Hunt Heats Up for Key Figure in Clinic Blast

The search for a man considered central to the investigation of the fatal bombing of an Alabama abortion clinic intensified Wednesday, with dozens of heavily armed federal agents going from cabin to trailer to shack along the rugged border of North Carolina and Georgia.

They are hunting Eric Robert Rudolph, a 31-year-old Army veteran said by some to hold strident anti-government views. He was seen outside the New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic in downtown Birmingham hours before a bomb went off two weeks ago, killing an off-duty police officer and partially blinding a clinic nurse.

Law enforcement officials call Rudolph a “material witness” and have urged him to come forward and share what he knows. Their search heated up when Rudolph’s tracks grew cold. The trailer where he last lived was found empty on the outskirts of this small mountain town, its door unlocked and its lights burning. His gray 1989 Nissan pickup truck was found abandoned and bogged down in nearby muddy woods.

“Obviously, he’s not coming forward voluntarily,” said one federal agent. “What we would do is arrest him and bring him in for questioning.”

After examining Rudolph’s truck, investigators returned to the abortion clinic Tuesday night and collected new soil samples. They declined to confirm a report that they had found evidence linking the truck to the bombing that left a crater in front of the Birmingham clinic Jan. 29.

“We’re not commenting on that,” said Brian Lett, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “But we’re not saying it’s erroneous.”

Fueling the search for Rudolph is more than just the discovery of possible evidence. Authorities also want to know what Rudolph knows about a series of bombings that have had Atlanta feeling jumpy for 18 months.

Days after the Birmingham attack--the nation’s first fatal bombing of an abortion clinic--letters were sent to the Reuters news agency and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution claiming responsibility on behalf of a 15-year-old group of loosely connected anti-abortionists called the Army of God.

With black, blocky handwriting and grammatical errors, the letters closely resembled letters sent last year after two bomb attacks in Atlanta, one that injured seven people at an abortion clinic and one that injured five people at a lesbian nightclub.

Previously, investigators have said they suspect a link between both of last year’s bombings and the bomb attack at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park, which killed one woman, injured 111 bystanders and marred the 1996 Summer Games.

If Rudolph is the sort of man who could be wanted in connection with such acts of terrorism, the sort of man who would warrant mobilizing helicopters with heat-seeking radar and federal agents with flak jackets, he gave few signs in his brief time here and in the military.

He left no last mark during two semesters at Western Carolina University. “He was just a face in the crowd,” said school spokesman Randall Holcombe.

A close friend from Rudolph’s high school years recalls that he moved here from Florida with his mother and five siblings in the early 1980s, some time after the death of his father, a pilot.

Before dropping out of Nantahala School, a K-12 facility with roughly 100 students, he left an impression on one teacher. Angie Bateman, who had him for freshman history, remembers “a paper he wrote expressing his views that the Holocaust didn’t happen,” she said. “It was the first time, the only time, anyone expressed those views to me.”

Kim Bateman, a local resident related by marriage to Angie Bateman, dated Rudolph 15 years ago. She remembers him as “well-mannered, a gentleman,” someone who treated her very well, loved baseball and took part in all school activities.

“He lived on the same road we did, and he’d come by and eat supper,” she said. “My parents really liked him.”

Recent reports in local newspapers have quoted old friends and acquaintances who say Rudolph didn’t write checks because he didn’t trust banks and didn’t give out his Social Security number because he feared the federal government.

But Kim Bateman said he was utterly normal. “We find it hard to believe he was involved” in the bombings, she said.

Other local residents just wish he had never come to their corner of the world. Parents of students at tiny Martin’s Creek Elementary School, three miles from where Rudolph’s truck was found, felt so edgy Wednesday that a sheriff’s deputy was posted outside the school as children were released for the day.

Tensions rose sharply when a clerk at the Circle K convenience store 18 miles down the road from Murphy, just over the Georgia state line, reported that Rudolph was a customer Tuesday night.

But Lett, an ATF spokesman, said late Wednesday that the Circle K sighting was “a case of mistaken identity.”

Those familiar with Murphy and the area think there’s a better than even chance that he can use the woods to elude his searchers, if that is his intent, particularly because of his Army training.

Lett said Rudolph received some survival instruction, but “he wasn’t Johnny Rambo or anything.”

Still, this area can be plentiful for any man who knows something about living off the land.

“There are so many places he can hide,” said Lewis Foster, owner of Foster’s Flea Market. “You’ve got caves and rocks. There are ponds where he can catch fish. And wild turkeys.”

And if Rudolph should go to such extremes to avoid capture, local residents openly wonder why. “He must be up to something,” said Scott Howden. “Or he would’ve come out.”

Moehringer reported from Atlanta and Stanley from North Carolina.