Outsiders look in

The wit of mountain subtlety was clearly lost on some of the hundred or so reporters who crammed into the wooden plank railroad depot in Murphy for the brief press conference with Cherokee County Deputy Sean Matthews Saturday night. Matthews was the third officer on the scene at the Save-A-Lot dumpster, but the first to recognize the midnight scavenger as Rudolph.

“When did you know it was him?” a TV reporter asked.

“When I saw him,” answered Matthews. That wasn’t exactly what the reporter was hoping for.

“What about him keyed you into the fact that this might be Eric Robert Rudolph?” asked another.

Two more reporters took a stab at the same question, until a fifth asked specifically “Was it those piercing eyes?” Matthews conceded “yes,” producing an answer that finally satiated reporters: “Aha! It was the piercing eyes,” they scribbled in their notebooks.

Then on to how Matthews felt.

“Now Sean, it’s not every day that you realize one of the top 10 most wanted criminals in America is standing before you. You must have felt something? Were there butterflies, elation, fear?” attempted one reporter.

“All of that,” Matthews answered.

“Did you and the other officers sit around and talk about Rudolph?” asked one.

“His name came up,” Matthews responded, but offered no accounts of long hours at the local Waffle King surmising about Rudolph’s whereabouts, or a dream of being the hero who captured the fugitive.

“What about all this attention? How is it affecting you now that you are suddenly a celebrity?”

“It’s different,” Matthews said, ending his portion of the press conference. Matthews’ ability to fend off hungry reporters with never more than a five-word sentence might win him a job as Ari Fleischer’s replacement.

Locals look the other way

Those who claim they would have helped Rudolph — or at least not reported him if they saw him – extend beyond those from his tightknit community or those who share his philosophy. Some just like the fact he’s pulled a fast one on the FBI all these years.

Many folks say they wouldn’t have recognized Rudolph. Looking for someone with shaggy hair and a big beard, the fellow that was captured with short hair and only two days of stubble “looked totally different,” said Tammy Luther, 34, of Andrews.

But few were actively looking any more. Robin Hughes of Andrews said she felt safe and didn’t scrutinize people.

“The only time I look at somebody crazy is if they are dressed funny,” Hughes said, describing funny as “the way people in Asheville look with colored hair.”

David Garrett of Cherokee has spent a lot of time on the Appalachian Trail and said he never would have spotted him.

“He might have been just another hiker, just another bearded, dirty guy,” Garrett said.

“I was more concerned about bears honestly,” said James Vaughan, an Appalachian Trail hiker from Texas.

Others believe the evidence against Rudolph is scant. While national media are depicting that belief as ignorance or an empathy for Rudolph, the “show-me-the-proof” attitude is a testimony to the mindset of Appalachian people and the constitutional freedoms they uphold.

“They’re trying to make him guilty before he even gets a trial,” said Tony Cable, a log hauler who lives in Andrews. While Rudolph may be responsible for some of the bombings, Cable doesn’t think he bombed the Olympics. It doesn’t fit, he said. Misty Brooks of Bryson City agrees.

“I’m not convinced he’s guilty,” Brooks said. Many question his portrayal as a dangerous criminal, pointing out that he wasn’t carrying a weapon when captured.

Brooks and Cable believe the FBI, embarrassed they still hadn’t come up with a suspect for the Olympics bombing two years after the fact, pinned it on Rudolph. Of course, running and hiding made him look guilty, Brooks said.

“He’s very intelligent. I don’t know why he didn’t leave the area,” Brooks said.

That sentiment has been echoed over and over in recent days. Some, though, are hardly surprised.

“It takes money to get to Mexico,” pointed out Gary Rogers of Murphy. Cable sat in his pick-up in the Ingle’s parking lot in Murphy Sunday, talking through the open window while he smoked cigarettes. His wife and daughter peered around him to offer their two cents. Why leave? Here, he supposedly had a network of supporters, slipping him supplies.

“He wasn’t way out in the woods where they were looking. He was right close by to town, up in the woods behind someone’s house,” surmised Roy Maney of Bryson City.

