Murder by Mail

By MARGARET CARLSON

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 earlier blasts had not yet been established.

With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington and Don Winbush/Atlanta