2 | TWINBOMB

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They argue that you stop for a second, please. For months, Richard Jewel, the security guard who was initially hailed a hero for discovering the bomb, was investigated by law enforcement and bombarded by the press, who framed him as the prime suspect. They speculated that he was a villainous attention seeker, one suffering from hero syndrome.

It's also called the Messiah complex, a person who wants.

To be godlike.

It's again that power thing they want to feel superior to all others.

Then six months later, those accusations quietly faded after he was cleared by the US government.

With regard to Richard Jewel, I deeply regret that his name was linked to the media. This not only damaged mister Jewell and his reputation, but it caused the FBI substantial damage to its investigation.

Richard answered a lot of questions the FDI and other long enforces who followed up, and at the end of the day, there certainly wasn't substantial evidence. It looked like he didn't do it.

Retired US attorney Kent Alexander remembers the man hunt for the Centennial Park bomber well. He showed up to our interview in the nineteen ninety six at Leant Olympics Polo with a framed letter that he sent to Richard Jewel during the investigation. Can you can you read the letter?

Sure? It's addressed to Jack Martin, who's one of several attorneys for Richard Jewel. Says, Dear Jack, this to advise you that, based on the evidence developed to date, your client, Richard Jewel, is not considered a target of the federal criminal investigation at the bombing on July twenty seven, nineteen ninety six, at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. Barring any

After clearing Richard Jewel, the FBI, atf and GBI, collectively known as the Scent Bomb Task Force, we're left with really no leads.

We had no shortage of potential bombers. The more you dig into things, you realize there are just a lot of crazy people out there, so there wasn't one particular suspect. In fact, at that point, there was still poster that some agent had drawn up. It was a squiggly figure of a guy sitting on a bench and something under the bench, and then written in black marker was wanted

Suspect episode two. Twin bomb.

My wife at the time, and we had twins arrive about eight months previous, so it was kind of a crazy household when you get invaded with kids all of a sudden. So my day started at four am, and it was a regular work day.

It's January sixteenth, nineteen ninety seven, six months after the bombing at the Olympics, and Rob Stadler is the news director at Star ninety four, a popular radio station in Atlanta.

And because we have the twins, I was able to get away after the show ended at nine and go to my wife's law office was located on the third floor of the Sandy Springs Profes Building.

Just off Roswell Road. The Sandy Springs Professional Building was a three story complex that housed a handful of different offices. On the top floor was Rob's wife's law firm. On the first was Atlanta North Side Planning Services, an abortion clinic. Rob's wife was a few counties north that morning for a trial.

We'd set up a kind of a nursery inside the office, so I would stop by and scoop them up and take them home. And it was dad duty the rest of the day, and I called the office up on my cell phone and it was probably the most important call I made in my life. I told them the folks at the office, I said, I'm kind of a rush. I won't really want to get home, so if you could take the girls out of the crib and have them ready to go in their carry all chairs, that

Rob and his twin girls made it out of the building safely with many of the staff. Immediately, yellow tape was rolled out and the area was labeled a crime scene.

We put the girls, my daughters in my mini pickup, and the office staff, one of them, drove them to our house in Sandy Springs, away from the site. That gave me a chance then to do my job being the news guy on Star ninety four. It's like, okay, this is a news story. I got as close as I could to where the smoke was coming out from the first floor window where the abortion clinic was located. So then I dialed up my cell phone and then called the radio station and jumped on Live.

E three Industrial Boulevards, darn ninty four.

It's nine thirty five and we go to Rob Standler, our news director, with a breaking news story.

Steve, I am at two seventy five Carpenter Drive. This is a three story building that parallels Roswell Road. It's right behind Good Old Days in Sandy Springs where a suspected bomb has gone off in this building. I was on the third floor of this building at the time when we were rocked by a flash and a loud boom, and it shattered windows on the southeastern part of the building.

I was in the car with a couple of my friends and we were listening to radio.

You can hear the sirens coming. Fire and Cruise are just now arriving. I can tell you what happened as best as I can.

I was on the third floor of.

The facility so and I think it was in the morning, and they said there had been an explosion at an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs, and my stomach dropped and I couldn't speak. I mean, all I could think was holy shit, Like, what am I going to do? Now?

I'm talking again with Leah. You probably remember her from the last episode. Leah also grew up in Atlanta, lived here all her life, and she remembers of the Olympic Park bombing well, but at the time, she couldn't know that the bombing was just the first in a series of events that would forever change her life in the lives of her entire family.

I was born knowing what I want to do from day one, knowing what I want to be, where I want to go to college. I didn't want to get married, didn't want kids. I've always known.

Among the many stories connected to the Olympic Park bombing, Leah's was unexpected and powerful, also complicated. It began the year before the Centennial Olympics.

I met Bo when I was fifteen. I was a sophomore. Bo was three years older. He had gotten involved with a group of guys that were stealing cars. He was awaiting trial for a series of felonies.

