A BYTE OUT OF HISTORY
The Mail Bomb Murders
12/26/06
Getting
a plainly wrapped package in the mail wasn’t
all that surprising. It was the holidays,
after all. What was inside was another matter.
It was a bomb.
When federal appeals Judge Robert Vance opened
the small brown parcel in the kitchen of his
suburban Alabama home on December 16, 1989—15
years ago this month—it exploded, killing
him instantly and seriously injuring his wife.
Two days later, virtually the same scenario
happened again. This time, the victim
was Atlanta Attorney Robert Robertson.
It wasn’t over. Two more bombs mysteriously
appeared. The third, sent to the federal courthouse
in Atlanta, was intercepted. A fourth was
recovered after being mailed to the Jacksonville
office of the NAACP. Through brave and careful
work, ATF
personnel defused the one bomb and Florida
police bomb experts the other.
The murders and serial bombings stunned the
nation. Who’d be spiteful enough to
send mail bombs during the holidays?
That’s what we aimed to find out.
We started with the obvious. Both men were
known for their work in civil rights. But
that turned out to be a red herring.
Meanwhile, with extensive help from U.S. postal
inspectors, we’d gathered the remnants
of the bombs and packages for our Lab to analyze,
learned the path the packages had taken through
the postal system, and assembled a long list
of suspects.
A break came when an ATF expert was contacted
by a colleague who had helped defuse one of
the bombs. He thought it resembled one he’d
seen 17 years before. And he remembered the
name of the person who had built it—Walter
Leroy Moody.
With this lead, the Bureau and its partners
began an extensive probe of the events—purchases,
contacts, phone calls, etc.—and ultimately
linked both the exploded and unexploded bombs
to each other and to Moody. Court authorized
surveillance of Moody at home and in jail
(he talked to himself) provided additional
evidence. Other leads were followed, suspects
eliminated or linked to the crimes, and detailed
analysis done on every bit of evidence, information,
and trail that we came across.
Over the next year, Moody’s motive became
clear. We found a pattern of experimentation
with bombs dating back to the early 1970s
when Moody was convicted of possessing a bomb
that had hurt his wife when it exploded. His
conviction and failed appeals in that case
had led him to harbor a long-festering resentment
of the court system. His contact with Judge
Vance in a 1980s case led to even deeper resentment
and a personal animus that led to revenge.
The other bombs, we determined, were meant
to make us suspect that racism was the motive.
By the spring of 1991, with the help of prosecutor
(and future FBI Director) Louis Freeh, a solid
case had been developed. The trial was difficult.
Moody had made every effort to conceal his
connection to the bombings.
Success. On June 28, 1991, based on the
extensive investigative work of the FBI, the
ATF, the IRS, the U.S. Marshals, the Georgia
State Police and many others, the jury found
Moody guilty of more than 70 charges and sentenced
him to life in prison.
It ended up one of the largest cases in our
history—and an important one, as protecting
our nation’s judges is a responsibility
we take very seriously.
Links: More
Bytes Out of History | FBI
History webpage
