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Speaker 3: Oh this is really important. Another explosion downtown. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: see a guy walking from that direction and he had
Speaker 3: a wig and it was like, what was that explosion?
Speaker 3: And you know, I walked outside him.
Speaker 4: What kind of thing?
Speaker 3: And this guy he was short with here a long week?
Speaker 3: What color the wig was like?
Speaker 5: Brown color?
Speaker 1: This is from a transcript of the nine one one
Speaker 1: call made by Jermaine Hughes, a UAB law student, just
Speaker 1: moments after a huge explosion in a Birmingham abortion clinic
Speaker 1: shook the entire downtown area on January twenty ninth, nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight. The same explosion that killed a police officer,
Speaker 1: Robert Sanderson, and critically injured a nurse Emily Lyons. Hughes
Speaker 1: made the call from a phone and a McDonald's near
Speaker 1: the clinic.
Speaker 4: Was he what or black?
Speaker 3: He's he's what guy?
Speaker 1: What did he have all?
Speaker 5: Sagan?
Speaker 6: What did he have all?
Speaker 3: I was following him in a burst. He had on
Speaker 3: flannel or something. I'm not exactly sure.
Speaker 1: This call went on for a while, with the nine
Speaker 1: one one operator and Hughes talking past each other. At
Speaker 1: one point, the operator even scolded him, you can't even
Speaker 1: what he had all met Mabe, you.
Speaker 6: Cannot remember a clothing description.
Speaker 3: No, I don't remember, Coles kind of exasperated right now.
Speaker 6: Hughes's frustration was building.
Speaker 1: At one point, he lost the connection and called back,
Speaker 1: still trying to convince someone to believe him, when suddenly
Speaker 1: he saw a man walking down twentieth Street who looked familiar.
Speaker 3: I got him.
Speaker 4: Where is he?
Speaker 3: I got him? I think this is him.
Speaker 6: Is he on foot?
Speaker 3: Yes, he's on foot, Yes, blood glasses on. He's walking
Speaker 3: into the woods toward Vulcan.
Speaker 1: It's safe to say most of the customers that this
Speaker 1: McDonald's were listening intently to Hughes's side of this phone call.
Speaker 1: One of them, a lawyer, named Jeff Tickle put aside
Speaker 1: his breakfast to help. Tickle started calling out a description
Speaker 1: for Hughes to give the nine to one one operator.
Speaker 1: The man they had seen had changed his appearance, now
Speaker 1: in a green and black plaid shirt, jeans, and brown boots. Together,
Speaker 1: they stood inside the McDonald's, watching through the giant picture
Speaker 1: window as the mysterious figure wandered off the road and
Speaker 1: into a wooded area.
Speaker 3: I can't see him now. I can't believe I'm standing here.
Speaker 3: There's not a cop here by now.
Speaker 6: Darrell sail be there in just a minute.
Speaker 1: Tickle got in his car and drove a long valley
Speaker 1: avenue looking for the individual. He eventually pulled to a
Speaker 1: side street to discover the same man loading gear into
Speaker 1: a gray niece on pickup. He trailed it and when
Speaker 1: he got a clear view, he wrote down its tag
Speaker 1: k n D one one one seven. He didn't know
Speaker 1: it at the time, but he just stumbled upon the
Speaker 1: key to unveiling the mysterious figure behind the Cereal bombings.
Speaker 1: Episode four From a McDonald's payphone.
Speaker 7: I had arranged to meet a Birmingham news reporter.
Speaker 5: She covered the federal courts.
Speaker 7: She just wanted to catch up on my first like
Speaker 7: five months in office and how things were going. And
Speaker 7: as I got in the car, the radio said that
Speaker 7: there was a traffic problem initially on south side and
Speaker 7: to steer clear of tenth Avenue South. But then shortly
Speaker 7: thereafter they came back and said that there were a
Speaker 7: report that there had been a bomb explode.
Speaker 1: Doug Jones is a figure of note in Alabama politics.
Speaker 1: His tenure as a US Senator spanned from twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: to twenty twenty one, a period in which he was
Speaker 1: thrust into the limelight as the first Democratic senator in
Speaker 1: the state of Alabama in twenty five years. But Doug
Speaker 1: Jones led a reputable career long before making the Senate.
