“He was killed in a brutally violent fashion. If they would go after a federal judge like that, nobody was off limits. It’s one thing to see crime scene tape; it’s another to see where a man’s physical being has been blown away. This is a thinking person who has a lot of different angles, utilizing other people to achieve his purpose. He probably has been thinking about this a long time. Four bombs in four days—we certainly felt we had a serial bomber, and we didn’t know how many other bombs were out there in the mail.”
“My father was well-regarded as a judge. He had a larger-than-life type personality.”
“Judge Vance was killed almost instantly. His wife, Helen, was sitting across the table from him when the bomb went off, and she was quite seriously injured. Mrs. Vance, amazingly, had one nail that entered her body and lodged, I believe, near her back. Despite her injuries, Helen remains conscious and manages to dial 911, but there’s a problem: the blast has left her temporarily deaf. So she got in her van and drove to the neighbor’s house, which was a couple hundred yards away, drove up to that house, and started blowing the horn. They called 911 and the ambulance came and took her to the hospital.”
“Your mom’s fine, she’s in the hospital now.”
“He’s gone.”
“There was semblance of bloodshed on the floor. It was very clear that there was some very serious damage done to a human being here. Judge Vance had been sitting here with Miss Vance across the table. He looked at the box and as soon as he opened it, he was blown back, with, uh, all the way over to this wall.”
“Well, the things that came to my mind that just outraged me the most was he was killed in a brutally violent fashion, and this man’s blown to smithereens in his own house right in front of his wife. There’s nothing this guy could have done that warranted what just happened to him.”
“My purpose is to find out what the device was and furnish that information to the field investigators to assist them in trying to determine the person or persons responsible for putting that device together and causing it to explode.”
“Your mind is going in two or three different directions. You know, was it a personal vendetta by a neighbor or a relative or a business associate? Or was it someone who didn’t like his verdict in the courtroom, or what he represented, or his politics? All these things come into play.”
“Well, if they would go after a federal judge like that, nobody was off limits. It was unthinkable. The whole criminal justice system will break down if you murder judges. I mean, that’s like something that would happen in Bogota, not Birmingham, Alabama.”
“A bomber chooses his weapon because he wants to make certain that somebody is going to die, but he doesn’t want to be there to see it. He didn’t leave the bomb in the mailbox; he let the postal authorities do it. So for him, the inference then for us was that his ego trip was beyond killing a federal judge; it was making an employee of the federal government, the mailman, an accessory to the crime. So we looked at that as part of his makeup: that he’s the kind of person that likes to laugh at the government and feels that he can outsmart us on all levels.”
“Pick me, pick me! I want to work with you on this case.”
“This time the device is delivered directly to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, the same court where Judge Vance presided.”
“Well, we had Judge Vance’s bomb on Saturday. We had the 11th Circuit Court bomb on Monday morning. No one knew what to expect next. It was anyone’s guess.”
“The FBI was the lead agency in the investigation, but we were really needing more help from other agencies, and especially expertise from the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms with bombings, with the postal inspectors with the delivery of a package in the mail, with the US Marshals who were going to be responsible for protecting all the judges.”
“It’s a horrific scene. The windows are blown out, his desk is blown basically in two, it is spattered with gore. The pale blue walls in his office have nails in them, and I will never forget it.”
“I think probably the impact it had on the public was to convey in a very important way the horror of what this bomber has done. You know, it’s one thing to see crime scene tape; it’s another to see where a man’s physical being has been blown away.”
“What explosion?”
“That’s all she said.”
“This was very, very painful because when we were on the road before we got to Savannah, they announced it on the radio, and I know that that really almost caused me to have a wreck. The kids didn’t know what to do ’cause I just stopped the car and got out of the car and just started running down the highway. I don’t know why, I just jumped out of the car.”
“It did feel like we were under attack, you know? Nobody knew when the next one was going to show up or anything, so pretty much the whole office was working this investigation.”
“He didn’t know for certain that Mr. Robinson would open that bomb. He sent it to him at his office. In doing that, someone else could have opened his mail. He didn’t care who did it; somebody at that office was going to die. And the other two bombs that he sent to the NAACP and the 11th Circuit, those were message bombs. They were diversion bombs, and he didn’t care who died there. That was an institutional diversion, not a personal assault.”
“Naturally, when you have two bombs going to the courts or to a judge, and then two bombs going to an NAACP lawyer in the NAACP office in Jacksonville, the conjecture was this is a hate crime. This is someone who’s mad at the courts and mad at black people, the NAACP. We don’t know what the motive is, so the field of suspects is huge, and one of the worst mistakes you can make in a big investigation is narrowing the focus too soon.”
“Hey, my cellmate last year said that when he got out, he was going to kill a federal judge.”
“I’d never seen a device specifically like this before. All four devices were essentially identical to each other. The bomb that killed Judge Vance was more of what I call a traditional pipe bomb where it had endcaps that were screwed on. The other three devices were lengths of pipe with end plates that were welded on. That made me feel very, very comfortable to say, ‘Hey, this was built not by persons plural, but by a singular person.'”
