Walter Leroy Moody Jr. was convicted of killing two men in the week before Christmas 1989. Judge Robert S. Vance of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit died on December 16 in Mountain Brook, a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, killed by a parcel sent to him through the mail. His wife was seriously injured. Two days later Robert E. Robinson, a 41-year-old civil rights attorney and city alderman, was killed in Savannah, Georgia, by a similar parcel. Two more parcels, one addressed to the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta and one to the NAACP branch in Jacksonville, Florida, were intercepted before anyone was hurt.
Moody was a Georgia man who had studied law and had spent nearly two decades trying to undo a federal conviction from 1972. Prosecutors argued that the appeals court's refusal to set that conviction aside, in June 1989, turned his grievance into a campaign against the courts. A federal jury convicted him on all 71 counts in 1991. An Alabama jury convicted him of capital murder in 1996, and he was sentenced to death in February 1997. He maintained his innocence until the end. Alabama executed him in Atmore on April 19, 2018. At 83 he was the oldest prisoner put to death in the United States since executions resumed in the 1970s.
Moody came from Rex, Georgia, south of Atlanta. He had served three years in the military and was honorably discharged, a fact the Alabama trial judge later weighed in his favor at sentencing. He described himself, and was described by others, as something of an amateur scientist. He also attended law school, and the ambition to practice law ran through the rest of his life.
That ambition met an obstacle in May 1972. In Macon, Georgia, his wife at the time was seriously injured in an incident for which federal prosecutors charged Moody. A federal jury convicted him of a possession offense and acquitted him on a second count. He served three years in federal prison. Under the conviction he could not be admitted to practice law, and he spent the following years trying to clear his name.
From 1985 onward Moody pursued the effort through the federal courts. The method he chose later cost him a second set of convictions. To support his claim of innocence he arranged false testimony blaming the 1972 incident on a man named "Gene Wallace," a person who did not exist, and he paid an acquaintance to help. A federal district court denied his petition for a writ of error coram nobis in March 1988. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed that denial in June 1989 and refused rehearing by the full court that August.
The Alabama appeals court that later reviewed his death sentence summarized the State's theory of what came next. In its words, his conviction and his failed attempts to overturn it fueled a "war" on the courts. The State argued that the killings of December 1989 followed directly from the June 1989 ruling. On August 21, 1989, an incident at the NAACP in Atlanta injured more than a dozen staff members; federal prosecutors later attributed it to him as part of the same course of conduct. Soon afterward Moody sent the Eleventh Circuit a letter accusing it of bias.
Robert Smith Vance was born in Talladega, Alabama, on May 10, 1931, the youngest of four children of Harrell Taylor Vance Sr. and Mae Smith Vance. He grew up in Birmingham and graduated from Woodlawn High School. At the University of Alabama he was president of the Student Government Association, and he took his bachelor's degree in 1950 and his law degree in 1952.
He joined the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps in 1952 and served until 1954, helping the Army's lawyers answer Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges during the Army-McCarthy hearings. He earned a master of laws at George Washington University in 1955, clerked for Justice James Mayfield of the Alabama Supreme Court, worked briefly for the Department of Labor, and stayed in the Army Reserve until he retired as a lieutenant colonel. In 1953 he married, and he and his wife had two sons.
Vance practiced law in Birmingham from 1956 to 1977. As a lawyer there he broke a gentlemen's agreement that kept Black citizens off juries, and he took civil rights cases, including for Black plaintiffs. From 1966 to 1977 he chaired the Alabama Democratic Party and pulled it away from segregation. He brought Black members into the party, removed the white rooster from its seal, and in 1968 led the first racially mixed Alabama delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, defeating a rival delegation from Governor George Wallace's faction that included Eugene "Bull" Connor. A man who worked for him recalled in 2018 that Vance believed the party "should be open and not be the party of George Wallace and the Dixiecrats."
President Jimmy Carter nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on November 4, 1977, and the Senate confirmed him on December 15 of that year. When Congress divided the Fifth Circuit in 1981, he moved on October 1 to the new Eleventh Circuit, which hears appeals from Alabama, Georgia and Florida. In 1985 he was one of three judges whose ruling allowed the criminal prosecution of Klansmen involved in a 1979 confrontation with Black marchers in Decatur, Alabama. In September 1989 he reversed a ruling that had lifted a desegregation order for the schools of Duval County, Florida, in a case brought by the Jacksonville NAACP. His son said years later that his father was personally opposed to the death penalty but applied the law as he found it.
