From a McDonald's Payphone
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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.com or on Apple Podcasts. You're listening to Flashpoint, a production of Tenderfoot TV in 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. Hello? This is really important. You know that explosion downtown? Yeah. I see the guy walking from that direction and he had a wig on. And I was like, what was that explosion? And, you know, I walked outside and... What kind of wig? And this guy, he was... Long wig? Short wig? He had a long wig. What color?

The wig was like brown color. This is from a transcript of the 911 call made by Jermaine Hughes, a UAB law student, just moments after a huge explosion at a Birmingham abortion clinic shook the entire downtown area on January 29th, 1998. The same explosion that killed a police officer, Robert Sanderson, and critically injured a nurse, Emily Lyons. Hughes made the call from a phone at a McDonald's near the clinic. Was he white or black?

This call went on for a while, with the 911 operator and Hughes talking past each other.

At one point, the operator even scolded him. Hughes' frustration was building. At one point, he lost the connection and called back, still trying to convince someone to believe him, when suddenly he saw a man walking down 20th Street who looked familiar.

It's safe to say, most of the customers at this McDonald's were listening intently to Hughes' side of this phone call. One of them, a lawyer named Jeff Tickle, put aside his breakfast to help. Tickle started calling out a description for Hughes to give the 911 operator.

The man they had seen had changed his appearance, now in a green and black plaid shirt, jeans, and brown boots. Together they stood inside the McDonald's, watching through the giant picture window as the mysterious figure wandered off the road and into a wooded area. "I can't see him now. I can't believe I'm standing here and there's not a cop here by now." "They're on the way. They'll be there in just a minute." Tickle got in his car and drove along Valley Avenue, looking for the individual.

He eventually pulled to a side street to discover the same man loading gear into a gray Nissan pickup. He trailed it, and when he got a clear view, he wrote down its tag. KND 1117. He didn't know it at the time, but he'd just stumbled upon the key to unveiling the mysterious figure behind the serial bombings. Episode 4, from a McDonald's payphone. I had arranged...

to meet a Birmingham News reporter. She covered the federal courts. She just wanted to catch up on my first, like, five months in office and how things were going. And as I got in the car, the radio said that there was a traffic problem initially on Southside and to steer clear of 10th Avenue South. But then shortly thereafter, they came back and said that there were reports that there had been a bomb explode. Doug Jones is a figure of note in Alabama politics.

His tenure as a U.S. Senator spanned from 2018 to 2021, a period in which he was thrust into the limelight as the first Democratic Senator in the state of Alabama in 25 years. But Doug Jones led a reputable career long before making the Senate. His roots were in law. In 1998, when the Birmingham abortion clinic bombing took place, he was a U.S. attorney working high-profile litigation cases. I parked my car because they had all of 10th Street South carded off with tape.

And the police officer that was standing there obviously recognized me. And I said, Lionel, what's going on? What's happened? He said, well, we had the bomb explode at the clinic. We got a police officer down. He's dead. There's a nurse who's been severely injured. I don't know if she'll make it or not. But we just got her in the ambulance and they took off. And I'm looking and I just look literally to my immediate left.

And there was the clinic building and you could see that the awning had been destroyed, windows had been broken out. It was a mess. You know, I like to say sometimes it looked like images that you would have seen through some bombing on another part of the world. And the body of the police officer was there. And I started moving that way because there was no one around that police officer's body. And I instinctively started moving that way. And I said, well, we've got to

do something and then I had a hand grab my shoulder and stop me he said Doug you can't go up there I said why not he's you know we seem like we've got to do something and he said look we're concerned that there could be a secondary device and we can't go up there for a while

The FBI, ATF, Birmingham police were all coming in with their mobile units and agents, keeping the area cleared, staying away from the scene, all coming, setting up radio, setting up things in the command post. The most significant part of that day for me was establishing the joint task force to investigate this case. I talked to the attorney general,

She had a preference for having the FBI take complete charge. And I said, you know, with all due respect, we've got a Birmingham police officer down. I want an ATF to take charge of doing all the forensics on the bomb. Do your thing and tell me what exploded. Get all that forensics to me.

For the FBI, you do what the FBI does best. You track down suspects. You track down witnesses. You do fingerprints. You do whatever DNA, if there is anything, whatever analysis that you need to do, you help get the search warrants. And I said, the third thing is, I know that there's often some friction between state and federal, but I want the Birmingham police to be a full partner here. They lost one of their own.

We established that task force. It became known in the FBI files as "Sandbomb," named after Sandy Sanderson, the police officer who died. And that task force, I think together, did a pretty remarkable job. And this time, with this bomb, something was different. The bomber didn't just stop and vanish before the explosion.

