Posted on 04/28/2005 4:39:58 PM PDT by CHARLITE
MANSFIELD TOWNSHIP, N.J. -- Roy Decker can look at the photos and letters now, more than 16 years later, and spot the clues with ease.
Right there, in sweeping cursive, the writings of his former Army roommate and future FBI's Most Wanted fugitive are eerie now.
Right there is the Hitler reference, with future serial bomber and alleged Nazi sympathizer Eric Robert Rudolph referring to himself in a 1989 letter to Decker as "Der Furher (sic), Adolf Rudolph."
Right there, on the snapshot taken by Decker at their Army camp in Kentucky in 1988, is the portrait of future survivalist Rudolph as a brooding loner, extending his middle finger.
And right there, under the can't-miss letterhead from "Eric R. Rudolph," is the homophobic reference from the future bomber of a lesbian dance club: "Roy -- Yea, I know the paper is kind of faggish, being yellow and all, but my mother got it for me and s---, you know what I mean."
Decker, 35, of Mansfield Township, still finds it spooky, more than 16 years later, to hold the photos and letters of an Army buddy who turned out to be one of America's most notorious terrorists.
A right-wing survivalist who escaped capture for more than five years in the mountains of North Carolina, Rudolph pleaded guilty this month to a string of bombings, including deadly ones at the Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics and at an abortion clinic in Alabama in 1998.
In all, his bombings killed three people and injured more than 100 others.
The signs jump off the photos and letters for Decker now, with the benefit of more than 16 extra years of maturity and hindsight.
But back at Fort Campbell, Ky., in parts of 1987-89, Decker knew Rudolph as a laid-back, intelligent, philosophical, pot-smoking, sometimes racist roommate who snored "like a freight train" and was kicked out of the Army for having marijuana in his system.
He knew Rudolph had an eccentric family, as evidenced by a brother who later sawed off his hand and videotaped it to protest the FBI's treatment of Eric Rudolph.
After Eric Rudolph was kicked out of the Army, he remained a penpal of Decker's, sprinkling his letters with a code name for cannabis -- "Books."
The two men showed up around the same time at the 101st Airborne -- Decker, a sports-loving soccer player from Rockaway Township, N.J., and Rudolph, a bookish North Carolinian who wore his hair cut almost into a mohawk.
While Decker at the time was a teenager who just wanted to party, Rudolph, three years Decker's senior, sponged all the knowledge he could.
"He was very meticulous, and he took a lot of notes," Decker said while perusing letters and photos of his old roommate on his dining room table. "He just wanted to learn whatever the government could teach him. I don't know if he was planning for an event."
Decker said Rudolph could be fun and engaging, and could show a tender side.
He said Rudolph genuinely felt bad for him when a somber Decker returned to camp after a breakup with his girlfriend back home in New Jersey in 1988.
"Don't worry about it; crack a beer and forget about it," Rudolph told Decker.
But Rudolph also showed hints of a white supremacist side, Decker recalled.
He remembered Rudolph often yelled at news reports on TV that featured minorities, and got a hoot over a TV episode in which a fracas with the Ku Klux Klan left Geraldo Rivera with a broken nose.
Decker said Rudolph once leveled a racial epithet at a black staff sergeant who told him to turn down his loud radio during Rudolph's attempt to blow off steam after three weeks of training in the woods.
In a March 3, 1989, letter to Decker after Rudolph was released from the Army with a general discharge, he wrote: "Roy -- Surprise, surprise. I'm out of the Army since 25 Jan. No more slavery, no more n----- standing over me in the morning. ... I love the feeling of freedom of movement, but one feels the sense of not knowing exactly what to do with oneself, but this is great too."
Rudolph's movements later became the subject of one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history.
With a bounty of $1 million on his head and sympathizers who wore T-shirts reading, "Run Rudy Run," Rudolph was finally nabbed in 2003 by a rookie cop in Murphy, N.C., who found the fugitive foraging for food.
This month, Rudolph agreed to a plea deal that spared him the death penalty in exchange for information about his stash of 250 pounds of explosives.
The plea ended the necessity for Decker to testify against his onetime friend.
He said FBI agents in 1998 looked at his photos of Rudolph, and showed particular interest in one in which Rudolph was seen in the background making a Heil Hitler salute as he dangled a cigarette from his mouth at a party.
The return address on the letters Rudolph sent to Decker was a post office box in Dillsboro, N.C., the town that tired of its association with Rudolph through reports in the national media.
Although Rudolph will be in jail for the rest of his life, Decker thinks that in Rudolph's mind, he beat the government.
"He likes seclusion," Decker said. "They couldn't kill him, and he could still get his word out from prison. In the long run, I believe he won."
Decker said he never thought he would want to testify against an Army buddy, but noted, "Once people started getting killed, all bets were off."
Still, Decker wouldn't mind getting one more letter from his old roommate.
"I'd like to get his address someday, to find out what was going through his mind."
April 27, 2005
(Mike Frassinelli is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at mfrassinelli@starledger.com.)
"Der Furher (sic), Adolf Rudolph."
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No speaka de Germ Inn !!! ;-))
Eric Rudolph, according to the "Christian News In Maine" people, is a persecuted hero.
(I tried to ping the freeper who posts from that site, but was unable to find that name.)
But if a "Christian news" guy from Maine sees this thread, maybe he can tell us why he and Bob Celeste think Rudolph is such a "christian patriot."
Per Google:
newsgatherer
http://www.freerepublic.com/~newsgatherer/
I've had my own issues with the site.
ping
NG,
Do you and Bob Celeste still think that Eric Rudolph is a man worthy of the support of TRUE pro-lifers and TRUE Christians?
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