Bomb Suspect’s First Trial to Be Held in Alabama

Following a brief court appearance here Monday, accused serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph was flown to Birmingham, Ala., where prosecutors have decided to try him in a fatal abortion clinic attack in 1998 that they said represents the government’s best chance for a speedy conviction.

Rudolph, shackled at the ankles, wore an orange jumpsuit and blue flak jacket as he appeared in court for the first time since his capture after a five-year manhunt. The hearing took place before a packed courtroom in U.S. District Court about 100 miles from where he was caught Saturday in the wooded mountains of western North Carolina.

It took 15 minutes for the reading of all 23 criminal counts stemming from four bombings in Birmingham and Atlanta, including one at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics.

Rudolph could face the death penalty. He did not enter a plea to the charges, which included bombing, use of explosives and their transportation across state lines, and making threats of violence by telephone and mail. The charges are contained in two federal indictments, issued in 2000.

The Birmingham charges stem from the Jan. 29, 1998, attack on the New Woman All Women Health Care clinic in Birmingham, where a dynamite-laden bomb packed with nails killed an off-duty police officer and injured another person.

The Birmingham bombing is considered the strongest of the four cases, and the decision to try it first was not a surprise. A witness saw a possible suspect leave the scene, remove a woman’s wig and jump into a Nissan pickup truck. The license plate allegedly matched that of a pickup truck registered to Rudolph.

Soon afterward, when officials opened a storage locker that Rudolph rented in Murphy, N.C., the town where he was arrested Saturday, they say they found nails like those used in the bombing, as well as extremist literature. That evidence led investigators to look into his possible role in the Atlanta-area attacks.

After Rudolph is tried in Birmingham, he will be transferred to Atlanta for a separate prosecution, said Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft. In addition to the Olympics bombing on July 27, 1996, Rudolph is charged in two Atlanta incidents the following year: a bombing at a family-planning clinic that injured seven people and an attack on a gay-oriented nightclub that injured four.

Ashcroft predicted the Birmingham trial would be “relatively short and straightforward.” The Atlanta cases represent a “more complicated trial,” he said in a statement.

“Our approach is designed to provide the best opportunity to bring justice to all of the victims of the bombings, and to each community that experienced these terrorist attacks,” Ashcroft said.

“His capture and return to Alabama will allow us the opportunity to move forward in our prosecution,” Alice Martin, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, said in a statement. “For the widow of slain Birmingham Police Officer Robert ‘Sande’ Sanderson and Emily Lyons, a nurse who was severely injured by the blast, this is a day long awaited. We are thankful Rudolph will now face justice in a court of law.”

After the Birmingham bombing, Rudolph is alleged to have sent a letter to news organizations in Atlanta claiming responsibility on behalf of the “Army of God.” Similar letters had been sent after the bombings of the Atlanta clinic and nightclub the year before. He also is accused of making a telephone bomb threat shortly before the Olympics explosion, warning, “You have 30 minutes.”

Beverly McMahon, former owner of the Otherside Lounge, the nightclub bombed on Feb. 21, 1997, said she wanted Rudolph to be prosecuted to the extent of the law, no matter where.

“I just want him to come to justice, that’s what I want,” said McMahon, who helped evacuate people after the initial explosion and whose car was blown up in a second blast during the incident. “I hope he goes to trial, no matter where he goes, and I hope they give him the death penalty.”

Rudolph, 36, was stubble-faced but appeared in good health during the 30-minute court appearance. He showed no emotion as U.S. District Judge Lacy H. Thornburg explained his right to be represented by an attorney and asked whether the defendant was indeed Eric Robert Rudolph.

“Yes, Your Honor,” Rudolph replied in a strong voice.

Later, Sean Devereux, an Asheville lawyer assigned to represent Rudolph during his hearing here, said his client is “a reflective individual, and he has a lot to think about. He is not an uncaring person.”

“He has been portrayed as some sort of zealot, and he’s not,” Devereux told reporters outside the courthouse.

The attorney said Rudolph had told police where to find “one or more” of his campsites. Among the reading materials at one of the sites, Devereux said, was a biography of Gandhi.

The legal proceedings opened as scores of federal, state and local law enforcement officers worked to retrace Rudolph’s steps in the thickly forested area around Murphy, where a rookie police officer came upon the former soldier behind a grocery.

Rudolph grew up about 30 miles from Murphy in the heart of Nantahala National Forest, and investigators hope to determine whether anyone helped him slip through the massive, years-long dragnet. Many in the mountain region firmly oppose abortion, though most vehemently disavow the use of violence to stop it.

Rudolph, who as a former soldier trained for Army Airborne duty, was known to be at home in the wild, thanks in large part to the time spent living with his mother and siblings in the rugged pine- and oak-shaded hill country. It also was during childhood that Rudolph made known his unconventional views, in one case drawing the notice of school officials for writing a social studies paper that denied the Holocaust had taken place.

Along the way, Rudolph, who dropped out of school after ninth grade, also brushed up against some of the extremist thinking that he is said to share, according to published reports and people close to the family.

Among friends, he was outspoken in opposing abortion and also denounced interracial marriage, homosexuals and Jews, according to his former sister-in-law, Deborah Rudolph. In a 2001 interview with Intelligence Report, the publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center, she depicted a family weaned on white supremacist views and survivalist inclinations.

According to that and a 1998 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Eric Rudolph’s mother, Patricia, was a close friend of a man named Tom Branham, who lived nearby and associated with Nord Davis Jr., another neighbor who was a leading proponent of the Christian Identity movement.

Christian Identity espouses white supremacy and anti-Semitism, and the FBI has warned that interracial couples, abortion practitioners and others could be targets of a philosophy that it says increasingly justifies the use of violence to punish perceived violations of God’s laws.

Branham later would be charged after agents found automatic weapons and explosives at his house. After the Birmingham bombing in 1998, Branham told reporters that he had been close to Eric Rudolph until the two had a “falling-out.”

During the 1980s, when Rudolph was a teenager, his mother took him and a brother to stay in Missouri with Dan Gayman, a Church of Israel pastor who followed Christian Identity tenets, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Birmingham-based group that tracks hate groups. The Rudolphs stayed six months. Gayman has since publicly distanced himself from Christian Identity.

Deborah Rudolph, who was formerly married to Eric’s older brother, Joel, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday that Rudolph opposed abortion in part because it led to what he viewed as the killing of too many white babies.

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Times staff writer Nick Anderson in Washington, researcher Rennie Sloan in Atlanta and Associated Press contributed to this report.