Jermaine Hughes was a freshman, African-American student from, you know, kind of a small town in Alabama. And he was doing his laundry, if I recall correctly. He was doing the laundry in the basement of the dorm. And he heard the bomb explode. And when he looked out of his window, you could see some smoke and some of those things coming from over the hill where the clinic was and some people moving that way.

But yet there was one individual that appeared to have some kind of disguise on, according to Tremaine, and was not running, but walking very hurriedly away from the scene. And he just thought to himself, there's something wrong with this picture. There's just something wrong with that person. And left his laundry and decided to go look and see for himself, not at the scene, but that individual he saw.

And he followed him some. At one point, he walked near him and Jermaine kind of pretended he had a problem with his car. But then he loses him and he gets in his car and he drives around to try to see what he could find. And he goes over Red Mountain and there's a McDonald's sitting on the other side. Now, he calls 911.

starts trying to describe what he saw, and there he is. There he is, right outside here. And Jeff Tickle, who's a lawyer in Birmingham, is sitting right there having breakfast and hears him, and he helps him describe what this man is wearing at the time. Before he gets to the intersection, he cuts through the woods and vanishes. So Jermaine finishes his call, and he and Jeff Tickle get in their separate vehicles.

They went in different places looking. Jeff saw him get in a truck, a gray Nissan pickup truck, and took a McDonald's coffee cup and wrote the tag number of the pickup truck down. Now law enforcement had a lead. They had a prime suspect. And what's more, forensics had determined that this bomb was detonated remotely, which meant the bomber was watching and deciding when to detonate, this time remotely.

The bomber wanted to choose his victims, wanted to see his victims suffer, wanted to see the damage he inflicted. The tag number we ran and was registered to Eric Rudolph, Eric Robert Rudolph.

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Doug Jones and his team had no clue who Eric Rudolph was. No one did. He wasn't a suspect on anyone's list. And the truth is, there was no list. This was the first real lead in the investigation.

So at some point in that day, they tracked his driver's license down. We had no idea that the driver of that vehicle was in fact Eric Rudolph. The only thing that we knew is that Eric Rudolph's truck, we believe, was involved in this bombing. And candidly, we were very sensitive about what had happened in Atlanta.

In Atlanta, Richard Jewell became a suspect. It was leaked. There was an incredible, intense focus on Richard Jewell. And as it turns out, there was nothing to that. We didn't want to repeat that. And we took extra cautions to try to not to do that. Jermaine Hughes and Jeff Tickle may have seen Rudolph fleeing the scene. But as far as law enforcement was learning, Eric Robert Rudolph was a ghost.

Aside from his current driver's license, his vehicle registration, and an eight-year-old military record, Rudolph had no paper trail. He owned no property. He paid no taxes. He never voted. He had no bank accounts. And he had never used a credit card. He had no criminal record, not even a speeding ticket. And now, following the Birmingham Clinic bombing, there were more than five agencies involved, including the FBI. That's a lot of cooks in the kitchen, which makes it that much harder to keep the lid on tight.

There was a lot of stress on everybody. And the FBI, they were already under tremendous pressure to solve the Atlanta Park cases and the women's clinic and the gay nightclub in Atlanta. They were under tremendous pressure there. And that is another reason why I wanted to make sure that this case stayed here. I didn't have those pressures. But, yeah, we butted heads a few times. This is not an uncommon problem. And in this case, it did work itself out, but not before a few bumps in the road.

We spent a day or two trying to find him. We couldn't find him. So we decided that we did not have enough because we did not have a good ID on the individual, only the truck. So the only other available option to us to make sure we brought him in for questioning was a material witness warrant.

And we were able to package that together to say, this person we believe has material information about this crime that was committed in Birmingham, Alabama. We have been unable to locate him. We don't have any reason to think that he would cooperate with us. And so we want the ability to arrest him and hold him should we be able to find him.

At this point, based on the directional plates found in each of the bombs, law enforcement was fairly certain that these different bombings were connected. But how does that information help you find a suspect? Here's former U.S. Attorney Ken Alexander again. Well, there's been a change in law enforcement since the Olympics, and I think part of it is results of the Olympic bombing. There was talk at the time, though, that

The recording by the bomber that there's a bomb in Centennial Park. There's a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes. There's talk of playing that. As you can imagine, if you had played that message right after the bombing, that voice, that recording would have essentially gone viral. Everybody in the world would have heard it.

I've got to think that at the time, had that been played right off the bat, that there's a pretty good chance Eric Rudolph would have been ID'd much earlier. But that just wasn't the way that law enforcement generally operated at the time. By contrast, if you fast forward to the Boston Marathon bombing, there when you had pictures of the two brothers, those went out immediately and people started identifying who the brothers were.

