Atlanta, to its credit, shared a bit of its glory. Cities across the South held events, and revelled in them. Preliminary soccer matches played out in stadiums from Miami to Washington, D.C., and in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. It seemed from my vantage point in Birmingham—a city three decades removed from segregation enforced by dogs, bombs, and fire hoses—that the South had begun to rise above its past.
And then, early on the eighth day of the Games, Atlanta police got a call.
“There is a bomb in Centennial Park,” a muffled voice said. “You have thirty minutes.”
A pipe bomb—federal agents would call it the biggest they’d ever seen—exploded twenty minutes later, in a park built to promote peace.
More than a hundred people were injured. A woman named Alice Hawthorne was shot through with a nail and died beside her daughter. A Turkish cameraman named Melih Uzunyol had a heart attack and died. And as federal agents and local police wrongly focussed on Richard Jewell, a security guard who had spotted the suspicious package and should have been hailed as a hero, the real bomber disappeared.
The F.B.I. analyzed nails and bomb components and thousands of photographs. There was little to go on. Federal agents found one blurry photo of a man who they thought was their suspect. NASA enhanced it, with the space-age technology of the day, but it was still unrecognizable, a grainy blob.
“We had a mock wanted poster that just said, ‘Looking for Blob Man,’ ” David Nahmias, then an Atlanta prosecutor and later the chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, recalled.
When my colleagues and I began putting together a podcast on Eric Rudolph and his part in the wave of white-male rage that has washed across this land, we came to think of that Blob Man as more than a photograph or a piece of dubious evidence. It was a metaphor for the anger of the Rudolphs and Timothy McVeighs. But how does one get caught up in such resentment, so as to believe that destruction leads to salvation?
Travis McAdam, who has long studied militia movements, currently for the Southern Poverty Law Center, likened the forces of radicalization to a great funnel cloud. The wide end spins way up in the sky, drawing in people for a lot of different reasons: gun or property rights, or immigration, or abortion, or taxes, or vaccines, or the Jeffrey Epstein files, or Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“A lot of people hang out there for a while and then spin back into their daily lives and take some of these ideas with them,” McAdam said. “But others are sucked down into the funnel, adopting conspiracy theories that change how they see the world, and their place in it.”
Rudolph’s funnel cloud surrounded him from the start. As a child, he spent time with a family friend named Tom Branham, a doomsday prepper who encouraged him to read books such as the antisemitic text “Imperium.” As a teen-ager, Rudolph was befriended by a leader of the Christian Identity movement named Nord Davis, who called for guerrilla warfare against gay people and abortion providers. When Rudolph was eighteen, he spent time in Missouri with a preacher named Dan Gayman, who railed that Jews are the spawn of Satan, that people of color ascended from the mud. Rudolph studied the Ruby Ridge standoff, the siege at Waco, and the Oklahoma City bombing. In early 1996, before the Olympic bombing, he let his family believe that he was going west. Instead, he moved closer to Murphy, North Carolina, where he planned his attack.
In January, 1997, six months after the Olympic bombing, and three months after Richard Jewell was officially cleared by the Feds, Rudolph set off two bombs at an abortion clinic on the north side of Atlanta.
“As the I.R.A. learned many years ago, you have a first bomb that’s designed to bring first responders into an area and a second bomb to kill those responders,” Mike Whisonant, a federal prosecutor who later led cases against Rudolph, said.
The next month, Rudolph struck again at the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian night club in Atlanta. A young woman named Memrie Creswell was there, celebrating a friend’s birthday, when the first blast went off. A four-inch nail shot through the back of her arm and out through her shoulder. She would have died, investigators told her, if she had not stood up just a moment before to tuck in her shirt. Creswell has spent decades trying to understand the blind fury that would drive someone to blow up strangers. “What he doesn’t realize is, even though I have a certain life style that he might not like, I’m conservative,” Cresswell said. “He might soften his heart to certain people if he just got to know people.”
on several occasions, Rudolph wrote letters to news outlets claiming responsibility for his attacks. He included the numbers 4-19-93, or April 19, 1993—the final day of the siege at Waco. He signed them “The Army of God.”
The Army of God is a rabidly anti-abortion group that encourages acts of violence. It is an amorphous thing, by intent, with little more than a glitchy website to prove its existence. It’s still unclear if Rudolph worked in league with the Army of God, or if they simply shared a goal. But, since he pleaded guilty to four bombings in 2005 and began four consecutive life sentences, the Army of God website has held him up as a martyr, an “anti-abortion prisoner.” It has featured Rudolph’s manifesto and a 2018 screed called “A Time for War,” in which he argues that Christian militancy is the only thing that can save Western civilization.
