From the archives | Special Report: Eric Rudolph tells how he eluded FBI

This story originally published on July 6, 2005. It is being republished as part of the commemoration of USA TODAY's 40th anniversary on Sept. 15, 2022.

ANDREWS, N.C. — During Eric Rudolph's five years on the lam, despite a nationwide manhunt and a million-dollar bounty, a transient appears to have come closer to catching the serial bomber than did any federal agent.

The search for Rudolph, sought in four bombings that killed two people and injured more than a hundred, always focused in this region -- a densely wooded area in the western part of North Carolina. Rudolph had spent his teenage years here and had returned as an adult in the early 1990s, supporting himself doing carpentry.

In letters to his mother written from a jail cell in Birmingham, Ala., Rudolph describes how he repeatedly crept into this town of 1,600, even after scores of federal agents had set up their headquarters just blocks away. He tells of raiding Dumpsters and gardens, of stealing grain from silos and transporting it in a truck he stole from a used car lot. He also recounts how he feared he had been discovered during a chance encounter at a trash pile less than two years into hiding.

"We did the best job we could do," says Woody Enderson, the FBI agent who headed the task force hunting for Rudolph until he retired in August 1999. "But to my knowledge, we never physically saw him."

His mother, Pat Rudolph, shared the letters with USA TODAY in the hope of showing a fuller picture of her son. He has granted no interviews and has released only an 11-page statement when he pleaded guilty April 13.

The 200-plus pages of letters, written freehand, offer the most complete account to date about how he survived in the wild. He describes what he ate, how he slept, even how he kept himself amused. He also tells, for the first time, how he was caught by a local cop.

Based on those letters, among them one he sent to an anti- abortion website in May, USA TODAY retraced Rudolph's steps and interviewed those whose lives were unwittingly touched.

The letters say nothing about whether others knowingly helped Rudolph; Enderson says neither he nor the FBI believes Rudolph had help. Nor do the letters contain explicit directions to his hide- outs in the mountains around Andrews and Murphy, N.C.

Those points are of little interest to Rudolph's mother. She's still trying to understand why the boy she raised turned into a terrorist -- a man who signed his Mother's Day card to her "Your wayward son."

But as Pat Rudolph reads her son's words, she allows herself to set aside his crimes. In her mind's eye, she lets Eric Rudolph take her with him on his clandestine journeys, to show her how he survived on the run.

'A piece of providence'

"You said you liked my little anecdotes," he writes in a July 27, 2004, letter, "so I have a little tale you may find entertaining."

The time is fall 1999, probably mid-October. "On this particular night, the air was cool, fall having started a month before," he writes. "I was hesitant to get out from under my improvised bed, which was made of leaves and plastic."

But he was hungry. He needed food. Forget hunting. He had found an easier -- if riskier -- way of getting it that summer, he writes. Under cover of darkness, he would slip into Andrews, where scores of federal agents had made an old sewing factory their headquarters.

On his way in, he would help himself to vegetables from two enormous gardens. Then, he would wade across the Valley River and sneak behind the McDonald's, picking through the burgers tossed out at closing. He would go behind the grocery store across the street and raid the trash bin there. Sometimes, he'd even scrounge through the trash at Civic Cinema, looking for unsold popcorn.

He started toward town before midnight, he writes, and "the mountain trail down to the road was steep and full of obstacles. Having to traverse it in the dark without a flashlight was something that was done primarily from memory. Each step must be calculated and correlated with the surrounding shadows produced by the trees and the general landscape. Once you get used to the step count and how the trail looks at night, it becomes fairly easy."

At the road -- based on the descriptions in his letter, most likely Airport Road just outside the Andrews city limits -- he paused "in a clump of bushes and shrubs" and waited for traffic to subside. Then, Rudolph writes, he headed down to the gardens.

"The gardens were a piece of providence; a real Godsend to have these two big, well-tended and continually stocked gardens right on the way to town," he writes. "Probably tended by two retired couples living next door to each other, these gardens were a regular cornucopia of plant life."

