White supremacist, religious fanatic, terrorist, survivalist -- Eric Rudolph has been called all of these things in his five years as one of America's most-wanted fugitives.
But none of the labels aptly captured the polite and brainy prisoner who sat chatting with his bewildered guards at the red-brick Cherokee County jail, after his improbable capture early last Saturday morning as he foraged through a dumpster behind the Save-A-Lot grocery store in Murphy, N.C.
It wasn't just that he'd lost 50 pounds off his once-stocky frame. Fit, clean-shaven and wearing new running shoes, he didn't look a bit like the Grizzly Adams character who had apparently survived on acorns, salamanders and black bears in the rugged Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina since 1998.
Nor did he fit the part of the alleged zealot behind a series of bombings directed at gays, abortion clinics and foreigners, a spree that began with the 1996 Olympic Park blast in Atlanta, Ga., which killed one woman and injured more than 100.
"We were all expecting some delinquent character," conceded Joe Morris, the jail's administrator. In 11 years working at this and other jails, Mr. Morris said he's rarely locked up a "guest" so well mannered.
"He was as nice an inmate as I've ever kept," he said.
At times, Mr. Rudolph calmly leafed through a Bible he had on him when he was captured.
Sergeant Lester White spent 35 hours watching and talking to Mr. Rudolph, 36, before his transfer this week to Asheville, N.C., and then Birmingham, Ala., to face 21 bombing-related charges. Sgt. White said the prisoner talked a lot about his years on the run, likening the experience of hunting and foraging in the wild to an extended "camping trip." He talked about how he shot bears, turkeys and wild boars, and ate nuts and raw "sushi" salamanders.
FBI officials have suggested that Mr. Rudolph seemed almost relieved to be caught, after evading a $24-million (U.S.) federal manhunt and a $1-million bounty for his arrest. But Sgt. White saw it differently.
"I got the impression he'd still like to be on the run," he said.
That his captors would show respect, even a hint of admiration, for Mr. Rudolph, is not entirely unsurprising.
Blood runs thick in this part of Appalachia, where people still think of themselves as "mountain folk" -- descendants of the settlers who first came to the hardscrabble area to mine, farm or cut timber. Locals can spot those who aren't from here long before their accent betrays them.
Although born in Florida, Mr. Rudolph moved to North Carolina at age 11, and grew up in the nearby community of Nantahala, 50 kilometres east of Murphy.
Mr. Rudolph's extreme views on race, abortion and government -- the apparent motivations for his alleged bombings -- probably seem aberrant to many Canadians. Few people here say they condone Mr. Rudolph's alleged crimes, but his hatred of abortion, his overt religiosity and his misgivings about government put him squarely in the mainstream.
In fact, some have celebrated him as a kind of folk hero for his ability to outsmart the feds for so long.
A sign outside the Peachtree Restaurant reads: "Pray for Eric Rudolph." Across town, the Daily Grind coffee shop is offering up "captured cappuccino" and "caught-ya coffee," while the Curiosity book shop is featuring How to Stay Alive in the Woods as its book of the week.
Before his arrest, local shops were doing a brisk business selling "RUN RUDOLPH, RUN" T-shirts and coffee mugs.
Clambering up a 45-degree wooded slope on the outskirts of town to a primitive camp that Mr. Rudolph apparently used as a summer base, Cherokee County Schools Police Chief Randy Phillips reflected on why the alleged bomber still has fans in the community.
"Everywhere you go, you could find people who think he did the right thing," acknowledged Mr. Phillips, 43. "That's the nature of people in the area."
But the chief made it clear he isn't one of them: "I don't support abortion, but you don't go bombing places either," he said.
The camp, one of two police have found, is perched on a narrow wooded hill a few hundred metres above Murphy -- an easy hike to a Wal-Mart, Taco Bell and the high school. The land belongs to the school, so this is Mr. Phillips's turf.
On the ground next to a fire pit is a pile of rotting tomatoes, onions and other vegetables, a stack of firewood and the remains of a lean-to. There are also pieces of plywood and a roll of tar paper, which Mr. Phillips speculated Mr. Rudolph had planned to use to make a more permanent shelter.
