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The Deadly Package

June 3, 2024

In this episode, Payton and Garrett dive into a string of mysterious mail bombing targeting people working in the Justice System.

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

You're listening to an Oh No Media podcast. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder with My Husband. I'm PaytonMoreland.

I'm Garrett Moreland.

And he's the husband.

And I'm the husband.

Thank you guys so much for your continued support. We love you, we love you, we love you. I just felt the need to say that this episode.Alright, G, are you ready for your 10 seconds?

Well, officially racking up the years. I had my birthday two days ago. I don't know, I guess I'm getting older. The big 3-0, which is alittle strange. I don't feel 30. I feel like I'm 20... 25, really.

Yeah, that's kind of what I feel like internally, but I'm30. 30 years old. I'm an adult now, which means I have to start acting like anadult. That means no more jokes in the podcast. Gotta be serious at all times.No more hot takes. Officially an adult.

That's kind of what I got for my 10 seconds. I'm stopping my10 seconds now that I'm 30. Sorry everybody.

No, but yeah, I had my birthday. It was good, it was great.Um, P and I have a lot of just work stuff and traveling coming up, so the nextfew weeks are going to be pretty crazy. We're going to be kind of all over theplace. We are actually recording really early in the morning, which issomething we've never done before. So it feels a little weird in here, doesn'tit?

Yeah.

Oh, I recorded Into the Dark before this and it was scary.It's just weird. It was dark outside when we first got here, and it's justweird to record early in the morning because we don't do that. Usually, werecord in the afternoon and I don't know, the vibes are different. I feel likewe're camping. I don't know, it's weird.

Yeah, that's what I got going. Let's hop into today's case.

Our sources for this episode are the FBI, USA Law, the USDepartment of Justice, the State of Alabama Office of the Attorney General, theState of Alabama Office of the Governor, NPR, Advanced Local, United StatesAttorney's Office, S House, California Law Group, WT1, Savannah Now, Fine Law,WJBF ABC 6, UPI, and Desert News.

Alright, I'm sure this is already fairly obvious to anyonewho enjoys true crime, but the criminal justice system is sacred. It's sodeeply important that we have working courts, appeals processes, rules aroundhow evidence is gathered, and so much more. If the criminal justice systembreaks down—say, you have a corrupt official or someone who bribes orintimidates someone into doing the wrong thing—it's dangerous for all ofsociety.

Put another way, of course it's bad when someone commits aviolent crime and harms another person. But if someone attacks the criminaljustice system itself to see that justice isn't done, then that's a threat tous all.

So let's go back to August 21st, 1989. On that day, anordinary-looking package was delivered to Atlanta's regional office for theNAACP. It was wrapped up in brown paper and had string tied around it. Theaddress label was black and red and the stamp had artwork for Yosemite NationalPark with an American flag waving over it.

Fun fact real quick: I climbed Half Dome like 13 years ago,15 years ago, something like that. Just wanted to spit that out. Thank you.

You're welcome.

This sort of typical ordinary package you've probably seen athousand times and you would never give a second thought to. Well, that Mondayin 1989, without warning, this package exploded in the NAACP office and thentear gas began pouring out of the box, or rather what had used to be the box.This was a bomb.

As the gas spread through the office building, the employeesrushed to evacuate. Luckily, nobody was killed, but everyone knew they mightnot be so lucky next time. They were worried that there would be a next time,and this is because the same day that the tear gas bomb exploded, an anonymousperson sent countless letters all over the United States.

So this bomb shows up at the NAACP, and on the same day, allof these letters go out all over the United States. The recipients werereporters, judges, lawyers, all kinds of important people. When they openedthese envelopes, they found letters that were labeled as a "declaration ofwar."

The reason? Apparently, America's courts were unfair andcorrupt, and the sender was going to keep bombing people until somethingchanged.

That's a lot. I mean, I've had this question for a longtime, but I don't bomb people. Unfortunately, the police didn't have any way offiguring out who sent these letters or the bomb. As frightening as thatdeclaration of war was, there was no way to move forward in the investigationwithout more information. So a few months go by without any major breaks.

