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The hunt for Eric Robert Rudolph
Investigators turned to Rudolph, 31, after witnesses at the Birmingham bombing told law enforcement agents they saw Rudolph's 1989 Nissan pickup truck at the scene of the explosion.
His truck was later found abandoned in the woods near where Rudolph grew up in the small town of Murphy, North Carolina, near the Georgia state line.
Agents initially sought Rudolph as a material witness to the Birmingham bombing, but named him as a suspect on February 14.
Federal law enforcement sources told CNN that investigators found that the bombs that exploded at Centennial Olympic Park and an Atlanta women's clinic had plates that were cut from steel found at a metal-working plant in Franklin, North Carolina, that employed a friend of Rudolph's.
The metal plates apparently were designed to control the direction of shrapnel sprayed by the explosion.
Investigators also found a book entitled "How to Build Bombs of Mass Destruction" in a storage shed rented by Rudolph near Murphy. Rudolph has been linked to the Christian Identity movement. Group members tend to be anti-gay, anti-Semitic and opposed to abortion and interracial marriage, said Brian Levin of the Center on Hate and Extremism at Richard Stockton College.
Despite a massive search, federal agents have been unable to located Rudolph. He was last seen renting a video and buying food in Murphy the night after the Birmingham bombing.
Investigators have been checking Rudolph's childhood haunts in the North Carolina woods, even bringing in an ex-girlfriend of Rudolph's to assist in the search.
"That seems to be his cup of tea, sitting in the woods," said Brian Lett, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
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