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It was 6:30 on a Saturday morning exactly 20 years ago today when the phone rang in the back room at the original location of Dean’s Art & Music in downtown Andrews. Since that’s where I was staying at the time, I flipped open my cell and answered it.
“Now I’m not 100 percent on this,” said Sally Hudson, the distinguished editor of the Andrews Journal, “but I think Eric Rudolph has been arrested.”
Thus began a 15-hour adventure that ended with the Cherokee Scout and the Journal, with a lot of help from some of our colleagues, publishing an eight-page special edition that made your local newspapers the first in the country to extensively report on Rudolph’s arrest. One of the proudest moments of my career was taking a stack of special editions from our old press plant to the Scout’s box at the Cherokee County Courthouse, weaving through a throng of national and international media literally camping out in the parking lot of United Community Bank.
To answer the obvious question, yes, I made all of the other media folks pay 50 cents a copy for it. And I still have a framed copy of that Saturday night special edition hanging in my office, this one signed by Jeffrey Postell, the rookie Murphy police officer and local boy done good, who made the bust while on patrol at about 3:30 a.m. after spotting a man crouched in the road behind the Save-A-Lot grocery store’s Dumpster.
It was an inglorious end to the so-called “Army of God.” We still have the original copy of that letter, by the way; maybe we should auction it off on eBay, with all proceeds going toward a charity that teaches acceptance of people who aren’t like you. But I still think Postell should have received the $1 million reward that was being offered at the time.
Rudolph – who was on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted List for a string of bombings in Alabama and Georgia, most infamously at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta – had been on the run for five years. He somewhat cynically, somewhat jokingly and somewhat sarcastically was declared the “Hide & Seek Champion” on bumper stickers you could buy at the old Hillbilly Mall. Even after he was long gone, the Dumpster he was at became a popular spot for visitors to take photos.
However, that was a long time ago. The Scout attempted to contact Rudolph at the five- and 10-year anniversaries of his arrest, but the Colorado Supermax prison inmate declined to respond while serving out his life sentence.
In 2017, Rudolph finally agreed to a mail interview with the Scout thanks to the good work of Taylor Simonds, a local teenager who wanted to write something big and talked us into it. She’s known as Taylor Gremli today and uses her writing talents to help sell real estate; come to think of it, she really deserved that plug since she never asked us for a dime after producing two front-page stories.
What Rudolph had to say back then wasn’t surprising. He was a fan of President Donald Trump. A civil war was coming. He notably said Trump’s Supreme Court nominees lacked the “testicular circumference” to overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision, so his prognostication talents aren’t exactly foolproof.
So while it might have been interesting to ask Rudolph about that decision on this, the 20th anniversary of his arrest, we ultimately decided to just say no. Cherokee County and Nantahala have gotten a raw deal over the years, with outside media portraying local residents as basically Deliverance come to life, but we are not defined by Eric Robert Rudolph.
We had no desire to rehash all of that nonsense and, since I’m the publisher, we didn’t, no matter how many extra copies it may have sold. Seeing how one score has gone by since Rudolph was put away, this seems like the perfect time to say goodbye to that sad saga and move forward into a better and brighter future.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. You can reach him by phone, 837-5122; email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com; or on Twitter @daviddBstroh.
I was able to dig up a bundle or two of the “Manhunt over” special edition from May 31, 2003. Copies will be on the front counter in the lobby until we run out.