That, in fact, was how it used to be, recalls Gene Webb. He's 77 now and doesn't plant as much as he used to. But based on Rudolph's descriptions, Webb may be the gardener who, along with his brother, unwittingly fed a fugitive. Webb's house sits where Rudolph describes. The gardens lie side by side, just across the road from his house. And when the weather turns cold, Webb covers his gardens with a plastic tarp to guard against frost, just as Rudolph recalls.

"I had to be extremely gentle with the frozen plastic," he writes, "for across the street, on the porch of the gardener's house, was my nemesis: a 20-pound pile of canine crap named 'Fluffy,' waiting patiently on guard for the slightest noise.

"Every time I would go to the garden, he would be there watching, waiting," he writes of the dog. "A sound from the garden would send him into a rage, forcing my hasty retreat. I tried to make friends by feeding him (McDonald's) hamburgers, but he would have none of my blackmail. He hated me, and I hated him, and the battle would continue every time I invaded his territory."

If Rudolph is referring to Webb's dog, the name is Blue, not Fluffy. And he's a Black Labrador, weighing about 100 pounds these days. But like the dog Rudolph remembers, Blue has always been protective, Webb says. "This one'll bark when somebody passes," he says with a nod toward Blue.

As for any signs that Rudolph had visited, Webb thinks for a moment. "Someone could get a dozen ears and you wouldn't know it," he says. "Now my brother, he got to missing a lot of tomatoes."

Former FBI agent Enderson says he isn't surprised. "There were thefts from gardens that had never had thefts before," he says. Rudolph, he says, "was absolutely resourceful."

'Lick the floor'

On that October night, Rudolph writes, "everything went smoothly and I proceeded to bag my take and put it under the bushes on the side of the road where I would retrieve it on my way back. And then I covered the last leg of my trek down to the intersection" just across the river from Andrews.

Instead of using the well-lighted bridge, Rudolph opted to cross the Valley River. A drought had left the water level low, and Rudolph had "improvised a pair of waders made out of plastic garbage bags and string," he writes. "I would put these on and cross the river just upstream from the bridge.

"Once over my first stop was the green garbage can behind Gibson Furniture, where I usually find a couple of items of interest. Cigarettes, lovely cigarettes, half smoked and many of them. A little work back at camp, cut the filters down and wipe the remainder with a clean towel, and you have nicotine-induced bliss."

Virgil Gibson, 62, who owns the store, says he had no idea Rudolph was smoking his spent Marlboro Lights. "Oh mercy," he says with a chuckle. "That's unusual."

After Rudolph was caught on May 31, 2003, Gibson says the FBI interviewed him. But not about any cigarettes. Rather, they had found a magazine at one of Rudolph's mountain campsites.

"It was addressed to me," he says. "It had my name on it."

Indeed, Rudolph proved an avid reader. "Also at Gibson's can," he writes, "are USA TODAY newspapers -- two, sometimes three a week. This was a good find, for I spent a good deal of my days reading and re-reading these papers.

"Often as I went about my weekly late night chores," he writes, "I would think about the articles I had read that day, and engage in debates with myself about the latest issue of interest in the news, or I would invent comedy routines based upon something in the paper that I had found to be funny."

In one article, he writes, "human rights groups were protesting the abuse of factory workers in Vietnam. Apparently, Nike shoe factories in Vietnam employ a large number of young females as workers, and these are usually managed by middle-aged South Korean males. ... One of the accusations involved these managers forcing the girls, when (they) misbehaved, to run around the factory, and also they were made to lick the floor. On this particular night the dialogue with myself was based upon an imagined scene between these abused girls and their tyrant boss."

The article was published Oct. 4, 1999. It is just as Rudolph describes. "In other Vietnam factories," one sentence reads, "workers had been slapped with shoes or ordered to lick factory floors."

"In my best Oriental accent, I would run the dialogue back and forth," Rudolph recalls in his letter. "In a light voice I had the imaginary manager say, 'You lick the floor. You run round factory now.'

