Feed drop: Introducing 'American Shrapnel'

Father Wants Us Dead

NJ.com

News, True Crime

4.6 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2025

⏱️ 3 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From our sister news site AL.com comes 'American Shrapnel.' The Olympics explode on a July night in 1996. The largest pipe bomb the country has ever seen. A string of bombings shakes Atlanta for the next year. Thousands of photos and videos produce one blurry image of the attacker, a photo so grainy the FBI called him “Blob Man.” Agents zero in on the wrong man, the media follows suit, and the real bomber slips away. Until Birmingham. In Alabama, the Blob Man finally makes a misstep. He detonates another bomb, but this time someone sees something. A college student asks himself a question: Why, when everyone else is rushing to see what happened, is that man running away? That curious student breaks open what was then the largest manhunt in U.S. history: the search for Eric Robert Rudolph. Years pass. No trace. Does he have help? Is he planning more attacks? In American Shrapnel, the latest podcast from the Murrow-winning Alabama Media Group, join 2x Pulitzer Prize winner John Archibald and award-winning journalist Becca Andrews as they track the path of destruction — from the bombings, through the manhunt, and back to the twisted politics that fueled it. You’ll hear the stories of survivors, radicals and heroes. This isn’t a story of the past. The anger that fueled it has only grown stronger today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Atlanta, 1996.
0:05.0	There's a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes.
0:12.0	They'd only get 20.
0:15.0	The largest pipe bomb America had ever seen tore through a crowd at the Atlanta Olympic Games.
0:24.6	Then a Georgia abortion clinic.
0:27.6	Then a lesbian bar.
0:30.6	Two years, three bombs. No answers.
0:34.6	Until Birmingham, where he bombed another abortion.
0:38.3	A cop dead. A nurse maimed.
0:50.3	And the blood was still on the wall.
0:53.3	It never came off. Each year, pieces of his uniform
0:57.7	would come up when it rained. But finally, a witness. He saw it all. So began the largest manhunt
1:08.7	in American history, the search for Eric Robert Rudolph.
1:13.6	He knew the area. He's like, this is where I can hide, and nobody's going to find me.
1:20.6	American Tropinal is a story of a homegrown terrorist.
1:26.6	He's got very cold, dark eyes, you know, and I don't think he was remorseful, in the least.
1:34.3	He would either be famous or infamous, that he was either going to do something great,
1:40.3	or he was going to shock the hell out of everybody.
1:50.0	It's the story of victims and survivors, heists and unlike the heroes of sympathizers
1:54.0	and a part of America that embraces violence in the name of God.
1:59.0	I think there's no way he was not somehow assisted in his years on the run a little bit.
2:05.5	Of course he had help.
	...

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