Mail Bomb Inquiry Still Focused on Alabama

FBI agents will remain in a southeastern Alabama county for the foreseeable future as they investigate the mail bombings that killed a federal judge and a civil rights attorney, a spokesman said Friday.

Scores of federal agents have been in Enterprise since Jan. 22. Robert Wayne O’Ferrell, an area salvage store owner, has been questioned several times and has given the FBI hair, blood and saliva samples. He has not been charged.

The FBI has collected other evidence in the area, and on Friday continued to search for a typewriter believed to have been used to write a letter from a person or group calling itself Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System, which claimed responsibility for the December bombings.

“I don’t think we’re at the end of it,” said Doug Marshall, an FBI spokesman in Mobile, Ala. “I don’t see any plans to end it at this point.”

Marshall would not say if investigators are satisfied with the evidence uncovered so far. “We’re not at the point where we can say anything evaluative like that,” he said.

O’Ferrell’s attorneys have asked the FBI to provide them with a case file of their client. Attorney Anthony Bishop said Friday the FBI has notified him that the documents have been prepared and that he would meet with O’Ferrell when he gets them.

The mail bombs killed U.S. Circuit Judge Robert S. Vance of Birmingham, Ala., and civil rights attorney Robert Robinson of Savannah, Ga. Bombs also were mailed to the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta and to the Jacksonville, Fla., headquarters of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, but those devices did not explode.

Vance, who served on the 11th Circuit, is to be remembered Monday with a memorial service in Atlanta that is to include an address by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.