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Rudolph Hearing Ends

Aired June 02, 2003 - 10:34   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: We have just learned this morning that Attorney General John Ashcroft has determined that this case, the first case against Eric Robert Rudolph, is going to be tried in Birmingham, Alabama.
Now, CNN senior producer Henry Schuster -- Henry, I can't believe I did that to you -- Henry Schuster. Henry used to be my producer here for a long time. Henry has been working on this case for years, literally, from almost the very beginning on this, and Henry was among the first to find out about the capture of Rudolph, reported all weekend for us here on CNN about that.

The question I have for you is, in all the time you've been covering this, why does it make sense, then, to have the first trial being held in Birmingham?

HENRY SCHUSTER, CNN SENIOR PRODUCER: Because until the Birmingham bombing, nobody had an idea that it was Eric Rudolph. What happened in Birmingham was what -- was something that broke the case open, and there were actually eyewitnesses in Birmingham, not to the actual bombing, but to the aftermath that led to the identification of Eric Robert Rudolph as a subject.

HARRIS: How many witnesses?

SCHUSTER: There are two. And we have shot some videotape a little while ago that shows you what they saw, if we could see that. Eric Rudolph was about where this camera was. He was -- detonated a bomb from the -- he's believed, if it was him, detonated a bomb from -- was standing behind a tree, detonated a bomb when he saw the policeman bend over with a baton, holding -- looking at a bomb in a flower pot. The policeman wasn't sure.

This is the vantage point of the bomber. Now, the bomber -- whoever the bomber is, he starts running away. And across the street, there's a medical student, and he looks out his window, wonders why somebody is leaving the scene when everybody else is rushing toward it. So he jumps in his car, he follows this man. He disappears into the woods, so he looks for a phone booth, this phone booth outside of a McDonald's. While he's making the phone call, he looks over and he sees, remarkably, man coming out of the woods.

A lawyer overhears him telling the police. They jump into a car, they try to trace -- chase the man. They spot his license plate. They spot a gray Nissan truck. They stop again and call the authorities when the man gets on the interstate, and they give them the information, and that's what led to the alert that led them to identify Eric Rudolph.

HARRIS: And if they -- if he hadn't gone out there and chased this truck down and gotten that license plate number, it's quite possible it could have taken either years or maybe never -- would anyone have ever found out that it was Eric Robert Rudolph?

SCHUSTER: Well, there might have been -- this is all speculation, of course. There might have been another bombing. They might have gotten a lead at another point, they might have developed some other evidence. But until then, there had been no -- there had been no identification of a suspect. And there are a lot of people that I've talked to, even this weekend, who say that if anybody deserves a slice of the reward, it's the medical student who looked out of his window and jumped in his car and chased the man, who he is going to testify, probably, of course, that he identifies him as Eric Rudolph, that he has his license plate, wrote down the license plate number, and that these are the people who helped crack the case.

HARRIS: Well, the government has been offering a $1 million reward for information leading to this arrest. It appears that that information did lead to it. Wasn't there also another witness as well, and do we know about how much information the other witness was able to...

SCHUSTER: Well, the other witness, as I was saying, when the medical student gets to that phone booth and he starts making the telephone call, there's another man, a lawyer, who overhears him, because he's talking and he is agitated. So they jump in the car together and they were the ones who gave chase, so you've got two -- you've got two witnesses who can tell you about the license plate, and about the gray Nissan truck. One witness can actually tell you, the medical student can tell you, that there was a man leaving the scene, and he can do a facial identification as well.

HARRIS: OK. What about the device itself? Is there any information germane to the device in the Birmingham case that actually makes that, I guess, also a better place to try this particular incident?

SCHUSTER: What happens is they can tie the device, or at least they say they can tie the device in Birmingham, elements of it, to material that was found in a storage shed that belonged to Eric Rudolph in North Carolina. But they can also tie some elements of that device also to elements of devices in Atlanta. Now, the one interesting thing about that device in Birmingham, you saw the vantage point from behind the tree. This one, unlike the others, was not set with a timer. They -- the person who was the bomber set the device off when he saw the policeman standing over it.

HARRIS: I want to jump in right now. Henry, stick around, don't go away, because our colleague, Gary Tuchman, who, as we just said moments ago who is inside the courtroom there in Asheville, North Carolina, Gary has come out. And Gary, can you tell us what you heard inside there?

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Leon, here's what happened. The 30-minute hearing is over. The headlines, Eric Robert Rudolph will be leaving soon for Birmingham, Alabama. How soon, we don't know.

