Criminal Minds (28 page)

THE KILLER IN THE EPISODE
“Doubt” (301) is a campus security guard. With murdered girls turning up on campus, it’s easy for him to attract more victims, since he’s someone they turn to for protection. Although the BAU team has a profile, Derek Morgan reminds them that Richard Jewell fit the profile of the bomber at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, but he was innocent, and the accusation ruined his life. When a defense attorney in the episode “Tabula Rasa” (319) also points out that the BAU’s profile led to Richard Jewell, Aaron Hotchner counters that when you look at the real Olympic bomber, Eric Rudolph, the profile was dead-on.

 

 

RICHARD JEWELL
was a college security guard. While working as a guard at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Jewell found a backpack containing three pipe bombs. He alerted the authorities and helped them to clear the area. The bombs exploded, killing one person and wounding more than a hundred. Another victim, a Turkish television cameraman, died of a heart attack while running to cover the blast.

Without Jewell’s discovery and a warning phone call from the real bomber, the number of dead and injured could have been considerably higher. At first Jewell was called a hero, but as the days passed, he went from hero to suspect. It was theorized that he had planted the bombs he “found,” and the whole plot stemmed from his desperate need to be seen as heroic. He was crucified in the media and was sued, and his entire life was put under a public magnifying glass. Virtually everyone he had ever known was interrogated, and he found himself under surveillance.

In October 1996, he was officially cleared by the investigating U.S. attorney, and in August 1997, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno formally apologized. On April 13, 2005, an Army veteran named Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to planting the bombs. Jewell died on August 29, 2007, at the age of forty-four, suffering from heart disease, kidney disease, and other ailments.

The real bomber, Rudolph, wasn’t finished.

Two bombs exploded at an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, on the morning of January 16, 1997. The first, placed on the building’s rear porch, damaged an empty examination room. The second explosion, about ninety minutes later, was near the parking lot, and seven people were injured in the blast. Bombers often plant two devices, the first intended to cause some damage and the second to kill or injure emergency responders on the scene.

On February 21, a bomb exploded at the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, and injured five people. The police found a second explosive device and defused it.

Investigators were looking into similarities among the three bombings when a letter showed up at some Atlanta news media outlets from a group calling itself the Army of God. The letter included details about the bombings that caused the investigators to believe that the writers were involved. It also railed against “sodomites” and abortion clinics and concluded with the phrase “Death to the New World Order.”

The next bomb, at a clinic that provided abortion services in Birmingham, Alabama, exploded on January 29, 1998. An off-duty police officer working as a clinic guard was killed, and a clinic nurse was badly injured.

This time a witness saw a man get into a pickup truck and drive away. The truck, it turned out, belonged to Eric Rudolph.

Eric Robert Rudolph was born in Florida on September 19, 1966, but after his father died in 1981, his mother moved the family to rural North Carolina. They lived in a cabin in the mountains, with a wood-burning stove, a generator in case of power failures, and a distiller so they wouldn’t have to drink fluoridated water. Rudolph’s mother held a variety of fringe beliefs that were passed on to her children: she was paranoid about Social Security numbers, didn’t trust the government, partly homeschooled her kids, and taught her children the racist beliefs of the Christian Identity movement, which claims that Anglo-Saxons are the “true” Israelites of the Bible and that Jews are the offspring of Satan.

When Rudolph was in a public school, he turned in a paper on the Holocaust in which he “proved” that it never happened. He grew up hating gays, blacks, and Jews and admired Nazi general Erwin Rommel. He was also a devoted user, and eventually cultivator and seller, of marijuana, reportedly earning sixty thousand dollars a year from it.

Two days after the Birmingham bombing, Rudolph essentially vanished. The authorities believed that he shouldered a backpack and headed into the hills around his North Carolina home. They swarmed into the area, launching one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history. While on the run, Rudolph became a folk hero to many in the fringe movements of the extreme right. In absentia, federal grand juries handed down twenty-three counts against Rudolph in the bombing incidents.

A rookie police officer spotted a suspicious looking man in an alley behind a grocery store in Murphy, North Carolina, on May 31, 2003. Suspecting that a burglary was in progress, the officer drew his gun and ordered the man to come out and lie down on the ground. The man complied, and the manhunt came to an end. Rudolph had been captured at last.

