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- [00:01]
Mary Harris
The election has come and gone. Now we're in a new era. It can be easy to get discouraged, frustrated, but you can't afford not to pay attention. You need trustworthy, independent journalism to cut through the noise and hold power to account. I'm Mary Harris, host of what next from slate.com. we are a Daily news podcast with a kind of transparent, smart, yet tongue in cheek analysis you can only find at Slate. Follow and listen to what Next wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:33]
John Archibald
Once Again, a Bomb in the Night.
- [00:38]
Memory Cresswell
Once again, a second bomb discovered after.
- [00:41]
John Archibald
The first one goes off.
- [00:43]
Memory Cresswell
It happened outside a lesbian club called the Other side.
- [00:48]
Mary Harris
I'm Memory Cresswell and yeah, living at Incoming Georgia and was involved in the 1997 other side bombing. It was a friend of mine's birthday that night and we had gone out to a Mexican place and then they begged me to go to the Other side for a little while and so I agreed to go because it was her birthday. And we got there about 9:30 and they were shooting pool and I was sitting on a at a high top table on a stool facing the bar and I had a little short shirt on and so I kept standing up and tucking my shirt in because it was driving me nuts. And the pool table was behind me and my friend was shooting pool and she said, hey Memory, watch this shot. So when I stood up to tuck my shirt in, I turned around to watch the shot.
- [01:40]
John Archibald
It was one of those moments that should have been nothing. Tying your shoe, ordering pizza, sliding behind the wheel of your car, stepping off the curb into the street.
- [01:51]
Becca Andrews
It was the kind of moment that ought to just fade. The kind not worth holding onto. But for Memory Cresswell, after that night, nothing was the same.
- [02:01]
Mary Harris
And that's when the bomb blast went off and it hit me. I had a 4 inch concrete nail blown through the back of my right upper arm and it came out my kind of my chest and it punctured my brachial artery. And I initially thought I had been shot. My friends rushed in front of me and I thought that people had shot in through the windows and I didn't know anything had happened at first and all of a sudden I started sweating really bad and then I had this really overwhelming cold feeling go over me and I looked down and there was blood spurting out of my arm. And so I grabbed my friend and I said, I think I've been shot. And about that time I couldn't breathe, like I couldn't catch my breath. And she was like, oh my gosh, and my friend was a dental hygienist. And she took her purse strap and, you know, of course people were freaking out, just running over us and jumping over us. And she took her purse strap to try to do a tourniquet on my arm because she saw how much blood I was losing. By then I was having a hard time breathing. I couldn't keep my consciousness. And she was screaming, somebody please call the ambulance. Call 911. Call. And nobody was paying attention. People were just running towards the door, not knowing that there was another bomb in the parking lot.
- [03:25]
Becca Andrews
Hi, I'm Becca Andrews.
- [03:27]
John Archibald
And I'm John Archibald. This is American Shrapnel, a story of rage and violence in the name of righteousness, of death in the name of life.
- [03:36]
Becca Andrews
But it's not just one man's story. It's also the story of the people who bore the brunt of his anger. The people targeted by the extremists that molded Eric Rudolph, that drove him to kill.
- [03:49]
John Archibald
It's the story, thank goodness, of a bad bomber. Eric Rudolph had been frustrated time after time by luck or fate or busybodies or bureaucrats or gravity itself. So his well laid plans for mass destruction failed to deliver the scale of devastation he envisioned.
- [04:08]
Becca Andrews
Some might call those interventions miracles. Others, coincidence.
- [04:13]
John Archibald
Remember July 27, 1996? The bomb that morning at Centennial park in Atlanta started it all.
- [04:21]
Becca Andrews
That pipe bomb killed Alice Hawthorne right in front of her teenage daughter. It also triggered a fatal heart attack for a photojournalist. Shrapnel wounded 111 people, which is a lot. But it could have been so much worse.
- [04:38]
John Archibald
Worse was Rudolph's intention. At 12:58 in the morning, as revelers filled the park to celebrate one of the proudest moments in the South's history, Rudolph dialed 911 from a bank of payphones. You have 30 minutes. The bomb exploded in 20.
