American Notes Crime

In December 1989, mail bombs killed Judge Robert S. Vance of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals at his home in Alabama and Robert E. Robinson, a civil rights attorney, at his office in Georgia. Last week Walter Leroy Moody Jr. was convicted of all 71 federal charges stemming from the slayings at a trial in St. Paul. Against the advice of his lawyers, Moody took the witness stand to provide a rambling account of his sex life and blame the Ku Klux Klan for the killings.

Prosecutors contended that Moody, an amateur scientist from Rex, Ga., was also responsible for bombs that were intercepted at the federal court in Atlanta and the N.A.A.C.P. office in Jacksonville, for a tear-gas bomb that exploded in the Atlanta office of the N.A.A.C.P. and for threatening letters to judges and TV stations. Prosecutors said Moody tried to make the bombings appear racially motivated but that he really wanted to damage the court system because of a 1972 conviction for bomb possession. "Retaliation is a way of life for Mr. Moody," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Freeh, "and the court was only his last target."