Probe of Junk Dealer in Dixie Mail Bombs Intensifies : Civil Rights: Workers dig up his septic tank in a search for evidence. FBI agents have several search warrants in the works.

Investigators, intensifying their search in the FBI’s top-priority investigation, dug through a septic tank here Tuesday and resumed questioning a local junk store operator, seeking evidence in the mail-bomb slayings last month of a federal judge and a civil rights lawyer.

FBI agent Church Archer said Robert Wayne O’Ferrell, the 46-year-old junk store owner, had not been arrested “and he is not in custody.” But sources close to the investigation indicated that O’Ferrell was at the center of the probe.

“We think he is involved. We just have to prove it,” said one law enforcement source who declined to be identified. Other sources said that O’Ferrell showed indications of deception when asked about the bombings during a polygraph examination administered by FBI agents on Monday.

Although lie-detector results are not admissible as evidence in federal trials, they are considered valuable investigative tools by the FBI and some other federal agencies.

“He knows something” about the bombing, “they’re (investigators) certain about that,” said one source 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.

Archer said FBI agents had seven search warrants to serve in the area. One was for O’Ferrell’s Old and New Surplus Salvage Warehouse. Another was for the downtown storefront where he used to operate the business. The third was for his home in nearby New Brockton and a fourth was for the septic tank at O’Ferrell’s home.

On Tuesday afternoon, federal agents pumped out O’Ferrell’s septic tank and began digging it up with backhoes. Asked what he hoped to find, Archer said, “Evidence of a bombing.”

Archer declined to discuss the remaining three search warrants, but he said agents hoped to have them all served by the end of the day. He said some of the warrants were for property that O’Ferrell did not own.

Authorities took O’Ferrell into police headquarters in Enterprise in the early afternoon after searching his salvage warehouse a second day.

Earlier Tuesday, O’Ferrell said he did not know the whereabouts of the typewriter. O’Ferrell said the FBI was looking for a typewriter “that supposedly we have had, have sold.”

“We don’t have any idea who it was sold to, when it was sold,” he said. “We don’t keep a record of that stuff. That’s all they want to know about is the typewriter--what we know about it. And that’s it.”

“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.

The FBI apparently found similarities between the type in the letters and 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.

Robert Robinson, a black civil rights lawyer 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 National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People headquarters in Jacksonville, Fla.

O’Ferrell, described by a neighbor as a former Baptist preacher who took up the junk business about three years ago, was questioned by investigators Monday and joined them in a brief trip to the warehouse Tuesday. The mail-bomb investigation team has been interviewing people and searching various locales in the Enterprise vicinity since Saturday.