- [04:57]
Becca Andrews
Rudolph told the feds he had called 911 earlier, but he had to call back because an operator hung up on him. But David Namius, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta at the time, calls bullshit. He thinks Rudolph just wanted to kill cops.
- [05:10]
Memory Cresswell
He clearly was trying to hurt people. But there was no need to make a warning call. I mean, the only purpose of a warning call, particularly one that says you have 30 minutes when you only have 20 minutes, is to get a law enforcement response. And that's what he got.
- [05:29]
Mike Wisenant
That was the largest pipe bomb ever found in the United States at that time.
- [05:33]
John Archibald
Mike Wisenin has been studying that bomb for years, using a model of it to teach federal agents about Bomb construction and components.
- [05:41]
Mike Wisenant
It used black powder, which is a relatively low power explosive. It used some standard things you see in most bombs, like a Big Ben alarm clock.
- [05:51]
John Archibald
That's a wind up clock like you see in the cartoons with the bells on top. They look like cymbals or Mickey Mouse ears.
- [05:59]
Mike Wisenant
It used eight pinning nails as shrapnel. But it had a unique aspect to it too. It had a piece of metal, 1-8-8 steel, metal that was used as sort of a directional device. If you're familiar with the claymore mine. Claymore mines are designed to shoot shrapnel in one direction. This bomb was also designed to shoot shrapnel in one direction. Was very unusual in the United States. Probably less than 5% of all bombs found would have that.
- [06:35]
Memory Cresswell
It was put under the TV tower aimed toward the stage. I think there were about 10,000 people in that pit area in front of the stage. And so, you know, the clear design was to shoot shrapnel through a crowd of people.
- [06:55]
Becca Andrews
The steel plate was designed to kill. It was designed to spray nails like a wall of shrapnel directly into the crowd. You could still see the impact of those nails in a bronze sculpture in the park near the spot where Alice Hawthorne died. The two of us visited the park and we stood where she stood and we ran our hands over the scars on the statue. It is emotional.
- [07:31]
John Archibald
Rudolph put his bomb in an Army Alice pack and hid it beneath a park bench before he called 911. A security guard named Richard Jewell famously spotted that pack. And he wasn't the only one.
- [07:44]
Memory Cresswell
Between the time he left the bag and the time Richard Jewell spotted it, this group of kids who were working at the speedo tent came by. They had been drinking and they saw the backpack. Some of them thought it might have something they could steal or some alcohol in it. And one of them kind of kicked it and it tipped over.
- [08:06]
Becca Andrews
That would turn out to be a lucky break.
- [08:09]
John Archibald
Jewell's life was turned upside down when he was wrongly vilified as a suspect. But now in Centennial park, he has a monument of his own.
- [08:19]
Memory Cresswell
Jewel had already found the device. Trying to think maybe right around or maybe even a minute or two before the call was made, he called the bomb techs. There's a story there. There was an ATF and FBI guy, I think, and when we interviewed him, they said they'd been. They'd responded to a million suspicious packages in their career, including a bunch at the Olympics, and they'd never seen an actual bomb. And the One guy, you know, they crawl up to it and they kind of open it up. He puts his flashlight and sees these giant pipes wrapped in nails with a battery and backs off fast and says, like, I was freaked out. And so they start calling in law enforcement to get the crowd back. And so a lot of the most severely injured people in the Centennial park bombing were actually law enforcement agents hit with shrapnel, like in their back as they were literally pushing people back. And so our theory was, you know, the target was he would be happy just causing a sensation and killing a lot of people, but law enforcement was certainly a target.
- [09:30]
John Archibald
This podcast has a lot of talk about crazy stuff done in the name of religion. Two non preachy preachers I know, Clay Farrington and Ross Furio, might explode at the thought. They talk about hard issues in an easy way, with understanding and without judgment on their podcast, Armchair Theology. So if you want an alternative view to those who use the Bible as an excuse to kill, give them a listen. Find them@armchairtheo.com and wherever podcasts are found. Let's go back to those Speedo boys. That moment of hooliganism, of temptation, may have saved a ton of lives. They knocked the bomb over. So the steel plate directed the nails on a less lethal path, and so.
- [10:13]
Memory Cresswell
It tipped on its back, and most of the shrapnel shot up instead of out. But for that, you might have had a thousand people injured and 100 killed.
