34:23):
an air invasion. It is an air invasion because they
shit everywhere, and I mean everywhere, and sometimes with the
really giant murmurations, like the one that shuts down the
city of Rome every summer, they can even block out
the sun, the whole world going black next time on flashpoint.
Speaker 4 (34:56):
So I was assigned to the overnight shift, So I
worked from ten at night to six in the morning.
Then it was a pain in the butt of a shift,
and I will tell you I hated it, and frankly,
be honest, we didn't nothing ever happened. And this night
I went into the Valley Village shopping center and as
I came around the left side of the building, I
activated my right alley spotlight. I observed a silhouette of
(35:18):
somebody kind of crouched down in the road, and I
immediately recognized that there appeared to be some type of
a large object that was kind of slung over the
individual's upper torso, but it looked like a weapon, and
I exited my patrol car, took cover behind my door
with my weapon drawn, and began giving commands to who
(35:40):
this individual was.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Flashpoint as a production Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeartMedia.
I'm Your Host. Cole Lcassio, Donald Albright, and Payne Lindsay
are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV. Flashpoint was created, written,
and executive produced by Doug Mattica and myself on behalf
of seven nine ninety seven. Lead producer is Alex Espastadt,
(36:23):
along with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stadman. Our associate
producer is witt Lukassio, Editing by Alex Espastad with additional
editing by Liam Luxon and Sidney Evans. Supervising producer is
Tracy Kaplan. Artwork by Station sixteen. Original music by Jay
(36:44):
Ragsdale mixed by Dayton Cole. Thank you to Orrin Rosenbaum
and the team at Uta Beck Media and Marketing and
the Nord Group. Special thanks to Angela Kew, Tyleie Revied,
Mattica and Tim Livingston. Special thanks to Matthew D. Taylor
for his discussion with us about Starling murmerations from his
(37:06):
first book, Scripture. People. For more podcasts like Flashpoint, search
Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app, or visit us
at tenderfoot dot tv. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening
(37:27):
to this episode of Flashpoint. This series is released weekly
absolutely free, but for ad free listening, early access and
exclusive bonuses, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple
Podcasts or at tenderfootplus dot com
Host
Cole Locascio
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