Olympic bomber got life sentence

Eric Rudolph, who detonated bombs in Olympic park, at a women's clinic in Birmingham and a gay nightclub, got life imprisonment Monday. The bombings took 1 life and injured more than 100.

Rudolph, 38, admitted earlier this year to carrying out the Olympics blast, which killed one and injured 111, and detonating bombs at a women's clinic that performed abortions and a gay nightclub that injured 11 in 1997.

He also received two consecutive life sentences last month for the 1998 bombing of a women's clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed a police officer and maimed a nurse.

Only about half the Olympic Park victims were likely to show up, partly because Rudolph turned the sentencing in Alabama into a forum for his anti-abortion, anti-gay views, and partly because they believe it's time to move on, AP informs.

Jane Henry refuses to give Eric Rudolph another second of her life. So she won't be in one of the 300 seats reserved for victims when Rudolph is sentenced here today in federal court to life in prison without parole.

"I don't want to give this guy any more time," Henry said. "It's taken enough of my time and my life."

Henry, of Boca Raton, Florida, was struck in the leg by shrapnel during the Olympic Park bombing in 1996.

At the Alabama sentencing, Rudolph portrayed himself as a devout Christian motivated by his hatred of abortion and a federal government that lets it continue.

Rudolph was identified after the Birmingham blast and spent the next five years hiding out in the mountains of western North Carolina. He was captured in 2003 while scavenging for food behind a grocery store in Murphy, North Carolina.

The former soldier and prosecutors struck a deal: they wouldn't seek the death penalty and he would tell them where to find more than 250 pounds of stolen dynamite he had buried in the North Carolina woods. Sixty-one victims and relatives notified the federal court in Atlanta that they planned to attend. About a dozen plan to speak.

Some wanted to be in the courtroom to ask Rudolph why.

On photo: Eric Rudolph happily smiling.