Leah and Bow began dating, but the way you do in high school, and you don't know much yet, and there's not much to a relationship except the fact that you're just together. It wasn't too long before Bow would be convicted it would have to serve time in prison. After six months behind bars, he took a deal which required him to serve six additional months of boot camp, followed by house arrest.

And for me, the absence and the time away made me realize, this is a lot to wrap my head around. I mean, I didn't get into a relationship with someone to.

Settle down at fifteen.

I wasn't choosing a lifelong partner. And Bo wrote me constantly. I don't know if I would say that he was needy, but he was more talking about long term. I love you, I want to marry you. I remember he would always put at the bottom of the letter, relax and hang in there, baby. To this day, if somebody tells me to relax, it makes my skin crawl, just assuming that I belonged to him.

That's the most selfish thing. That's not loving somebody.

While Bou was in boot camp, Leah was living her high school life. Bo was less and less on her radar, but she was still very much on his. Their time apart made her realize that their relationship was over.

It was more one of those things where I just decided to wait to discuss it until he was out. So Bo was released from boot camp and my best friend and I drove down to pick him up, and he's super excited to see me, want to ride in the backseat with me, and was overly affectionate. All he could focus on was the fact that he was going to spend the next several months in house arrest, and that I was going to spend it with him. It was the longest car I feel like I've ever had.

He would break house arrest and come to find me.

I didn't know how to get out of what I was in with bo. I remember, he was upset and he called me and called me and called me repeatedly, and so I went to his place and I staying in the night with him. We had sex that night, which I don't know why, but we did. I overslept the next morning for work. I left his house in a panic, and I ended up getting in a wreck and totaling my car, not knowing that I had just conceived a child.

Leah was pregnant at age seventeen. She spoke in confidence to a teacher at her school about it, and her teacher told her that she should tell her mom. Leah decided not to.

It wasn't real to me, but in my mind there was no choice. I knew I was having an abortion, and that's it. It was just very, you know, matter of fact, like okay, well you just do it.

I mean, I didn't have an option in my mind.

My mom didn't believe an abortion, so I knew there was no discussion to be had, and I knew I didn't want kids.

So I don't think.

I don't think I felt anything at the time, or I didn't let myself think about it.

It didn't feel real to me.

Leah did, however, break the news to Bo. They scoured the Yellow Pages for an abortion clinic in Atlanta. They'd eventually land on an office in Sandy Springs, but since she was under eighteen to legally have the procedures, she needed parental permission or a parent with her. But Bo had a solution to that.

So given his skill sets, he made an id for me and we scheduled an appointment. Yeah, and I thought at the time that that was it, that's what was happening. There'd be nothing more to it.

Leah scheduled the appointment January seventeenth, nineteen ninety seven. She wasn't scared. She decided it needed to be done. But the day which would forever take root in her memory was the day before January sixteenth, the day the clinic was bombed.

I'm sitting at my desk and my boss, Jim Tapman, came out and he goes, Mike, she's been a bomb went off an abortion clinic up in Sandy Springs. Here's the address, Get on up there.

Mike Rising as a cold case homicide investigator in Walton County, which is about forty minutes outside Atlanta, but back in ninety seven. He was a supervisory special agent with the FBI.

So I drive up to the location and when I arrived at her ems people, some fire trucks, a lot of government cars. An FBI agent came up to me. I didn't know him, but he knew me and identified himself and took me over to where the door of the abortion clinic was and they had just taped it off. My role was find out the lay of the land. So who had responded to take a look at the site, and I walked around to the northwest corner. I had

It's nineteen sixty nine.

I was hit with a rocket propel grenade in Vietnam, and when it hit, it came from the left side. I was actually holding a radio set and in this case I'm holding a cell phone and a force of the blast just shoved me a couple of feet, and I'm thinking, I don't think I said it, but I'm going not again.

Where were you in the building and where was the explosion.

This second explosion, about an hour later, injured a television photographer, an ATF agent, and at least four others.

Rob Stadler's wife rushed back from trial to her law firm, which was housed just two stories above the abortion clinic in the same building. Both she and Rob were standing at the top of the hill overlooking the crime scene when the second bomb exploded.

It was kind of like when you're too close to a firework and you feel it in your chest if it goes off way too close. It was like that, except the shockwave from the bomb enters the front part of your brain, goes through your brain and exits the back. It's the weirdest feeling in the world. Split second, but it seemed like it lasted forever. Shrapnel was buzzing by our heads, so at that point it was like, Okay, they're going to be a third boone, and that's a really frightening thing.

No one has claimed credit for these explosions.

Police say there were no calls to nine one one beforehand, and clinic workers received no threats.