Speaker 6: His roots were in law.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety eight, when the Birmingham abortion clinic bombing
Speaker 1: took place, he was a US attorney working high profile
Speaker 1: litigation cases.
Speaker 7: I parked my car because they had all of tenth
Speaker 7: Street South cardened off with Tate, and the police officer
Speaker 7: that was standing there obviously recognized me, and I said,
Speaker 7: I know what's going on. What's happened? He said, well,
Speaker 7: we've had the bomb explode at the clinic. We got
Speaker 7: a police officer down. He's dead. There's a nurse who's
Speaker 7: been severely injured. I don't know if she'll make it
Speaker 7: or not, but we just got her in the ambulance
Speaker 7: and they took off and I'm looking and I just
Speaker 7: looked literally to my immediate left, and there was the
Speaker 7: clinic building and you could see the awning had been destroyed,
Speaker 7: windows had been broken out. It was a mess, you know.
Speaker 7: I like to say sometimes it looked like images that
Speaker 7: you would have seen through some bombing on another part
Speaker 7: of the world.
Speaker 5: And the body of.
Speaker 7: The police officer was there, and I started moving that
Speaker 7: way because there was no one around that police officer's body,
Speaker 7: and I instinctively started moving that way, and I said, well,
Speaker 7: we've got to do something. And then I had a
Speaker 7: hand grab my shoulder and stop me. He said, Doug,
Speaker 7: you can't go up there. I said, why not. He's
Speaker 7: you know, we seem like we've got to do something,
Speaker 7: and he said, look, we're concerned that there could be
Speaker 7: a secondary device and we can't go up there.
Speaker 5: For a while, the FBI atf.
Speaker 7: Birmingham Police were all coming in with their mobile units
Speaker 7: and agents, keeping the area cleared, staying away from the scene,
Speaker 7: all coming, setting up radio, setting up things in the
Speaker 7: command post.
Speaker 5: The most significant.
Speaker 7: Part of that day for me was establishing the joint
Speaker 7: Task Force to investigate this case. I talked to the
Speaker 7: Attorney General. She had a preference for having the FBI
Speaker 7: take complete charge, and I said, you know, with all
Speaker 7: due respect, we've got a Birmingham police officer down. I
Speaker 7: want a ATF to take charge of doing all the
Speaker 7: forensics on the bomb. Do your thing and tell me
Speaker 7: what exploded. Get all that forensics to me for the FBI.
Speaker 7: You do what the FBI does best. You track down suspects,
Speaker 7: you track down witnesses, you do fingerprints, you do whatever DNA,
Speaker 7: if there is anything, whatever analysis that you need to do.
Speaker 5: You help get the search warrants.
Speaker 7: And I said, the third thing is I know that
Speaker 7: there's often some friction between state and federal, but I
Speaker 7: want the Birmingham police to be a full partner here.
Speaker 7: They lost one of their own. We established that task force.
Speaker 7: It became known in the FBI files as Sandbomb, named
Speaker 7: after Sandy Sanderson, the police officer who died, and that
Speaker 7: task force, I think together did a pretty remarkable job.
Speaker 1: And this time with bomb something was different. The bomber
Speaker 1: didn't just up and vanish before the explosion.
Speaker 7: Jermaine Hughes was the freshman African American student from you know,
Speaker 7: kind of a small town in Alabama, and he was
Speaker 7: doing his laundry, if I recall correctly, he was doing
Speaker 7: the laundry in the basement of the dorm and he
Speaker 7: heard the bomb explode, and when he looked out of
Speaker 7: his window, you could see some smoke and some those
Speaker 7: things coming from over the hill where the clinic was,
Speaker 7: and some people moving that way. But yet there was
Speaker 7: one individual that appeared to have some kind of disguise.
Speaker 5: On, according to Germaine, and was not running but walking
Speaker 5: very hurriedly away.
