Murder by Mail

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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.