- We get a call regarding an unattended backpack.
I was on my hands and knees
and I could hear the ticking of a clock.
It's a bomb.
[an explosion blasts]
- Then there was another bomb that goes off.
- He pulls a switch.
[an explosion blasts]
- The bad guy actually waited for the proper moment
to cause as much harm and death as he could when it detonated.
- He's willing to kill. He's committed.
- Someone notices someone walking away from the scene.
- Now we have a suspect.
- That launched probably one of the most extensive
manhunts and fugitive investigations in the FBI's history.
[intense music]
- Time is of the essence. People are dying
and we don't know where the next bombs are going to go off.
[narrator]: In the FBI we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings...
...terrorist takedowns.
We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it. - Freeze!
- FBI. - FBI! - Action!
But they don't know the half of it.
What really goes down?
We save that for each other
when we're talking agent to agent.
This is FBI True.
- So we've had Centennial Park bombing...
...women's clinic bombing...
...lesbian bar bombing.
- And then one in Alabama.
The Birmingham abortion clinic bomb.
- This clinic had received some threats
and some phone calls and so forth.
The members of the Birmingham police department were hired
to provide security for the opening and closing
of the clinic each day.
Officer Sanderson was the officer working that day.
He met Emily Lyons,
who was a nurse there at the clinic.
And they together walked up
to open up the clinic that day.
[somber music]
- The police officer who was doing security
was killed, and a nurse was seriously wounded.
[somber music]
The nurse was looking right at the device
based on the debris that hit her in the face and blinded her.
She had severe injuries from looking right at it.
Thank God, she lived.
[somber music]
This was a little bit different than the other bombs
in that this was a remote- controlled, detonated device.
[suspenseful music]
- Our bomber is across the street.
- How do we know that, Bill? - Well, because in order to fire
this device off, the radio frequency only goes a certain distance.
So you can't be, you know, real far away
and have it go off.
- The device was sitting in a fake plant by the front door.
[suspenseful music]
That means that the bad guy is there within sight
watching and actually waited
for the proper moment to cause as much harm and death as he could when it detonated.
- The bomber, the individual doing this actually
was waiting for the officer.
- Correct. - And the other person to get close.
And when that officer was at the closest possible place,
that bomber made the decision to ignite.
- He pulls a switch.
[somber music]
- If your goal in this was to shut the clinic down
or to shut me down, it didn't work.
It's not going to work.
The clinics will stay open.
The workers will continue to come.
Patients will continue to come.
[somber music]
- As you know, we've invited two of your colleagues,
Ron and Chris, to share their part of the case.
Here they are.
Hey, guys. - Hey.
- Good to see you.
Grab a chair.
Ron, when did you become involved, in what capacity?
- One of my primary missions
was to do profiles, behavioral assessments of bombers.
[narrator]: Ron Tunkel is a retired special agent
criminal profiler with the ATF.
He was detailed to the FBI for 17 years.
- Bombers like this tend to be lone solitary offenders.
- And he fit the classic definition of a domestic terrorist.
[narrator]: Chris Swecker served for 24 years
as a special agent with the FB.
He retired as assistant director
with responsibility over all FBI criminal investigations.
- And one of the things that we relied
heavily on was the profiling,
the written profiles that I studied, they became our Bible.
- We had an idea of the type of individual.
A note of hypervigilance
or what some people might call paranoia.
He's committed.
Anti-government, anti-abortion,
anti-homosexuality.
- What kind of clues were you given access to,
to make a more detailed assessment of this target?
- Certainly, the anti-personnel nature of the device,
the shrapnel.
Added metal, ball bearings in this case,
nails, that are designed to increase the lethality.
[suspenseful music]
He's willing to kill,
willing to accept the consequences.
Certainly he's going to be the object of a massive manhunt
and investigation by the federal agencies.
[suspenseful music]
But after the bombing in Birmingham,
the witnesses who heard the explosion,
seeing people either standing there
staring that way or running,
a man is methodically walking away from the explosion.
Which the witnesses thought was odd.
- And he gets into a pickup truck.
The witness gets the license number
and calls 911.
- So we have the license plate number.
They research it, they trace it, it comes back to North Carolina.
And like I always say, sometimes God loves cops
because now we have a name,
Eric Robert Rudolph.
And lo and behold, finally, once and for all, we have a suspect,
but now we've got to catch him.
- So at this point, guys, we have a witness that was able to grab a tag.
- The FBI very quickly
looks at the license tag, gets a name,
Eric Robert Rudolph, and a location.
Murphy, North Carolina.
[suspenseful music]
First thing they do is pick up the phone
and call the sheriff up in Cherokee County.
They know their people in their counties.
They knew of him and they were ready to go.
They were ready to launch right then and there to his trailer
and make the arrest.
The FBI told them to hold off.