“A threaded rod had been run through the end plates on the end of these pipe bombs, apparently just to delay by, I guess, milliseconds the instant of explosion, because the more that explosion is delayed, the more force that builds up. Very risky for the bomber, because, you know, friction from turning that threaded rod with the powder inside, the welding that he did to affix the pipe together, could have had disastrous consequences for him.”
“The bomb maker was a very detail-oriented person who would take a lot of time and effort to make the bombs, who would probably test different components of the bombs before we actually put them into use, and who had the money and resources to accomplish all this. It would be a lone white male aged 45 to 53.”
“We were extremely impressed with his overall patience demonstrated in preparing the bombs. That would indicate that he would be at least middle-aged. He would be capable of being a college student; if not, he was self-taught, obviously well-read, even if he hadn’t attended college. He’s probably obsessive-compulsive, very neat.”
“There’s a chess game going on here. The public and the investigators are on one side of the board and our bomber’s on the other side, and that board is made up of the media, and he’s making his move, we’re making our move. So if we say something which he’s going to perceive to be challenging, more bombs are going to fly, and that’s why we carefully orchestrated press releases from then on because we knew he would relate to what we were saying, and it may cause him to send more bombs, and we did not want to see that.”
“It was determined that the typewriter that was used on the address labels and some of the threat letters had in fact been in Farrell’s possession.”
“Y’all been following me?”
“Yes, we have.”
“That’s interesting.”
“One of the first things that came to my attention was the way his shelves were put together, and I asked him who did his carpentry work, and he proudly stated that he did the shelves. Honestly, a number of them were about ready to fall down. I can’t at that point imagine someone building the shelves like that being in the same person who had built the bombs. There was too much in the devices, too much planning had gone into the construction of those devices, and the handiwork was of a higher level in the bombs than what I saw in the shelves. If the person that built these shelves tried to put the bomb together, we wouldn’t be talking to him right now; he would have blown himself up.”
“I’ve only ever seen one bomber use that signature.”
“Moody went from one of the 20 names that a chemist remembers from 20 years ago. That’s got to stay on the list. Moody, at least with ATF and with me and the case agent, Moody went high on the hit parade. We were in an agreement with the FBI that they would continue to pursue other avenues and persons of interest, but we were locking on Moody, and that was fine because you know it ain’t over till it’s over.”
“What were the odds that this guy built a package bomb previously in Macon, Georgia, and had a beef with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals? You know, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the guy.”
“The way he made them work with each other was superior in every way. You know, it was genius, it was madness.”
“I’m being followed by the feds, and I think it’s because they think I killed that federal judge and sent that bomb in the mail.”
“Bombers are very meticulous people; if they’re not, they kill themselves. In their persona to other people, they sometimes come across as almost effeminate, not in a homosexual way necessarily, but because they were just so neat about their hair, their dress—more like women than men—and that reflects in their bomb making, that reflects in their lifestyle. So Mr. Moody, if you looked at his appearance, it was impeccable most of the time—never a hair out of place.”
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t even have the typewriter. You never found the typewriter at my house. You never found anything else that I typed on that typewriter. It must be the junk dealer in Alabama.”
“Susan Moody had been the person Roy Moody sent out to gather the components from around the Southeast. Susan Moody was able to take investigators to the places where these components had come from; she was able to help them piece together this mosaic. Susan Moody worshiped Moody and did his bidding; whatever it was, she would follow and do whatever he told her. She didn’t seem to have a mind of her own anymore. You know, he was… she was his robot.”
“We had an outstanding investigative team that made things terribly uncomfortable, Mr. Farrell, but proved that he was innocent, and it’s difficult for him to accept, but I hope someday that he sees that we were just doing our job and will understand it.”
“Bombers, they are convinced that they are brighter than we are. They’re brighter than victims, they’re brighter than the system. They think things out, they fantasize about them, and bombers will rationalize that it’s not my fault he opened that package—you know, I didn’t give them to him, the mailman did; it’s the mailman’s fault. This guy was a revenge nut. He wanted to go to law school; he fancied himself the smartest man on the planet, and he could probably go to a law school, but he could never be admitted to the bar because of his 1972 conviction for the bomb in Macon, Georgia. So 18, 19 years later, he is still consumed with proving he didn’t do that and having his conviction overturned, and he’s getting nowhere.”
“I saw Walter Moody for the first time in his trial, and he never showed any emotion. I remember he had a writing pad in front of him, and he would just spend his time writing on his pad. He would just sit there without any sign of remorse. Just that fact alone, that he could not show any emotion under such circumstances, was very telling to me.”
“This man, it just ruined our whole family.”
“I came away from the trial convinced that Walter Moody was a very bright man but a complete psychopath, without any regard for any other person. He was interested only in himself, and if he had some sort of grievance or grudge, then he would do what it takes to address that without regard to how it might affect other people.”
“I think Lloyd Irwin really cracked the case, that his memory of what had happened back in 1972 was the key in focusing the investigation where it should be—on Walter Leroy Moody.”
“I believe that Walter Moody is one of the most dangerous people that I ever encountered. He is locked up, and it’s over.”