Speaker 7: From the scene. And he just thought to himself, there's
Speaker 7: something wrong with this picture. There's just something wrong with
Speaker 7: that person, and left his laundry then decided to go
Speaker 7: look and see for himself, not at the scene, but
Speaker 7: that individual he saw, and he followed him some. At
Speaker 7: one point he walked near him and Jermaine kind of
Speaker 7: pretended he had a problem with his car, But then
Speaker 7: he loses him and he gets in his car and
Speaker 7: he drives around to try to see what he could find.
Speaker 7: And he goes over Red Mountain and there's a McDonald
Speaker 7: sitting on the other side. Now, he calls nine to
Speaker 7: one to one, starts trying to describe what he saw.
Speaker 7: And there he is there, he is right outside here,
Speaker 7: and Jeff Tickle, who's a lawyer in Birmingham, is sitting
Speaker 7: right there having breakfast and hears him and he helps
Speaker 7: him describe what this man is wearing at the time.
Speaker 7: Before he gets to the intersection, he cuts through the
Speaker 7: woods and vanishes. So Jermaine finishes his call and he
Speaker 7: and Jeff Tickle get in their separate vehicles.
Speaker 5: They went in different places looking.
Speaker 7: Jeff saw him get in a truck, a gray Nissan
Speaker 7: pickup truck, and took a McDonald's coffee cup and wrote
Speaker 7: the tag number of the pickup truck down.
Speaker 1: Now law enforcement had to lead. They had a prime suspect.
Speaker 1: And what's more, forensics had determined that this bomb was
Speaker 1: detonated remotely, which meant the bomber was watching and deciding
Speaker 1: when to detonate. This time, the bomber wanted to choose
Speaker 1: his victims, wanted to see his victims suffer, wanted to
Speaker 1: see the damage he inflicted.
Speaker 7: The tag number we ran and was registered to Eric Rudolph,
Speaker 7: Eric Robert Rudolph. They initially put out what the color
Speaker 7: bolo be on the lookout for the gray Nissan pickup truck.
Speaker 7: We knew it was North Carolina plate, so they started looking.
Speaker 1: Doug Jones and his team had no clue who Eric
Speaker 1: Rudolph was.
Speaker 6: No one did.
Speaker 1: He wasn't a suspect on anyone's list, and the truth
Speaker 1: is there was no list.
Speaker 6: This was the first real lead in the investigation.
Speaker 7: So at some point in that day they tracked his
Speaker 7: driver's license down. We had no id that the driver
Speaker 7: of that vehicle was in fact Eric Rudolph.
Speaker 5: The only thing that we knew is that.
Speaker 7: Eric Rudolph's truck we believe was involved in this bombing.
Speaker 7: And and candidly, we were very sensitive about what had
Speaker 7: happened in Atlanta. In Atlanta, Richard Jewell became a suspect.
Speaker 5: It was leaked.
Speaker 7: There was an incredible intense focus on Richard Jewell, and
Speaker 7: as it turns out, there was nothing to that. We
Speaker 7: didn't want to repeat that, and we took extra cautions
Speaker 7: to try to not to do that.
Speaker 1: Jermaine Hughes and Jeff Tickle may have seen Rudolph fleeing
Speaker 1: the scene, but as far as law enforcement was learning,
Speaker 1: Eric Robert Rudolph was a ghost. Aside from his current
Speaker 1: driver's license, his vehicle registration in an eight year old
Speaker 1: military record, Rudolph had no paper trail. He owned no property,
Speaker 1: he paid no taxes, he never voted, he had no
Speaker 1: bank accounts, and he had never used a credit card.
Speaker 1: He had no criminal record, not even a speeding ticket.
Speaker 1: And now, following the Birmingham clinic bombing, there were more
Speaker 1: than five agencies involved, including the FBI. That's a lot
Speaker 1: of cooks in the kitchen, which makes it that much
Speaker 1: harder to keep the lid on tight.
Speaker 7: There was a lot of stress on everybody in the FBI.
Speaker 7: They were already under tremendous pressure to solve the Atlanta
Speaker 7: Park cases and the women's clinic and the gay nightclub
Speaker 7: in Atlanta.
Speaker 5: They were under.
Speaker 7: Tremendous pressure there, and that is another reason why I
Speaker 7: wanted to make sure that this case stayed here.
Speaker 5: I didn't have those pressures.
Speaker 7: But yeah, we butted heads a few times.
