On May 31, 2003, 5 years 4 months and 2 days after Eric Robert Rudolph blew up the New Woman All Women clinic in Birmingham and disappeared into the North Carolina mountains, a 21-year-old rookie cop named Jeff Postell turned off the lights in his police cruiser and pulled around the corner of the Save-A-Lot grocery store in Murphy, North Carolina.

He did what a lot of seasoned cops hadn’t done over the years. He followed procedure to a T, varying his routine and arriving at an unexpected time. He saw a man running away from a trash bin behind the grocery store. He ordered him to stop. The great survivalist Eric Rudolph had been caught by a rookie cop while dumpster diving for rotten bananas behind a grocery story. This is that story.

American Shrapnel is an eight-part series from Alabam

See Full Page