The chief said he suspects some local residents may have given Mr. Rudolph supplies and shelter -- a lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation is now actively pursuing. He may also have used any of the hundreds of remote vacation cabins which sit vacant much of the year.
"My gut feel is, he had help," Mr. Phillips said.
How Mr. Rudolph managed to evade capture for so long remains a mystery that Mr. Phillips is anxious to unravel.
"If he sat down and wrote a book about the past five years -- not the bombings, but eluding the FBI -- it would be a bestseller," he suggested. "I'd like to read it."
Some local residents may have helped the fugitive unwittingly. Wade, who works at a gas station and would not give his last name, said he gave a man a short ride in his pickup truck a few months back. "When I saw Rudolph's picture on the news, I said, 'My God, that's him.' "
The FBI recovered a .223-calibre rifle and buried plastic containers of dried goods at a second, more elaborate remote mountain hideout, located 20 kilometres from the nearest paved road up a mountain in the Nantahala National Forest.
As a teenager, Mr. Rudolph spent weeks at a time camping out in the same forest. After dropping out of high school and a failed stint in the U.S. Army, he became a self-styled military and religious survivalist. He learned to hunt, fish and live off the land. To make money, he also reportedly grew marijuana in the woods. Inspired by his mother, he attended several openly anti-Semitic Christian Identity churches. He is also said to have developed a fascination with German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the racial theories of Nazism.
Two months before the Atlanta Olympics bombing, he sold his family's Nantahala home for $65,000 (U.S.) and went underground.
If Mr. Rudolph's outlaw and survivalist persona heightened his reputation, it was his religion that really distinguished him from the parade of small-time criminals that normally occupy the Cherokee County jail.
This is the heart of the Bible Belt, where the political clout of the church is omnipresent. While the world was watching the Rudolph story unfold this week, a church-backed movement won a city referendum blocking the sale of beer in stores and restaurants.
Cherokee County has an estimated 250 churches -- one for every 100 of its 25,000 inhabitants. They range from the 1,300-member First Baptist Church to scores of tiny family congregations that seem to be everywhere along the roads, a legacy of when the area was so isolated that people formed their own churches rather than wait for a visiting preacher to show up.
But Robert Heard, associate pastor at the First Baptist Church in Murphy, said the making of Mr. Rudolph into a folk hero has less to do with religion than a culture that romanticizes outlaws.
"I agree abortion is wrong and I agree homosexuality is wrong," Mr. Heard said bluntly. "But I could not condone the violence. And I don't know anyone who would say that's an appropriate way to protest."
Like religious zeal, the outlaw spirit has a long tradition here. In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson ordered the exile of thousands of Cherokee Indians from the mountains of North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama, marching them out along a route that became known as "the trail of tears" because so many of them died. Murphy was founded as part of a network of forts built for the eviction campaign. Some of the Indians, however, hid for years in the high mountain passes and dense forests, not unlike Mr. Rudolph.
In the first half of the 1900s, the federal government once again targeted mountain people. During the Prohibition era, impoverished families making moonshine whisky in the hills were relentlessly pursued by federal authorities. In the 1930s, thousands of people were thrown off their land to make way for the construction of the massive Tennessee Valley dams and reservoirs. Others were displaced to make way for the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Each incursion bred mistrust between the local population and the federal government.
In its own way, the hunt for Mr. Rudolph perpetuated those tensions. At its peak in 1998, when Mr. Rudolph's pickup truck was found abandoned in Murphy days after the 1998 bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., hundreds of FBI agents swarmed into the county. They used helicopters, sophisticated infrared heat scopes and bloodhounds, but the hunt came up empty.
This week, the feds returned in force after local police already had Mr. Rudolph behind bars.
The local police are intensely proud that it was not the FBI who apprehended Mr. Rudolph but a rookie local cop who graduated from Murphy's high school last year.
"It was one of our own who managed to bring the five-year Rudolph caper to a conclusion," the Cherokee Sentinel newspaper beamed in its editorial this week.
Barrie McKenna