Speaker 1: This is not an uncommon problem, and in this case,
Speaker 1: it did work itself out, but not before a few
Speaker 1: bumps in the road.
Speaker 5: We spent a day or two trying to find him.
Speaker 5: We couldn't find.
Speaker 7: Him, so we decided that we did not have enough
Speaker 7: because we did not have a good idea on the individual,
Speaker 7: only the truck. So the only other available option to
Speaker 7: us to make sure we brought him in for questioning
Speaker 7: was a material witness warrant and we were able to
Speaker 7: package that together to say, this person we believe has
Speaker 7: material information about this crime that was committed in Birmingham, Alabama.
Speaker 5: We have been unable to locate him.
Speaker 7: We don't have any reason to think that he would
Speaker 7: cooperate with us, and so we want the ability to
Speaker 7: arrest him and hold him should we be able to
Speaker 7: find him.
Speaker 1: At this point, based on the directional plates found in
Speaker 1: each of the bombs, law enforcement was fairly certain that
Speaker 1: these different bombings were connected. But how does that information
Speaker 1: help you find a suspect. Here's former US Attorney Ken
Speaker 1: Alexander again.
Speaker 8: Well, there's been a change in law enforcement since the Olympics,
Speaker 8: and I think part of it has results of the
Speaker 8: Olympic bombing. There was talk at the time though that
Speaker 8: the recording by the bomber that there's a bomb Cinceennial Park,
Speaker 8: there is.
Speaker 1: A bomb in any old farm, you have a thirty minute.
Speaker 8: There's talk of playing that, as you can imagine, and
Speaker 8: if you had played that message right after the bombing,
Speaker 8: that voice, that recording would have essentially gone virally. Everybody
Speaker 8: in the world would have heard it. I've got to
Speaker 8: think that at the time, had that been played right
Speaker 8: off the bat, that there's a pretty good chance erk
Speaker 8: Rudoff would have been ideed much earlier. But that just
Speaker 8: wasn't the way that law enforcement generally operated at the time.
Speaker 8: By contrast, if you fast forward to the Boston marathon bombing, there,
Speaker 8: when you had pictures of the two brothers, those went
Speaker 8: out immediately and people started identifying who the brothers were.
Speaker 8: That allowed the case to be solved a lot faster.
Speaker 8: So there's been a morphing in law enforcement of bringing
Speaker 8: the public in to help with an investigation as supposed
Speaker 8: to push in the public aside. If that morphing had
Speaker 8: taken place already, there's a chance we would have found
Speaker 8: Eric Rudoff far earlier than we did.
Speaker 4: Vic Ocorn called me up and said, hey, we've got
Speaker 4: a solid lead on this Birmingham bombing that had occurred
Speaker 4: earlier that day. He said a witness had got a
Speaker 4: personal description, a vehicle description, and they'd got a tag number,
Speaker 4: a license plate number. And I figured, since he's called me,
Speaker 4: the tag probably came back to somewhere in western North Carolina.
Speaker 1: FBI agent Jim Russell was one of just a few
Speaker 1: agents responsible for the western side of North Carolina back
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety eight. He mostly investigated violent crimes in
Speaker 1: the area's expanse of National Forests and Cherokee Indian reservations.
Speaker 4: And he said they had already run the tag and
Speaker 4: got an address as a registration, and it came back
Speaker 4: to an apartment complex in Asheville, North Carolina. This is
Speaker 4: close to Quentin time, close to five. So my other
Speaker 4: new agent partner, Rex Roden Rex and I went out
Speaker 4: to that location.
Speaker 1: Western North Carolina is hill country Russia's forests, with steep
Speaker 1: terrain and rushing rivers running through the valleys. The forest
Speaker 1: is overwhelming, it kind of swallows you. Everything is isolated,
Speaker 1: even neighbors, and there's a libertarian sort of independence that
Speaker 1: doesn't quite mesh with the idea of a society. The
Speaker 1: people here are straightforward resistant to nuance, but sometimes nuance
Speaker 1: is really important.
Speaker 6: The devil is in the details.
Speaker 1: The apartment that Jim Russell and his partner Rex went
Speaker 1: to investigate was a sixty four unit apartment complex called
Speaker 1: Skyland Heights in Nashville.
