The Olympics. An abortion clinic. A lesbian club. A string of bombings shook Atlanta in the 1990s, and as agents zeroed in on the wrong guy, the bomber slipped away. Investigators had nothing but a roster of extremists and a photo of a man on a park bench so grainy they called it “Blob Man.”

Until almost two years later. Until Birmingham, when a bomb exploded near a college campus and a mild-mannered student asked himself a question.

Why, when everyone else is running to see what happened, is that man running away?

The young man followed, through narrow streets and wooded trails beneath the largest cast iron statue in the world. He broke the case open, leading agents to North Carolina, into what was then the largest manhunt in U.S. history.

In American Shrapnel, the latest from the Murrow-winning Alabama Media Group, Pulitzer winner John Archibald and award-winning journalist Becca Andrews, follow heroes, survivors and villains through the South, from Atlanta’s Centennial Park to dense rhododendron scrub in the Appalachians.

This story is more than a search for Eric Rudolph. It is a journey through the influences that drove him, and the rise of the kind of anger that broke from the dark web into courthouses, state houses, and the White House.