Blind Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders

by Ray Jenkins

Overview

Just days before Christmas 1989, bombs delivered through the U.S. mail exploded in two southern states, taking the lives of a federal judge in Alabama and a civil rights attorney in Georgia. The same week, two more deadly packages were intercepted en route to a federal courthouse and an office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Blind Vengeance is the riveting account of the frantic federal, state, and local investigations that ensued, eventually resulting in the arrest and conviction of Walter Leroy Moody Jr., a small-time con man who blamed society for his failures.

In-depth portraits of the victims and their killer show three men representative of the changing South: the privileged white man, Judge Robert Smith Vance of Birmingham, who saw the necessity of political changes; the black lawyer and city alderman, Robert Robinson of Savannah, who prevailed in a segregated society to become a respected professional figure; and the embittered lifelong criminal Roy Moody, who led a brooding, solitary life on the edges of society.

Ray Jenkins's research is based on new information from interviews, record searches, and unprecedented access to Moody's psychiatric profile. The result is a chilling exploration of the mind of a killer blinded by a desire for revenge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820341019
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	02/28/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	14.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

RAY JENKINS is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former syndicated columnist and editorial page editor with the Baltimore Sun. A Georgia native, he makes his home in Baltimore.

RAY JENKINS is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former syndicated columnist and editorial page editor with the Baltimore Sun. A Georgia native, he makes his home in Baltimore.

Editorial Reviews

Recommended reading for all students of the American South as well as mental health officials, police officers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and politicians everywhere. Its theme is universal.

Mississippi Quarterly - Walter J. Fraser Jr.

A difficult story, told well.

author of The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Poli - Dan Carter

True-crime aficionados will revel in the bits of verifying reality that Jenkins details in his excellent triple biography of mail-bomber Roy Moody and the two men he killed, a federal judge and a prominent African American lawyer. . . . He produces a dynamic story of racism, the slow death of a culture of racial hatred, and a man of that culture—Moody—who determined to act on his convictions and resentments. Jenkins brings understanding and perspective to this episode in the journey from the Old South to the more inclusive modern South.

Booklist - Mike Tribby

Informative in ways that skilled journalism often is—detailed, fact-filled, richly descriptive—and, in reading a bit like police procedurals (all the ingredients are here—detection, chase, trial, punishment).

Southern Cultures - Larry J. Griffin

Highly readable . . . Equal parts biography, legal drama, and political/social history of the South through an era of searing change . . . Jenkins suggests that Moody is a 'kindred soul' to Timothy McVeigh, the convicted Oklahoma City bomber, and the 'Unabomber,' whose devices killed three people and wounded sixteen others over eighteen years.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Bill Montgomery

Jenkins, an attorney and Pulitzer Prize-winning former syndicated columnist and editorial-page editor observed the South for 40 years, beginning as a journalist with Montgomery's Alabama Journal in 1959. His 25 years of "first-hand observation of Alabama politics" provide an authoritative backdrop for what is ostensibly an account of a series of bombings eight years ago. But in fact, Jenkins uses this as a springboard to consider Southern sociology, politics and the changing face of the South during decades of integration and racial conflicts. Shortly before Christmas 1989, mail bombs took the lives of a federal judge in Alabama and a Georgia civil rights attorney, and two other packages were intercepted en route to an NAACP office and a federal courthouse. Following federal, state and local investigations, small-time con man Roy Moody was arrested and convicted. Jenkins makes excellent use of court reports, newspaper files, interviews, the 3000-page trial transcript and a psychiatric profile that included 25 hours of videotaped interviews with Moody (not introduced at the trial) which enabled him to probe the racist mind of this killer who blamed society for his failures. Like Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, the book benefits from memories of the woman closest to the central subject. Unfortunately Jenkins interrupts the narrative flow with digressive discourses, overlong background material and sidebar scene-settings. A chilling portrait of Moody eventually emerges, but some readers may abandon this book well before. Photos. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Attorney Jenkins is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly with the Baltimore Evening Sun. He was also born in Georgia, covered the Civil Rights Movement in his home state and neighboring Alabama as a reporter and attorney, and was familiar with the social milieu that gave rise to the anger of mail bomber Roy Moody, who first struck in 1989. Drawing on his own experience and on interviews, court and other records, and what the publisher describes as "unprecedented access" to Moody's psychiatric profile, the author details the murders of Judge Robert S. Vance and civil rights attorney Robert Robinson, the failed attacks on others, the ensuing criminal investigation, and, finally, the prosecution of Moody. The reader is drawn here into the bizarre mind of the bomber and the peculiar events that unraveled his plan. A compelling description of the birth of a terrorist that both lay readers and scholars will find elucidating.William L. Waugh, Georgia State Univ., Atlanta

Library Journal

A disciplined, incisive reconstruction of one of the century's most notorious crimes: the 1989 mail-bomb assassination of a federal judge and an NAACP attorney.

After Jenkins won a Pulitzer in 1954 for reporting on the assassination of a Georgia state attorney general, he turned to covering the burgeoning civil rights movement. In the three principals of this story he finds symbols of the South's reaction to that turbulent period: Judge Robert Vance, the privileged white who embraced desegregation as a moral imperative; Robert Robinson, the black activist and community leader who demanded progress; and Roy Moody, the lower-class white "who was left behind in the class conflict and became bitterly obsessed with his perception of injustice in the changing order." Jenkins's dual background as a lawyer and journalist serves him well in this bizarre case: He combines reportorial objectivity with the methodicalness (and the artful storytelling) of a prosecutor laying a damning case before a jury, insightfully describing the workings of the judicial system and the mechanics of a jury trial. He diligently traces the backgrounds and family histories of all three men, but it's Moody—a highly intelligent sociopath who nurses an aggrandized sense of victimization—who steals the show. Relying heavily on trial transcripts and psychiatric reports, Jenkins delves into the troubled criminal mind of the erratic misfit convicted of the bombings following "the largest manhunt in history." One report, written by Dr. Park Elliot Dietz, the renowned forensic psychiatrist who examined John Hinckley, contributes the most extensive insight into Moody's motives and modus operandi. It also provides Jenkins's biggest scoop: The report, never admitted as evidence because of Moody's last-minute rejection of his lawyer's planned insanity defense, is here examined at length for the first time.

Jenkins's recounting of the crimes, investigation, and trial is as suspenseful as his wide-net harvest of historical context is enlightening.

Kirkus Reviews