Shortly after 4:00 a.m. on May 31, 2003, a rookie police officer in Murphy, North Carolina, named Jeffrey Postell saw a man crouched behind a Save-A-Lot grocery store, took him for a burglar, and arrested him. The man was Eric Robert Rudolph, the most wanted fugitive in the United States, who had eluded one of the largest and most expensive manhunts in the country’s history for more than five years by living in the Appalachian wilderness. The end of that manhunt was not a tactical triumph but an accident — a foot patrol behind a supermarket at dawn.
Rudolph carried out four bombings across the Southeast. The first and most notorious, at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta on July 27, 1996, killed Alice Hawthorne, a 44-year-old visitor from Albany, Georgia, and indirectly caused the death of a Turkish television cameraman, Melih Uzunyol, who suffered a fatal heart attack running to the scene; more than a hundred people were injured. Rudolph followed with bombings at a Sandy Springs abortion clinic and an Atlanta gay nightclub in 1997, and at a Birmingham, Alabama, women’s clinic in 1998. These were targeted attacks driven by his hostility to abortion and to what he denounced as the policies of the federal government, and the dead and maimed are the center of this record.
The Olympic Park bombing also produced a notorious investigative failure: the security guard Richard Jewell, who had found the bomb and helped clear the area, was publicly treated as the prime suspect for months before being cleared. Rudolph was not identified until the 1998 Birmingham bombing, where witnesses noted a man and his truck leaving the scene; the license plate led investigators to him within days.
He fled into the mountains of western North Carolina before he could be arrested. For five years a multi-agency task force searched terrain he knew intimately and could not locate him. After Postell’s chance arrest in 2003, Rudolph agreed in 2005 to plead guilty to all four bombings in exchange for the government dropping the death penalty, a deal that also required him to disclose hidden caches of dynamite. He was sentenced to consecutive life terms without parole and is held at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado.
In the early morning of June 6, 2015, two convicted murderers were found missing from the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, the first escape from the prison’s secure perimeter in its long history. Richard Matt, forty-eight, and David Sweat, thirty-four, had spent weeks cutting through the steel wall at the back of their adjoining cells, working down through a labyrinth of catwalks and tunnels, sawing through a steam pipe, and surfacing through a manhole on a Dannemora street roughly a block beyond the wall. They left a taunting note behind. The breakout triggered one of the largest manhunts in New York history.
The escape was not a feat of solitary genius; it ran on inside help. A civilian tailor-shop instructor, Joyce Mitchell, supplied the hacksaw blades, drill bits, and chisels the men used, smuggling them past unmanned screening in frozen ground beef. A corrections officer, Gene Palmer, passed contraband for Matt’s paintings. Mitchell had agreed to be the getaway driver and to bring a gun; on the night of the escape she suffered what she described as a panic attack and never appeared, leaving Matt and Sweat on foot in the densely forested Adirondack borderland just south of Canada.
For three weeks the two evaded a force the State Inspector General later put at as many as 1,300 law-enforcement personnel, costing 22.8 million dollars in state overtime alone, who chased more than 2,500 leads through rain-soaked woods and abandoned hunting cabins. The arc ended in violence. On June 26, in the wilderness near Malone, U.S. Border Patrol agents confronted Matt after he fired a shotgun at a passing camper; he was shot and killed. Two days later, on June 28, a State Police sergeant spotted Sweat walking a back road near the Canadian line, gave chase across a hayfield, and shot him twice as he ran for a tree line. Sweat survived.
David Sweat, captured wounded and later recovered, pleaded guilty to first-degree escape and received an additional three-and-a-half to seven years on top of his existing sentence of life without parole. Richard Matt, who had been serving twenty-five years to life for a 1997 murder and dismemberment, died in the field. The escape exposed a culture of complacency at Clinton so thorough that, by the Inspector General’s account, basic counts and cell inspections that would have foiled the plot many times over had not been performed for years.
On October 30, 2014, members of a U.S. Marshals tactical team arrested Eric Matthew Frein without resistance in an open field beside an abandoned aircraft hangar at the Birchwood-Pocono Airpark, ending a forty-eight-day manhunt across the wilderness of northeastern Pennsylvania. Frein, then thirty-one, was a self-taught survivalist and military reenactor who, seven weeks earlier, had ambushed the Pennsylvania State Police barracks at Blooming Grove with a high-powered rifle, killing one trooper and gravely wounding another before vanishing into the Pocono Mountains. The marshals, in a detail noted at the time, restrained him with the handcuffs of the corporal he had killed.
The attack came during a late-night shift change on September 12, 2014. Firing a .308-caliber rifle from the treeline outside the barracks, Frein killed Corporal Bryon K. Dickson II, thirty-eight, and shot Trooper Alex Douglass, who survived with disabling injuries. Frein then disappeared into terrain he knew well, prompting a search that at its peak involved nearly a thousand officers, ranged across more than three hundred square miles, closed schools, and cost an estimated 11.9 million dollars.
The hunt was a slow contest of attrition rather than a chase. Searchers periodically recovered items Frein abandoned in the woods — among them an AK-47-style rifle, pipe bombs, ammunition, and soiled diapers he had apparently used to remain motionless in hiding. The discoveries confirmed both his presence and his preparation, but for weeks he stayed ahead of the cordon, moving at night through a landscape of dense forest and abandoned structures. The end was an anticlimax: spotted near a disused airfield, he gave up without a fight.
A jury in Pike County convicted Frein in April 2017 on all twelve counts, including first-degree murder of a law enforcement officer, two counts of terrorism, and two counts involving weapons of mass destruction. A week later the same jury sentenced him to death. In April 2019 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in a mandatory review, affirmed the conviction and the death sentence, finding the evidence sufficient to support both.