On Saturday, December 16, 1989, Judge Vance was killed in Mountain Brook by a parcel sent to him through the mail. His wife was seriously injured. He was 58 years old, and the federal judiciary's records close his service on the court that day with the words "due to death." He was only the third federal judge murdered in the twentieth century.
The parcel had been mailed from Georgia. Investigators had no suspect and several theories. Because the Eleventh Circuit heard a heavy volume of drug appeals, some officials first suspected Colombian traffickers. Within days attention shifted toward racial hatred as a possible motive.
Robert E. Robinson, known to friends as Robbie, grew up near Cann Park in Savannah. On September 3, 1963, he was one of about a dozen Black students who entered Savannah High School, which had admitted only white students until then, and he graduated in 1964. As a teenager he joined the "wade-ins" at the segregated public beach on Tybee Island, part of the movement led in Savannah by W. W. Law.
He graduated from the University of Georgia School of Law in 1974. In 1975 he joined Savannah's first integrated law firm, and in 1981 he opened his own practice. Early on he represented clients who could not afford a lawyer, first through Legal Aid and then alongside the civil rights attorney Bobby Hill. He sat on the NAACP's executive board and served as its general counsel, and he represented the organization in a long-running school desegregation case against the Savannah school district. That case had recently been lost; the Eleventh Circuit upheld the ruling, although Judge Vance took no part in it. He also sat as a judge pro tem.
In 1982 Robinson was elected to the Savannah City Council alongside his friends Otis Johnson and Floyd Adams. He was the first African American to represent the city's 5th District, and he won a second term in 1986. Among the work he took on was paving and drainage for neglected neighborhoods and the first traffic light in Liberty City. Colleagues regarded him as one of Savannah's rising figures. Otis Johnson, who later became mayor himself, said Robinson "would have been the next mayor." Robinson was married, and he was the father of a daughter who later remembered him as a devoted parent.
On Monday, December 18, 1989, a parcel addressed to the Eleventh Circuit was found at the federal courthouse in Atlanta and disarmed. Later that day, in Savannah, Robinson was killed by a parcel sent to him. He died that night. He was 41.
A fourth parcel, addressed to the NAACP branch in Jacksonville, was intercepted, and on Tuesday, December 19, the Duval County sheriff's office removed it before anyone was hurt. In Montgomery, Alabama, a federal magistrate received a telephoned death threat in the early hours of December 19 and was given extra protection. Federal courthouses in Miami and Fort Lauderdale closed briefly after a threat; nothing was found. Around the same time an Atlanta television station received a letter threatening further harm to judges, lawyers and NAACP leaders.
Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called the killings "a vicious assault on innocent life" and an attack on the institutions that protect basic freedoms, and he made the case the FBI's top priority. A postal inspector observed that every mailing had taken place inside the Eleventh Circuit. The FBI's Birmingham office noted that the parcels shared no common postmark and that the return addresses belonged to people with no apparent involvement. In Savannah, friends of Robinson, who had kept a low profile, found it hard to believe anyone had singled him out, and some suspected a copycat.
Earl Shinhoster, the NAACP's Southeast director, said in 1990 that the killings had left civil rights workers across the region in a state of uneasy apprehension.
Federal agencies worked the case together from the start: the FBI, the ATF, the Postal Inspection Service and the U.S. Marshals Service, with local sheriffs and police. Bill Hinshaw had only recently taken charge of the FBI's Atlanta office when the parcel was intercepted at the courthouse there, and he led the inquiry. Officials later described it as one of the largest federal investigations ever mounted; Thornburgh called it among the most intensive the Justice Department had conducted.
Investigators concluded from the evidence that one person had prepared all four parcels. The decisive link came from an ATF specialist who saw a resemblance between the 1989 parcels and the 1972 case in Macon, and that recollection drew the inquiry to Moody, a man with a prior federal conviction and a known grudge against the courts.
Before the investigation settled on Moody, it fixed for a time on another man. In January 1990 federal agents treated R.W.O., an Alabama man, as a suspect. He was questioned at length but never charged, and his business and family life collapsed under the scrutiny. After Moody's conviction the FBI offered him $10,000, which he refused. He later sued in federal court in Montgomery, seeking an apology.
