Austin bombs revive trauma of 1989 assassination of judge
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Judge Robert Vance was at his kitchen table on Dec. 16, 1989, when he opened a package that had been mailed to his home. The bomb hidden inside exploded with brutal force, killing Vance instantly and severely injuring his wife.
Two days later, a similar device killed an attorney in Georgia. Two other mail bombs were later intercepted and defused, one at a federal courthouse in Atlanta and the other at an NAACP office in Jacksonville, Fla.
The bombings created a wave of terror across the South. Now, nearly 30 years later, Alabama is preparing to execute the man convicted in Vance’s killing, Walter Leroy Moody Jr. of Rex, Ga. Moody is set for lethal injection next month.
The long-delayed resolution to the old crime comes as Texas officials grapple with a deadly spate of bombings over three weeks that ended last week when the suspect blew himself up.
The complex investigation that led to Moody’s prosecution is a reflection of how difficult it can be to get to the bottom of sporadic bombings like the ones in Texas. And it is also a testament to the lingering effects that such a crime can have.
Tom Thurman, who retired from the FBI’s crime laboratory after handling cases including the Vance assassination, said bombings are “more complicated in many aspects” than other crimes.
“On the investigative side it’s so different from other crimes that involve personal contact,” he said. “An individual is there to stab, hit or shoot somebody and a lot of times law enforcement is fortunate to have someone who was there. In most bombing cases, the person who sets the device or sends it is not there. They’ve got some anonymity.”
Vance’s son, Robert Vance Jr., said he is thankful Moody is in prison, and he feels for the victims in Texas, where two people were killed and four were badly injured by package bombs.
“I’ve been in the place of the families down in the Austin area going through this. It’s just so frustrating because you don’t know who is responsible or why,” said Vance, now a Democratic state court judge.
Moody has always maintained his innocence. Agents arrested him in July 1990.
Robert S. Vance was a member of the Atlantabased 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and prosecutors alleged Moody targeted him out of anger at the 11th Circuit’s refusal to overturn a conviction that blocked Moody, who had attended law school, from ever practicing law.
The bomb that killed Robert Robinson, a black civil rights attorney from Savannah, Ga., was meant to cast suspicion on the Ku Klux Klan, as was the bomb sent to the NAACP office, authorities said.
By reconstructing the two bombs that killed Vance and Robinson and disarming the two others, investigators determined they were wrapped in nearly identical packages and mailed using the same kind of stamps. There were also similarities between the materials used in the bombs, including improvised detonators and wiring methods, Thurman said.
In Moody’s case, the bomb was manufactured in a way that led back to its maker, he said.
After Vance’s death, officials retrieved an intact bomb from the courthouse that housed 11th Circuit judges in Atlanta. Forensic chemist Lloyd Erwin of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recognized a unique element of its construction from a previous case: The ends of the pipe bomb were made of flat, welded pieces of metal rather than the screw caps most commonly used.
That tidbit led investigators to Moody, who had been convicted in a 1972 case involving a bomb with flat, welded end pieces.