That allowed the case to be solved a lot faster. So there's been a morphing in law enforcement of bringing the public in to help with an investigation as opposed to pushing the public aside. If that morphing had taken place already, there's a chance we would have found Eric Rudolph far earlier than we did. Vic O'Korn called me up and said, hey, we've got a solid lead on this Birmingham bombing that had occurred earlier that day.

He said a witness had got a personal description, a vehicle description, and they'd got a tag number, a license plate number. And I figured, since he's calling me, that the tag probably came back to somewhere in western North Carolina. FBI agent Jim Russell was one of just a few agents responsible for the western side of North Carolina back in 1998. He mostly investigated violent crimes in the area's expansive national forests and Cherokee Indian Reservations.

And he said they had already run the tag and got an address as a registration, and it came back to an apartment complex in Asheville, North Carolina. This was close to quitting time, close to five. So my other new agent partner, Rex, wrote in. Rex and I went out to that location. Western North Carolina is hill country, luscious forests with steep terrain, and rushing rivers running through the valleys. The forest is overwhelming. It kind of swallows you. Everything is isolated.

even neighbors. And there's a libertarian sort of independence that doesn't quite mesh with the idea of a society. The people here are straightforward, resistant to nuance. But sometimes nuance is really important. The devil is in the details. The apartment that Jim Russell and his partner Rex went to investigate was a 64-unit apartment complex called Skyland Heights in Asheville.

The truck was not in the parking lot. So we went to the manager's office and she was just getting ready to leave. And we asked her if she had a tenant by the name of Eric Rudolph staying there at that complex. And she says, "That name doesn't ring a bell. I don't know everybody, but I'll be happy to check." And she went through all the old tenancies of the apartment complex. She says, "The only person I found here is a Patricia Rudolph." I asked her, "Can we look at the application?"

And I noticed on there that there was an emergency contact name and number for Mora Roads in Hendersonville, North Carolina, which is about 15 to 20 miles south of Asheville. And there was an emergency contact number. And when I called that number, her husband, Keith, picked up the phone. I started talking to Keith and I asked him what he knew about Mora.

And was he somehow related to Eric Rudolph? And he said, yes, that's my brother-in-law. It's Maura's brother. He said, I'm not too shocked that the FBI is calling me. What did he do now? And I said, well, there's some indication that he might have had something to do with the bombing that happened in Birmingham. And he said, well, I don't want to talk in front of Maura. Maura is Rudolph's older sister. Little was known about her then. Little is known about her now.

She was cooperative to an extent, but she didn't want to believe that he could have done something like that. And so she was more reticent. I believe we got much more information out of Keith because Keith didn't like him. Keith didn't like Eric. They just didn't get along. So we arranged to meet him at a shop that was like a bicycle shop. Jim Russell, his partner, and Keith huddled into a car in that bicycle shop parking lot. The first thing we asked is, do you know where Eric is at now? Where is he currently living?

And he said he had no specific location for him. Eric was very secretive about his whereabouts, always had been. If I had to guess, I think he's probably living in Western North Carolina, in Topton, North Carolina, which is his boyhood home. Topton's located about two and a half hours from Atlanta, going up I-75 to 575 to get there. Like all of Western North Carolina, it's beautiful, but remote.

Billboard's screaming of Jesus, guns, and pharmaceuticals are rampant, and they're not always advertised on separate billboards. The area gets a lot of vacationers, with folks coming to visit the Nantahala National Forest. But not to be disturbed are the residents of Topton. People in this region don't go in for a lot of bullshit.

And outsiders, they bring a lot of bullshit. And I said, you know, is he married? Does he have girlfriends? Does he have friends? He says, no, he's a loner. He's always been a loner. He tends to irritate people. He's very racist. He's very sexist. He is anti-government. And as he's clicking off these terms to describe Eric Rudolph...

You know, Rex and I were just kind of looking at each other. Nothing he's saying is eliminating Eric as being a possible suspect. All those indications are ticking off the right boxes that we are on the trail of the right person. Keith said the last time he and Mara saw her brother was the week prior, when he came to their son's basketball game.

Rudolph was late to the game and left immediately after in a gray Nissan pickup truck with a white camper top. And he said, and that's typical. He never tells us he's coming. He just, he will show up. You know, we said, is there a telephone number for him? He said, if he has his phone, he doesn't give us any information. Everything is a one-way street with Eric. He's a ghost not only to law enforcement, but to his family as well. I developed a good working relationship and a friendship with the

SBI special agent that worked in the Topton Andrews, North Carolina area by the name of Tom Fry. Tom Fry had been a State Bureau investigation agent out there for maybe at least 15 years. So every bad guy, every drug dealer, Tom pretty much knew and Tom had never heard of Eric Rudolph. So he says, I'm going to do some record checks and I'll meet you in the morning. It's very rural, very isolated.

