He was supposed to be dead. Five years after Eric Rudolph escaped into the mountains of North Carolina, the FBI had long since abandoned the largest manhunt ever launched on U.S. soil. The fugitive accused of bombing the Atlanta Olympics, a gay bar, and two abortion clinics, leaving a trail of carnage across the southeast, had become a figure of folk legend. Many of his pursuers thought he had either skipped the country or crawled into a cave to die. In fact, Rudolph had been haunting the mountains and towns he knew best, pilfering food, stealing trucks, stalking the men who hunted him, and keeping his secrets buried in the woods. Then one night Rudolph got careless, and a rookie cop captured him a few miles from where he had first disappeared. But even in custody, Rudolph remained a mystery.

In Lone Wolf, Maryanne Vollers brings the reader inside one of the most sensational cases of domestic terrorism in American history. In addition to her unprecedented correspondence with Rudolph, Vollers had access to the FBI, the ATF, federal prosecutors, members of Rudolph's defense team, and his family to re-create the story in all its sweeping breadth and complexity.

Lone Wolf asks the inevitable questions: Who is Eric Rudolph, and why did he kill? Is he the hate-filled neo-Nazi described by federal agents, or is he the passionate, curious, and engaging man described by his lawyers and his family? Can both personalities exist in one rare, complicated, and deadly individual?

The profilers and psychologists Vollers interviews identify Rudolph as a "lone offender," a self-appointed avenger with no real alliances and no meaningful social ties. It puts Rudolph in the same category as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. The "lone wolf" believes history will judge him to be a hero. Society judges him to be a monster. Without losing sight of the hideous violence of his crimes, Lone Wolf seeks to put a human face on this iconic killer as it explores the painful mysteries of the human heart.

In the end, the moon was just another enemy. It hadn't always been that way. When he started writing about his fugitive years the word he chose was "addicting": "There is something addicting about the full moon on an early summer or fall evening in the South . . ." Now the moonlight pinned him to the shadows, kept him off the roads and dirt tracks where the breeze would disperse his scent before the hounds could follow it. The damp grass and foliage would hold his trail for days. The years of hiding, he later said, had turned him into a nocturnal creature, sleeping in the day, prowling for food at night, always watchful.

Eric Rudolph kept his campsite orderly: hiking boots lined up like soldiers on the cardboard pallet beneath a double tarp; scavenged newspapers and magazines stacked up neatly beside them. A small ring of stones for a cooking fire, with two blackened pots upturned to drain. He had scattered overripe bananas, tomatoes, and onions to dry in the sun. He could store them, use them later when food was scarce. His life was consumed with planning: figuring out the movement of police patrols through town, knowing which days the grocery stores dumped their expired bread and vegetables. He traced a grid on notebook paper to make into a calendar and neatly crossed off each day as it passed. When the federal agents found the calendar at his camp, the last marked date was May 30, 2003.

It was a weekend night, not much of a moon, and Rudolph figured that the lone patrolman would be distracted by teenage drunks out looking for trouble. He pulled on his "rummaging" clothes: a black cotton T-shirt, dark slacks, old black tennis shoes. In the darkness his feet remembered the steep trail down the small mountain overlooking town. When he reached the bottom he watched for the glow of headlights approaching, and when it was safe he ran across the four-lane highway, following the bridge a short distance until it crossed the Valley River. One time a car had surprised him and he'd had to hang off the side of the bridge to keep from being seen. Tonight the trip went smoothly and he dropped down quietly into a field on the other side of the river. He followed another well-worn path through the grass and weeds to the alley behind a small shopping center. The patrol car usually passed this way every hour or so. He crouched in the darkness and waited.

It was late in the third shift on the first night of the long Memorial Day weekend, and Officer Jeff Postell was running through his routine business checks along Andrews Road in Murphy, North Carolina. At about 3:30 A.M., Postell cruised through the alley behind the Save-A-Lot grocery store and the Sears appliance retailer, past a cluster of old, one-story shops with their backs to the marshy bottomland of the Valley River. Then he turned his patrol car back into the deserted parking lot.

Postell was short and slight, a twenty-one-year-old rookie with less than a year on the Murphy police force. But as his colleagues had already noticed, Postell compensated for his size with hard work and enthusiasm. More seasoned police officers might slide through the bottom of the third shift, waiting for trouble to call itself in. Not Jeff Postell. He was flush with the optimism of inexperience, and he wanted to catch himself a burglar before he switched over to working days.

Murphy is the largest municipality in the mountainous western tip of North Carolina. The town has 2,500 people in a county with 25,000 scattered residents, a population that almost doubles in the summer months. Locals like to boast that the area is "two hours from anywhere": two hours' drive from Asheville to the east, Chattanooga to the west...

Maryanne Vollers's first book, Ghosts of Mississippi, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She coauthored (with Jerri Nielsen) the number one New York Times bestseller Ice Bound and collaborated with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on her memoir, Living History. A former editor at Rolling Stone, she has written for Time, Esquire, GQ, and the New York Times Magazine. The daughter of a New York City fire chief, Vollers lives in Montana with her husband.

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