The prosecutors and defense attorneys have both agreed, no arguing about that, he'll be going to Alabama, and his attorney, who was in the court, an attorney he got yesterday, Eric Robert Rudolph, says Rudolph will fight the charges.

Under federal rules, he can waive trials, plead guilty. They made it clear he will not plead guilty. He will face the charges. Rudolph came in the courtroom at 10:02 Eastern time wearing an orange shirt and a bulletproof vest. This man, who is said to hate the federal government, was told to stand up for a federal judge when (UNINTELLIGIBLE) room, did stand up respectfully, then sat down.

Indictments were read, the 21-count indictment. It took 20 minutes for the U.S. attorney to read the indictment. Eric Robert Rudolph read along. This is actually the sheet with all the indictments. He read along with the indictments.

At times, he whispered to his attorney, but he was very quiet the whole time. He talked with his lawyers while charges were being read, as we said.

The judge then asked him, one of the purposes of the removal hearing, and that's the official name of it, is to find out, for sure, if this is, indeed, Eric Robert Rudolph. His attorney says it is Eric Robert Rudolph. The judge said to Rudolph, are you Eric Robert Rudolph, and then we heard his voice for the first time. He said "Yes, your Honor." He was also asked if he waived his right to plead guilty, and Rudolph also said, "Yes, your Honor."

He made it clear he has an inability to pay for an attorney. It is not clear if this attorney who was in the courtroom today will follow him to Alabama for the first round of legal action that takes place there, but he will not be able to pay for an attorney, so one will be provided for him. He was then handcuffed after the 30-minute hearing, led away, and we assume he'll be heading to Alabama shortly.

It was very crowded courtroom, about 100 people inside. It was hushed as he came in, and hushed as he went out -- Leon, back to you.

HARRIS: All right. Quickly, Gary, give us an idea how he looked to you. A big question on many people's minds is how this man may look after spending some five years alone in the woods.

TUCHMAN: He looked like he did in his mug shot. He had a mustache, he had shortly cropped hair. He did not look like a man who had been, perhaps, living on oats and berries and letting his hair grow down to his backside. He just looked like, perhaps, he'd been in a hotel for five years. Obviously, we don't know where he has been for the last five years, although authorities do believe he's been in North Carolina the whole time, but he certainly did not look like he lived in the wild though.

HARRIS: All right. Good deal. Thanks, Gary. Gary Tuchman reporting live for us from Asheville, North Carolina. We'll let Gary go. There's a press conference about to be staged momentarily, and Gary and his camera crew are going to run over and cover that for us now.

Let's go back to Henry Schuster, who is joining us here on the set to talk about this. Have you talked to anybody, the investigators who have been following this case, gotten any sense at all of what kind of help he may have been getting?

SCHUSTER: Well, that's been the question for the last five years. One of the most interesting things is that even when the investigation was scaled back, when then massive manhunt ended, one of the tactics that the investigators used in North Carolina was that they would go to people who were high school friends of Eric Rudolph's, and they would deliver this message to them.

No. 1, we believe he's a cop killer, which is an important thing to say, because they didn't want the political agenda to be confused, whatever political agenda that Eric Rudolph might have had. But No. 2, they said there's a million dollar reward. That was the carrot. But the stick was there's federal charges if we find out that anybody has been helping him.

So even though there were only one or two agents up there in the last couple of years, they would still periodically pay visits to friends, because they wanted to know then, just as they want to know now, did he have help?

HARRIS: Interesting, very interesting. One of the reasons why a lot of people were thinking it was going to be -- the trial, the first trial that he would face would be here in Atlanta is the fact that -- he's being accused of the bombing, the Olympic Park bombing. That was a bombing and an event that actually involved an international crowd, and in addition to being one, maybe a federal charge as well, considering what that meant to the entire world it would almost seem to make sense to go ahead and tackle that one first. But you think it still makes better sense to go to Birmingham?

SCHUSTER: Well, it's an easier case. As prosecutors have told me over the years, it's an easier case in Birmingham because there are witnesses. Now, remarkably, there were all those people in Centennial Park, yet there was no eyewitness who can definitively say Eric Robert Rudolph was there.

Interestingly enough, we did a comparison, and I don't know if we can get the graphic now, but maybe later in the show we can give it to you. We did a comparison of the -- of a graphic. There was a man in a hooded sweatshirt, and they had a sketch drawn. If you look at that sketch, and you put it side by side with the mug shot, the first mug shot that came out of Eric Rudolph with just the mustache, they look astoundingly similar.

HARRIS: Interesting.