I was in a funk for about six to nine months, definitely a PTSD. That weekend, we have remote broadcasts that we go out to a store or something and we bring our radio truck and all that stuff, and we always have helium balloons that we blow up and give the kids or whatever. One of the balloons popped, and I swear I jumped about five feet because again that's just that PTSD, and it kind of gave me a

It's worth noting that the timing and placement at the second bomb is a well known military tactic used by the US and by foreign terrorists. But what's new here is that this was a Domestically, it may have been the first such incident on home soil, so to speak. In light of this, law enforcement was scrambling, just trying to get their ducks in a row. But at this point it didn't help that there were so many cooks in the kitchen.

I remember that bombing situation especially well because we were all standing in this command center. Woody Johnson was head of the FBI, and a guy Jack Calaurin, whose first day on the jobs, head of the Atlanta ATF, were there. They were each on the phone with their respective bosses, and Woody's case it was Louis Free and each of the directors of the FBI and ATF were saying, fine, glad you're working together, as long as we're in charge.

The Sandy Springs bombings came six months after the bomb at the Olympics. There were serious injuries this time, but no one was killed. There had now been three bombings in Atlanta, but no streamlined, cohesive plan of action from law enforcement. Not yet. All they had to run on were theories that didn't quite connect.

As far as a motive. I know a lot of you are assuming this is related to abortion clinic violence. That is definitely a possibility, but we are not ruling out the possibility of domestic terrorism unrelated to clinic violence.

We took a look at what the purpose could possibly be of the second bomb. It was put in a location where law enforcement would gather, So there was a working theory almost right off the bat that whoever did this, they might have been after abortion clinics to make a statement, but there was a good chance they were after something else, and the theory was it was law enforcement. Going forward, the protocol became always checked the perimeter for a second bomb.

The various task forces may not have been in lockstep yet, but they were starting to put the pieces together.

One of the things that we focused on from the Olympic bomb there was a directional plate, a steel plate that backed the bomb.

This directional plate was the first big clue.

Fast forward to January the Sandy Springs clinic bombing, there was directional plate in that bomb as well, so they took samples from there and started comparing it. Not too long after that, it was clear that these plates came from the same basically piece of large metal, same production. It looked like it was either unbelievable happenstance or these bombs might be connected.

While the motivation behind these three bombs was still unclear, what was clear is that these bombs were related. Three bombs, two locations, one with a warning called a nine to one one, the others no warning. The pieces were beginning to come together, but the bomber was still on the loose, standing by, ready to strike again, just waiting for the right time.

Holy crap, what am I going to do? That was my initial thought.

With an appointment set for the following day at the clinic that was just bombed, Leah's seventeen year old mind was racing.

This is like, maybe I'm not supposed to just make another appointment. Maybe I need to tell my mom. Like That's where I think it became an actual reality. I was actually pregnant. I was actually about to just go have an abortion without even saying anything. I think in the back of my mind I thought that by saying something to my mom, deep down, it meant I was going to have to keep the baby, because I knew if I told her, she wouldn't allow me to have an abortion.

That's what I thought.

My stepdad was out of town, so I thought it was a good opportunity. We were talking one night and she it was the worst. It was the worst setup ever because she said to me how proud she is of me and all my accomplishments and how well I'm doing in school and this and that, and I'm thinking, oh, dear god, ladies, stop talking because I'm about to drop the biggest bomb on you. And so I kind of turned it around and I said, Mom, how do you always know the right thing to do? And she said, well,

She said, well, we'll deal with it, but you're having an abortion. That was the first thing she said. And I was like what.

I thought, maybe I mishard her and I thought, she said you're not and she said, yes, you are having an abortion.

This will ruin your life.

I mean, I can hear it. I can hear her saying it, this will ruin your life. I mean that is how she's her cadence. That just exactly how she would say it. And the following day she called the pediatrician to get a referral to an obstetrician and she went in with me. And I was not the typical

Have you ever talked with mom about this?

No? Not, well, not until we started talking about it.

And you never considered having an abortion after that moment.

No. I was a very headstrong person, and once my mind was made up on something, it was made up. And I mean I knew from the second sitting in that doctor's office that I just knew it wasn't something that I could do, wasn't a choice that I could make.

I knew I was keeping you.

So yeah, that's my mom. The circumstances that led to my birth, they're pretty complicated. I'm not okay with any of the bomber's actions. That part isn't complicated to me. But in a fucked up kind of way, you could say that bomb saved my life. There's a Jason isbel song I always come back to. It's called Children of Children, and there's a line in there that says, all the years you took from her just by being born. My mom's my best friend, So for her, I wish she

It happened outside a lesbian club called The Other Side.

Because there's nails everywhere, and that's I bled on the dance floor and.

All we will be searching out the possibility that we have a cereal bomber.

At latimay Er Bill Campbell.

We clearly believe that we are dealing with a deranged killer, but one who is very clever as well.

Flashpoint is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeartMedia. I'm Your Host, Cola Cassio, Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV. Flashpoint was created, written, and executive produced by Doug Mattica and myself on behalf of seven nine ninety seven. Lead producer is Alex Espastad, along with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stadman. Our Associate producer is witt Lukassio. Editing by Alex Espastad with additional