CNN producer says Rudolph should have been captured much sooner

<p>The five-year manhunt for Eric Rudolph, wanted in the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, should never have happened, claims a CNN producer in "Hunting Eric Rudolph," a book to be published on Tuesday.</p><p>In the book, producer Henry Schuster and Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Charles Stone explain that a miscommunication between the FBI and a North Carolina sheriff, Jack Thompson, on Jan. 30, 1998, allowed Rudolph to slip away.</p><p>"The sheriff and his folks had located Eric Rudolph's trailer, and they were ready to go pick him up," Schuster says. "But the FBI never told Sheriff Thompson that Rudolph was anything other than a material witness. Instead, they told him to wait."</p><p>The FBI didn't show up at the trailer until after a U.S. attorney in Birmingham said in a televised news conference that Rudolph was a suspect in an abortion clinic bombing that killed a security guard, Schuster says.</p><p>"By the time the FBI went to Rudolph's trailer in North Carolina, he had stocked up with supplies at Bi-Lo and disappeared," Schuster said.</p><p>Rudolph was finally captured in 2003 when a police officer caught him foraging for food behind a grocery store.</p><p>One question is how Rudolph managed to survive in the wild for more than five years.</p><p>"It doesn't completely add up," Schuster says. "I talked with a Navy Reserve guy who had been through a survival and escape school. He was skeptical of Eric's story. He said Eric looked in far too good a condition for someone who had been on a five-year camping trip."</p><p>___</p><p>HASH(0x2866624)</p>