Woman Expects to Be Charged With Helping Bombing Suspect

A woman charged with firing a shotgun into an abortion clinic says she expects to be indicted on charges of helping serial bombing suspect Eric Robert Rudolph elude capture, according to a published report Sunday.

Brenda Kay Phillips, 44, told FBI agents after her arrest in February that she had helped Rudolph hide when she moved in 2001 to Murphy, N.C., where Rudolph was arrested May 31. She would not discuss how she knew Rudolph or what she did to help him, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said.

“I can’t talk about Eric right now because the federal government is talking about going for an indictment for helping him,” Phillips told the newspaper in an interview at the county jail in Marion, N.C.

FBI agents initially discounted Phillips’ claims that she helped Rudolph, but that has changed, said her attorney, Jack Stewart.

“Government authorities have shown a renewed interest in what Brenda has to say during the past couple of weeks,” Stewart said Sunday.

He said investigators questioned Phillips within days of her arrest. “Later, she reneged on it and said it all was not true,” Stewart said. Since then, she has refused to cooperate with authorities, he said.

After she had a psychiatric evaluation, a federal judge found her competent to stand trial. No psychological or psychiatric disorders were found, “but nevertheless there were some personality disorders that were determined,” Stewart said.

A trial could be scheduled as early as September, he said.

An agent at the FBI office in Charlotte said no one was available to comment on the case.

Phillips, a former nurse, told the Journal-Constitution that on Feb. 13 she fired a shotgun at the Femcare Clinic in Asheville to draw attention to the abortion issue. She then called police because she was concerned a guard could have been injured, the newspaper reported. The clinic was closed at the time and no one was hurt.

Phillips is also charged with telephoning threats to the Asheville clinic and to the Birmingham, Ala., clinic where a 1998 explosion killed an off-duty police officer and maimed a nurse. Rudolph has been charged in that bombing and is being held in Birmingham awaiting trial.

Rudolph, a 36-year-old survivalist and former soldier, is also accused in the 1996 Olympic park bombing in Atlanta, where a woman was killed and more than 100 people were injured, and in two 1997 bombings in Atlanta at a lesbian-oriented bar and a building that housed an abortion clinic. Since his arrest, federal agents have searched for people who may have helped him.