Speaker 4: The truck was not in the parking lot, so we
Speaker 4: went to the manager's office and she was just getting
Speaker 4: ready to leave, and we asked her if she had
Speaker 4: a tenant by the name of Eric Rudolph staying there
Speaker 4: at the complex. And she says, that name doesn't ring
Speaker 4: a bell. I don't know everybody, but I'll be happy
Speaker 4: to check. And she went through all the old tenancies
Speaker 4: of the apartment complex. He says, the only person I
Speaker 4: found here is a Patricia Rudolph. I asked her if
Speaker 4: can we look at the application, and I noticed on
Speaker 4: there that there was an emergency contact name a number
Speaker 4: for Moura Roads in Hendersonville, North Carolina, which is about
Speaker 4: fifteen to twenty miles south of Asheville, and there was
Speaker 4: an emergency contact number. And when I called that number,
Speaker 4: her husband, Keith picked up the phone. I started talking
Speaker 4: to Keith and I asked him what he knew about
Speaker 4: and was he somehow related to Eric Rudolph and he said, yes,
Speaker 4: that's my brother in law. It's Moura's brother. He said,
Speaker 4: I'm not too shocked that the FBI has called me.
Speaker 4: What did he do now? And I said, well, there's
Speaker 4: some indication that he might have had something to do
Speaker 4: with the bombing that happened in Burma. And he said, well,
Speaker 4: I don't want to talk in front of Moura.
Speaker 1: Mara is Rudolf's older sister. Little was known about her then,
Speaker 1: little is known about her now.
Speaker 4: She was cooperative to an extent, but she didn't want
Speaker 4: to believe that he could have done something like that,
Speaker 4: and so she was more reticent. I believe we got
Speaker 4: much more information out of Keith because Keith didn't like him.
Speaker 4: Keith didn't like Eric Keith. They just didn't get along.
Speaker 4: So we arranged to meet him at a shop that
Speaker 4: was like a bicycle shop.
Speaker 1: Jim Russell, his partner, and Keith huddled into a car
Speaker 1: in that bicycle shop parking lot.
Speaker 4: The first thing we asked is do you know where
Speaker 4: Eric is at now? Where is he currently living? And
Speaker 4: he said he had no specific location for him. Eric
Speaker 4: was very secretive about his whereabouts, always had been. If
Speaker 4: I had to guess. I think he's probably living in
Speaker 4: Western North Carolina, in Topton, North Carolina, which is his
Speaker 4: boy hit home.
Speaker 1: Topton's located about two and a half hours from Atlanta,
Speaker 1: going up I seventy five to five seventy five to
Speaker 1: get there. Like all of western North Carolina, it's beautiful
Speaker 1: but remote. Billboard screaming of Jesus, guns and pharmaceuticals are rampant,
Speaker 1: and they're not always advertised on the separate billboards. The
Speaker 1: area gets a lot of vacationers with folks coming to
Speaker 1: visit the Nanahala National Forest. But not to be disturbed
Speaker 1: are the residents of Topton. People in this region don't
Speaker 1: go in for a lot of bullshit and outsiders they
Speaker 1: bring a lot of bullshit.
Speaker 4: And I said, does he you know, is he married?
Speaker 4: Does he have girlfriends? Does he have friends? He says no,
Speaker 4: He's a loner. He's always been a loner. He tends
Speaker 4: to irritate people. He's very racist, he's very sexist. He
Speaker 4: is anti government. And as he's clicking off these terms
Speaker 4: to describe Eric Rudolph Rex and I were just kind
Speaker 4: of look at each other. Nothing he's saying is eliminating
Speaker 4: Eric as being a possible suspect. All those indications are
Speaker 4: taking off the right boxes that we are on the
Speaker 4: trail of the right person.
Speaker 6: Keith said.
Speaker 1: The last time he and Mars saw her brother was
Speaker 1: the week prior when he came to their son's basketball game.
Speaker 1: Rudolph is late to the game and left immediately after
Speaker 1: in a gray Nissan pickup truck with a white camper top.