- [10:26]
Becca Andrews
Those were two pretty remarkable strokes of luck. Rudolf could not have been happy. All that effort, all that risk, all that opportunity for attention For a guy who built his own claymore mine with black powder and construction supplies, things did not go the way he planned.
- [10:44]
John Archibald
Rudolph would change some things before he bombed again.
- [10:48]
Becca Andrews
174 days after the Olympic bombing, on the morning of January 17, 1997, two bombs rocked a family planning clinic in the northern Atlanta suburbs. It was a clear escalation both in bomb construction and tactics.
- [11:04]
John Archibald
But again, what seems like dumb luck saved lives at that clinic in Sandy Springs.
- [11:10]
Mike Wisenant
Bombers evolve over time. They learn, and they unfortunately get better at what they do. In the Sandy Springs bomb, we see for the first time that he uses a decoy bomb. One bomb that was planted next to the building that had no shrapnel in it. Then he planted a second bomb that was outside in the parking lot that again had the metal plate in it, and it was directed into the parking lot, and it was set to detonate shortly after the first bomb. As the IRA learned many years ago, you have A first bomb that's designed to bring first responders into an area and a second bomb to kill those responders. And that's what this bomb was designed to do.
- [11:57]
Becca Andrews
But again, it didn't work, not the way it was supposed to, because somebody wizen it remembers a fire chief Anomias remembers the methadone patient parked their car at the corner of the parking lot right next to the second bomb.
- [12:12]
Mike Wisenant
And it absorbed virtually all the blast and the shrapnel. There were some people who were injured from the blast effect, but no one was killed.
- [12:21]
Becca Andrews
Reporters were actually on the scene when the second bomb went off. You can hear it happening here.
- [12:27]
Mary Harris
Where were you in the building and where was the explosion?
- [12:31]
Memory Cresswell
This second explosion about an hour later injured a television photographer, an ATF agent, and at least four others.
- [12:39]
John Archibald
One by one, the bombs escalated. In the days after the Olympics, Rudolph decided he needed more powerful explosives. So he set his sights on dynamite stored at the Austin powder company in Asheville, North Carolina.
- [12:52]
Mary Harris
He got the dynamite after doing cop.
- [12:56]
Memory Cresswell
Centennial Olympic park, because that's why he.
- [12:58]
Mary Harris
Made the switch from black powder to dynamite.
- [13:01]
Becca Andrews
This is Paul Kish, a lawyer who would later represent Rudolph in Georgia. Rudolph told him all about how he smuggled dynamite from the company at night. Trip after trip across cold water.
- [13:12]
Memory Cresswell
He says, yeah, that damn river is cold.
- [13:15]
Mary Harris
So I'd load up my Alice backpack, you know, with like 20 pounds, you know, dynamite in the middle of the night, and there's these goddamn slippery rocks.
- [13:21]
Memory Cresswell
I'm thinking, I got dynamite on my back.
- [13:23]
Mary Harris
I better be firm with each step.
- [13:34]
John Archibald
We don't know if he had help inside or out, but in his writings, Rudolph claims he staked out the company and found no security. He scaled its barbed wire fence, drilled out two locks and made his way inside. He packed dynamite in his backpack and carried it back over the fence. But I across a cow pasture in the snow in five separate loads. It was risky stuff, dangerous, but in a way, having all that dynamite saved his life.
- [14:02]
Becca Andrews
We'll get back to that. For now, let's return to how Rudolph's bombs escalated.
- [14:08]
Mike Wisenant
And we see also a graduation of explosive. Okay, the first bomb in the Olympics used that black powder I mentioned. The next bombs, the Birmingham bomb, use nitroglycerin based dynamite. So it is a higher order of explosive. Again, the bomber's growing, he's learning, and he did not accomplish his goals. I don't believe at the first bombings. So in the second bombing, he wanted to make sure that he accomplished his goal, that is killing people a little.
- [14:40]
Becca Andrews
More Than a month after the Sandy Springs attack, Rudolph planted two bombs outside a lesbian bar in the Atlanta suburbs. The other side Lounge memory.
- [14:50]
John Archibald
Creswell was injured by the first bomb, but that attack also could have been much worse.
