The Suspect: An Olympic Bombing, the FBI, the Media, and Richard Jewell, the Man Caught in the Middle

by Kent Alexander

Downtown Atlanta, traditionally a ghost town after work hours, had become home to the newly constructed Centennial Olympic Park.

Good security, Jewell believed, required two elements. The first was attentiveness. One of his favorite games was to close his eyes and try to precisely recall the nearby scene—the color and make of parked cars, signs on the pavilions, the straw panama hat of the Olympic volunteer standing a dozen feet away. The second attribute was unpredictability. Each night, Jewell patrolled at odd intervals. Ten P.M. outside the tower; 10:30 inside. Maybe both again at 11:15, then again at 11:45. Stay sporadic. Don’t set patterns.

Just two days before the Opening Ceremony in Atlanta, TWA Flight 800 had exploded mysteriously off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 on board. Law enforcement officers in the park were telling Jewell they thought the downing was an act of terror.

The GBI man continued to believe that Jewell was overreacting, maybe a little overzealous.

Davis radioed the Centennial Park command center, a “27.” Suspicious package report. It was 12:57 A.M.

Young, a civil rights icon, was an elite Atlanta power broker. His path had begun in the ministry in the late 1950s, and he grew close to Martin Luther King Jr. They marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama together, stood unbowed against police and military in Birmingham, and fought segregation at the “swim-in” at St. Augustine, Florida. Young was also with King when he was murdered in Memphis in April 1968. In the decades that followed King’s death, Young went on to become a U.S. congressman and the first African American to be a United Nations ambassador. Since 1982, he had served as Atlanta mayor.

“Nazism and white supremacy is a sickness,” he told his son. But “you can’t help them unless you try to understand them.”

Billy Payne cobbled together the Atlanta Nine, an ad hoc group of highly successful businesspeople and socialites,

The Olympic Games had been created in Greece in the eighth century BCE as a religious event to honor the god Zeus. Footraces, discus throws, boxing, wrestling, and the pentathlon would be added over the following centuries. Every four years, a time period called an Olympiad, wars would pause as athletic competitions blossomed in a spirit of pagan piety. But in the fourth century CE, the Games were relegated to history, victim to a push for Christian purity across the Roman State. Then in 1896, a French aristocrat with a passion for Greek philosophy, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, led an effort to relaunch the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece. Athletes from fourteen countries were sponsored by their schools or sports clubs; no one would march behind a national flag until 1908.

The chance that any competitor might beat out the Greeks was deemed so remote that an Indianapolis executive, armed with $50 million of philanthropic funds to bring sports events to his city, refused to even consider a bid. “The ’96 Olympics will be in Athens. Anyone who spends a nickel trying to get the ’96 Games is wasting his money,” he told the Atlanta Constitution.

In sports, its pro teams ranged from second rate to awful, triggering Sports Illustrated to dub Atlanta “Loserville, U.S.A.”

Originally called Terminus for the train lines that ended there, the city grew into a crucial rail depot for the American South during the Civil War.

Its business leaders, never missing a branding opportunity, christened Atlanta “the city too busy to hate.”

Within a few months, the committee had narrowed the choice to Atlanta and Minneapolis-St. Paul.

At any event attended by an IOC voter, Payne extended his arm for a warm handshake and offered a smiling “Hi, I’m Billy” or “How y’all doin’?” The rest of the Atlanta Nine followed suit. In time, they began hearing “How y’all doin’?” coming back to them in heavy Chinese, Spanish, and French accents.

Volunteers meticulously crafted dossiers on each of the eighty-five voters, their likes and dislikes, family members, favorite cocktails.

When delegations visited Atlanta, they were offered meals and accommodations not at the usual sterile luxury hotels but instead in elegant homes that echoed the fabled Tara from Gone with the Wind.

The Dutch had bankrolled more than $1.5 billion in Atlanta, including two Ritz-Carlton hotels; the Japanese had invested heavily too. They each had built-in financial reasons to support Atlanta.

“You can blame the white people for buying us, but dammit, you all sold us.”