Speaker 4: And he said, and that's typical. He never tells us
Speaker 4: he's coming. He just will show up, you know. We said,
Speaker 4: is there a telephone number for him? He said, if
Speaker 4: he has his phone, he doesn't give us any information.
Speaker 4: Everything is a one way street with Eric.
Speaker 1: He's a ghost, not only to law enforcement, but to
Speaker 1: his family as well.
Speaker 4: I developed a good working relationship and a friendship with
Speaker 4: the SBI special agent that worked in the Topton Andrews,
Speaker 4: North Carolina area, by the name of Tom Fry. Tom
Speaker 4: Fry had been a State Bureau of Investigation agent out there
Speaker 4: for maybe at least fifteen years. So every bad guy,
Speaker 4: every drug dealer, Tom pretty much knew. And Tom had
Speaker 4: never heard of Eric Rudolph. So he says, I'm going
Speaker 4: to do some record checks and I'll meet you in
Speaker 4: the morning. It's very rural, very isolated. It's in some beautiful,
Speaker 4: beautiful mountains. I don't even think there's a traffic light,
Speaker 4: you know, very two lane, windy roads. People as a
Speaker 4: general rule that can be cooperative to the FBI, but
Speaker 4: there's a lot of anti federal government sediment out there.
Speaker 4: Tom and I had gotten up there early. We were
Speaker 4: going to his last known address where he had grown up.
Speaker 4: You know, it was a good investigative technique that we
Speaker 4: have used in the past. Out there is you know,
Speaker 4: it seems like the guy who delivers the mail knows
Speaker 4: a lot about a lot of people. Tom and I
Speaker 4: we were just trying to catch up with this rural
Speaker 4: delivery mail truck for a while, and we finally got
Speaker 4: up with him, and then he said, nah, I know
Speaker 4: Eric Rudolph. I haven't seen him in a long time.
Speaker 4: But if anybody was a friend of Eric Rudolf, it's
Speaker 4: Randy Cochran, the every buddy's in high school. You know,
Speaker 4: it might be a good idea for you to get
Speaker 4: touched with Randy. He said, that'd be my best guess
Speaker 4: of trying to find out where Eric is living right now.
Speaker 4: By the time we got up to his house. I'm
Speaker 4: thinking it's around six o'clock in the evening, and I
Speaker 4: didn't know who he was at the time, but he
Speaker 4: opens the door and I said, you know, it's Jim
Speaker 4: Russell FBI, Tom fry SBI. We're wanting to ask you
Speaker 4: about And before we could even get the word eye,
Speaker 4: he says, oh, you guys would probably hear about Eric,
Speaker 4: and I said, Eric Cooch said Eric Rudolph, and Tom
Speaker 4: and I are dumbfounded at this point where he just
Speaker 4: kind of looked at each other and we said, well,
Speaker 4: why would you think we're here about Eric Rudolph And
Speaker 4: he said, well, because he's all over the news. Tom
Speaker 4: and I were like, and he said, and if you
Speaker 4: want to come in, and there's a press conference going
Speaker 4: on right now, you can watch.
Speaker 9: You have issue the warrant for a mister Eric Robert Rudolph.
Speaker 9: This is a material witness warm and no one should
Speaker 9: jump to any conclusions about the fact that we are
Speaker 9: looking to question mister Rudolph.
Speaker 4: No one told us that there was a press conference
Speaker 4: coming and that they were just gonna send that out
Speaker 4: to all the airwaves, and we were upset, you know,
Speaker 4: everything was hey, this is confidential. We don't want to
Speaker 4: spook him. We're trying to find out where he's living
Speaker 4: without letting everybody know why.
Speaker 1: No one could have known at the time, but that
Speaker 1: press conference could have very well been responsible for what
Speaker 1: would become years of searching.