"'No, I don't want to lick floor. Oh prease don't make lick floor,' lamented the cringing, crying girls. ... And on and on this improvised skit would go as I sifted through the garbage," he writes. That night, he was searching for a way to improve his leaf sleeping bag, he writes. "Right on top was the very thing: (a) large piece of plastic perfectly draped over the top of a long rectangular box. Pulling the plastic off the box, I proceeded to fold it up, all the while continuing with my running dialogue between the fictitious manager and shop girls."

That's when he saw the man -- and when the man saw him.

'Would he tell?'

"Out of the corner of my eye, just as I was finishing this line, the long rectangular box began to slowly open like a coffin lid in a vampire movie, and there in the box was the barely visible figure of a human being," he writes. "My thoughts started racing. 'Was this an ambush? Did someone see me going through the garbage on a previous night and set this up?' With my heart in my throat, the figure suddenly spoke.

"'Who's making you lick the floor, buddy?' said the figure. His voice came hard ... " he writes, "and had probably been damaged by years of alcohol and cigarettes. Suddenly it came to me. 'This is a bum. ... Without thinking I said, 'Nobody ... nobody is making me lick the floor,' and slowly moved away, back towards the river."

But Rudolph couldn't help but worry. "Did he recognize me? Would he run and tell? I thought to myself. I made my way quickly back across (the river), splashing through the cold water, and climbing up the bank, my half-soaked body was beginning to feel the cold," he writes. Then he looked back. The transient hadn't moved.

"It looked good so far, but was he just waiting to catch his breath before leaving?" he writes. "Then, after several tense moments, he lit up a cigarette, and every few drags on his smoke, he would let out a few gut-wrenching coughs. After finishing his cigarette, he lifted the lid on his box, climbed back in, and laid back down to sleep."

Rudolph writes that he waited a week before heading into town again. "But needless to say," he writes, "I began to approach garbage a little differently."

'The staple that sustained me'

In another letter -- one Rudolph apparently also sent to a website run by a militant anti-abortion group called the Army of God -- he writes about how he drew hundreds of pounds of corn, wheat and soybeans from silos even as authorities set up a speed trap a few feet away. A mix of the three grains -- boiled, then pounded into pancakes and fried -- proved to be "the staple that sustained me for many years," he writes in the letter, dated Sept. 11, 2004.

During his trips into Andrews that October 1999, Rudolph had stolen garbage cans from stores, he writes. He swiped garbage bags from the Dumpsters at McDonald's. He washed them in the river and then began filling them with grain from silos along Airport Road, in a town named Marble halfway between Murphy and Andrews.

At night, he climbed to the top of a silo, opened a hatch and scooped the feed into the trash bags, he writes. Then he dumped the bags in the garbage cans, which he stored behind a lone building across the road from the silos.

"One night I had to wait atop the silo for a few hours as a state trooper set up across the road at the church to lay in ambush for hapless speeders," he writes. "He would race off and catch one, and after writing his ticket he'd return to his spot next to the church."

Based on his description of the silos and the building, the "church" appears to be a structure that housed a racquetball court that doctors and other professionals built years ago.

Once, he writes, he thought he had been spotted by a hunter along the creek behind the building. He scurried up a ridge and waited for the feds, he writes. "I realized they weren't coming. For whatever reason, the hunter didn't divulge what happened," Rudolph surmises.

No matter. Rudolph resumed his harvest. In the letter, he talks about how he scoped out a truck to haul the filled garbage cans back to one of his camps. He spotted it on a used car lot about a mile from the silos. "A nice dark blue 1996 four wheel drive Chevrolet Silverado was the truck of choice," he writes.

He apparently stole it and transported the filled garbage cans on Halloween 1999. A police report filed in Andrews and subsequently with the Cherokee County Sheriff's Department shows that a 1996 Chevrolet Silverado disappeared from the lot of Buy Rite Motors between Oct. 30, 1999, and Nov. 1, when it was reported stolen. Rudolph mentioned Buy Rite in his letter. The stolen truck wasn't dark blue, though. It was black.

"At this time there are no leads," a deputy handling the case writes.