In “Amplification,” when a new strain of weaponized anthrax is released into the public, Dr. Reid and the team work with members of the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Homeland Security to catch the unsub.

Survivalist and military training had kept Rudolph alive through cold winters in the North Carolina mountains. His defense team seemed anxious to keep him a free man, but in April 2005, he agreed to a plea deal. As part of the deal, he directed the authorities to a stash of more than 250 pounds of dynamite he had buried in the mountains, and he admitted guilt in all of the crimes with which he was charged. In exchange, he would receive four consecutive life sentences instead of the death penalty. The way he put it, he “decided to deprive the government of its goal of sentencing me to death.” He claimed it was a “purely tactical choice” on his part and did not indicate any guilt.

Rudolph wrote further that he believes that abortion is murder and that force is therefore justified in trying to stop it. He considers homosexuality “aberrant sexual behavior,” permissible in the privacy of one’s home but not in public, and any attempt to present it as something legitimate and normal should be met with force. He saw the Olympic games as an example of “global socialism,” and he hoped to shut them down.

In other words, in his statement Rudolph doesn’t admit to doing anything wrong (although he has apologized for the Olympic bombing and claims to have felt remorse at the time); he merely details and excuses his actions on the basis of his extremist political beliefs.

The Army of God organization continues to support Rudolph, hosting a Web site where his writings can be found and soliciting funds for him to use in prison. He’s spending the rest of his days in a supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, where the only continuing damage he can do to society is as a propagandist and an inspiration to those who share his views.

 

 

A DIFFERENT
Olympic attack is referenced in “The Tribe” (116), in which the killers are members of a cult who strike in a pack. BAU profiler Elle Greenaway mentions the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which members of Black September, a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, broke into the housing for the Israeli Olympic team, killed an athlete and a coach, and took nine more hostage. The terrorists demanded the release of 234 Palestinians from Israeli prisons. They also wanted two German terrorist leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, released and given safe passage out of West Germany.

Israel refused to negotiate with the terrorists, but West Germany, hoping to avoid a bloodbath at the games it was hosting, tried to stall the Palestinians. The terrorists kept pushing back the deadline for when they would start killing, knowing that the longer the drama played out, the more people watching on TV around the world would be exposed to their cause.

The Palestinians demanded a flight to Cairo, so the West German authorities developed a plan to take out the terrorists at the airport. While the terrorists and their hostages helicoptered in from the Olympic Village, the police got into place. Five police sharpshooters would try to hit the terrorists on the tarmac, but in case that failed, there were to be more police positioned on the airplane, disguised as crew. At the last minute, the backup plan was called off, so everything was up to the sharpshooters.

However, the sharpshooters—none of whom had sniper training—were expecting five terrorists, and there were eight. The shooters got into position, and two terrorists crossed the tarmac to check the plane. Unexpectedly finding it empty, they hurried back to the helicopters.

As the other six terrorists came out of the helicopters, the Germans opened fire. Three Palestinians went down right away. Finally, after more than an hour, armored personnel carriers moved on the helicopters, and as they did, the terrorists killed their hostages. Five terrorists were killed in the firefight, along with one West German police officer. The remaining Palestinians were captured, but they were released later when more terrorists hijacked an airliner and demanded their release.

The West German rescue plan had been flawed from the start, and the resulting tragedy almost brought the games to an end. The decision was made to continue the games, and after a memorial service on September 6, 1972, the games went on as scheduled.

 

 

ANOTHER REFERENCE
in “The Tribe” (116), as well as in “The Crossing” (318), in which Stockholm syndrome is discussed, is to Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Patricia Campbell Hearst came from a wealthy family; she was the granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

Hearst was attending the University of California at Berkeley when, on February 4, 1974, members of the SLA kidnapped her from the apartment she shared with her fiancé. The SLA demanded the release of two convicted killers, members of the group, from prison. Officials refused. The kidnappers changed their demand, and the Hearst family met the new one, providing two million dollars in food aid to the poor. Then the group wanted more.