Atlanta Olympics Bomber Apologizes to His Victims

With a slight tremor in his voice, convicted bomber Eric Rudolph on Monday apologized to people maimed or killed by a pipe bomb packed in nails that he planted amid a crowd during the 1996 Olympics.

“Responsibility for what took place in the park that night belongs to me and me alone,” said Rudolph, 38. “I would do anything to take that night back. To those victims, I do apologize.”

In a chilly, nondescript courtroom, Rudolph’s victims stood before him: A college instructor in a tweed jacket thrust his hand into the air to show Rudolph the stump where his index finger had been blown off. A retired federal agent called Rudolph an “isolated cancer of mankind.” A female executive told him to “rot in hell.”

At a hearing at which he received four consecutive life sentences, plus 120 years, Rudolph did not wink and smirk, as he had at previous appearances. But the victims who filed out of the courthouse -- even the most optimistic of them -- were not sure they had seen true emotion.

“It sounded sincere,” said John Hawthorne, whose wife, Alice, was killed in the Olympic Park bombing. “Whether or not it was, no one will ever know other than him.”

There was, pointedly, no apology for his second and third bombings in the city -- of an abortion clinic and a gay nightclub. Tonya Wolford, who still suffers seizures from the nightclub blast, wiped tears from her face as she left the courtroom.

“He was real cold and callous,” said Wolford, 39, who was an ironworker before the bombing. As she cataloged her injuries -- fluid on the brain, partial hearing loss, post-traumatic stress disorder -- she said Rudolph “got this grin on his face, gave a half-cocked laugh and looked away.”

The sentencing hearing marked the end of a wrenching chapter in Atlanta’s history. Among the agents who participated in the investigation -- the largest in state history -- were some who had “been on this case literally since 1:20 in the morning on July 27,” the day the blast shook Olympic Park, U.S. Atty. David Nahmias said. One agent, he said, “has three kids of pretty good size who didn’t exist when that bomb went off.”

Rudolph’s first bomb hit Atlanta at its most jubilant moment -- in the middle of an event designed to vault the city into international prominence. Skyscrapers were illuminated with strobe lights, manhole covers were welded closed as a precaution and a huge Ferris wheel spun in a downtown parking lot.

A week into the Olympics, 50,000 people were gathered in Centennial Olympic Park to hear a band called Jack Mack and the Heart Attack. It was in that crowd, at 1:27 a.m., that a pipe bomb exploded, spattering blood across the new plaza.

As the acrid cloud cleared, dozens of bodies lay on the ground, and 44-year-old Alice Hawthorne, who had brought her daughter Fallon to the concert as a birthday treat, was dead.

Fallon Stubbs, now 23, addressed Rudolph for the first time Monday. He seemed different, she said -- “humble.”

“Today, not for you, but for me, I forgive,” she told Rudolph. “If I cry, it’s not for me, or for my father, or for my mother. It’s for you.”

Others were not so friendly.

Ronald Smith, 45, a college instructor from Charlotte, N.C., held up his hand to show Rudolph the stump where his index finger had been blown off.

“Look closely at my face, my hands, my limp,” he said. “May [this] be what you see when you lay your head down, one night after another, for the rest of your life.”

John Hawthorne needled Rudolph about his stature.

“You are a very small man, and like other small men, you have a Napoleonic complex,” Hawthorne said. “Little person, big bomb.”

Rudolph inveighed against abortion at an earlier sentencing hearing for a 1998 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., abortion clinic. He told a different story in Atlanta. In an excerpt from the 11-page statement he released in April, he said the Atlanta bomb aimed to “confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand” -- and emphasized that he “sincerely hoped to achieve my objectives without harming innocent civilians.”

In the statement, Rudolph argued that he had twice attempted to prevent civilian deaths by calling in a bomb threat, and that both conversations had been cut off.

Rudolph said he was so distraught by the harm to civilians that he canceled the “operation,” detonating four additional bombs in a vacant lot and leaving Atlanta “with much remorse.”

He made no mention of the bombing of a Sandy Springs abortion clinic the following January, or the Otherside Lounge a month later.

In a news conference after the hearing, Nahmias warned against taking Rudolph’s statements at face value.

Although Rudolph presents himself as a crusader against abortion providers, Nahmias said, investigators who interviewed Rudolph’s friends and family found that before the bombing campaign, he focused his hatred on other groups, including law enforcement officers, African Americans and Jews.

Nahmias said Rudolph was primarily an antigovernment militant, but recognized that “other causes -- [the causes of] people like Timothy McVeigh -- those have gone nowhere in America.” The focus on opposition to abortion, he said, is “something he has created to draw support.”

After the hearing ended, several victims lingered outside the courthouse, considering what it meant that the case was over.

Wolford, who had wiped tears from her face as she left the courtroom, said she felt sour and unsatisfied. The only good thing about the day, she said, was “actually seeing how short he really was, and knowing I might be just a little bit taller.”

And she smiled, thinking about the tiny sliver of a window that will be Rudolph’s only connection to the natural world.

“I wish I could be on the other side, saying, ‘Hey!’ ” she said.