FLORENCE, Colo. — Unrepentant, Olympics and abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph sits in his cell at Supermax complaining about being treated like a "terrorist" and composing "satires" mocking his victims.
Rudolph's homemade bombs in Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., killed two people and injured 120. He was captured in 2003 after hiding out for five years in the North Carolina mountains.
In correspondence with The Gazette during the past 15 months, Rudolph refers to himself as a political prisoner and accuses the federal Bureau of Prisons of inhumane treatment for keeping him and other terrorists in their cells for 23 hours a day.
"It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis," Rudolph wrote last month to The Gazette.
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He has no remorse for his victims, and they're glad he doesn't like his accommodations.
"It gives me a great deal of pride to think he's never coming out of there," said Diane Derzis, who runs the Birmingham family planning clinic Rudolph bombed in 1998. "He should never see daylight again.
"He's a monster."
Got life sentence in plea deal
Rudolph is serving life without parole because federal prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for his pleading guilty to the bombings and revealing the location of dynamite he buried.
At his sentencing hearings in Birmingham and Atlanta last summer, Rudolph was smug and largely unapologetic. He read a statement saying he bombed two abortion clinics because "abortion is murder, and because it is murder I believe deadly force is needed to stop it."
The attack at the Olympics in 1996, he said, was meant to "confound, anger and embarrass" the government for sanctioning abortion. He offered a muted apology for the woman he killed and the more than 100 people injured by the nails and screws he packed into the explosives.
He concluded his statement by saying, "The talking heads on the news opine that I am 'finished,' that I will languish broken and unloved in the bowels of some Supermax, but I say to you people that by the grace of God I am still here — a little bloodied, but emphatically unbowed."
Nearly 16 months in isolation have not changed his attitude.
Last month, Rudolph sent The Gazette a 16-page story he said was a "satire" based on his sentencing in Birmingham in July 2005.
In it, he mocks the prosecutors, judge and victims of his 1998 bombing of the New Woman All Women clinic.
Rudolph also detailed his thoughts during the judge's indictment of his motives:
"Deadly force is sometimes justified to save life. That is what his law books say. This is a riddle that even a fool can resolve," Rudolph wrote. "The only real question is under what circumstances it is justified to take life."
