Woman seeks $1 million reward for Olympic park bomber conviction

<p>A suburban Atlanta woman is hoping to claim the $1 million reward offered for the capture and conviction of now-imprisoned serial bomber Eric Rudolph.</p><p>Tammy Stoner of Douglasville, Ga., said she's the only Atlanta witness who put Rudolph at one of the crime scenes connected with the 1996 bombing at Centennial Olympic Park.</p><p>Steven Jampol, Stoner's lawyer, has sent a written request for the reward money to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Atlanta. Douglasville is about 25 miles west of Atlanta.</p><p>Rudolph was captured in May 2003, pleaded guilty in four bombings, and is now in federal prison serving four life terms.</p><p>Alice Hawthorne was killed and 111 others were injured in the Olympic Park blast that Rudolph later said he detonated because he wanted to force the cancellation of the Games and "confound, anger and embarrass" the federal government for sanctioning abortion.</p><p>Information on how many others have sought the $1 million reward was not available Wednesday. Officials from the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI declined to comment on Stoner's claim. The local policeman who apprehended Rudolph in North Carolina is not eligible to claim the reward because he works in law enforcement.</p><p>Stoner, 47, said she wants to give 75 percent of the reward money to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.</p><p>She said she remained silent for years because she was told she could be called as a witness in Rudolph's federal trial and didn't want to jeopardize the case.</p><p>Within two days of the Olympic Park bombing, she said she gave federal investigators a description of a suspicious man. She said on the night of the bombing, she encountered a man acting suspiciously at 1 a.m. in the parking lot of the Days Inn in downtown Atlanta, just blocks from the park.</p><p>Stoner, who was a vendor during the 1996 Olympic Games, had shut down her booth and was waiting in the parking lot to catch a ride with some of her employees when she noticed the "odd-acting" man. They eventually came within two feet of each other.</p><p>She later thought that man might be the perpetrator of the bombing after she heard reports that someone had made an anonymous call from a pay phone near the hotel to issue a warning about the bomb.</p><p>"I watched him for about five minutes. I had a bird's-eye view of him," she said. "I didn't see anybody plant a bomb or make a call. I was standing alone and scared because I was alone, female and had money on me."</p><p>In her later dealings with investigators, she identified a newspaper photograph of Rudolph as the man she saw that night.</p><p>___</p><p>HASH(0x1cdc8b8)</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2005/9/138581