It's in some beautiful, beautiful mountains. I don't even think there's a traffic light. You know, very two-lane, windy roads. People, as a general rule, they can be cooperative to the FBI, but there's a lot of anti-federal government sediment out there. Tom and I had gotten up there early. We were going to his last known address where he had grown up.

You know, it was a good investigative technique that we have used in the past out there is, you know, it seems like the guy who delivers the mail knows a lot about a lot of people. Tom and I, we were just trying to catch up with this rural delivery mail truck for a while, and we finally got up with him. And then he said, "Nah, I know Eric Rudolph. I haven't seen him in a long time." But if anybody was a friend of Eric Rudolph, it's Randy Cochran. They were buddies in high school.

You know, it might be a good idea for you to get in touch with Randy." And he said, "That'd be my best guess of trying to find out where Eric is living right now." By the time we got up to his house, I'm thinking it's around six o'clock in the evening. I didn't know who he was at the time, but he opens the door and I said, "You know, it's Jim Russell, FBI, Tom Fry, SBI. We're wanting to ask you about..." And before we could even get the word out, he says, "Oh, you guys are probably here about Eric."

And I said, Eric who? He said, well, Eric Rudolph. And Tom and I are dumbfounded at this point where we just kind of looked at each other and we said, well, why would you think we're here about Eric Rudolph? And he said, well, because he's all over the news. Tom and I were like, what the fuck? And he said, and if you want to come in, there's a press conference going on right now. You can watch.

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You have issued a warrant for a Mr. Eric Robert Rudolph. This is a material witness warrant and no one should jump to any conclusions about the fact that we are looking to question Mr. Rudolph. No one told us there was a press conference coming and that they were just going to send that out to all the airwaves. And we were upset.

You know, everything was, hey, this is confidential. We don't want to spook him. We're trying to find out where he's living without letting everybody know why. No one could have known at the time, but that press conference could have very well been responsible for what would become years of searching. We further talked to Randy saying, okay, do you have a phone? Do you have an address for him? Where's he living? And that's when Randy said,

I don't have a specific address, but I have a feeling or a hunch that he's in Murphy, North Carolina, which was kind of on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. And so Tom had a real good relationship with the sheriff of Cherokee County, Jack Thompson. So he called Jack and he said, well, I'll go back into the office. I'll run some records checks and see if I can find out anything for Eric Rudolph.

so we started heading there and tom called sheriff thompson again and the sheriff said yeah i've got electricity and water records that he's renting a trailer here in murphy and it's current so he says and i can run out there right now jim and i said no sheriff let us get there let us do this approach to him tactically if he's the guy that committed a bombing there's several reasons why

I didn't want Sheriff Jack Thompson to just go up and knock on his front door. And so it was decided that John and I would put our tactical gear on and Tom Fry would drive us in his car to the end of the driveway that goes to his trailer. We make a tactical approach up the driveway. It was several hundred yards in before we even saw the trailer. The lights were on, which I thought that's a great sign, but there's like a parking space next to the trailer. No truck.

John, just watch the road while I do a 360 around the trailer. Make sure the truck wasn't parked behind the trailer, like he was hiding it. And or see if he was visible within any of the windows as I went around the trailer. So I did that. No truck behind the trailer and no one home. That was the aw shit moment. It's like, you know, we'd hoped he'd been there. So we sat up in the woods all night waiting for Eric to come home.

They kept the surveillance of the trailer for three more days, but at that point he was gone. You know, there was just no idea where it could have been.

It was apparent that he'd left in a hurry. He had over $1,000 in $100 bills taped behind a picture in the wall of his bedroom. So he didn't stop to take that. You know, this was January in western North Carolina. It was cold. And when I first got to the trailer, I noticed that the screen door was shut, but the front door was wide open.

Yeah, I mean, you're just losing heat the way that indicated to me. So based upon other things, I think he just got out of there as quick as he could. Next time on Flashpoint. Yeah, the FBI come to my dad's house and asked him where the kids was. My dad said, I ain't going to tell you a damn thing. Right. They said, he said, if Rudolph come to my porch right now, I'd feed him. Everybody helped him. Mm-hmm.

To me, he didn't do it. Flashpoint is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeartMedia. I'm your host, Cole Lacascio. Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV. Flashpoint was created, written, and executive produced by Doug Matica and myself on behalf of 7997. Lead producer is Alex Vespestad, along with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stedman. Our associate producer is Whit Lacascio.

Editing by Alex Vespestad, with additional editing by Liam Luxen and Sydney Evans. Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Artwork by Station 16. Original music by Jay Ragsdale. Mix by Dayton Cole. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, Beck Media and Marketing, and the Nord Group. Special thanks to Angela Q, Tali Ravid-Matica, and Tim Livingston. For more podcasts like Flashpoint, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app.

or visit us at tenderfoot.tv. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening 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.com.

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