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