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