Instead, in the final few months, Payne and Young leaned heavily on a stealth strategy: They urged IOC voters to view Atlanta as their default option. The Olympics host-city selection process, they knew, would be formal and rapid-fire. All IOC delegates would gather in a single room. A secret ballot would be held, after which the city with the lowest score would be eliminated. The next round would occur immediately afterward, without additional discussion, and again the lowest vote getter would be knocked out. The process would continue until the fifth ballot when a winner was selected in head-to-head competition. Once the voting started, Young noted, it would be the purest voting system he had ever heard of, with no room for lobbying, horse-trading, or corruption. At every opportunity, the Atlanta committee would offer this message: We understand if you favor another city, maybe out of alliance or allegiance. No hard feelings. But if that city is eliminated, please make us your No. 2. That meant shifting their votes to Atlanta once their favorite had been beaten. Or, as Payne viewed it, their second-best friend.

The AJC’s first-run banner headline would be reprinted on T-shirts and posters for years: IT’S ATLANTA! Just below, in a smaller font, the paper ran a less heralded and unintentionally foreboding subhead: CITY EXPLODES IN THRILL OF VICTORY.

Richard’s parents signed him up for the Royal Ambassadors program through church, known colloquially as “Boy Scouts for Baptists.”

John Jewell did not call the next day or the one after. Law enforcement put out an APB for him, but the man had simply disappeared. Richard would never return to college, and he and Bobi would never see John Jewell again.

Having honed his skills in handling weapons and experienced the satisfaction of helping disaster victims in need, Jewell wanted to be a cop.

One night in December 1989, she agreed to join Jewell at Bobi’s for dinner to celebrate his twenty-seventh birthday. After he picked up Nancy, Jewell confided to her that his mother thought they were dating. He hoped she didn’t mind. Inside the apartment, Jewell tried to show Bobi how close he and Nancy were by putting his arm around her and trying to hold her hand. It was all finally too much. Nancy ended the friendship and changed her phone number.

Jewell, meanwhile, unsuccessfully applied to other local forces—Smyrna, DeKalb County, and the Atlanta Police Department (APD).

On February 8, 1990, Jewell dressed early for his start as a Habersham County deputy sheriff.

One previous deputy had considered the place so foul that he trained on the job for three hours, went outside to get a Coke, and never returned. Another who would come and go said, “I wouldn’t walk my dog through that jail.”

Three months into the job, Jewell’s heavy-handedness almost derailed him. On May 26, 1990, the department’s phone rang very early in the morning. A DeKalb County officer was on the line. Does Richard Jewell work in Habersham? Yes. What does he do? He’s a jailer. Is he a certified peace officer? Well, not yet. That’s all the caller needed to hear. The DeKalb police drove to Jewell’s apartment, handcuffed him, and locked him up for impersonating an officer.

Finally, in a routine condition of such cases, the judge ordered Jewell to be evaluated to see if counseling was necessary. The judge wished him luck. When Jewell later went to his psychological evaluation, it took only fifteen or twenty minutes. “There’s nothing to this,” the counselor told Jewell. “Don’t worry about it.”

The price tag had been set at a whopping $1.6 billion, including hiring nearly five thousand employees and supporting an additional fifty-five thousand volunteers.

The first was Montreal ’76. Government run and funded, that Olympics had been a fiscal disaster, saddling the city with debt of more than $1 billion. A decade later, when Payne first visited Andy Young, the mayor spoke of Montreal still being $700 million underwater. Montreal’s experience so spooked future potential hosts that Los Angeles had been the only city in the world to bid for the Games held eight years later.

Coleman believed that worrywarts overstated the time and effort required to protect visitors. His strategy would be far simpler, he explained to Maples and others; he would just wait until about six months before the Games, then instruct police chiefs: “All right, this is your responsibility; this is your venue. I want you to make it safe like you would a sporting event. … Now run that son of a bitch and call me when you get a problem.”

Atlanta had seen its crime rate worsen so badly that by the early 1990s one local journalist suggested that the informal motto should be changed to “a city too busy to reload.”

