The first of a series of deadly package bombs killed a federal judge in Alabama.
Judge Robert Vance opened a small brown parcel in the kitchen of his suburban Birmingham home, causing a massive explosion that killed him instantly and seriously injured his wife.
Two days later, a mail bomb killed lawyer Robert Robinson in Savannah, Ga.
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, Fla., office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
An FBI agent remembered that Walter LeRoy Moody Jr. had been convicted in 1972 for setting off a pipe bomb with a similar design to that of the 1989 bombs. Bomb experts compared his 1972 bomb with the ’89 explosives and determined that there was little doubt that the same man had made them all.
In June 1991, a federal jury convicted Moody and sentenced him to seven life terms. In 1997, an Alabama judge sentenced Moody to die in the electric chair. He remains on death row in federal prison.