Federal agents arrested Moody in July 1990. The first charges against him did not concern the deaths at all. A federal grand jury indicted him that July on charges of suborning perjury and obstructing justice, based on the false evidence he had arranged in his effort to overturn the 1972 conviction. He was tried in Brunswick, Georgia, and convicted in December 1990 on thirteen counts of obstruction of justice and related offenses. The Eleventh Circuit, sitting with judges from another circuit, affirmed the judgment on October 9, 1992.
On Wednesday, November 7, 1990, a federal grand jury indicted Moody in the deaths of Judge Vance and Robert Robinson. The charges included murder and assault together with further counts, and the indictment also accused him of mailing threatening letters to the NAACP in Atlanta and to other judges. The NAACP praised federal authorities for their persistence. Prosecutors said the parcels sent to Robinson and to the Jacksonville branch had been meant to cast suspicion on the Ku Klux Klan.
The case could not be heard by the court whose judge had been killed. Every judge then sitting on the Eleventh Circuit stepped aside from cases connected to it, and so did the entire federal district court for the Northern District of Georgia. Chief Justice William Rehnquist designated Senior Judge Edward J. Devitt of the District of Minnesota to preside. Devitt granted Moody's motion for a change of venue and moved the trial to St. Paul, Minnesota. Moody's former wife testified for the prosecution. The government's team was led by Louis Freeh, then an assistant U.S. attorney and later director of the FBI.
The trial ran from June 4 to June 28, 1991. Against the advice of his lawyers, Moody took the stand and testified for four days. He offered an alibi and told the jury that he had been working to replicate cold fusion. He blamed the Ku Klux Klan for the killings. The government called rebuttal witnesses who contradicted his account.
Prosecutors described a man who had tried to disguise a private vendetta as racial violence. "Retaliation is a way of life for Mr. Moody," Freeh said, adding that "the court was only his last target." Their case was that the targeting of a civil rights lawyer and an NAACP branch had been a deliberate misdirection, and that the real object of his anger was the court system that had upheld his 1972 conviction.
The jurors deliberated for about seven hours on Thursday, June 27, and asked the judge for a definition of interstate commerce. They were told that anything sent through the mail counts, even when it stays within one state. They returned their verdicts on Friday, June 28, 1991: guilty on all 71 counts. Moody, then 57, showed no emotion. His lawyer, Edward Tolley, said Moody had anticipated the result and that the defense had "fought a good fight." Judge Vance's widow said she wanted him "off the street" and that the question of a death sentence did not concern her.
On August 20, 1991, Devitt sentenced Moody to seven life sentences and 400 years, to run concurrently with one another and consecutively to the Georgia obstruction sentence. On November 6, 1992, a panel of three judges from the Fourth Circuit, sitting by designation, affirmed all 71 convictions. The court held that the right to testify belonged to Moody himself and could not be overridden by his lawyers as a matter of strategy, and it rejected his challenges to the way the government had gathered its evidence.
Alabama brought its own prosecution for the death of Judge Vance. In December 1991 a Jefferson County grand jury indicted Moody on two counts of capital murder and one count of first-degree assault, the assault count relating to the injuries to Judge Vance's wife. One capital count rested on section 13A-5-40(a)(9) of the Alabama Code. The other rested on section 13A-5-40(a)(11), which makes it a capital offense to kill a federal public official in relation to his official position.
Years of delay followed. His appointed lawyers, L. Dan Turberville and Richard S. Jaffe, were allowed to withdraw on August 2, 1994, the same day the court granted Moody's request to represent himself. He reaffirmed that choice repeatedly over the next two years. On the eve of trial in 1996 he asked to be represented by two outside attorneys and sought a continuance of 12 to 18 months. Circuit Judge William H. Rhea III refused both requests, and he did not appoint standby counsel, which Moody had expressly opposed. When the trial began Moody declined to take part in it. He also turned down the court's offer to appoint the experts who had assisted him at his federal trial.
Jury selection began on October 7, 1996, and the trial opened on October 15. Over four weeks the State presented evidence of all the December 1989 parcels, which the court admitted to show identity and a common plan, along with his long litigation over the 1972 case to show motive and evidence of racially hostile statements he had made. On November 5, 1996, the jury found him guilty of all charges.
