A Bomber Murders a Judge and a Lawyer
(“Deadly Delivery,” Forensic Files)
Nothing made Walter Leroy Moody more angry than authorities who held him accountable.
It never seemed to occur to Moody that, if he stopped committing more and worse crimes, the law would stop showing up at his door with arrest warrants.
His criminal record started with an accidental maiming and ended with lethal bomb attacks that created a panic throughout Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.
Moody also directed his rage at his victims for having the audacity to seek justice. Forensic Files didn’t mention it but, somewhere in the middle of his criminal years, Moody allegedly attempted to drown three of his own business associates, then sued them for pressing charges against him.
In the final tally, he killed two innocent people, destroyed his own life, and made some FBI agents put in a lot OT.
Mail aggression. For this week, I searched for any clues from Moody’s personal history to explain what made him turn into a terrorist and murderer.
So let’s get started on a recap of the Forensic Files episode “Deadly Delivery,” along with information culled from online research:
On December 16, 1989, a package arrived at the brick mansion owned by Robert and Helen Vance in Mountain Brook, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama.
When Robert, a federal court judge, untied the string on the box, it exploded and sent him flying across the room.
He died on the scene.
Here come the feds. One of the nails that came spewing from the package pierced Helen’s liver, but she survived.
Days later, a security guard at an Atlanta courthouse spotted a bomb during a routine X-ray of mail.
By this time, federal authorities, who don’t particularly like it when people send explosive devices through the U.S. Postal Service, had come out in full force to help local law enforcement.
Uncivil attack. ATF investigators determined that the two bombs came from the same individual. They were meticulously constructed and had been sprayed with black paint to cover any fingerprints.
The bombs resembled a device that had exploded four months earlier at an NAACP office in Atlanta. Fortunately, it held only teargas — not nails — and no one died. A letter enclosed with the teargas bomb wrote of unfairness at the 11th Circuit Court
Then, on Dec. 18, 1989, Savannah alderman and civil rights lawyer Robert Robinson — who had been one of the first black students to integrate Savannah High in 1963 — opened a package he found on his desk. It exploded and Robinson, 42, died three hours later.
Saved by the bell. In just a few days, the anonymous bomber had the 11th District states of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia gripped by fear.
Rep. Willye F. Dennis, who was president of the NAACP in Jacksonville, Florida, received a package shortly after Robinson died, but a friend called to warn her before she had a chance to open it. It contained a bomb like the others.
Inside the box, the sender placed letters taking credit for the NAACP teargas attack and the other bombs. The killer said he was hunting NAACP officers.
Declaration of vengeance. His motive, it seemed at first, was revenge for a case that had no connection to him whatsoever — the rape and murder of preschool teacher Julie Love by Emmanuel Hammond on July 11, 1988.
“Anytime a black man rapes a white woman in Alabama, Florida, or Georgia, Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System shall assassinate one federal judge, one attorney, and one officer of the NAACP,” one of the bomber’s letters stated.
He sent around 30 threatening letters to various federal judges, civil rights groups, and news organizations, including one to popular local TV anchor Brenda Wood.
‘One’ holds the key. The U.S. Marshall Service spent nearly $5 million on 24-hour bodyguards to protect Helen Vance and federal judges in the district and to upgrade courthouses’ video and X-ray equipment.
Noting that the typewriter the bomber used to write his letters and address the mailing labels had a replacement “1” key, the FBI put a huge effort into searching for the machine. In fact, the Feds nearly hectored an innocent junk dealer named Robert Wayne O’Ferrell to the point of suicide after they found out that he once owned a similar typewriter.
The big break in the case came when an ATF chemist named Lloyd Erwin remembered a bomb discovered by a Georgia woman in her home 17 years earlier, in 1972.
Charismatic at times. Hazel Strickland Moody had opened a still-unmailed box she found in her home. It was addressed to an auto dealership that repossessed a car belonging to her husband, Walter Leroy Moody. The explosion blew away parts of her finger and thigh and wounded her face and shoulder. She needed six operations to recover.
So who was Walter Leroy Moody, commonly known as Roy? Born the son of an auto mechanic on March 24, 1935, in Rex, Georgia, Moody was alternately depicted as a charmer and a loner.
The Atlanta Constitution, which covered the bombing cases extensively, noted descriptions of Moody as an obsessive and manipulative man who could “sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Certifiable. As a young man, Moody studied chemistry and physics at Mercer University and enrolled in John Marshall Law School. He never finished at either school but enjoyed successful stints in the army and air force and received honorable discharges.
In 1967, psychiatrist Thomas M. Hall diagnosed Moody as having “ambulatory schizophrenia” and general trouble readjusting to civilian life, according to reporting from the Atlanta Constitution. Moody “knew right from wrong, but couldn’t seem to keep from impulsively going ahead and doing whatever he thought of,” according to the analysis.
Multiple media sources give Moody’s latter occupation as “literary consultant.” Although he didn’t exactly seem like someone Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis met for high tea at the Plaza, Moody had founded an organization called the Associated Writers Guild of America. For a fee, he offered to publish writers’ work in a book called Authors to Watch. The Better Business Bureau received complaints from consumers in 48 states about the organization, which Moody claimed was a nonprofit.
According to Deadly Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders by Ray Jenkins, it was Hazel Moody who provided the more steady income to the couple and their son, Mark, via her job with Ralston Purina.
POTUS plea. When he was tried for creating and possessing the bomb that injured his wife in 1972, Moody strenuously denied the charges, but was convicted anyway. Judge Robert Vance Sr. sentenced him to six years. (Hazel divorced him despite his legal salvos to fight the split, according to Deadly Vengeance.)