Speaker 4: We further talked to Randy, saying, Okay, do you have
Speaker 4: a phone, do you have an address for him? Where's
Speaker 4: he living? And that's when Randy said, I don't have
Speaker 4: a specific address, but I have a feeling or a
Speaker 4: hunch that he's in Murphy, North Carolina, which was kind
Speaker 4: of on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. And
Speaker 4: so Tom had a real good relationship with the sheriff
Speaker 4: of Cherokee County, Jack Thompson. So he called Jack and
Speaker 4: he said, well, I'll go back into the office. I'll
Speaker 4: run some records checks and see if I can find
Speaker 4: out anything for Eric Rudolph. So we started heading there
Speaker 4: and Tom called Sheriff Thompson again and the sheriff said, yeah,
Speaker 4: I've got electricity and water records that he's renting a
Speaker 4: trailer here in Murphy and it's current. So he says,
Speaker 4: and I can run out there right now. Jim and
Speaker 4: I said, no, Sheriff, let us get there. Let us
Speaker 4: do this approach to him tactically. If he's the guy
Speaker 4: that committed a bombing. There's several reasons why I didn't
Speaker 4: want Sheriff Jack Thompson just go up a knock on
Speaker 4: his front door. And so it was decided that John
Speaker 4: and I would put our tactical gear on and Tom
Speaker 4: Fry would drive us in his car to the end
Speaker 4: of the driveway that goes to his trailer.
Speaker 5: We make a.
Speaker 4: Tactical chuck the driveway. It was several hundred yards in
Speaker 4: before we even saw the trailer. The lights were on,
Speaker 4: which I thought, that's a great sign. But there's like
Speaker 4: a parking space next to the trailer, no truck. John
Speaker 4: just watched the road. Well, I do a three sixty
Speaker 4: around the trailer, make sure the truck wasn't parked behind
Speaker 4: the trailer like he was hiding it, and or see
Speaker 4: if he was visible within any of the windows as
Speaker 4: I went around the trailer. So I did that, no
Speaker 4: truck behind the trailer and no one home. That was
Speaker 4: the offeshit moment is like, you know, we'd hoped he'd
Speaker 4: been there. So we sat up in the woods all
Speaker 4: night waiting for Eric to come home. They kept the
Speaker 4: surveillance of the trailer for three more days, but at
Speaker 4: that point he was gone.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: There was just no idea where it could have been.
Speaker 4: It was apparent that he'd left in a hurry. He
Speaker 4: had over one thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills
Speaker 4: taped behind a picture in the wall of his bedroom,
Speaker 4: so he didn't stop to take that. You know, this
Speaker 4: was January in western North Carolina. It was cold, and
Speaker 4: when I first got to the trailer, I noticed that
Speaker 4: the screen door was shut, but the front door was
Speaker 4: wide open. Yeah, I mean, you're just losing heat the
Speaker 4: way that indicated to me. So based upon other things,
Speaker 4: I think he just got out of there as.
Speaker 5: Quick as he could.
Speaker 6: Next time on.
Speaker 2: Flashpoint, yeah, I come to my dad's holes and I asked.
Speaker 5: Him where the cads was. My dad said, I ain't
Speaker 5: going to tell you to him thing.
Speaker 3: They said.
Speaker 8: He said, if Rudolph come to my poor trut now,
Speaker 8: I'd feed him.
Speaker 3: Everybody helped him, may he didn't do it.
Speaker 1: Flashpoint is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeartMedia.
Speaker 1: I'm your host Cole La Caassio, Donald Albright and Payne
Speaker 1: Lindsay are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV. Flashpoint
Speaker 1: was created, written, and executive produced by Doug Mattica and
Speaker 1: myself on behalf of seven nine nine seven. Lead producer
Speaker 1: is Alex Espastad, along with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stadman.
Speaker 6: Our associate producer is witt Lukassio.
Speaker 1: Editing by Alex Espastad with additional editing by Liam Luxon
Speaker 1: and Sidney Evans. Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Artwork by
Speaker 1: Station sixteen, original music by Jay Ragsdale, mixed by Day
Speaker 1: and Cole. Thank you to Orrin Rosenbaum and the team
Speaker 1: at Uta Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Angela q, Tylie Revive Matica and Tim Livingston.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts like Flashpoint, search Tenderfoot TV on your
Speaker 1: favorite podcast app, or visit us at tenderfoot dot tv.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to this episode of Flashpoint.
Speaker 1: This series is released weekly absolutely free, but for ad
Speaker 1: free listening, early access and exclusive bonuses, you can subscribe
Speaker 1: to Tenderfoot plus on Apple Podcasts or at tenderfootplus dot com,