Jumping ahead to December 16th, 1989, 58-year-old JudgeRobert Vance of Mountain Brook, Alabama, received a plain package in the mail.Once again, it was wrapped in brown paper, tied up with string, and had a redand white return label and a stamp showing an American flag at YosemiteNational Park. And Garrett still climbed Half Dome.

Now, as you can probably guess from the date, it was rightbefore Christmas. So any other time of the year, he might have found it strangefor an unexpected package to be delivered to his house. But understandably,Judge Vance figured this was a gift. In fact, he thought he knew who it wasfrom. He was good friends with another judge, and Vance figured that judge hadprobably sent him something special for the holiday. Not that there was anyshortage of people who'd want to do something nice for Vance. He had a greatrecord professionally and personally.

When Vance had first been getting started in his career,he'd been a big supporter of civil rights. This was especially controversial inAlabama in the early 1960s, and Vance had clashed with a lot of politicianswhen he fought for what he believed was right. Eventually, his advocacy paidoff. Among other things, Vance had become personal friends with Jimmy Carter,who'd appointed him to a higher profile position during his presidency. Sincethen, Vance had basically been a rising star in his sector. He was a judge inthe 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and worked hard to make sure his rulings werealways fair.

So again, it wasn't that hard to imagine that one of Vance'sfriends or co-workers was just sending him a Christmas package to his house.Yeah, so he carried the package into the kitchen, set it on the table, and hiswife Helen was excited to see what was inside. Oh no.

He set it on the table, and his wife Helen was excited tosee what was inside. Oh no. So she sat across from Vance to watch him open it,and as Vance unwrapped the package, it exploded instantly. Holy crap!

Now, unlike the bomb that had gone off at the NAACPheadquarters, this one didn't have tear gas in it. Instead, this bomb hadshrapnel in it—80 nails crammed inside of it. When the bomb blew up, they flewoutward at incredible speeds, skewering Vance's body. He died on the spot, andhis wife Helen, who was still sitting across the table, was also badly injured.Thankfully, she survived.

Just two days later, it was like history was repeatingitself. A 41-year-old attorney named Robert Robinson got a package in the mail.It looked just like the other two—a Yosemite stamp, a red and white addresslabel, brown paper tied up in string. The moment Robinson opened his package,it blew up and killed him too.

Now, there were a few key differences with this bombing.Robert Robinson was obviously an attorney, not a judge, and he was based inGeorgia, not Alabama. The package wasn't delivered to his home; he received itand opened it at his office. But otherwise, his story was eerily similar toRobert Vance's. First, you have this bomb go off, and then all these letters goout saying, "Hey, I'm going to start killing people until somethingchanges." Then a judge dies, and now an attorney dies.

The way they died wasn't the only thing that Robinson andVance had in common. Robinson had also been a civil rights attorney. He spenthis career fighting for equality, just like Vance had, and like the people atthe NAACP had.

So, I assume they think it's racially motivated?

Well, even before he became a lawyer, Robinson had been anactivist. He was Black and one of the very first students of color to enroll ina formerly whites-only school when it was desegregated. People threatened him,harassed him, and bullied him, but he kept showing up every day. As an adult,he focused on representing low-income defendants who couldn't afford a goodlawyer otherwise.

A few weeks after Robinson's death, another round of letterswent out to local TV stations, just like what had happened with the tear gasbomb at the NAACP. The sender said they were part of a group called"Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System," and they'dkilled Vance and Robinson because they disagreed with the way the judge and theattorney had handled previous cases that came their way. Specifically, thekiller thought that they'd given preferential treatment to Black defendants.

So, 100% they're coming out and saying, yeah, it is raciallymotivated.

The people who received these letters shared them with thepolice, and they sent the evidence up the chain to the FBI, who had stepped into help investigate this case of bombings. Right away, the bureau figured outone key detail: there was no such group as the Americans for a CompetentFederal Judicial System. The assumption was that one person was behind theseattacks and that they'd invented this group to try to distract the authorities.But the investigators were confident that all three of the bombs had come fromthe same individual.