Bomb scares had numbered over one hundred at every Summer Olympics since 1984.

In one case at the Los Angeles Games, an LAPD officer discovered an unexploded device under a Turkish team bus. Investigators soon determined that the police officer had secretly planted a fake bomb himself so that he could “find” it and be declared a hero.

In prior Olympics outside the United States, other host countries had simply called in their armies.

But the United States had to work under posse comitatus, an 1878 Act of Congress that barred the use of federal troops to enforce domestic laws and make arrests.

Metro Atlanta only had a pool of 2,500 sworn officers, roughly one-sixth of the number in metro Los Angeles in 1984.

Waco instantly became a battle cry for militia groups throughout rural America, who centered on the FBI’s heavy use of firepower. Anti-government radicals vowed to avenge April 19, 1993, the day of the final siege.

Issue by issue, the Secret Seven debated and resolved a list of security questions, easing but never fully quelling their worries about domestic or international terrorist attacks. One particularly vexing matter was how to assemble the promised force of thirty thousand personnel. A major piece of that answer, they recognized but never came to trust, would have to be private security guards. Richard Jewell would later be part of that force.

For past projects, Atlanta had shown almost no ability to move at any pace but slowly,

Within months, corporate and philanthropic funders had pledged enough money for the state to acquire twenty-one acres of squalid downtown blocks. Some property owners sold, others donated their sites, and the state used eminent domain to capture a few. Centennial Park was becoming a reality.

Then came Rathburn’s most controversial line. He told Turner, “This will not be a public park.”

Cameras would be installed around the perimeter, as would a fence with wide open entrance points.

Unlike the athletic venues, there would be no magnetometers or bag checks.

During a high school summer break, Bubber hired Kathy to take photos of houses underwritten by his company. She roped in her cousin and closest relative, Bentley. The work itself wasn’t challenging, but some of the residences were in Athens’s less-affluent communities. One afternoon, the girls pulled up in an old white van outside a ramshackle home. They stepped onto the sidewalk to take pictures. Suddenly, a woman bolted out of the front door with a shotgun, aimed directly at the girls. The homeowner wanted answers fast. Kathy quickly lowered her camera, perkily announcing, “Congratulations, your house has been nominated for yard of the month!” Within minutes, the homeowner had gathered her family in the yard for a group portrait. Kathy snapped photo after photo, making sure to include the house in the background for the underwriting staff. Then she and Bentley hopped back in the van, turned the corner, and burst into laughter.

The Atlanta Constitution launched in 1868 in the shadow of the Civil War. Over the following decades, the morning publication grew to regional prominence, featuring not only Henry Grady and his eloquent support for the New South, but also fellow editor Joel Chandler Harris and his Uncle Remus chronicles of African American folktales. Three-quarters of a century later, during the civil rights movement, another crusading editor named Ralph McGill earned the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for his forceful arguments against intolerance and segregation. The afternoon competitor, the Atlanta Journal, was founded in 1883, and featured the front-page motto “Covers Dixie Like the Dew.” It boasted its own celebrated Southern past. In 1922, the paper hired an outgoing, petite Atlanta native named Peggy Mitchell to write for its Sunday Magazine. The following decade, Mitchell wrote her first and only novel, Gone with the Wind, which won the Pulitzer Prize and put Atlanta on the literary map forever.

Atlanta’s oldest radio station (whose call letters WSB slyly stood for Welcome South, Brother),

In September 1982, editors at the Gannett Corporation debuted a national paper patterned after Americans’ TV viewing habits. USA Today featured short articles, pie charts, bright colors, and news abbreviated to “chunklets,” all designed for readability and speed. Almost no stories “jumped” from the front page to an inside page. “Upbeat” was the buzzword. In the first issue, an airline crash in Spain was headlined, “Miracle: 327 survive, 55 die.” Many journalists decried the rise of the media equivalent of fast food, dubbing the publication “McPaper.” Legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee snarled, “If USA Today is a good newspaper, then I’m in the wrong business.”