Mountain Manhunt

By SYLVESTER MONROE/ATLANTA

He didn't act much like a man on the run. Not at first. Ten hours after last month's fatal bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., Eric Robert Rudolph strolled into a video store near his mobile home in the mountains of North Carolina, his hair still damp from a shower, and rented an action-adventure movie. He returned it the next morning and rented another tape. "He's always been very prompt," says clerk Dedra McGrady, "in returning his rentals."

But Rudolph still hasn't returned the second tape--perhaps because that same afternoon, on Jan. 30, FBI investigators named him as a "material witness" to the bombing. Rudolph, 31, is registered as the owner of a putty-colored Nissan pickup whose license number a witness recorded as the truck drove away from the New Woman All Women's Health Center moments after a pipe bomb filled with nails had exploded, killing an off-duty police officer and maiming a nurse.

Last week a pair of raccoon hunters led federal agents to that truck, mired to its axles in soggy woods near Rudolph's trailer in Murphy, a hamlet tucked into the southwestern corner of North Carolina. By the weekend, the FBI had enough evidence to charge Rudolph with the bombing and offer a $100,000 reward. That evidence, investigators say, includes explosives residue in the truck and in a storage shed Rudolph had rented, fibers from a blond wig like the one a witness had seen a man remove as he ran from the bombing scene, and a folding shovel with dirt believed to match the soil where the bomb had been buried beneath a flowerpot.

By the time lawmen arrived in Murphy, however, Rudolph had stopped at the local grocery to stock up on raisins, trail mix and eight packs of flashlight batteries. Then, apparently on foot, he vanished, leading more than 100 federal agents and local officers on a manhunt across rugged terrain right out of the best-selling novel Cold Mountain. Agents of the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms armed themselves with semiautomatic rifles and bulletproof vests as they searched Rudolph's trailer and poked cautiously under neighbors' porches and in their barns. Helicopters clattered overhead, using infrared scanners that can detect body heat amid brush and darkness. And two bloodhounds named after TV detectives, Colombo and Quincy, were flown in from Texas.

Leaders of the search believe that Rudolph, a former Army paratrooper trained in wilderness survival, remains on foot, holed up in nearby mountains. "The area is vast," says FBI special agent Craig Dahle, "and locals say, 'Lotsa luck.'" Other investigators are asking acquaintances and associates, Who, really, is Eric Rudolph?

A sometime carpenter with a good reputation among those who've hired him, Rudolph is one of five children reared by a strict and deeply religious mother. Their father, an airline pilot, died when Rudolph was in his early teens. Teresa Morgan, 28, who attended school with the Rudolph kids, described them as "very well mannered. Everything was 'yes, ma'am' and 'no, sir.'" Rudolph, she recalls, was so bright and attentive in class that he could pass exams "without ever reading a textbook." He harbored "very extreme views" but was quiet and something of a loner. When other kids would go to a local lake to picnic and swim with family or friends, they would see him there by himself.

Rudolph's history teacher, Angelia Bateman, recalls that when she had the class write a report on World War II, Rudolph "challenged the prevalent view of Hitler and wrote that the Holocaust never occurred." Asked the source of his information, he cited a right-wing pamphlet.

Ever since his father died, Rudolph has been strongly influenced by a family friend named Thomas Wayne Branham. Owner of a sawmill and an avid survivalist, Branham was once arrested on federal weapons charges after machine guns and explosives were found on his property. (The charges were dismissed on appeal.) He and Rudolph's mother taught Rudolph to distrust federal authority, and it took hold. Rudolph told friends he wouldn't get a Social Security number lest it be used to track his movements. Branham declined to be interviewed, but his brother James, who also knows Rudolph, says, "I can't imagine that Eric would be involved in this bombing. My brother feels the same way."

Rudolph dropped out of school after the ninth grade, later earning a general-equivalency diploma. He attended Western Carolina University for two semesters and served 18 months in the Army's elite 101st Airborne Division.

Rudolph and his mother, investigators say, are longtime followers of the late Nord William Davis Jr., a leader of the Christian Identity movement, which holds that the U.S. should be governed according to the Bible rather than federal law. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, which tracks extremist groups, reports that after Davis died last September, one eulogy invoked an image of "the Army of God being led by Christ on a horse." The Army of God is the name used by those who claimed responsibility for the Birmingham clinic bombing and two similar bombings in Atlanta.

--Reported by Greg Fulton/Birmingham and Timothy Roche/Murphy

With reporting by Greg Fulton/Birmingham and Timothy Roche/Murphy