Eric Rudolph Slept Here (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine September 2003

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Eric Rudolph Slept Here (Cont.)

"HE DIDN'T CROSS THAT BRIDGE," Tom Brown tells me. "It's too exposed."

On my last day in Murphy, I meet up with Brown, 53, a world-renowned tracker and founder of Tom Brown's Tracker School, in Asbury, New Jersey. He's brought along Kevin Reeve, 46, who oversees the operation of Brown's tracker teams, which law enforcement agencies often use to help find missing persons. Both happened to be appearing at a knife show in Georgia shortly after Rudolph's capture and agreed to drive up and sniff around the fugitive's lair.

First Brown wants to check the land around Rudolph's summer camp in Murphy. The camp is still off-limits, so we stand next to the Save-A-Lot dumpster. Brown scans the hillside and immediately spies two secure routes, both utilizing a small side-street bridge a few hundred yards south of the I-74 bridge. "See those trees?" he says. "He's got cover all the way over here." From another vantage, Reeve spots faint trails coming down the hillside.

Next we hop in the car and head for Tarkiln Ridge. Brown's silver hair has a military cut, his body is strong and trim, and he carries himself with command presence. When he's working in the field, he hikes like a four-year-old, taking small steps, wandering off the trail, and stopping to investigate whatever strikes his senses. On the trail up the ridge, Brown spots something buried in the mud and digs up a government-issue ballpoint pen. "Right where the agent slipped and fell on his ass," he says, adding, "I've got a lot of respect for those boys. They know how to process a crime scene. But they don't know the woods so well."

The FBI's evidence team has left a stampede of tracks on the hillside, but Brown is undeterred.

"It's not hard to distinguish tracks made in the past week from those a month or two old," he says.

The ground here is soft and steep, Reeve points out. The only way to descend without slipping is to dig in heel-first, like a mountaineer coming down a snowfield. If Rudolph met a friend and picked up supplies at the road, he'd have left heel divots behind. Brown finds none.

"No trail means no road drop," Brown declares as we reach camp. "Everything points up-ridge." Translation: Rudolph must have approached his winter camp from above. Brown stirs the bench fire and proclaims it six weeks old. "Any older and it would be damper and more decomposed," he says.

Reeve studies a stump next to the rain cubby. A tree is most easily felled by notching two sides; Rudolph had hacked the entire circumference like a beaver. "He girdled it," Reeve says. "He had an ax but didn't know how to use it."

Given that Rudolph had an ax, a rifle, and a shovel to dig the food pits, the fugitive's winter camp leaves Brown and Reeve unimpressed. "He's got the morning sun, which is good," says Brown. "That's the coldest part of the day. And if anybody walks up on him, he'll hear them. But he's too far from water. And why would you sleep by your food, knowing there's bears in the area? This isn't a bad choice for seclusion, but I wouldn't have done it this way.

"Rudolph was no survivalist," Brown continues. "Survival is the act of living off the land. Rudolph just did not have the skills."

So what exactly was this camp? How did he use it?

"Let me see that map," Brown says. "What's behind his camp?"

We check the map. "Nothing," I say.

"Exactly," says Brown, pointing out that it's possible to travel cross-country from the Murphy camp to Tarkiln Ridge without crossing more than two roads. A straight 18-mile line separates the Murphy camp from the point where Rudolph abandoned George Nordmann's stolen truck in 1998. That's two days' travel through open forest. At the midpoint of that line sits Tarkiln Ridge.

"This was no camp," Reeve concludes. "This was a waypoint. He was heading somewhere else." To Brown's and Reeve's way of thinking, somewhere at least nine miles beyond Tarkiln Ridge, Eric Rudolph must have maintained a deep-woods camp that no one has yet discovered.

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