They'd all been delivered in southern states—Alabama andGeorgia—in the past five months. All of the packages looked the same, and allof the targets had ties to the Civil Rights Movement. When explosives expertslooked at the way these bombs had been put together, they also found even moresimilarities. They were all held together with the same kind of 2-inch wide tantape, and they'd all been placed inside of cardboard boxes that had beenpainted black on the inside.

Does anybody work at the postal service or post office? I'vealways wondered how it works with packages because they don't go through metaldetectors, do they? I don't think so. I think they just start sending them off,which is kind of crazy to think of. I could be wrong—someone correct me if I'mwrong or let us know in the comments below because I don't know. I've neverbeen backstage or behind the scenes of a post office.

And each explosive device worked the same way, even the onethat released gas instead of nails. It all came down to little details like theway everything was wired together or the fact that the person who built themused the casing from a ballpoint pen. There are a lot of ways to make bombs, soit felt statistically unlikely that these three bombs would have so many thingsin common if these attacks weren't related. So the police figured, okay, theyhave a serial bomber on their hands—someone who might be willing to strike yetagain.

The good news was that now that the police were on thealert, they managed to intercept the next crop of mail bombs before they couldgo off and hurt anyone. One had been sent to an Atlanta courthouse, but postalworkers thought it was suspicious, so they never delivered it. They handed itover to authorities instead. Another made its way to another NAACP office—thisone was in Jacksonville, Florida. But luckily, someone realized it wasdangerous before it could be opened, and they handed it over to the police.Once the officials defused these two bombs, they were able to learn more abouthow they'd been put together, and from there, they could use the evidence toidentify the sender.

But the investigators got their real breakthrough when theylooked at something that wasn't in the bombs, but on them. It was the red andwhite address labels on the packages. These labels were typed, not handwritten.But remember, this was 1989—people didn't have personal computers and homeprinters the way they do today.

Okay, interesting. So the sender must have typed thoselabels using a typewriter. Now, if you didn't know this, typewriters are a lotlike snowflakes—each one has a unique signature or fingerprint. Individualtypewriters can space letters out differently, or a specific character mightalways come out a little crooked, maybe slightly higher or lower than theothers. If you have a long enough writing sample, in theory, it's possible toidentify what typewriter produced it. And I don't just mean in terms of makeand model, but you can actually determine which individual machine made aspecific printed document.

When the police asked him about the typewriter, he said thathe'd sold it months ago. And like I said, he did sell antiques. He didn'tremember who bought the typewriter. It hadn't seemed like a big deal at thetime, plus O'Farrell had never been very organized when it came to that kind ofrecord-keeping. So, there was no way to say who he'd sold the typewriter to,but also no evidence that O'Farrell had actually done anything wrong.

And it's kind of crazy because what are the chances thatthis guy is convicted by the judge who's murdered? Yeah, and then also happensto be innocent and has just sold the typewriter? Yeah, chances are super low. Iguess eventually the investigators concluded that he had nothing to do with thebombings. Crazy, that's crazy. And the typewriter lead was actually a dead end.

But the police found another potential clue. It was afingerprint that was inside the package that had been delivered to theJacksonville NAACP office. Now, as a reminder, the police got that explosiveand defused it before it could go off. If it had exploded, the fingerprintwould have been destroyed. But instead, they ran it and found a match.

Specifically, it belonged to a teenage boy who lived inKentucky. Oh, and when the police finally closed in on this teenager, theyfound that he was working in a commercial print shop, which was a big problem.It seems the paper that had his fingerprint on it had been repurposed. The shopthe teenager worked in had printed some documents for a customer, and thosedocuments had made their way into the bomb later on. So he actually had nothingto do with the deadly explosions. He was just unlucky enough to have touched apiece of paper that the bomb maker would later use. So, once again, the policeare at a dead end.

They knew where the killer had bought this typewriter andwhere the pages had been printed, but that didn't put them much closer toactually figuring out who the killer was. Now, the next lead that the policegenerated was honestly a stroke of luck.

