Don’t say it was luck.

When Jeff Postell was 21 years old, he noticed something moving behind a dumpster in the middle of the night. He pulled his police cruiser back around to have a closer look.

“I don’t think an experienced officer would have gone back,” Chris Swecker, the former head of the FBI in North Carolina, told me back in 2019.

But Postell, who was 10 months out of the police academy, was doing what he’d been taught. “Do your job differently every night,” he recalled his training officer telling him. “Don't do the same thing every night. Don't go check the same building at the same time in the same manner every night. Change it up if you want to throw people off, because people watch the movements of the police.”

One of the guys watching those movements? Eric Rudolph. Before Postell was working the overnight shift in Murphy, Rudolph had no problem sneaking in town to get the food and supplies he needed to survive in the western North Carolina mountains. But in the 10 months before his capture—the months when Postell was patrolling during the wee hours in Murphy—Rudolph didn’t quite know when the police would be cruising by. “I had almost caught him once before,” Postell says. That night, Rudolph was packing a gun. The night Postell caught him, he was only wearing a flashlight. And that’s when he got caught.

“[Rudolph] said, ‘I just miscalculated this guy, just I totally underestimated him,’” Swecker said. It wasn’t luck. It was training.

Eric Rudolph was the man who set off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics on July 27, 1996, killing one person and injuring 111 others. Over the next two years, he set off more bombs at abortion clinics across the south. At one of those bombings, someone saw him getting into a car with North Carolina license plates. Not long afterward, police and federal agents swarmed his home in Cherokee County. Rudolph had been watching TV inside, saw that he was now wanted, and fled. Agents missed him by mere minutes.

What followed was an intense five-year manhunt, which is widely considered to be the longest and most intense in American history. “[It] was more like an occupation of western North Carolina,” Swecker told me. Soldiers and feds looked for Rudolph everywhere, and kept coming up empty. They knew he was somewhere up in the mountains. They just couldn’t find him.

And then, around 3:30 a.m. on May 31, 2003, Jeff Postell caught him rummaging through a dumpster.

What happened to Eric Rudolph has been thoroughly documented. What happened to Jeff Postell has not.

That’s what led me to fly to Boston in 2019 to meet up with Postell, who had moved on to become an officer at Boston College. I was working at Our State magazine at the time, and part of my motivation for the trip was pure curiosity. The other part was a bit of a self-imposed challenge. Our State is a relentlessly positive publication. The manhunt for Eric Rudolph was an especially dark time in western North Carolina. Sometimes, I’d think to myself: How could I sneak a story about a bleak era in this state’s history into a publication that prides itself on joy and celebration? What’s the most positive thing that came out of a very negative period?

Postell’s capture of Rudolph seemed to be it. By 2019, the podcast I’d created, Away Message, had gone from passion project to a legitimate endeavor at Our State. I’d earned enough goodwill to take a two-day trip to Boston to go see Jeff Postell.

That’s the backstory. The actual story was the longest episode of Away Message that I ever produced. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of from a nearly quarter-century career in journalism. And, I can honestly say that I knew very little before I flew to Boston. Over two days, I found myself surprised and astonished multiple times.

My friends at WUNC’s wonderful podcast, The Broadside, republished that episode last week. You can listen below on YouTube, or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

For your reference, all of the old episodes of Away Message, from 2017 through 2020, are still in my podcast feed. You can find them by mashing one of the buttons below. I think they all still hold up, and if you’re looking to explore this state, you might find some stories in there that’ll put you in the mood for a road trip.

In the six years since this particular episode aired, Postell has taken a new job, and one of the people I interviewed, Bill Hughes, passed away earlier this month. I’m grateful to WUNC for highlighting this story again, 30 years after the bombing. In their words: “Being a footnote to history is sometimes just the beginning of a life well-lived.”