True Crime

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."