- [14:57]
Mary Harris
One of the FBI says, I want to show you a trajectory of the diagram from where the shrapnel came in, where the nail came in. And they said, had you been sitting down at that table where you'd been all night long, at the high top table, facing that bar where that nail came in, it would have gone straight through your head. But because you stood up and turned around, it went through the back of your shoulder. So the trajectory changed. I mean, it would have killed me had I been sitting there and that, you know, I was saved. I was saved for a reason.
- [15:29]
John Archibald
After Creswell was hit, patrons ran outside, not knowing that other bomb was out there. Fortunately, agents found it and detonated it with a robot. It was one hell of an explosion.
- [15:41]
Memory Cresswell
When they were trying to disable the second bomb, and it went off. That piece of steel got shot out, folded in half, almost like a piece of bread. Went about a quarter mile, went through the gutter of a house, and landed inside the front door.
- [16:05]
Becca Andrews
We keep saying it could have been worse, and it could have been. Lord knows that Rudolph wanted to kill so many more people than he was able to. But don't mistake a lack of death for a lack of impact memory. Cresswell has suffered for years, physically and emotionally. So have her family and friends.
- [16:25]
Mary Harris
You're impacted by that for the rest of your life, you know, so it scars you. I didn't go a lot of places anyway, and so I was very cautious not to do that so that I wouldn't be exposed to that anyway. But, yeah, I was very fearful. And PTSD was rampant at the time. I was drinking a lot. I was doing a lot of destructive things at the time and desperately needed therapy because of that. That was, you know, going in and out of relationships more than I should and very unhealthy.
- [17:03]
Becca Andrews
She says nearly dying at a lesbian bar led to public discussion of her sexuality and cost her her job. It was hell for conservative women from the Mississippi Delta.
- [17:13]
Mary Harris
Well, that was. They added me to the whole world. I mean, I had friends in Australia that saw my name on the news. They were seeing it on cnn. So everybody in the whole world knew at that point. And so there was no hiding any more of that. You know, everybody knew. And my mother was embarrassed. My family was embarrassed.
- [17:32]
John Archibald
It was freaking horrible. But it wasn't enough for Rudolph. So then came Birmingham.
- [17:40]
Mike Wisenant
So that's why he went to a remote control device. So it was an evolution for him. And so he's using a more powerful explosive, he's using dynamite, and he's using a remote control device to set off the bomb.
- [17:54]
Becca Andrews
Rudolph hid behind a tree in Birmingham. You may recall he pushed the button as off duty police officer Sandy Sanderson walked over to examine the camouflage bomb. Sanderson was killed. Nurse Emily Lyons was maimed so severely she's had to have more than 50 surgeries.
- [18:14]
Memory Cresswell
I think he wanted to make sure he got somebody in Birmingham. And you know, in many ways it's even more horrific than setting off a bomb with 10,000, well, 50,000 people in the park and 10,000 probably within range to actually watch somebody stand over a bomb and set it off in their face.
- [18:38]
John Archibald
That's what keeps coming up for people. What kind of guy, in the name of life itself, builds bigger and better bombs to kill more people? What kind of a person stands in the shadows behind a tree to kill a cop and maim a woman at a distance with the push of a button?
- [18:56]
Mary Harris
He's evil. I think he's evil. I think he has no respect for life. I think he has no respect for people. I think he's evil. He doesn't deserve to be here. But I know this. I know it was designed to kill people. It wasn't designed just to destroy a clinic. It was designed to kill somebody who was ever in its way.
- [19:23]
John Archibald
That's Senator Doug Jones, U.S. attorney in the Northern district of Alabama at the time.
- [19:28]
Mary Harris
But he was waiting and was going to make a conscious decision to kill somebody that was going into that clinic. And it just so happened that Sandy found him and he was seeing him with it and Emily standing near the door. I get chills thinking about it. He is no soul. He is nothing but pure evil. I can't say that enough.
- [19:57]
Becca Andrews
James Blanton is the Birmingham cop who interviewed Jermaine Hughes, the witness who changed everything.
- [20:02]
Memory Cresswell
A lot of times it doesn't take somebody really tough or bad to kill somebody.