Until USA TODAY contacted the owner of Buy Rite Motors late last month, it appears no one had any idea that Rudolph was the thief. The Silverado was recovered a few weeks after it was stolen, owner Paul Pollina says. "When they found that truck," he recalls, "they didn't even dust for fingerprints or anything."

Former FBI agent Enderson says he's "confident" that no one ever connected the stolen truck to Rudolph. "There was a point in time when we had told local authorities to notify us of any stolen vehicles," he says. "But that was early on. By October of '99, it probably had slipped their mind or something like that."

In the letter, Rudolph hints that he even encountered police on the way back with the grain. "But just wait until you hear about the time the cops took me to get some gas for my stolen truck," the letter ends. "Maybe next time."

'He had me'

On May 29, 2004 -- almost a year to the day after his capture -- Rudolph decided to tell his mother what happened the night a rookie cop spotted and arrested him behind the Save-A-Lot grocery store in Murphy.

"It was a Saturday night, like other Saturday nights, a good night for garbage," he writes in a letter. "I had a good pile of bananas already, but thought I could get more and end my fruit drying early this year, and this is how I ended up at the Dumpster that night. I told myself not to go out, for I had plenty of bananas already, and enough Taco Bell burritos to cure an anorexic. Pushing aside my fears, I left the camp."

He writes about walking down the trail in the darkness, about trying to cross the highway over a bridge, about how sometimes, if a car approached, he'd have to "hang over the side of the bridge on the other side of the rail," the shallow river about 50 feet below.

"Finally, I get over the bridge and make my way through the field to the back of the Save-A-Lot's Dumpsters. ... At this point, I'm blind as to what is coming around the sides of the building, and have to rely solely on the sight of headlights. ... So I sit in the field looking from side to side, waiting for the patrol."

The police officer, he writes, drives by "usually once an hour, but on the weekends, with drunks and teenagers to deal with, his schedule is uncertain. For three years I have dodged him, on many a cold night he has come within inches of finding me. One night, while I was hiding in the Dumpster at Taco Bell, he got out of his car, went into the Dumpster area and (urinated) on the Dumpster I was hiding in.

"On this particular night," Rudolph writes, "he was the least of my worries, having to haul 200 pounds of fruit up to the camp was the only thing on my mind. ... I run to the Dumpster. Halfway across the asphalt out of the corner of my eye, he comes whipping around the corner of the building, with his lights off. This is unusual, for he never turns them off, and this is how I've spotted him coming around the building for three years. Maybe he watched Cops the TV show last night. ... But whatever the case, he had me. I knew he would get me, if anybody could; that some FBI tactical team, and a platoon of helicopters would not do the trick, but rather this lonely rookie cop patrolling garbage cans.

"I rush behind a stack of milk crates," Rudolph writes. "He pulls up in front of them; I think about running, about the headache of hiding, the many nights rooting through garbage, the 10 degrees below zero days when I sit in my tent all day and shiver; and I decide that I don't care. It was meant to happen. I'm sick of hiding from these worms. I'm not afraid to die. And so this is how I came to this place a year ago."

Murphy police Officer Jeff Postell had been a cop for less than a year before spotting Rudolph early that morning, well before dawn. He said at the time that he mistook Rudolph's flashlight for a weapon, drew his gun and ordered Rudolph to the ground. "I was doing what I was supposed to do," Postell explained.

'Flickers of light'

Pat Rudolph can't get enough of her son's stories. She sometimes wishes he were still out there, free. But if he were, then she would never be sure if he were alive. She would never read these stories.

Not every mother would be so impressed by tales of stolen trucks and thievery. But considering the crimes to which her son has confessed, Pat Rudolph allows herself to enjoy the victimless ones.

In time, she prays, her son will come to understand the magnitude of his transgressions. To see them as wrong. "There's flickers of light there that I think will eventually deaden the darkness," Pat Rudolph says. "When he finally understands who he is, then he'll come to learn forgiveness.

"Once he comes to reconcile where that devil exists in his mind, he's going to realize all along that that devil was him."

In these letters home from her wayward son, Pat Rudolph thinks she may have found Eric. Now, she hopes he might find himself.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Retracing a serial bomber's steps through letters sent to his mother