One day, an investigator got a call from someone who workedon a bomb squad. Specifically, this person had defused one of those two mailbombs that were intercepted before they could explode. And it's not clear whichone it was, but the bomb squad expert had personally handled the device, and heknew how it was put together and how it worked.

Being a bomb diffuser would be one of the craziest jobsever. You always see them in movies, and it's weird to think there's actuallypeople who, for their job, they diffuse bombs. Well, you know what I alwaysthink about? That's nuts. It's like if I was in a situation with a bomb, and Iwas able to call and the bomb squad showed up immediately, it'd be like okay,I'm safe. But that's not actually true. No, just because the bomb squad arrivesdoes not mean that that bomb, I mean, could you imagine? They're sitting therein the suits. I mean, yeah, they have these suits on, but I mean, if it's a bigbomb, those aren't doing anything, you know? Yeah, and they're just sweatingand just trying to defuse those things. I actually would. That's crazy. I wouldbe interested to hear a story about someone who has diffused a bomb that'sblown up. Or if... oh, they'd be dead. Well, maybe not. Or if they have passed.I would still be interested to hear about the story. Yeah, if anyone is on thebomb squad and has diffused some bombs, not the Vlog squad, the bomb squad,reach out to us. I'm interested.

Now, remember what I said before about how there are a lotof different ways to make an explosive device, and it would be very unlikelyfor two bomb makers to put their weapons together in the exact same way?

Well, as this Bomb Squad employee was taking apart thepackage, he actually realized that the bomb looked familiar to him. In fact, itreminded him of another bomb that he'd handled 17 years earlier, way back in1972. And the man who'd made that older bomb was named Walter Leroy Moody.

Now, if you're like, "Okay, this doesn't makesense," it makes sense. I have heard that bombs are like signatures,they're like fingerprints. Well, also, how many bombs are you really diffusingin your entire career? So, you're probably going to remember every single one,right? Right. And interestingly enough, this Moody guy and his wife werecustomers of Robert O'Farrell. They'd even bought a typewriter from himrecently, and not too long ago, his wife had ordered a print job from that shopwhere the teenager worked.

So, this bomb diffuser comes forward and says, "Hey,this bomb looks eerily familiar to another bomb I've diffused that was made bythis same guy." And then police look into him and realize this guy is nowconnected to the two other leads that had originally been dead ends. So, therewas circumstantial evidence connecting Moody to the bombs, but now they justneeded their proof.

So, after securing their warrants, the detective searchedMoody's home and some previous addresses where he'd lived, and they found redand white mailing labels, string, and brown paper, all ordinary officesupplies, but they all matched the packaging on the bomb's ex exactly. And theinvestigators read his personal journals and found references to makingweapons. And then, in February of 1990, the police found another explosivedevice at one of those previous residences, and it had some traits in common withthe one from 1972. This was the one the bomb squad expert remembered, and othertraits in common with the more recent bombing spree.

So, the police thought it was evidence that Moody had beenexperimenting and perfecting his craft. And you have to think how scary itwould be to go search these houses knowing that this guy is probably makingbombs, finding ways to make explosives that were deadlier and more effective isprobably what he was doing. And you'd think that this would all be enough tojustify an arrest, but the police weren't ready to move forward. They wantedmore evidence.

So next, they bugged Moody's house and listened to theconversations he had with his wife and with himself because Moody had a badhabit of muttering to himself out loud. All right, Moody. And when he was allalone with no one in the room, he actually talked about how he'd killed peopleby sending them mail bombs. So he confesses to himself.

To himself, he's confessing? What a weirdo.

The police couldn't have asked for more perfect evidence ifthey tried, and it was all enough for them to arrest Moody in late 1990.

Does that count, like, can you? Yeah, if you're talking toyourself, for sure.

But when they took him in for interrogation, Moody obviouslydenied everything. He insisted that he didn't know anything about the mailbombs. He had nothing to do with the murders, and the police had the wrong man.But the investigators aren't buying it. There was plenty of evidence tyingMoody to the crimes, and there was just one detail that they hadn't figured outyet, one they wouldn't figure out with a confession.

They needed a motive. Like, they're like, why? Why wouldthis guy even do this in the first place? Mhm.

