The timeline just didn’t make sense to Bill Rankin. He was reporting on the investigation into Richard Jewell, a security guard suspected of single handedly orchestrating the July 17, 1996, Centennial Olympic Park bombing.
A few days after the bombing, which led to the deaths of two people and tainted the flag-waving cheer of Atlanta’s Olympic Games, Rankin stepped out of the downtown office of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and strolled a few blocks past Centennial Olympic Park. Then, keeping an eye on his watch, he walked the distance between the payphone Jewell supposedly used to call in the attack and the spot where the bomb exploded.
It would have been impossible for a lone bomber, as law enforcement suspected Jewell to be, to cover that ground in the time alleged by law enforcement. That realization, combined with doubts Rankin was hearing from court and legal sources and even his own pastor, who knew Jewell’s mother personally, shifted Rankin’s reporting. He believed the feds had the wrong man.
Jewell was the wrong man. Eric Robert Rudolph, finally captured by police in 2003, was sentenced to life in prison in 2005 for the Olympic Park bombing and other crimes.
“I’m as proud of that story as anything I ever wrote,” Rankin said, recalling the impact of his initial article that began to dismantle the case against Jewell. It remains a standout among thousands of news stories he wrote as legal affairs reporter for the AJC.
Rankin opened a window into Georgia’s criminal justice system through compelling storytelling that educated the public on the importance of transparency in Georgia’s courtrooms and criminal justice systems. “I wanted to do everything I could to keep the wheels of justice on an even keel,” Rankin said.
That critical work is why the Georgia First Amendment Foundation is honoring Rankin with the 2026 Charles L. Weltner Freedom of Information Award. He will receive the award and give the keynote speech at the foundation’s 2026 Weltner Banquet, 6:30-9 p.m., Oct. 28, at the Emory Conference Center in Atlanta.
Rankin’s reporting always reminded readers – and later podcast listeners – what was at stake: The people have given their government officials the power to prosecute, punish and kill. Georgians have a right to know how that power gets used. It was a tenet passed to Rankin by his father, Jim Rankin, a former AJC assistant managing editor. His father’s message, that the state never wields more power than when it executes someone, became the younger Rankin’s journalistic raison d’être.
“Bill has a very strong sense of justice, to the point of outrage,” said his longtime AJC editor and collaborator Richard Halicks. “Take, for example, his work on the death penalty and how capriciously it was imposed.”
A 2007 series showed that in more than 1,000 death penalty convictions over a decade, Georgia’s ultimate punishment was being administered arbitrarily and unfairly, particularly in cases with Black defendants and white victims.
While his investigative coverage got results, Rankin’s day-to-day chronicles of sensational Georgia court cases won followers. The murder trial of NFL star Ray Lewis after Atlanta’s 2000 Super Bowl. A racketeering trial centered on celebrity-frequented Atlanta strip club The Gold Club. The murder trial of a father accused of intentionally leaving his child in a hot car. The trial of white men who, in 2020, murdered a Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, as he jogged through a neighborhood near Brunswick. The racketeering case accusing President Donald Trump and his allies of attempting to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results.
An Atlanta native and University of Georgia graduate, Rankin started as a reporter in 1980, pounding out stories on a manual typewriter. But he was quick to embrace technological change. In 2011, he used Twitter to scoop other news outlets worldwide by reporting — in fewer than 140 characters — that the U.S. Supreme Court would allow Georgia to move ahead with the controversial execution of Troy Anthony Davis, convicted of killing a Savannah police officer.
He eagerly became lead reporter and narrator for the AJC’s award-winning true-crime podcast “Breakdown.” With a storyteller’s finesse and a courthouse regular’s acumen, he colorfully detailed botched prosecutions, shocking witness statements, judicial strictures and the consequences of each case.
Still, Rankin, who retired from the AJC in 2025, was at his core an old-school, shoe-leather reporter who thrived on competition and searched for angles other journalists missed.
“He did not want to get beat,” Halicks said. “And he had this wonderful way of getting it first and getting it right.”