The jury voted 11 to 1 to recommend death. Under Alabama law at the time the judge decided the sentence, and Judge Rhea accepted the recommendation. He found two aggravating circumstances: that Moody had a prior conviction for a violent felony, and that he had knowingly created a great risk of death to many persons. He found no statutory mitigating circumstances, and as nonstatutory mitigation he credited Moody's honorable military service, "some mild mental problems" and good conduct in jail. On February 10, 1997, in Birmingham, he sentenced Moody, then 61, to death for capital murder. For the assault, as a habitual felony offender, Moody received life imprisonment.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the convictions and the death sentence on April 18, 2003. It held that Moody had validly waived his right to counsel and that his last-minute request for new lawyers and more time had been contrived to delay the trial. It found the trial fair overall, observing that the State had "tried its case cleanly" and that the trial judge had been patient with the defendant. It rejected his claim under Ring v. Arizona and found the sentence neither excessive nor disproportionate. "Moody's convictions and his sentences are affirmed," the opinion concluded. The court denied rehearing on September 12, 2003. The Alabama Supreme Court denied review on March 26, 2004, and the U.S. Supreme Court did the same on November 1, 2004.
Moody filed for state post-conviction relief on March 23, 2005, and amended his petition in 2006 and 2009. The Jefferson County circuit court dismissed it on December 28, 2009. The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed on December 16, 2011, and the Alabama Supreme Court denied review on May 18, 2012.
His federal habeas corpus petition, filed on December 20, 2012, raised a familiar problem in a new form. Moody asked that the district judge, L. Scott Coogler, step aside, and that every judge in the Eleventh Circuit be disqualified because the man he had been convicted of killing had sat on that court. On January 10, 2014, a panel of Judges Charles Wilson, Beverly Martin and Adalberto Jordan refused. None of them had been a federal judge in 1989, known Vance or taken part in the prosecution. Their only link to the case was service on the same court, the panel wrote, "And that is not enough." Any doubt of that kind, it added, would extend to every federal judge in the country and leave Moody with no federal forum at all.
Judge Coogler denied the petition on February 20, 2015. In March 2017 the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, holding that Moody had waived his right to counsel at the 1996 trial knowingly and intelligently. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on January 8, 2018.
In March 2018 the Alabama Supreme Court set the execution for April 19. Moody, then 82, was the oldest prisoner awaiting execution in the state. He had written to Judge Vance's son, by then himself a circuit judge in Jefferson County, insisting that he was the innocent victim of a government conspiracy. "Had my Dad been murdered, I would want to know who had done it," the letter said. The son threw it away. He said he had no doubt of Moody's guilt and felt at peace "that justice has been done." He did not attend the execution. "He was a great judge, a great lawyer before that, and a great father," he said of his father.
Moody's lawyers made a final argument that Alabama could not execute him while his federal sentences, imposed first, remained unserved. On April 18, 2018, the Eleventh Circuit rejected the claim on the merits. His lawyers asked Governor Kay Ivey for clemency, citing his age and health; she declined. "A jury found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and his conviction has been upheld at every level of the judicial system," she said, adding that the judiciary "must be able to operate without undue outside influence."
On the evening of April 19 the U.S. Supreme Court briefly halted the execution to consider his last appeals, then lifted the stay without comment and denied his application and his petition for a writ of mandamus. Walter Leroy Moody Jr. was executed in Atmore, Alabama, that night. He made no final statement. Attorney General Steve Marshall said that Moody's appeals "finally came to a rightful end" and that "Justice has been served." Jay Town, the U.S. Attorney in Birmingham, said Moody "was executed because of his own murderous actions," and that the Vance family "never lost faith in America's system of justice and the rule of law."
In 1990 the federal building and courthouse in Birmingham was renamed the Robert S. Vance Federal Building and United States Courthouse. The Alabama Law Review dedicated part of its spring 1991 issue to him. His daughter-in-law, Joyce White Vance, served as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017, in the office that later announced Moody's execution.
Savannah planted a tree in Robinson's memory at Savannah High School and named the Robert E. Robinson Parking Garage and Robbie Robinson Park for him. In December 2022 the City Council voted unanimously to place a historical marker near Cann Park, where he grew up, and it was unveiled on June 21, 2023. "This marker will serve as a reminder about his impact on his community and in Savannah," Mayor Van Johnson said. His daughter said the family was honored "that Savannah still remembers our father." The University of Georgia School of Law preserves letters and tributes sent after his death, including a certificate from President George H. W. Bush.