By the time the agents and the SWAT team got to his trailer,
it was very obvious that he had left in a big hurry.
The FBI made a tactical error.
Somebody had leaked some of the information, so he had already left.
[suspenseful music]
- They basically froze the premises.
There was food there,
there were receipts for some fast food.
He had rented a blockbuster movie the night before.
They did a very thorough search.
- And the other thing there was some other additional evidence
that was with explosive material that was found.
Materials that were used
commonly with the wiring and the triggering
of the bombs that were consistent all the way through.
- So, we have evidence that from a technical standpoint
that bombs were made the same.
- In a forensic way. - Right.
- But also matching the bombings to this individual.
And that's why they needed to take their time
searching the trailer, but also launch the manhunt right then and there.
- What does that manhunt look like?
- A lot of people, local sheriff, police chiefs,
surrounding sheriffs, ATF,
park rangers,
the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,
the State Bureau of Investigation.
I mean, it was a cast of thousands.
It was a very, very intense,
very extensive manhunt.
[suspenseful music]
The personality profile
convinced everybody that he was still there.
A couple days after
the FBI had missed him at his trailer,
his car was found...
[suspenseful music]
...and it was in the Nantahala National Forest area.
The immediate assumption was that he was in those woods,
that he had a campsite back there.
He was, some would say, a survivalist.
And he was extremely familiar with the terrain and the area.
So advantage Rudolph at that point.
[suspenseful music]
- What's the environment like that we believe Rudolph was in?
- This is a very remote,
mountainous region of North Carolina.
[calm music]
- This is a vast national forest.
Just heavy trees, heavy underbrush.
And you can be literally feet from a person and not see him.
- Eric was trained from the army in escape and evasion.
[suspenseful music]
I was amazed
looking at the country and thinking,
we're never going to find the guy here.
There's snakes, poisonous snakes,
mosquitoes, ticks,
all kinds of things that the pursuing agents
I think we tend to forget about
just the environmental hazards they had facing them. - Wow.
- Talking to some of the locals I've talked to, many of them,
I'm from North Carolina.
It was almost like a war zone.
Choppers flying overhead, people in cammies,
you know, kitted out,
with tactical weapons, tramping through the woods on the trails,
off the trails, dogs.
It felt, you know, almost like an occupational army
had taken over Murphy and topped into that area.
- Chris, you're from that area
and you're familiar with where Rudolph had escaped to.
What's the atmosphere like?
- That's the far reaches of western North Carolina.
So that area, in Cherokee County and Murphy,
there's a strain of anti-government
throughout that whole area.
There were people who were obvious sympathizers.
- Do you think Eric Rudolph has a lot of friends around here?
- All over the United States, I'd say.
- Do you think you would be pleased
if Eric Rudolph were never caught?
- I'd rather not have no comment on that.
[suspenseful music]
Somebody fired into our command post,
and that was an intense investigation,
because an agent had almost been shot.
The round landed right next to his head.
And you had to think, well,
somebody's willing to shoot into the command post,
is he in alliance with Eric Rudolph?
Does somebody like this know where he is?
Is he working with other people?
[suspenseful music]
- Who was the individual that shot
and was it a sympathizer, or...?
- It was a local, kind of a local ne'er-do-well
who shared the ideology, local supporter.
You know, even rank-and-file people
were somewhat sympathetic
because Eric Rudolph was anti-abortion.
This is a very conservative area.
Quite a few people, they're anti-abortion, anti-gay,
so, there was sympathy for Eric Rudolph.
There were T-shirts that said, "Run, Eric, run!"
being sold in the local stores.
♪ Run, Rudolph, run
♪ Or the FBI's gonna shoot you with their gun ♪♪
- He had this folk hero status.
He was this heroic survivalist.
In interviews of Eric's close friends,
we found out that he had spent his earlier years
camping and playing hide and seek in those mountains,
elaborate war games they used to play
where they would run out in the hills.
Eric had roots in Christian identity,
extremist beliefs.
After the bombing in the gay bar in Atlanta,
he sends a note targeting the sodomites.
Pages are highlighted, verses are highlighted.
[suspenseful music]
And in the margins he had written "anti-homosexual."
So, he espouses that he's against homosexuality,
yet he has a good and close relationship with his brother,
who's openly gay at the time.
We kind of distilled all of that down
into what we thought was the core of his issue.
And this is a very angry young man.
Narcissistic traits and characteristics.
And but... the anger that needed to be expressed.
[eerie music]
We felt that these causes: anti-abortion,
anti-homosexuality,
anti-big government, they were convenient postures
or positions for him to take
to nobly express his violent intentions
and allow him to vent his anger
and hostility and desire to kill
and cloak it in the mantle of nobility of a higher cause.
[suspenseful music]
- There were still a lot of people that thought
he can't be in that area. Nobody's caught him.
