Eric Rudolph Slept Here (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine September 2003

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Eric Rudolph Slept Here (Cont.)

A FEW DAYS AFTER RUDOLPH WAS CAUGHT, a reporter asked Cherokee County sheriff Keith Lovin if he expected more arrests. Lovin smiled and said, "I think the next few weeks may be interesting."

Part of Rudolph's folkloric appeal to some people was the idea that he made it out there alone, using the skills of a crack survivalist. As I discover while talking to citizens in and around Murphy, his reputation didn't completely collapse in the wake of his arrest, but the details of his capture have led many to shift from asking whether he had help to who was involved. FBI agents are still patrolling the hills with dogs, looking for more camps and evidence of accomplices, but if they've found anything, they're not telling. "We're basically under orders from the Department of Justice to keep a lid on all information until the trial," says an FBI spokesman. "If there's anything that's worthy, it'll come out then."

These days, about the only people publicly advocating the five-years-alone theory are Rudolph himself and Murphy mayor Bill Hughes. Hughes's motive is clear: He's defending his town's honor. "The people of this area deplore Rudolph's actions," he tells me. "We are very patriotic, we respect authority, and we are not anti-government." Hughes is livid over the portrayal of his town as a hotbed of bigoted redneck radicalism, and rightly so. Murphy's bright shops, stately churches, and groomed baseball diamonds are the marks of a quaint southern town on the upswing. But beyond the city limits, where the kudzu creeps over buildings and trees, the mood can turn darker. Nord Davis Jr. ran his hate operation from a mountaintop compound outside of Andrews, a down-on-its-luck former factory town about 14 miles north of Murphy, until his death six years ago. Today, vociferous anti-abortion billboards and homemade religious signs still stand in front yards and hang from roadside trees. Around here, folks roll their eyes when Mayor Hughes denies the possibility of local involvement.

"Plenty of folks might've helped him," says Hoover Anderson, 84, who lives in nearby Hayesville, the county seat of neighboring Clay County. "What he done was wrong, but a lot of people around here think what they're doing at abortion clinics is wrong, too."

At Clay's Corner general store in Brasstown, eight miles south of Rudolph's winter camp, owner Clay Logan lays out T-shirts that show a possum with the slogan RUDOLPH'S SURVIVAL FOOD.

"Man who survived five years had to eat some possum," says Logan, 57, a grandfatherly type in denim overalls. His wife, Judy, a sharp-featured woman with frosted hair, tends the counter. Among the items for sale are beef jerky, Winchester ammunition, and nine kinds of chewing tobacco.

"If he done what they say he did, he's a criminal," Logan tells me. "You don't go around doing things like that, no matter what you believe in. I don't think people around here really defend him, but abortion is a pretty strong issue in these mountains."

"Killin's killin'," Judy Logan concurs.

There's more to this than anti-abortion beliefs, though. Mountain people are famously iconoclastic, and Rudolph bet his life on that independent streak. Most Americans are already convinced that Rudolph is the Olympic bomber. That's not the case in western North Carolina. Time and again, locals answer my questions with the preface "If he did what they say . . ."

Out here, just because the government says something is true doesn't make it so, and the heavy-footed federal presence during the five-year manhunt didn't help matters. The curt professionalism of FBI agents can easily be read as cold Yankee contempt.

Charles Williams, a business manager who lived in Brasstown during the intensive 1998 hunt, tells me about the day four agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms showed up on his porch armed with automatic weapons. "My wife hears a knock at the door," Williams says. "They wanted to come in and search the house. They came in and of course didn't find anything. They had the feeling that people would hide Eric Rudolph." After five years of that sort of thing, a lot of people opted for a "none of the above" vote: not for Rudolph, not for the FBI.

Even the local cops seem to distance themselves from the FBI's Rudolph obsession. Still, Clay County sheriff Tony Woody is very clear on one point: He doesn't think Rudolph could have survived five winters in the woods. "I think he had all these places laid out beforehand," he says, indicating that Rudolph had prepared his hiding spots. "He made plans."

Woody leans back in his chair and clasps his hands behind his head. "This is just one man's speculation," he says, "but I know it'd take an extraordinary man to take those winters and never get sick. Could you imagine a man sleeping out on the ground for five years? There's no way."

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