Moody was a little bit moody. He was a little emotionallydisregulated. And since Moody wouldn't tell them why he had done what he'ddone, the officials decided to try and make an educated guess. Here's what theythought happened. As I mentioned before, Moody was tied to a different bombingincident from 17 years before, back in 1972. Basically, Moody had bought a carthat he couldn't afford, and it got repossessed. In May of that year, Moodyhanded his wife a package which was addressed to the dealership that had takenthe car away from him, and he asked her to mail the box for him.

Now, it's safe to say his wife did not know what was in thebox. Maybe she suspected something, maybe she was curious, but she climbed intothe car one day and opened the package to see what her husband was mailing. Asyou can probably guess, it was a bomb, and it exploded in her hands. I wish Ihad pictures in front of me because I was curious to see how, like, how theseare made to where they're exploding when people are opening them. Opening them,yeah.

So, the good news is this explosive wasn't nearly aspowerful or as deadly as the ones he would go on to make in 1989. And whileMoody's wife was hurt in the blast, she survived. And when the police came toinvestigate the explosion, it wasn't too hard to guess what had happened. WhenMoody lost his car, he blamed the dealership, and he wanted to get revenge byblowing them up. That's crazy, this guy's just sending bombs to everybody, andthen accidentally blowing up his wife. Yeah, it was only good luck on thedealership's part that Moody's wife had decided to be curious and open the boxbefore she sent it.

The problem was the courts at the time couldn't prove thatMoody had built the bomb himself. In theory, he could have got it from someoneelse. So, they could only charge him with possession of a bomb, not withbuilding it. And it's odd because he still obviously wanted to send it to thedealership and hurt or even kill someone, but because they couldn't chargeMoody with actually building the bomb, his sentence was really light. He onlyserved 3 years for that.

Now, after he got out of prison, Moody really seemed tocommit to living a better life. At least for a little while. Before his arrest,he'd gotten part of the way through law school, and now he wanted to finish hisstudies and become an attorney. But one thing was standing in his way, and thatwas his criminal record.

To become a lawyer, a person needs to do two things: passthe bar exam and prove they have good moral character. It's very difficult tocome across as moral when you've been convicted of a serious violent crime.It's not impossible, but it's difficult.

So beginning in the 1980s, Moody began filing appeals tryingto get his conviction overturned, and the court rejected his appeal withouteven letting it go to trial. They weren't willing to even hear him out beforethey shut him down. And the specific court that made that ruling was the 11thCircuit where Judge Robert Vance worked. So maybe it wasn't racially motivatedthen.

Well, Moody just had a reason to want to hurt Vance. Hemight have seen Vance as the one person standing in the way of his new careerpath. So the motive in that bombing may have been revenge.

And as for the other explosives, the smoke bomb at the NAACPoffices, the one that killed Robert Robinson, and the two other mail bombs thatwere intercepted, the best guess the police could make was that they were redherrings. Moody may have been pretending to be violently opposed to civilrights just to throw investigators off his track. If you, it's kind of likeinstead of killing one person, kill three, so you don't know who the of this isall speculation.

Moody still wasn't confessing, and he wasn't telling them amotive. He still maintained his innocence through his trial. But it didn't dohim much. The evidence the prosecution presented was overwhelming. They evenplayed the recordings they'd secretly made of Moody, and at one point he wastalking to himself and he said, "Now that you've killed two, you can'tpull another bombing."

Plus, Moody had confessed to the bombings to his wife, atleast kind of. At one point after Vance and Robinson's death, a married judgewas injured by a mail bomb, and when Moody and his wife saw the news coverage,he turned to her and said something, and it's not clear what the exact wordingwas, but the gist was that this bomb wasn't one of his, but the earlier onethat had hurt her was.

Now, ultimately, Walter Leroy Moody was found guilty of 71separate charges, including capital murder, 71, and he was sentenced to death.

Now, this sentence brought up a lot of mixed feelings forRobert Vance's family members. Before his murder, Vance had been openly opposedto the death penalty. This is our judge, the judge that died. He was actuallyin a difficult position as a judge. He believed it was very important to followthe rule of law, even when he didn't agree with it.

