NATION, Page 33Murder by MailParcel bombs kill a federal judge and a civil rights lawyerBy Margaret Carlson/Reported by Elaine Shannon/Washington andDon Winbush/Atlanta
On the cold, overcast afternoon of Dec. 16, federal appeals
court Judge Robert Vance received a package at his white-columned
house in Mountain Brook, Ala., a Birmingham suburb. The return
address indicated that the parcel had been mailed by Vance's old
friend Senior Judge Lewis R. Morgan, who knew of Vance's passion
for animals. "I guess Judge Morgan sent me some more of those horse
magazines," Vance told his wife Helen. But as Vance eagerly opened
the shoe box-size parcel, it exploded. Vance was killed instantly;
his wife was seriously injured.
Two days later two more parcel bombs appeared. One detonated
in Savannah, killing Robert E. Robinson, an attorney and alderman.
In Atlanta, police disarmed another lethal package; it was
addressed to the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, on
which Vance served. In Jacksonville, Fla., local N.A.A.C.P.
president Willye Dennis was in such a hurry to leave the office
that she did not have time to unwrap a package that had just been
delivered. Hearing the next morning of Robinson's death, she
remembered the unopened box and called the sheriff's office, which
discovered inside it a bomb made with nails and smokeless powder.
In the search for a motive for the deadly mailings, many feared
that Colombian cocaine dealers had opened a new front in their
counteroffensive against the war on drugs by targeting the Eleventh
Circuit, which handles many drug cases. Later a different but
equally appalling rationale began to emerge: racial hatred.
White supremacists may have been angered at rulings by Vance
in highly publicized federal court cases. He had joined in
decisions that upheld the murder conviction of a member of the
Aryan Brotherhood and allowed the prosecution to present evidence
that led to the convictions of Ku Klux Klansmen involved in a
bloody 1979 confrontation with blacks in Decatur, Ala. In September
Vance wrote a bluntly worded reversal of a lower-court ruling that
had lifted an 18-year-old desegregation order from the Duval
County, Fla., schools. The plaintiff in that case was the
Jacksonville branch of the N.A.A.C.P. Robinson had played a part
in a failed N.A.A.C.P. challenge to a school desegregation plan
for Savannah.
As chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party from 1966 to 1977,
the jovial, imposing (6 ft. 3 in.) Vance was the epitome of the
moderate Southerner intent on expanding the rights of blacks. Vance
successfully integrated the party, in the process helping to remove
from its seal the white rooster that had long served as a symbol
of white supremacy. In 1968 he led the first racially mixed state
delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As a
lawyer, Vance shocked the tight-knit legal community by breaking
a gentlemen's agreement to keep blacks off juries in Birmingham.
President Jimmy Carter fulfilled Vance's lifelong ambition by
nominating him to the federal bench in 1977. He became part of the
Eleventh Circuit four years later.
According to investigators, all four bombs appear to have been
made with smokeless powder, easily purchased at any gun store, and
packed with nails that spray like shrapnel when the devices
explode. All were wrapped in brown paper and twine with neatly
typed red-bordered labels. All carried plausible return addresses.
Three were deposited in mailboxes in Georgia (the fourth had a
smudged postmark) with more postage than necessary, apparently so
that the sender could avoid a face-to-face transaction with a clerk
at a post office counter. The package intended for Vance may have
been sent to his house to elude detection devices at the federal
courthouse.
The bombings were a throwback to an earlier era of violent
resistance to desegregation. During the 1960s the homes of so many
Birmingham civil rights activists were bombed that the city came
to be known as "Bombingham." According to Klanwatch, a
Montgomery-based organization that tracks such incidents, the past
two years have brought 100 racially motivated shootings and
assaults, eleven murders and 60 cross burnings in 40 states and the
District of Columbia. The N.A.A.C.P. has suffered several attacks.
The organization's national headquarters in Baltimore has been hit
by mysterious gunfire twice since July, and last August a parcel
containing a tear-gas bomb exploded in its Atlanta office; more
than a dozen employees were injured.
In a nation that prides itself on the peaceful resolution of
its deepest conflicts, the murder of a judge is an especially
horrifying act. Vance is only the third federal judge to be
murdered in this century. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh is
making finding the killer the FBI's No. 1 priority. The sooner the
mystery is solved, the better. At week's end another bomb went off,
injuring Maryland state circuit court Judge John P. Corderman in
his Hagerstown apartment. Whether that bombing was connected to the
