True Crime

The last memory Hannah Price has of her father before he vanished is waking up to him praying over her. That itself was not unusual; Aubrey Lee Price had always been a demonstrative Christian.

You have to go back almost ten years before December 9, 1938, to get to the beginning of this story. Ed Rivers was an up-and-coming politician then, serving as a state senator from Lakeland. It would be another eight years before Rivers would be elected governor, but he was trying to make a name for himself statewide, trying to lay a foundation.

It was a bright weekday in mid-September and the Cormier boys—thirty-one years old, identical twins, best friends, incorrigible malcontents—were coming home. Their sixty-two-year-old father looked out his living room window as a U-Haul rumbled into the gravel drive.

As midnight approached on Friday, July 26, 1996, there were still 15,000 people crowding Centennial Olympic Park. A heat wave that had kept temperatures hovering near 90 degrees for the past week had broken, and there was a cool breeze in the air.

Police Chief Paige McNeese leans back in his chair and pensively tugs on a Marlboro. "That word, hero," he says, "it can backfire on you in a heartbeat."

Overzealous. That adjective haunted Richard Jewell long before he became known as the FBI's leading suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing on July 27, 1996.