FBI Steps Up Inquiry of Junk Dealer in Mail Bombings : Civil rights: Alabama man says he’s ‘not guilty.’ Workers dig through two of his septic tanks in a search for evidence.

Federal agents questioned a junk dealer for the second day Tuesday and dug up a septic tank at his home as they intensified their probe of the mail-bomb murders of a federal judge and a Georgia NAACP official.

FBI agents questioned Robert Wayne O’Ferrell for more than eight hours Tuesday. They also pumped out the contents of the septic tank, apparently in a search for explosive material, and continued to search the surplus store O’Ferrell owns here.

Tuesday night, FBI agents accompanied soldiers from nearby Ft. Rucker Army Base who dug up another septic tank at O’Ferrell’s warehouse.

Authorities would say only that they were seeking “evidence of a bombing.”

Chuck Archer, an FBI spokesman, declined to say whether O’Ferrell was a suspect. “He is one of a number of people we are talking to,” he said. O’Ferrell has not been arrested and is apparently cooperating with investigators, at least to the extent of submitting to extensive questioning without hiring a lawyer.

“He may be directly linked (to the bombings) and he may not be,” one knowledgeable source said Tuesday.

However, another source close to the investigation said authorities believe O’Ferrell is involved in the bombings, “but we’ve got to prove it.”

Other sources said that O’Ferrell showed indications of deception when asked about the bombings during a polygraph exam administered by FBI agents Monday.

“He knows something” about the bombings, “they’re certain about that,” said a source referring to investigators in the case.

More important to investigators, however, is the physical evidence that led them to O’Ferrell.

The sources confirmed that agents here were looking for an old manual typewriter thought to have been used to type letters signed “Americans for a Competent Federal Judiciary” and asserting responsibility for the fatal bombings.

More than 100 federal and local law enforcement officers executed search warrants at a surplus store and a warehouse owned by O’Ferrell and at his home.

Archer said he expected an additional four search warrants to have been served by the end of the day Tuesday.

O’Ferrell, 46, said in an interview Tuesday morning at his home that federal agents had questioned him Monday about a typewriter that he might have owned.

“All they want to know about is the typewriter, or what we know about it and that’s it,” he said.

O’Ferrell said he had sold an old typewriter but that he didn’t recall to whom he sold it. “You don’t keep records of that kind of stuff,” he said.

“I’m not guilty,” O’Ferrell declared as he walked his dog outside his white, two-story clapboard house Tuesday morning. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

“All we are doing is cooperating with them, doing whatever they ask us.” He said he was “disappointed and embarrassed” at the attention he is getting.

O’Ferrell, who said he is a licensed Southern Baptist minister, said he did not have a lawyer. “I don’t have any need for one,” he said. “You have to be guilty to hire a lawyer.”

Brenda Douglas, whose husband operates a short-line railroad next door to O’Ferrell’s warehouse, said she saw an FBI agent remove a typewriter from O’Ferrell’s property Monday. She said the agent sat in a car typing for two hours.

She said FBI agents who interviewed her Monday asked her if O’Ferrell was violent, had a nasty temper or talked racially.

“I said he was always working,” she said. “He was kind of neighborly like.”

She called him “a nice man.”

Sources said the FBI apparently is looking for similarities between the type in the letter claiming responsibility for the bombings and the type in documents O’Ferrell submitted in an appeal of an unrelated case to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

O’Ferrell had lost the original lawsuit and the decision was upheld by the 11th Circuit in an April decision written by Judge Robert Vance, who was killed in the first mail-bombing Dec. 16 at his home in suburban Birmingham, Ala.

Robert Robinson, a black civil rights lawyer and NAACP official in Savannah, Ga., was killed two days later by another exploding package, and similar mail bombs were defused at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, where Vance served, and at the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People headquarters in Jacksonville, Fla.

The mailbox in front of O’Ferrell’s house identifies him as Rev. Wayne O’Ferrell. “I don’t have a church and I never went to any Bible institute,” he said. “I sit down and study and pray and that’s all.”

Agents brought O’Ferrell to the warehouse about 1:15 p.m. Tuesday. After spending about 15 minutes inside with him, they drove him to city hall, where he was taken into the police chief’s inner office and interrogated for at least six hours.

Agents had already questioned him at length in two interviews Monday.

Also Tuesday afternoon, from six to eight FBI agents and two postal inspectors went to O’Ferrell’s home, which is on a red-dirt road in nearby New Brockton.

The agents supervised the unearthing of O’Ferrell’s septic tank by two backhoes. The contents of the tank were pumped out and taken to a treatment plant for screening, a process that would reveal whether materials used in explosives were present.