SCHUSTER: So, whoever provided that information may be called to try to give an eyewitness -- try to pick him up out of a lineup. HARRIS: And that's a tough one. We talked moments ago about trying to bring witnesses back to talk about something they saw on a night like that years ago. That person in that case only got a fleeting look. However, the witness in Birmingham, as you were talking about moments ago, got a longer look.

SCHUSTER: Right. Absolutely. Now, to repeat what happened, there was a tree behind which investigators believe that Eric Rudolph was standing when he detonated the device. Now, a man is looking out the window of his medical school dormitory nearby. He sees somebody -- that's the view from that tree to the front of the clinic.

HARRIS: OK. Now, we traced the route. So the man turns around and he starts leaving, and the medical student jumps into his car, because he's wondering, Why is somebody leaving the scene instead of rushing towards it? So the medical student comes downstairs, gets in his car, and he tries to give chase. The man disappears from him as he's heading up into a park that borders that side of Birmingham. He gets on a phone at a McDonald's. A man overhears him calling police.

Now, as he's making that phone call, remarkably, his eyes shift over and he sees the man emerge from the woods. So he and the other man, who is a lawyer, get in a car and they try to chase the man. They see him getting in a gray Nissan truck. And what they do is they follow him, they write down the license plate number. They stop again to call authorities when the man takes a left in traffic, and then turns out he gets on an interstate.

And that's the tip that broke it open, because the investigators were able to take that license plate number, run it through. Now, there were still some delays. They had put out an all points bulletin looking for the truck that day. But they still had some problems because Eric Rudolph, even then, had the wrong address on his driver's license. It was listed at an old address for his former brother and sister-in-law's residence in Tennessee. So it took them -- there was a delay -- a very crucial delay of a day before they could trace him to North Carolina. By the time they got to the trailer where he was living, he had disappeared.

HARRIS: It strikes me now, though, it's interesting to see that the two key figures in this case may be two novices in their particular ranks, the medical student who actually eyewitnessed it, and the rookie police cop who happened to walk behind that grocery store and nabbed him.

SCHUSTER: Right, and it's been suggested, again, that one or both of those should get some of the reward money.

HARRIS: Henry Schuster, appreciate that, appreciate the insight. No doubt we'll be calling upon you quite a bit in the days to come.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com






Aired June 2, 2003 - 10:34   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: We have just learned this morning that Attorney General John Ashcroft has determined that this case, the first case against Eric Robert Rudolph, is going to be tried in Birmingham, Alabama.
Now, CNN senior producer Henry Schuster -- Henry, I can't believe I did that to you -- Henry Schuster. Henry used to be my producer here for a long time. Henry has been working on this case for years, literally, from almost the very beginning on this, and Henry was among the first to find out about the capture of Rudolph, reported all weekend for us here on CNN about that.

The question I have for you is, in all the time you've been covering this, why does it make sense, then, to have the first trial being held in Birmingham?

HENRY SCHUSTER, CNN SENIOR PRODUCER: Because until the Birmingham bombing, nobody had an idea that it was Eric Rudolph. What happened in Birmingham was what -- was something that broke the case open, and there were actually eyewitnesses in Birmingham, not to the actual bombing, but to the aftermath that led to the identification of Eric Robert Rudolph as a subject.

HARRIS: How many witnesses?

SCHUSTER: There are two. And we have shot some videotape a little while ago that shows you what they saw, if we could see that. Eric Rudolph was about where this camera was. He was -- detonated a bomb from the -- he's believed, if it was him, detonated a bomb from -- was standing behind a tree, detonated a bomb when he saw the policeman bend over with a baton, holding -- looking at a bomb in a flower pot. The policeman wasn't sure.

This is the vantage point of the bomber. Now, the bomber -- whoever the bomber is, he starts running away. And across the street, there's a medical student, and he looks out his window, wonders why somebody is leaving the scene when everybody else is rushing toward it. So he jumps in his car, he follows this man. He disappears into the woods, so he looks for a phone booth, this phone booth outside of a McDonald's. While he's making the phone call, he looks over and he sees, remarkably, man coming out of the woods.

A lawyer overhears him telling the police. They jump into a car, they try to trace -- chase the man. They spot his license plate. They spot a gray Nissan truck. They stop again and call the authorities when the man gets on the interstate, and they give them the information, and that's what led to the alert that led them to identify Eric Rudolph.

HARRIS: And if they -- if he hadn't gone out there and chased this truck down and gotten that license plate number, it's quite possible it could have taken either years or maybe never -- would anyone have ever found out that it was Eric Robert Rudolph?

