Eric Rudolph’s rage was a long time brewing

Eric’s excellent adventure
Reports vary on how passionately Rudolph adopted the Christian Identity philosophy. What is known is that he drifted for a time.

He dropped out of high school, but eventually got his GED. The Citizen-Times reported that he attended Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., but quit after only two semesters. Rudolph enlisted in the U.S. Army in August 1987, and served at Fort Benning, Ga. He lasted only 18 months before his discharge; some reports say it was for using illegal drugs; others claim it was for insubordination.

Deborah Rudolph told the SPLC that Rudolph frequently visited her and his brother Joel in Nashville in the early 1990's. “Eric stayed in my home a lot,” Deborah Rudolph said. “He would sleep all day, then stay up all night and eat pizza and smoke pot and watch movies by Cheech and Chong. I mean, what do I not know about the guy? If you were to walk into my house, you’d see him hanging out with his brothers, talking about an issue they were discussing on TV with a joint hanging out of his mouth. They’d say, “Hey dude, let’s eat a pizza.” It was like [the movie] “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

Deborah Rudolph recounts that “[A]t one point, he was probably making $60,000 a year selling pot. ... he had already been growing pot out on Army Corps of Engineers land behind the house.”

But even during that furry, freaked-out phase of existence, there were ominous overtones. “You could be watching a 30-minute sitcom and the credits would roll and there’d be Jewish names and, excuse my expression, but he would say, ‘You f—king Yids.’ Any little thing and he would start,” she said.

A transformation
“Friends said he worked in North Carolina and Tennessee and may have done construction work elsewhere. He earned a reputation as a meticulous, talented craftsman,” the Citizen-Times reported.

After acquiring sole ownership of the family's home in the Nantahala region, Rudolph sold the home in 1996 for $65,000 and began what some say was the pivotal transformation. With money came options. He reportedly began to adopt aliases. The Citizen-Times reports that a favorite moniker was “Bob Randolph,” though he had others.

Rudolph moved to Cherokee County, N.C., where he apparently lived in rental properties, hunkering down in a trailer from November 1997 to February 1998.

In July 1998, Newsweek magazine interviewed another Rudolph girlfriend saying that he acted mysteriously, and that he lied about traveling to the western United States to fight forest fires.

She reported met Rudolph in a grocery store in December 1997. “I stopped and asked him, 'Whatcha been doin'?' But he just started at me real strange,” Newsweek reported. The bombing of the New Woman All Women Health Care abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., took place the following month. An off-duty police officer was killed in the blast, a nurse critically injured.

Strange disconnects
There are curious disconnects in the follow-through of Rudolph's beliefs:

He is accused of the February 1997 bombing of the Otherside Lounge, an Atlanta nightclub frequented by lesbian patrons, but apparently held his younger brother, Jamie, close despite Jamie's coming out that he was gay. “Jamie and Eric were pretty close,” Cathy said. “He was his shadow.”

Deborah Rudolph recalled a similar dichotomy of mind for the SPLC report. “He never talked about it,” she said of Jamie's disclosure. “But boy, let somebody else be gay and he was very verbal, calling them sodomites and faggots.”

His distrust of authority had its limits as well. Sources told NBC News in May 2003 that after his capture in Murphy, N.C., Rudolph refused to talk to federal officials, even though he had spoken to local police — a sign, they said, of his disdain for the federal government.

The differing sides of Eric Rudolph remain the case's most intriguing aspects.

Whatever more is learned about the enigma of his life, it's already known that the life of Eric Rudolph has had parallels with lives of other disaffected Americans who've found a haven in extremism.
 
Perhaps unintentionally, Deborah Rudolph invoked a disturbing parallel of her own.

“In his mind, Eric believes that what he’s doing is right,” she said. “Just like Osama bin Laden thinks what he’s doing is right.”

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