- [20:07]
Mary Harris
Pulling a five pound trigger out of emotions. This is, this is plotting. This is cold blooded.
- [20:15]
Memory Cresswell
I know what I'm gonna do.
- [20:16]
Mary Harris
I'm not.
- [20:16]
Memory Cresswell
This is not emotions.
- [20:19]
Mary Harris
That's different. This guy here is cold and calculated.
- [20:34]
Becca Andrews
Diane Derzis, the owner of the New Woman All Women clinic, said you could see the physical effects of the bomb even up until the clinic was torn down a few years ago.
- [20:43]
Mary Harris
By the next day they had the pink threads up that showed the view of all of the shrapnel and where it came from. And, I mean, that was the thing. When you went in and saw that they went to actual chairs, I mean, it would be like you'd see it going right towards that pillow. It was aimed in the middle. Middle of each one of those staff would have been in and patients would have been in. And Sandy, the security guard, who was also a Birmingham policeman, when he was blown apart, he landed on the brick wall. And the blood, when we tried to clean that off, never completely erased. And the pieces of his uniform, just thousands of pieces. Threads came up for years afterwards, every time it would rain.
- [21:48]
Becca Andrews
Scott Morrow is a lawyer now, but at the time he was a Birmingham cop and head of security for New Woman, All Women. He was Sandy Sanderson's boss. Sanderson was not scheduled to work that morning, but he filled in for another officer. Here's how Scott remembers Sandy.
- [22:05]
Memory Cresswell
Sandy was unique. He was not from Alabama either. Hard worker, rough around the edges, tatted up, but a kind person. But it was a difficult place to work and probably the hardest place to work in the United States at the. At the time, with all the protesting. And it was difficult to be a police officer there, you know.
- [22:28]
Becca Andrews
Now, Scott and Sandy had talked about things like poking packages, and he shouldn't have done it, but that may have saved lives too.
- [22:37]
Memory Cresswell
You know, if Sandy hadn't done that, they would have been. Emily would have opened the door. There would have been people lined up waiting, and it would have been a lot more, a lot worse people killed.
- [22:51]
John Archibald
But it's not just the people who were physically injured. Rudolph's bombs changed the life of paramedics, nurses, cops, even bystanders. Chris Edson was on the scene of the Birmingham bombing. He's still haunted by the feeling that he could have done more to help Sandy and Emily.
- [23:09]
Chris Edson
It was a normal day. And then it was, you know, not. I mean, it was something that really kind of, I guess, changed my life in a way. I mean, it's definitely a formative kind of thing that is part of who I am, I guess now just coming to terms with the feeling of helplessness, of being unprepared of. In a way, like the experience told me how.
- [23:40]
Mary Harris
How.
- [23:42]
Chris Edson
I mean, nobody knows how they'd respond in situations like that, and. And I didn't. I like to think that I. I would respond in a responsible way and a. But all that stuff is. I mean, it's such a visceral kind of thing and just coming to terms with that, that I. I wasn't prepared and that I did freeze. I mean, it wasn't for that long. But then after that, I carried around gloves and I carried around like a CPR face mask for years in my car. I didn't want to be. If something did happen again, I wasn't going to respond the same way.
- [24:32]
Becca Andrews
Edson followed the manhunt for Rudolph for years. And that day at the clinic still affects him.
- [24:38]
Chris Edson
And then. And then little things like one Saving Private Ryan came out. It was not that far. I mean, it was. I don't know if it was a year after. Yeah. But seeing it and then just like. I mean, I was bawling like a baby. And I know it's a. It's a powerful movie by itself, but I mean, I was thinking about the blast the whole time.
- [25:05]
John Archibald
And Emily Lyons herself, she has no memory of that horrific day in January of 98, but thousands of moments of pain she'd gladly forget. She remembers the summer of that year when the FBI came to her door.
- [25:19]
Mary Harris
I learned who had done it and how they did it. They said it was remote controlled. I just started crying. I said, so somebody actually stood there and watched the destruction that they caused that day. Rudolph was across the street behind the tree, kind of like a coward. And he pushed the button. I had never known anyone to have that much hate destruction. Wanting to kill as he did, knowing that he pushed the button and the destruction just went from there.
