ATLANTA — The 1996 Olympic bombing in Atlanta was the focus of a Clint Eastwood movie, a detailed book and a TV series, all in the 2019-2020 time period. Nearly five years later, CNN and Atlanta-based Tenderfoot TV both tackle the subject again in the same week.
On Thursday, July 25, Tenderfoot, the podcast company best known for its “Up and Vanished” series, debuted two episodes of “Flashpoint,” a podcast exploring the entire arc of Eric Rudolph’s terrorist acts and the victims he left behind. He not only bombed Centennial Olympic Park but also two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar. He then hid in the North Carolina woods for five years as a fugitive before being captured in 2003.
Rudolph pleaded guilty in 2005 to the bombings and received four life sentences without possibility of parole and is now at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado, the same place that houses Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols and the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
CNN’s series “How It Really Happened,” hosted by actor Jesse L. Martin, is running two episodes on the same topic debuting this Saturday at 9 p.m. It uses vintage CNN footage from the nine-year period when the story unfolded.
“How It Really Happened” focuses more heavily than the podcast on the initial hunt for the bomber and features GBI, FBI and ATF investigators providing commentary and insight.
The first episode spends a lot of time on Richard Jewell, a security guard who first saw Rudolph’s purposely abandoned backpack and who saved lives by ensuring fewer people were near the bomb when it went off. But the FBI targeted him as suspect, which leaked to the press, who followed him for 88 days until the FBI deemed him innocent. Jewell died in 2007 but his attorney Watson Bryant provided his perspective in the episode.
The second CNN episode traces the subsequent bombings and the eventual capture of Rudolph.
Kitty Pilgrim, now a consultant on the subjects of women, peace and security, covered the Alabama abortion clinic bombing for CNN in 1997 and the often frustrating hunt for Rudolph.
“He kind of faded into the mist,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “There was so much speculation where he could have gone. We always felt he melted into the local community. We encountered many sympathetic people to his cause” in the rural mountains of North Carolina.
The host of the “Flashpoint” podcast Cole Locascio has a very personal connection to one of the bombings but in an interview with the AJC, didn’t want to reveal exactly what that was. (He makes it known by the end of the second episode.)
“It’s a story deeply rooted in me,” said Locascio, who was born less than a year after the initial bombing. “It’s a story about paradox. None of it really lives in the black and white, especially when it comes to my story. All of it very much lives in the gray. There is a unique perspective to gain from it.”
With this podcast, Locascio wanted to shed light not only on Rudolph’s motivations but also the impact his bombings had on its many victims. And he felt the audio medium allowed him to get more insight and detail from his subjects than if he had done this for TV. “It was just me and my interview subject in my tiny recording studio,” he said.
Former Star 94 news reporter Rob Stadler was picking up his twin infant daughters at a nursery upstairs in early 1997 when Rudolph’s first bomb exploded at the Sandy Springs abortion clinic. The cribs his kids had been in moments earlier were destroyed. Later, when a second bomb exploded, he was still in the vicinity reporting on what was happening for the radio station and experienced permanent hearing loss. He told Locascio he experienced PTSD for months after that traumatic event.
Dana Ford, one of the owners of Atlanta’s The Otherside Lounge, a lesbian-friendly bar which Rudolph bombed a month later, said in the podcast that the bar closed four years later after one too many death threats. “The bombing had its effects,” she said. “It wiped out our savings.”
Emily Lyons, a nurse seriously injured at the Birmingham abortion clinic he bombed in 2018, is still suffering more than a quarter-century later. She spoke to both CNN and “Flashpoint.”
“My face was covered in shrapnel holes … my eyelids were torn back,” she told CNN, noting she lost an eye in the process. She said she has since had 54 surgeries, four in the past year.
“He burned me, broke my face,” Lyons said on “Flashpoint.” “How could someone do that to someone else? Just deliberate. He thought about it. He planned on it. I just cried because you hurt me so badly and you don’t know me. Your opinion, your thoughts are no more important than mine are.”
Other recognizable voices in the podcast include former WSB-TV anchor and current AJC contributor Monica Pearson and WSB radio traffic reporter Mark McKay, who was working at CNN Sports and was just 100 yards away from where the Centennial Olympic bomb went off. (He also appears in the CNN episodes.)
“The bomb felt concussive,” said McKay in an interview with the AJC. “I felt it in my chest. That shows you how powerful it was even though I was on the other side of the venue.”
Vince Velazquez, a retired Atlanta detective who has two TV One shows “ATL Homicide” and “Deadly Case Files,” provided his voice in the podcast as well. He was a new police officer who happened to be working near the park when the bomb exploded and was knocked off his feet.
He also happened to live just a few blocks from the Sandy Springs abortion clinic and also heard those bombs go off six months later. “It shook my windows,” he told the AJC.
Coincidentally, his divorce attorney was Rob Stadler’s wife Christine, whose office was in the same building. “I’d been there several times preparing my case for court,” he said. “I was somehow connected to both events.”
“How It Really Happened” focused on the 1996 Olympic bombing and aftermath, 9 p.m. Saturday on CNN. (It will be available on Max later in the summer.)
“Flashpoint” podcast about the 1996 bombings and aftermath, available podcast platforms such as Spotify, Apple and iHeart.