He served his time at a state penitentiary and spent the latter 1970s and early 1980s trying to get his conviction overturned, fighting bitterly with the 11th District Court to no avail. He wrote to President George H.W. Bush for help, but had no luck there either.
Sprung from prison after two years, Moody started a boat equipment company, then allegedly tried to drown three of his employees — he had taken out life insurance policies totaling $2.2 million on the men — whom he tasked with shooting underwater photos, according to the New York Times.
One of the men claimed that Moody had stomped on his hand while he was desperately trying to climb the ladder to get back on the boat. After a 1983 trial, the jury couldn’t reach a decision and prosecutors declined to retry the case against Moody.
Race or restiveness. Moody filed lawsuits against the three former employees plus law enforcement involved with the case. A panel including Judge Vance scuttled the suit.
Now it was 1989, and Moody — a free man — was the No. 1 suspect in two fatal bomb attacks.
It seemed that he was so indignant about being accused of making one bomb that injured his wife back in 1972 that he decided to make more bombs to hurt more people.
Scattered living quarters. Or were the bombings motivated by the racist reasons Moody proclaimed in his letters? Like Robert Robinson, Judge Vance had a long history of supporting civil rights.
We’ll get to that question in a minute but, first, the takedown: Investigators yielded a suspicious number of typical bomb-making items while searching three locations — Moody’s antiseptically clean house in Rex, an apartment he rented in Chamblee, and an airplane hangar he somehow had access to.
Investigators also found a letter-folding machine. The bomb letters had been perfectly folded.
Spouse starts spilling. On July 13, 1990, authorities arrested Moody, who looked as though he used leftover Rust-Oleum to paint his own mop top.
What really sealed his fate was information from the one person he probably never expected to betray him: his mousey second wife.
Susan McBride Moody, 28, was arrested along with her husband, but she got out on bail.
Dressed to kill. At the federal trial in 1991 — which was held in Minnesota before a sequestered jury — Susan testified about the couple’s special shopping trips, when he would instruct her to fill a cart with such items as metal pipes, nails, safety glasses, gloves, and shower caps. He figured no one would suspect the innocent-looking Susan of anything.
Authorities believed that, to avoid leaving evidence, Moody outfitted himself like a surgeon while making the bombs.
Susan, who allegedly suffered from Battered Woman Syndrome and received immunity, testified that she had purchased a secondhand typewriter for Leroy like the one used to write the threatening letters; the machine was later thrown away and never recovered.
Solitary conversations. The prosecution, led by future FBI director Louis Freeh, had plenty more ammunition in store: The authorities had matched a fingerprint on one of the bomb letters to an employee at a copy shop in Kentucky where Susan said she had Xeroxed documents related to the bombings.
Plus, the authorities had surveilled Moody at home and in jail (where he talked to himself) and picked up some incriminating utterances, according to the FBI’s website.
Although Forensic Files and Moody himself portrayed his string of 1989 bombings as racism-motivated, in the end, the FBI concluded that it was just a ruse to throw off investigators so no one would suspect him of killing the primary target of his resentment: Judge Robert Vance.
Not doing himself any favor. Meanwhile, Moody blamed the exploding packages on the Ku Klux Klan.
Against his lawyer’s advice, Moody took the stand as the only defense witness, giving “rambling, sometimes bizarre testimony during which he interspersed details of his sex life,” according to an AP account.
As for the shopping trips for the bomb components, the defendant explained that he had been duped into buying them for someone else.
On June 28, 1991, the jury found Moody guilty of 70 charges, including the murder of Vance and mailing threats to Vance’s colleagues as well as to area journalists.
Ultimate punishment. Judge Edward J. Devitt sentenced Moody to seven life terms plus 400 years.
Because Moody’s second murder victim, Robert Robinson, was a local official rather than a federal one, his case was a state action. Moody argued loudly and created disruptions toward the beginning of the trial but, by the time it wound down, he was quietly reading a paperback, the Atlanta Constitution reported.
In 1997, Moody received a sentence of death by the electric chair.
By this time, Susan Moody had divorced him.
The four children Walter Leroy Moody had accrued over the years weren’t in his corner either. They wanted nothing to do with him and refused to use his last name, according to Ray Jenkins’ book.
Moody denied his guilt right up to the end, claiming a government conspiracy framed him. He appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the federal court had no right to hand him over to Alabama, which was slated to carry out the execution.
Feigned empathy. His lawyers took a stab at persuading Alabama’s governor to grant Moody clemency because the murdered judge wasn’t a fan of capital punishment.
Moody even tried to get Robert Vance Jr. — the son of the murdered judge — on his side, claiming that Vance deserved to see the “real killer” of his father revealed.
Those bids were unsuccessful.
And with an IQ of 130, Moody couldn’t play the last-resort “no execution because I’m retarded” card (Ronnie Joe Neal and John Lotter).
In the end, Walter Leroy Moody succeeded only at postponing justice — until April 19, 2018, when was 83 years old.
Moody declined to order a last meal, although he had earlier enjoyed cheesesteak sandwiches and Dr Peppers with some visiting friends at William C. Holman Correctional Facility.
He refused to give any last words.
By this time, Alabama was offering death row inmates a choice of lethal injection or the electric chair.
Moody took the needle.
Newspapers all over the world reported on the “execution of the oldest inmate in modern times.”
Widow’s mixed feelings. It’s not clear whether or not homicide victim Robert Robinson’s family witnessed the event. Robert Vance Jr., who by this time had become a judge himself, didn’t attend.
Neither did Helen Vance, who opposed the death penalty but admitted she wasn’t too sorry to see her husband’s assassin exit this world.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Tubi