Running scared

The prospect that Rudolph eluded the FBI for the past five years while never leaving the area infuriates the FBI, and they have decided to retrace Rudolph’s footsteps to find his old campsites.

“We’re going to have to work backwards, where ever he was and wherever he’s been,” FBI director Chris Swecker said at a press conference Saturday. “We are trying not to become an occupational force here.” Swecker encouraged those with information to call 704.377.9200. Those with information have yet to give it up, and it seems unlikely now that anyone would call a long distance Charlotte number to do so.

Some are grumbling over the FBI’s obsession with retracing Rudolph’s footsteps. More taxpayer money for what? An additional charge of illegal camping in a national forest? At a press conference Saturday, reporters drilled FBI agents about what evidence they expected to find in the woods. Swecker said he could not comment on forensics.

Some, though, do think it’s a good idea to comb the woods, like Richard Moore of the Little Choge section of the Nantahala Lake.

“It would be interesting to know where he’s been the past five years,” Moore said.

But Moore also said he hopes they are more courteous. Last time, he remembers a telephone lineman in a marked telephone truck who wasn’t allowed up the remote gravel roads long Nantahala Lake to string a telephone wire.

The Nantahala Outdoor Center is glad the FBI is returning to retrace Rudolph’s footsteps. Agents just bought about a dozen backpacks this weekend.

Others are more skeptical.

“I don’t think they’ll do much good retracing his footsteps unless he tells them where he’s been,” said Nellie Hughes, relaxing at her lakeside vacation cabin on the shore of Nantahala Lake Sunday afternoon.

Hughes likes to tell people how the FBI rented her cabin for three months in the summer of 1998. It has a beautiful view and a fishing and swimming dock. She had never thought twice about Rudolph being in the area until last summer, when she stopped leaving her purse in the cabin when she went on walks.

“After a couple years of not finding him, you didn’t know whether he was camped out right behind where you were at,” Hughes said, waving to the dense, brushy hillside that rose up from the shore of the lake.

Most likely, the FBI is looking for evidence linking Rudolph’s campsites to locals who could be charged with “harboring and aiding a fugitive” rather than evidence that would connect Rudolph with bombings seven years ago.

That has many locals scared to talk for fear the FBI will come knocking again. The grandmother of Jeff Postell, the officer who caught Rudolph, was warned by the FBI not to talk to media, “don’t even tell them where your son went to high school.” While proud of Postell and eager to talk, she shooed reporters off her doorstep Saturday, saying the FBI could be coming by any minute.

“From our point of view, we didn’t really have a problem with them. They had a job to do,” Jeff Howard, a builder from Murphy, said of the FBI agents. “Some of the locals up where he’s from didn’t take it too well. That goes to the old adage blood’s thicker than water.”

Around in circles

During the FBI’s five-year wilderness manhunt, they frequented the Nantahala Outdoor Center in the Nantahala Gorge, a wilderness area they combed extensively.

Mary Kelley, an NOC employee, said she sold a dozen FBI agents camelbacks and Smart Wool socks.

“They all had to have the same stuff,” Kelley said. The agents are exempt from sales tax, and the store’s workers initially could not ring up purchases without automatically including tax. That was fixed quickly, however, said store manager James R. Jackson.

“The FBI and the ATF spent a good deal of money in here,” Jackson said. “They’re real good customers. They tried to spend locally.”

The FBI also purchased boots locally, from Roper’s boot store in Topton where Rudolph bought a pair of boots in 1997, marking one of the last confirmed sightings. They bought Danner boots with the exact same sole as the boots Rudolph had purchased, which could have made tracking difficult, said a store employee.

The FBI installed surveillance cameras at the back door of the restaurant where trash bins were kept. They hid in the woods with binoculars keeping watch on trashcans. They hired fly fishing guides and rafters to take them down the river. They rented horses from local stables. They rented mountain bikes and kept them on racks on their Suburbans, possibly to blend in as tourists or possibly for their days off.

But there wasn’t much blending in, say locals, even on their casual days when they wore shorts and T-shirts and kept their guns in a quick draw fanny pack. Their saunter and shoulder build was usually a give away. Along with the sales tax exemption forms.

