Eric Rudolph’s rage was a long time brewing

The ‘N’ word, out of the blue
But behind the aw-shucks facade lay opinions that she had problems with. “He had some pretty radical views regarding race. It's one of the reason why I was estranging myself from him. He was quiet and shy and respectful to me, but that was one of the things we had a really big difference of opinion on. I remember him being a little prejudiced, and I was not comfortable with that.”

“Things came out in casual conversations,“ Cathy said. “ ... And I heard the word that turned me off.”

The “N” word.

“I was totally caught off guard,“ she said. “It was something I didn't expect to come out of his mouth.”

It wouldn't be the last, or the worst, evidence of Eric Rudolph's volatile interactions with the world at large.

Deborah Rudolph, who in 1985 married Joel Rudolph, one of Eric's older brothers, was interviewed for a 2001 intelligence report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and crimes in the United States. She said that Eric disliked television, which she said he called “the electronic Jew.”

Early indicators
Aspects of Eric Rudolph's survivalist identity appear to have developed early. In the SPLC interview, Deborah Rudolph noted that the Rudolph family “had a charming little house on eight-and-a-half acres on one of the highest peaks in North Carolina.

“It was something to realize how self-sufficient they were, how they had a generator in case the electricity went out. They had a wood-burning stove that heated water inside a radiator. They had a distiller for their water that steamed the water so you wouldn’t have to drink faucet water and its fluoride.”

In 1981, Eric Rudolph's father died of cancer; it was a passing that apparently traumatized Eric. Charles Stone, a former Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent, told The Associated Press how investigators thought Rudolph acted out of anger with the government because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration refused to approve the drug laetrile, the controversial, highly suspect concoction made of apricot pits that was officially discredited as a cancer treatment in 1982. Rudolph is said to have believed the drug could have saved his father.

“They have hard feelings [about Bob’s death],” Deborah Rudolph told the SPLC. “They think that if Pat could have given him laetrile, he wouldn’t have died.”

A vagabond life
Shortly after that, Eric Rudolph began what by all accounts was an itinerant life. His mother, Patricia, bundled her sons Eric and Jamie into a station wagon and drove them from Homestead, Fla., to a home near the scenic but remote 500,000-acre Nantahala National Forest of North Carolina.

While attending the K-12 Nantahala School, Eric reportedly wrote a high school essay that contended the Holocaust was a hoax. Other actions presaged the future. The Asheville, N.C., Citizen-Times reported that Nantahala residents recalled Rudolph “going to camp in six inches of snow equipped with nothing but a poncho, leading some to speculate he prepared a hiding spot — perhaps a bunker — many years ago.”

When Eric was 18, Patricia Rudolph briefly took Eric and two of her other children to the Church of Israel in Schell City, Mo., Dan Gayman, a leader in the church, took them in.

By all accounts, Gayman was a father figure to the young Rudolph. Deborah Rudolph told the Joplin (Mo.) Globe in January 2001 that “Eric ... always seemed to be in a great deal of pain because of his father's death and the family's loss of the American dream. Eric Rudolph idolized Dan Gayman ... and soon came to regard the charismatic minister as a foster father.”
Gayman was known to be a leader in Christian Identity, which despite its benign name has attained a reputation as perhaps the nation's most dangerous hate movement, according to the FBI.

A University of Virginia Web site that monitors religious movements found that Christian Identity's “most fundamental teaching pivots on the idea that Anglo-Saxons, are the direct descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and, thus, are the 'true chosen people' of God.”

Christian Identity appears to be more a movement — fluid, amorphous, adaptable — than a specific organization. Some groups — Aryan Nations, Confederate Hammerskins; the American Nazi Party, National Association for the Advancement of White People, The Order, White Aryan Resistance — have agendas and strategies that differ slightly, some more confrontational than others.

But all adhere to Christian Identity's core tenet: the anthropological supremacy of the white race.

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