After five years, he's either dead or he's somewhere else.
[suspenseful music]
I mean, there were hundreds, literally hundreds
of law enforcement, various law enforcement agents and officers there.
But we knew we couldn't sustain that...
And going forward, it was going to slim down.
And that slimmed-down version of it looked like five agents.
We relied on the local sheriff's departments.
There were four in the area, several police departments,
forest rangers, North Carolina Wildlife.
We had hired scouts from the Eastern band of the Cherokees.
They were walking the trails.
Some local hunters were still walking the trails.
The idea was, we still have to suppress him,
even though we've dwindled down, we gotta let him know we're still out there.
[somber music]
- Then, yeah, he's still in the area.
We've got a sighting.
We've got a recent sighting, and he's in the area.
So we have a lead at the point of the investigation
where Rudolph approaches a store owner.
- Nordman, who runs a very remote general store
is a bit of a survivalist as well.
He was pretty much to himself.
- Eric had actually camped by Nordman's residence,
surveilling it...
[eerie music]
...figuring out when he could approach him safely.
He's hungry and he's running out of supplies.
Eric approached Nordman one day at his remote home.
They had a conversation and Eric wanted to borrow his truck.
And he wanted Nordman to get him some supplies.
Mr. Nordman was very frightened.
Eric took the truck nonetheless.
He hardwired it, I think.
And it was that truck that he used
to get the supplies to his camp.
And it was left there.
[eerie music]
- It's possible that the truck may have been driven
some distance out of the forest area,
and later back in again to where it was found.
- This was the wow moment
because now we knew we had an actual sighting.
We felt part of his method
of success involved intensive surveillance
of the sites he attacked,
and the command post, there was a ridge line above it
and a ridge line on the other side.
And we thought, you know, sooner or later,
he's going to be very curious
and he's going to want to know what's going on.
So we said that he might be surveilling us,
and to have forward observers on the opposite ridge,
observing the ridge where we thought he would be
to see if they would pick him up.
[suspenseful music]
- So, May 31st, 2003,
a young rookie officer
with the Murphy Police Department
is driving on his rounds at night
and he goes behind a grocery store.
[suspenseful music]
He sees something. He thought it was a deer initially,
and he realized it was a person.
He was moving outside behind a dumpster.
He stopped and confronted him.
Jeffrey Postell, who was the officer,
decided to detain him until he could identify him.
I get a phone call early in the morning, it's Rick Schwein,
who's the supervisory FBI special agent.
Back in Murphy, another deputy comes up on the scene.
That deputy grew up in Murphy.
Thought he recognized him as Eric Rudolph,
but it was a tentative identification.
On the phone, Rick says, "I think we have Eric Rudolph.
You probably need to get out there."
They take him down to the sheriff's department
fingerprint him, and then he basically says,
"You got me, I'm Eric Rudolph."
[menacing music]
I've already got a go-bag packed and in my car
because we knew this day would come.
And so I jumped in the car
and I immediately took off for Murphy, North Carolina,
which is about a 3.5 hour drive from my house.
I did it in about 2 hours and 45 minutes.
I made it there in record time.
You know, this only happens once or twice in your career.
I mean, he's a top-ten fugitive.
He's got a $1,000,000 price on his head.
It's a good feeling.
This morning at 4:30 in the morning,
an alert Murphy police officer
noticed something unusual going on behind the Value Village
Shopping Center here in Murphy.
He investigated, he called for backup,
and ultimately arrested Eric Robert Rudolph
at about 4:30 AM this morning.
[reporter]: Eric Rudolph is no longer phantom, no longer shadow.
Finally captured, he's skin and bones and not much more.
[eerie music]
- During the debrief of Eric Rudolph,
he gave information about his two campsites.
That took some time. We drew maps.
We knew there was about 400 pounds of dynamite
hidden somewhere.
We suspected there were booby traps as well.
[eerie music]
We didn't want anybody to get hurt.
So the prosecutor made a bargain with Rudolph's attorney
that they would take the death penalty off the table
if he would disclose the locations of the dynamite,
which he did.
So he hadn't given up on
continuing to try to kill people.
[stressful music]
It was a deep sense of satisfaction
and knowing that a plan had come together.
And it turns out we were actually right,
because the FBI had taken a lot of heat.
You know, the occupational army
five years out, and still couldn't catch him.
For all practical purposes, he had outwitted the government.
But not really. He got caught.
- My overwhelming feeling with the closure
of all this is just the gratitude.
I just think of all the experiences,
not only myself but everybody that was in the park that night,
and escaped severe injury or death.
I'm profoundly grateful
this time of the year, every year.
And I think about those things.
- We're glad you're still here, brother.
- And, you know, I've been blessed with another day.
Many more days.
At 1:20 a.m. on July 27th,
I was the luckiest FBI agent in the country, for sure.