They hired local woodsmen to hike around and look for Rudolph and signs of campsites. Mostly, these were folks who spent a lot of time on the trails anyway, and picked up a little extra cash to keep their eye out for clues. How to tell Rudolph’s stash of pork and beans under a rock overhang from that of local hunter’s is anyone’s guess.

The FBI took heat-censored photographs from helicopters and hiked to hot spots the following day, hoping to find remnants of a campsite, or possiblly just deer foot prints.

Jackson took the outfitter store’s Rudolph wanted poster down last summer. “It was just time,” Jackson said, plus they needed the display space in the front window. The poster found a home in the upstairs employee bathroom for a while but disappeared off the wall.

Roper’s boot store said its wanted poster fell off the front window last summer, and as it was looking quite aged and raggedy, they never put it back up. The Topton Post Office said they didn’t have one. A rafting outfitter said theirs kept getting stolen, and after going through five posters, they gave up.

Rudolph sitings

Myths of Rudolph sightings are a dime a dozen among hikers and outdoor enthusiasts.

Nikki Prothero, 21, told a story that in retrospect qualifies as a potential Rudolph sighting. Last Tuesday, from her vantage point at the window of Slow Joe’s Cafe, she saw a man rummaging through trashcans by the river. A little later, he turned up at the back door of the food stand with a can of cream of mushroom soup in his hand asking for a can opener.

“I said, ‘I can open it for you inside. Ours is mounted to the wall,’” Prothero recounted. She opened the can and returned it to him, offering him a spoon as well. Then it got weird.

“He asked me, ‘Have you been saved? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?’” Prothero said. Given Rudolph’s religious nature – he asked his attorney only one favor, to see his Bible made it to Alabama – it could have been him. Only the guy had lighter brown hair than Rudolph and no moustache, which the real Rudolph had when he was captured Saturday, Prothero added. Nonetheless, it’s worth mulling over, and the story has been repeated several times at Nantahala Outdoor Center since Rudolph’s capture.

Jason Ewing, 30, a professional van driver with Rafting in the Smokies, has been awed by the Rudolph talk of his coworkers.

Stephen Farber reluctantly shared a story about his Rudolph sighting, one he rarely tells because no one believes him. He was 14 and hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to the Nantahala Gorge with a friend in the summer of 1998. On the Georgia section of the trail, they ran into a man packing up a camouflage tarp some distance off the trail. He went by the name Billy Joe and wouldn’t say where he was from. He had little food, talked about being broke and needing to call his girlfriend to get money. He camped with Farber that night, but again walked some distance off the trail, buried into some brush and wrapped the camouflage tarp over himself. He slept with an ax by his side.

When out of earshot of this fellow, Farber and his friend debated whether it might by Rudolph. They dared each other to say, “So how is you sister recovering from that abortion?” to see what kind of response it roused from the fellow, but neither did. Farber remembered Billy Joe made frequent racist comments on the trail, but the pair were not afraid of the man.

“We knew what he was and what he did, but he was nice to us,” Farber said.

Farber and his friend even hitchhiked into a town, Suches, Ga., with the alleged Rudolph character. He called someone to ask for money, and he bought the boys cigarettes because they were under age. In parting, they gave the fellow rice and Pop Tarts.

It was another week before they got off the trail. When they did, posters of Rudolph were plastered everywhere.

“The dude looked exactly like him, same height, same weight, everything,” Farber said.

Farber’s older brother, Michael, is sad the saga is over. No more poring through Appalachian Trail rosters at shelters looking for Rudolph signatures, of which there are plenty.

“The mystery has already died down for us over the past few years,” said Lawrence English of Murphy, who said he rarely thought of Rudolph anymore.

A few miles from the wilderness cabin where Rudolph lived as a teen, Todd Bateman manned the counter of Bateman’s Lakeside Camp store this weekend, dishing out directions to reporters searching for Rudolph’s old home. The plank floors were worn smooth with age. Customers bought Cokes in a bottle and admired the wooden sign in the window that read “Patrolled by Eric Rudolph.”

“I’ll have to take my sign down now,” lamented Bateman.