The killing of Judge Vance put the federal system in an unusual position. The victim belonged to the court that would ordinarily hear the appeal, and one of the intercepted parcels had been addressed to that court in Atlanta. The solution was to bring in judges from outside: a senior judge from Minnesota to try the case, designated by the Chief Justice, and a panel from the Fourth Circuit to hear the appeal. The question returned in 2014, when Moody asked for a judge from outside the Eleventh Circuit for his habeas petition, and the court held that judges who joined the bench long after 1989 were not part of any "victim class."
The Alabama prosecution ran under a different structure. Alabama's capital statute lists the circumstances that make murder a capital offense, among them the killing of a federal official in relation to his duties. At the time of the trial an Alabama jury's verdict on punishment was advisory, and the judge made the final decision. Moody's jury recommended death by 11 votes to 1, and the appeals court upheld the scheme, holding that the aggravating circumstance of his prior violent felony conviction required no separate jury finding. Edward Tolley, who defended him in both federal cases, said afterward that the case changed courthouse security and the way marshals protect judges.
Moody denied the killings from his arrest until his death. At his federal trial he blamed the Ku Klux Klan; in later letters he described himself as the target of a government conspiracy. Neither claim was accepted by any court, and his convictions were upheld at every level.
His motive was argued rather than admitted. Prosecutors said he acted out of anger at the Eleventh Circuit's refusal to overturn his 1972 conviction, and that the parcels sent to Robinson and the Jacksonville NAACP were meant to point investigators toward white supremacists. Judge Vance himself had no direct part in Moody's own case. Tolley later suggested that Robinson's death was part of a smokescreen and that Moody's real goal was revenge against a federal judge. The judge's son said there "wasn't any real good reason" his father had been chosen. Some in Savannah came to believe Robinson's ties to the NAACP made him a target.
In 1997 the Justice Department's Inspector General reviewed allegations by a former FBI laboratory employee about expert testimony at the 1991 federal trial. The review found no basis to conclude that any examiner had committed perjury, fabricated evidence or obstructed justice, and no knowing or deliberate misconduct, though it found that one examiner had stated some conclusions "more strongly than was justified." It found no misconduct by the prosecutors. The convictions stood.
Federal prosecutors also attributed to Moody the August 1989 incident at the NAACP in Atlanta and threatening letters to judges and television stations. Investigators at the time examined whether a December 1989 incident involving a Maryland state judge was connected; no link to Moody has been reported.
May 1972: Moody's wife at the time is seriously injured in Macon, Georgia; he is convicted in federal court of a possession offense and serves three years.
1985: Moody begins his effort to overturn the 1972 conviction.
March 1988: A federal district court denies his coram nobis petition.
June 1989: The Eleventh Circuit affirms the denial; rehearing by the full court is refused in August.
August 21, 1989: An incident at the NAACP in Atlanta injures staff; prosecutors later attribute it to Moody.
December 16, 1989: Judge Robert S. Vance is killed in Mountain Brook, Alabama; his wife is seriously injured.
December 18, 1989: A parcel addressed to the Eleventh Circuit is intercepted in Atlanta; Robert E. Robinson is killed in Savannah, Georgia.
December 19, 1989: A parcel delivered to the NAACP branch in Jacksonville, Florida, is removed unopened.
July 1990: Federal agents arrest Moody; he is indicted on perjury and obstruction charges.
November 7, 1990: Federal indictment in the deaths of Vance and Robinson.
December 1990: Convicted in Brunswick, Georgia, of obstruction of justice and related offenses.
June 4 to 28, 1991: Federal trial in St. Paul, Minnesota; guilty on all 71 counts.
August 20, 1991: Sentenced to seven life sentences and 400 years.
December 1991: Jefferson County, Alabama, indictment for capital murder and first-degree assault.
November 6, 1992: Federal convictions affirmed.
August 2, 1994: Moody is allowed to represent himself in the Alabama case.
November 5, 1996: Alabama jury finds him guilty of all charges; it recommends death, 11 to 1.
February 10, 1997: Sentenced to death in Birmingham.
April 18, 2003: Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
November 1, 2004: U.S. Supreme Court denies review of the direct appeal.
May 18, 2012: State post-conviction proceedings end.
January 10, 2014: Eleventh Circuit refuses to disqualify its judges.
February 20, 2015: Federal habeas petition denied; affirmed in March 2017.
January 8, 2018: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
April 19, 2018: Executed in Atmore, Alabama, at 83.
June 21, 2023: Savannah unveils a historical marker for Robert E. Robinson.