- [26:01]
John Archibald
Lyons refuses to call herself a victim. She is a survivor. She knows the bomb that killed Sandy and forever changed her life was the result of Rudolph's repeated attempts to make his bombs more lethal to more and more people.
- [26:17]
Becca Andrews
Forgiveness for Lyons is out of the question, but there is some satisfaction.
- [26:23]
Mary Harris
He didn't get what he wanted. He wanted more people there that day. I think there would have been about eight patients and probably four other staff members that day. That he wanted to get along with Sandy because it was aimed at the front door. He would have pushed that button, killed all of them. You say you'll never join the Navy, never climb Mount Fuji on a port visit or break the sound barrier. Joining the Navy sounds crazy. Saying never actually is. Learn why@navy.com America's Navy forged by the sea bundle and safe with Expedia, you were made to follow your favorite band. And from the front row, we were made to quietly save you.
- [27:15]
John Archibald
More Expedia made to travel.
- [27:18]
Mary Harris
Savings vary and subject to availability. Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.
- [27:30]
Becca Andrews
Bombs don't discriminate. The shrapnel hit everything in its path, including People who Rudolph might actually agree with on a lot of issues. Memory. Creswell wonders why he'd rather blow her up than listen to her.
- [27:44]
Mary Harris
You know, the funny thing is, what he doesn't realize is even though I have a certain lifestyle that he might not like, I'm conservative. I have conservative beliefs just like he does. I'm probably voting for the same people that he's voting for, which is odd. You know, he doesn't realize that if he took the time to get to know some of the people that he was out hurting or having certain feelings for, he might align with them, he might like them, he might soften his heart to certain people. You know, if he just got to know people.
- [28:19]
John Archibald
She's had a lot of time to think about that, and she's fought hard to get herself into a better place.
- [28:26]
Becca Andrews
Talking to her, it's impressive. She's impressive. But it's very clear that her fight isn't over and that it likely never will be.
- [28:35]
Mary Harris
I love to shoot guns. Go figure. I want to be. I want to always be prepared for any circumstance. And I've trained with a guy that is a former. He's a veteran, he's a former police officer. And so he knows how to train me, right? And so I was in the gun range with him, and there was a guy that was testing another gun in another room, and it literally sounded like a cannon. And I lost it. I was shooting with him and he was working with me. He's telling me things. He was like, you're not paying attention. And it was like, I couldn't. I couldn't. I couldn't. I needed to get out of there. I had to get out of there because it sounded like a bomb, like, going off. And I just lost it. I couldn't catch our breath. I was. I started shaking. I started crying. And he was like, what is going on? And then my mother was like, it's. It's ptsd. She. She lost it. I couldn't. I had to get out of there.
- [29:48]
John Archibald
Next time on American Shrapnel.
- [29:50]
Mike Wisenant
You'll hear more.
- [29:50]
John Archibald
More from Emily Lyons and Diane Dersis, firebrands who for decades stared down a violent movement that believes anything to end abortion is justifiable, even murder.
- [30:06]
Becca Andrews
American Shrapnel is a production of Alabama Media Group. It was written and hosted by me.
- [30:11]
John Archibald
Becca Andrews and me, John Archibald. Our co creator and executive producer is John Hammondry.
- [30:20]
Becca Andrews
This episode was engineered by Daniel Potter. Our field producer is Sarah Weitz Kodachek. And our social media producers are Caroline Vincent and Mila Oliveira. Our logo and cover art were designed by Jack Browning.
- [30:33]
John Archibald
Chalan Stevens is our editor in chief. Consulting producers Dan Carson and Ashley Remkes provided valuable feedback. The song you're hearing right now is Birmingham by Beth Thornley and Rob Cairn. This episode also featured their song Everyone Falls.
- [30:51]
Becca Andrews
Special thanks to Memory Creswell, David Namius, Mike Wisenant, Paul Kish, Doug Jones, James Blanton, Diane Derzis, Scott Morrow, Chris Edson and Emily Lyons. Thanks also to Kathryn Osais Champion and the Birmingham Public Library.
- [31:08]
John Archibald
If you like our show, please leave us a rating and review and follow us on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.
- [31:16]
Becca Andrews
Thanks for listening.