So there were times that he condemned people to death, eventhough personally he didn't think it was the right call. Still, it was kind ofironic that Moody was now also going to be executed for Vance's murder. It waslike the pathway to justice involved ignoring the victim's own wishes.

So that said, Vance's wife, who was also anti-death penalty,once told someone she might quote "make an exception in thisinstance," which is what you always say when you say, "What if it wasyour family member? How would you feel?" Uh-huh. Yeah, 'cause it's alwaysdifferent, right? It's always, you talk about this, I mean, with anything, whensomeone in your family is sick, or someone in your family has cancer, orsomething tragic happens, it's just always different when it's someone that youare emotionally connected to than someone with an outside perspective, right?

So after sitting on death row for 27 years, Moody wasactually executed in 2018. Oh, recently, yeah. He refused to say any last wordsbefore he received a lethal injection at 8:42 p.m. on April 19th. Moody was 83years old, making him the oldest person to be executed in recent US history.

This kind of opens up another can of worms and doesn't talka ton about the case, but it is interesting to me that the people who do getdeath penalties, right? Say they're convicted at 30 years old. I feel like it'salways happening, it's like 40 years later or whatever, or 50 years later,they've already lived their whole life, and then they get the death penalty. Atthat point, why even... why even do it? Different can of worms, justinteresting.

Also, can I say 8:42 p.m.? Evil. Why they made him, like,not saying they made him as in he's a victim, but like to wait an entire day toget executed is kind of crazy. I mean, he killed a bunch of people. Some, thatI'm not saying he's a victim. I'm saying, like, that's crazy.

And he died without ever confessing to the crime, and tothis day, we'll never know his real motives or if the police were right toassume that it was all just a revenge plot against Robert Vance.

Now, Walter Leroy Moody's crimes were very alarming for alot of people. Not only because his motives were so confusing, but because ofwhat the bombings represented. He allegedly wasn't just trying to punish thejudge who'd hurt him or get personal revenge. He may have wanted to attack thefoundations of the criminal justice system itself, punish attorneys and judgesfor upholding the law in a way that he just didn't like. And that's one reasonthat his sentence was so harsh. Not only because of all of the lives he'dtaken, but because it was important to send a message that government officialswould not be intimidated. They would not tolerate threats to the ways theyhandled crime and punishment.

The criminal justice system is not perfect by any means, butit's better than alternatives. And in the end, it was necessary to defend theinstitution against people like Moody, not just for Robert Vance or RobertRobinson or any of the other victims, but for all of us. And that is the caseof Judge Robert Vance and Robert Robinson.

Yeah, I've... I've never heard of this one. Surprisingbecause it was bombings, and I feel like I usually know about that type ofstuff in a weird way. But I think probably because a lot of the more infamousbombings are kind of about like terrorism or groups or things like that. It'snot just like a one person. Yeah, I've heard of postal bombings before. I feellike it doesn't... I remember like a few years ago, you, as in like 10 yearsago, I feel like there was something else with postal bombings, but I can'tremember.

Are you thinking of the Unabomber? I might be. When wasthat? That's probably what you're thinking of. That might be what I'm thinkingof. Maybe we can cover that next. Okay, all right.

You like bombs? You... you not like bombings, but what thefreak? That's wild. Are you intrigued by bombings? No, no. Like, I would say Iwould say of murderers that we cover or cases that we cover, bombings are notnecessarily one that, like, is super fascinating to me. Yeah, I think... Oh, Ithink I like them more than, like, regular true crime episodes.

Okay, so yes, that's just because I don't love true crime.So, well, it is still crime, yeah. Still murder. Like, bomb, it's like actioncrime. Like, you would... you would rather hear... I don't know if"rather" is the word. Yeah, "rather" is the wrong word, butyou're more intrigued, are more intrigued by a bombing case than a stabbingcase? Sure, okay. Yeah, all right.

You guys, that is our case for this week, and we will seeyou next time with another episode.

I love it.

And I hate it.

Goodbye.

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