SCHUSTER: Well, there might have been -- this is all speculation, of course. There might have been another bombing. They might have gotten a lead at another point, they might have developed some other evidence. But until then, there had been no -- there had been no identification of a suspect. And there are a lot of people that I've talked to, even this weekend, who say that if anybody deserves a slice of the reward, it's the medical student who looked out of his window and jumped in his car and chased the man, who he is going to testify, probably, of course, that he identifies him as Eric Rudolph, that he has his license plate, wrote down the license plate number, and that these are the people who helped crack the case.

HARRIS: Well, the government has been offering a $1 million reward for information leading to this arrest. It appears that that information did lead to it. Wasn't there also another witness as well, and do we know about how much information the other witness was able to...

SCHUSTER: Well, the other witness, as I was saying, when the medical student gets to that phone booth and he starts making the telephone call, there's another man, a lawyer, who overhears him, because he's talking and he is agitated. So they jump in the car together and they were the ones who gave chase, so you've got two -- you've got two witnesses who can tell you about the license plate, and about the gray Nissan truck. One witness can actually tell you, the medical student can tell you, that there was a man leaving the scene, and he can do a facial identification as well.

HARRIS: OK. What about the device itself? Is there any information germane to the device in the Birmingham case that actually makes that, I guess, also a better place to try this particular incident?

SCHUSTER: What happens is they can tie the device, or at least they say they can tie the device in Birmingham, elements of it, to material that was found in a storage shed that belonged to Eric Rudolph in North Carolina. But they can also tie some elements of that device also to elements of devices in Atlanta. Now, the one interesting thing about that device in Birmingham, you saw the vantage point from behind the tree. This one, unlike the others, was not set with a timer. They -- the person who was the bomber set the device off when he saw the policeman standing over it.

HARRIS: I want to jump in right now. Henry, stick around, don't go away, because our colleague, Gary Tuchman, who, as we just said moments ago who is inside the courtroom there in Asheville, North Carolina, Gary has come out. And Gary, can you tell us what you heard inside there?

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Leon, here's what happened. The 30-minute hearing is over. The headlines, Eric Robert Rudolph will be leaving soon for Birmingham, Alabama. How soon, we don't know.

The prosecutors and defense attorneys have both agreed, no arguing about that, he'll be going to Alabama, and his attorney, who was in the court, an attorney he got yesterday, Eric Robert Rudolph, says Rudolph will fight the charges.

Under federal rules, he can waive trials, plead guilty. They made it clear he will not plead guilty. He will face the charges. Rudolph came in the courtroom at 10:02 Eastern time wearing an orange shirt and a bulletproof vest. This man, who is said to hate the federal government, was told to stand up for a federal judge when (UNINTELLIGIBLE) room, did stand up respectfully, then sat down.

Indictments were read, the 21-count indictment. It took 20 minutes for the U.S. attorney to read the indictment. Eric Robert Rudolph read along. This is actually the sheet with all the indictments. He read along with the indictments.

At times, he whispered to his attorney, but he was very quiet the whole time. He talked with his lawyers while charges were being read, as we said.

The judge then asked him, one of the purposes of the removal hearing, and that's the official name of it, is to find out, for sure, if this is, indeed, Eric Robert Rudolph. His attorney says it is Eric Robert Rudolph. The judge said to Rudolph, are you Eric Robert Rudolph, and then we heard his voice for the first time. He said "Yes, your Honor." He was also asked if he waived his right to plead guilty, and Rudolph also said, "Yes, your Honor."

He made it clear he has an inability to pay for an attorney. It is not clear if this attorney who was in the courtroom today will follow him to Alabama for the first round of legal action that takes place there, but he will not be able to pay for an attorney, so one will be provided for him. He was then handcuffed after the 30-minute hearing, led away, and we assume he'll be heading to Alabama shortly.

It was very crowded courtroom, about 100 people inside. It was hushed as he came in, and hushed as he went out -- Leon, back to you.

HARRIS: All right. Quickly, Gary, give us an idea how he looked to you. A big question on many people's minds is how this man may look after spending some five years alone in the woods.

TUCHMAN: He looked like he did in his mug shot. He had a mustache, he had shortly cropped hair. He did not look like a man who had been, perhaps, living on oats and berries and letting his hair grow down to his backside. He just looked like, perhaps, he'd been in a hotel for five years. Obviously, we don't know where he has been for the last five years, although authorities do believe he's been in North Carolina the whole time, but he certainly did not look like he lived in the wild though.

