How the team behind the ‘American Shrapnel’ podcast helped their sources feel safe

John Hammontree knows a good story when he hears one. Hammontree, the Murrow Award-winning head of podcasts for AL.com and current Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, says the idea for a podcast about domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph initially came to him following the events of January 6^th and the fall of Roe v. Wade. 

During a lunch outing with some of his newsroom colleagues in Birmingham, Alabama, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and 2021 Nieman Fellow John Archibald held the table rapt with the story of his trip to North Carolina in search of Rudolph, who bombed Birmingham’s New Woman All Women Health Care Center in 1997. 

Rudolph was eventually convicted in connection with bombings across the South from 1996 to 1998, including the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

After that lunch, Hammontree decided to reach out to Becca Andrews, a Western Kentucky University journalism professor and author of “No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right.”

Together, they got to work on making an eight-episode serialized podcast, “American Shrapnel: The Weaponization of Eric Robert Rudolph,” which was released in July and tells a story of domestic terrorism and extremist political ideology that still resonates today. 

“I knew Becca through Reckon, and through her work with Mother Jones. Her deep history of knowing the history of abortion rights, abortion access, anti-abortion movements, was a piece that we needed for this story,” Hammontree says. (Hammontree, Andrews, and I were all colleagues at Reckon News, the now-shuttered digital publication that grew out of AL.com).

Even with the right team in place, producing a podcast on Rudolph and the bombings was no easy feat — and no one had anticipated production taking three years. I chatted with the team about a familiar issue to journalists that has grown more challenging as our nation’s politics have grown more fractured: getting sources to speak on the record. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

I clocked at least six reasons various people gave you for not wanting to be interviewed: it was too long ago, privacy, fear of being targeted for speaking on the record about controversial topics, concern about their careers, faulty memory, concerns about what their families might think. To some extent, this just comes with the territory as journalists, but it seemed like for this specific project, there was an overwhelming number of refusals to speak on the record. Would you agree?

John Archibald: There were a lot, but that also comes with the fact that we interviewed a whole lot of people. There were people who were never going to talk to us. [Jeff Tickal], who was instrumental in getting [Eric Rudolph’s] car tag number in Episode 1, said, in some ways, the case is still active, and “if I said something that didn’t match up with what I said, I could jeopardize the case.” But what he would never say out loud, I think, is that he’s a Republican sitting judge in Alabama and he would rather hang on a cross than talk about abortion, than how he helped catch a killer.

Becca Andrews: We have this person that I’m trying to talk to right now who has been very back-and-forth. She’s just genuinely terrified of this moment. She’s a private person and the political climate is not helping her feel safe to tell her story that is critical of white supremacy. And even though her experience is her experience and has nothing to do with politics, she’s just like, “I don’t know that I even want to consider touching that.”

As a journalist it’s frustrating because … I feel it right now in my position as a professor, this chilling effect of, “Can we speak freely…? What’s going to happen?” I think it’s affecting us in journalism too with our sources.

John Hammontree: Jermaine Hughes [the University of Alabama at Birmingham student who witnessed Rudolph leaving the scene of the crime and followed him] is a whole separate category of person. He hasn’t spoken to the media since [the bombing] happened. He’s just the true definition of a Good Samaritan and a hero. There’s something almost noble about it. I mean, it’s frustrating, don’t get me wrong, but he has this principled stance of … never going to try to seek out credit or anything for this story. I wish he had talked to us, I wish we were the exception, but there’s something to be said for the fact that he’s never spoken to the media.

We’ve spoken off the record to some people who knew Eric directly. One of them was an old Army buddy of his, who initially was interested in going on the record, and then called back the next day [after] he’d spoken with his wife and he just didn’t want to get his name dragged into all that, which I understand. I wouldn’t want to be on the record of being an old friend of a serial bomber. But some of those conversations did give us the chance to learn more about Rudolph, which, on deep background, did affect the way we told the story.

We reached out to everybody in his family: his brothers, his sisters, his mother. Some people talked to [Rudolph’s mother, Patricia] back then, but since then, they’ve gone cone of silence. The family’s not talking. Maybe that’ll change when [his mother] passes, maybe not.

And then Eric, we each wrote multiple letters. We don’t know if he got them, we don’t know if he read them, but we never heard from him.

Archibald: For everybody in the story that made the final cut, there were many more who didn’t get that far, who had other reasons for not wanting to talk, and a good many of them were trauma. 

It’s like one of those things with Jermaine Hughes, the witness who followed [Rudolph], the hero. We didn’t get to talk to him, but when we found that transcript of his police interview from two hours after the [Birmingham clinic] bombing, in some ways, it seemed even more perfect because he was telling his story fresh in that moment. And what we found from so many people is when they talk about things they remember — like me — they remember things wrong, and through their own particular filter in that moment.

Hammontree: And there were some mundane things like people not checking their Facebook messages or not checking their emails. We had about three — they responded two weeks after the podcast went live.

How did you care for the people you interviewed? Some folks got quite emotional during their recollections.

Archibald: [Chris Edson, a paramedic on the scene featured in Episode 1] comes to mind on that. We just let him talk. I think some of that’s in the final tape. He was obviously very shaken by [the Birmingham clinic bombing].

I think I said something about, “I’m sorry to put you through it again,” and he said, “No, no, no, that’s what I think is supportive.”

We had a lot of conversations you didn’t hear with him about how it was going to be portrayed. He said he came to us because he knew we would tell it in a sensitive way. And then we talked about what that sensitivity looked like. And that’s what you end up with.

We basically said, “We just want you to tell your story, and you tell what you’re comfortable telling.” And he just opened up. And John and I, honestly, just sat there in an emotional state of wonder because he was summing up things that I thought were so extremely powerful and that we had never heard before. I think he understood that.

Hammontree: Some of the details he provided affected things like sound design or the music we would play. He talked about the ringing in his ears, and we tried to bring that to life for listeners.

One of the things I love about podcasting is just how intimate it is as a medium. If you’re just reading Chris Edson’s words, it’s not the same as hearing the catch in his voice. It’s a great way to [practice] journalism because it takes audiences into the room with you. You can hear the timbre in [police officer] Jeff Postell’s voice, and you can hear [The Otherside Lounge bombing victim Memrie Wells Cresswell’s] birds tweeting in the background. You can hear [former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama] Doug Jones banging on the table for emphasis. I think, in some ways, that’s unique to the form.

Talk about Memrie, Becca.

Andrews: I’m still shocked that we got through the phone conversation, because the first phone conversation she was like, “I Googled you and you’re a liberal.” And because I’m human, I sometimes make assumptions about people too. I was taken aback because I was like, “Oh, you’re queer — you wouldn’t be conservative!” So it took us a minute to be like, “Okay, look, I’m not telling the story as someone who typically votes Democrat. I am telling the story as someone who cares about the story, we care about the story, and we care about what happened to you and we care about the societal repercussions that are echoing in our present moment.”

It was clear that she was still dealing with some of this trauma. Basically everyone who has been through a bombing is dealing with that trauma for the rest of their lives. I took that really seriously and tried to prep for the interview with that in mind: What’s going to make you comfortable? Do you want your partner there? How do we do this in way that makes you feel safe?

I just remember that interview and feeling so lucky to be able to sit there and listen to her talk about her experience and share. It’s a thing we feel as journalists, right? When you’re in an interview and someone’s sharing with you and there’s this intimacy and you feel so fortunate to do this work in the first place, but also to just be trusted with that kind of experience. The whole interview was like that. I just felt like I was holding my breath and awed by it, by her.

The other dynamic with [Memrie] specifically was she had also been traumatized by the media. She had been outed by the media. That was another thing that was very present in the dynamic, that I think that we all felt was important to be sensitive to and thoughtful about. And we were all horrified that that happened to her.

Hammontree: When we were structuring the podcast, we wanted to make sure that we built episodes around her perspective, around Diane [Derzis, owner of the New Woman All Women Health Care Center in Birmingham, Ala.] and Emily [Lyons, the nurse injured in the bombing there] so that it wasn’t just the story of Eric Rudolph. He’s a vehicle, and this is the story of dozens of people who were affected by him, and it’s also the story of the people trying to make a whole army of Eric Rudolphs. So we wanted to try to set aside specific episodes to broaden the scope of the story.

How were you all able to take care of yourselves? You all spent three years researching and recording the podcast.

Archibald: I’ve been doing this a long time and covered a lot of these things … but we’re in a fortunate situation in that anytime we come across this stuff, we get to write it down. And when you write this stuff down, you process it in a different way than when you let it sit and fester. I honestly believe, whether it’s executions or bombings or disasters, the fact that I’ve always had to do obits for people … you get to process it, and you give them some kind of honor with the way you do it, and you get to figure out how you think about it.

And having two other people in this situation to share it all with, and bounce it all back and forth, and hear them — even when they’re wrong — tell you what they think about it, and to just check yourself … has been really valuable.

Andrews: The group dynamic really helped. None of us can take ourselves seriously because the other two are there to check that. That’s a gift.

Hammontree: Doing this deep dive back into the history, about the rise of some of these violent movements, in some way made the current moments scarier — the assassination in Minnesota [of state Rep. Melissa Hortman], the [Charlie Kirk] assassination, January 6^th, the bombing of an IVF clinic, the bomb threats in North Carolina — you could just see the continuum of them. But I think it also helped us, or at least helped me, to understand that this is not brand new. This is something that’s been building, and that there have also been people kind of pushing back, and getting in the way. When you hear Memrie or you hear Emily or Diane, you hear that they’re still fighting 20, 25 years later, and it gives you resolve.

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Minda Honey is the author of the dating memoir "The Heartbreak Years" and writes a weekly newsletter, Writing for Fakers, at mindahoney.substack.com.