HARRIS: All right. Good deal. Thanks, Gary. Gary Tuchman reporting live for us from Asheville, North Carolina. We'll let Gary go. There's a press conference about to be staged momentarily, and Gary and his camera crew are going to run over and cover that for us now.

Let's go back to Henry Schuster, who is joining us here on the set to talk about this. Have you talked to anybody, the investigators who have been following this case, gotten any sense at all of what kind of help he may have been getting?

SCHUSTER: Well, that's been the question for the last five years. One of the most interesting things is that even when the investigation was scaled back, when then massive manhunt ended, one of the tactics that the investigators used in North Carolina was that they would go to people who were high school friends of Eric Rudolph's, and they would deliver this message to them.

No. 1, we believe he's a cop killer, which is an important thing to say, because they didn't want the political agenda to be confused, whatever political agenda that Eric Rudolph might have had. But No. 2, they said there's a million dollar reward. That was the carrot. But the stick was there's federal charges if we find out that anybody has been helping him.

So even though there were only one or two agents up there in the last couple of years, they would still periodically pay visits to friends, because they wanted to know then, just as they want to know now, did he have help?

HARRIS: Interesting, very interesting. One of the reasons why a lot of people were thinking it was going to be -- the trial, the first trial that he would face would be here in Atlanta is the fact that -- he's being accused of the bombing, the Olympic Park bombing. That was a bombing and an event that actually involved an international crowd, and in addition to being one, maybe a federal charge as well, considering what that meant to the entire world it would almost seem to make sense to go ahead and tackle that one first. But you think it still makes better sense to go to Birmingham?

SCHUSTER: Well, it's an easier case. As prosecutors have told me over the years, it's an easier case in Birmingham because there are witnesses. Now, remarkably, there were all those people in Centennial Park, yet there was no eyewitness who can definitively say Eric Robert Rudolph was there.

Interestingly enough, we did a comparison, and I don't know if we can get the graphic now, but maybe later in the show we can give it to you. We did a comparison of the -- of a graphic. There was a man in a hooded sweatshirt, and they had a sketch drawn. If you look at that sketch, and you put it side by side with the mug shot, the first mug shot that came out of Eric Rudolph with just the mustache, they look astoundingly similar.

HARRIS: Interesting.

SCHUSTER: So, whoever provided that information may be called to try to give an eyewitness -- try to pick him up out of a lineup. HARRIS: And that's a tough one. We talked moments ago about trying to bring witnesses back to talk about something they saw on a night like that years ago. That person in that case only got a fleeting look. However, the witness in Birmingham, as you were talking about moments ago, got a longer look.

SCHUSTER: Right. Absolutely. Now, to repeat what happened, there was a tree behind which investigators believe that Eric Rudolph was standing when he detonated the device. Now, a man is looking out the window of his medical school dormitory nearby. He sees somebody -- that's the view from that tree to the front of the clinic.

HARRIS: OK. Now, we traced the route. So the man turns around and he starts leaving, and the medical student jumps into his car, because he's wondering, Why is somebody leaving the scene instead of rushing towards it? So the medical student comes downstairs, gets in his car, and he tries to give chase. The man disappears from him as he's heading up into a park that borders that side of Birmingham. He gets on a phone at a McDonald's. A man overhears him calling police.

Now, as he's making that phone call, remarkably, his eyes shift over and he sees the man emerge from the woods. So he and the other man, who is a lawyer, get in a car and they try to chase the man. They see him getting in a gray Nissan truck. And what they do is they follow him, they write down the license plate number. They stop again to call authorities when the man takes a left in traffic, and then turns out he gets on an interstate.

And that's the tip that broke it open, because the investigators were able to take that license plate number, run it through. Now, there were still some delays. They had put out an all points bulletin looking for the truck that day. But they still had some problems because Eric Rudolph, even then, had the wrong address on his driver's license. It was listed at an old address for his former brother and sister-in-law's residence in Tennessee. So it took them -- there was a delay -- a very crucial delay of a day before they could trace him to North Carolina. By the time they got to the trailer where he was living, he had disappeared.

HARRIS: It strikes me now, though, it's interesting to see that the two key figures in this case may be two novices in their particular ranks, the medical student who actually eyewitnessed it, and the rookie police cop who happened to walk behind that grocery store and nabbed him.

SCHUSTER: Right, and it's been suggested, again, that one or both of those should get some of the reward money.

HARRIS: Henry Schuster, appreciate that, appreciate the insight. No doubt we'll be calling upon you quite a bit in the days to come.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com