As Richard Jewell Saga Started, Journalist Explored Case of an Innocent Suspect

August 5, 1996

A man who lives in a trailer in New Brockton, Ala., tuned in to the 10 o’clock news one night last week and could not turn it off. He saw his own past come flashing back.

The feds had fingered a suspect in a murderous pipe-bomb case, but when the reporters named the man and the cameras showed his face, the viewer in Alabama did not cheer the quick work of the FBI or the cleverness of the reporters who got wind of the story. What the viewer in Alabama did was fear for the suspect. He wondered whether “it could have been that bad” for Richard A. Jewell as it had been for him. For him, it was about as bad as it gets.

“I lost my family, I lost my home and everything else I owned,” says Robert Wayne O’Ferrell. For a while, he lost his health, and he almost lost the will to live. What he lost forever was his faith in federal law enforcement.

For O’Ferrell, everything changed on Jan. 22, 1990, when the attorney general of the United States, Richard Thornburgh, and law enforcement sources in Atlanta alerted reporters that they expected a major break in the month-old search for the person who sent pipe bombs through the mail, killing 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert S. Vance and Savannah lawyer Robert E. Robinson. The break would come in Enterprise, Ala., reporters learned. It didn’t take long for them to find their way to O’Ferrell’s Old and New Surplus Salvage store.

There they found scores of federal agents swarming O’Ferrell’s store, his home, his pond, even his septic tanks.

This was no whim on the part of federal law enforcers. A search by hundreds of agents reading 11th Circuit case files had turned up a pro se appeal that had been typed on the same typewriter the mail bomber had used to address the labels on his deadly packages. The appeal, in a civil case, had been filed by one Robert Wayne O’Ferrell of Alabama. The feds figured if they could find that typewriter, they’d have their bomber.

O’Ferrell, an unordained Baptist minister, was an affable man. At the beginning, he would wave to the cameras and chat with reporters, seemingly happy to help the law enforcers.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” O’Ferrell told a television reporter. “I’m not guilty, don’t have anything to hide.”

But the camera crews stayed, the search went on, and so did the interrogations. “I was yelled at, I was scorned at. Fingers were stuck in my face,” says O’Ferrell. “They were calling me a horrible murderer.” His interrogators told him his wife had confessed and that he should come clean, too.

“That’s not legal. That’s not even right,” says O’Ferrell.

They wired him up to a polygraph two or three times. And they told him to picture himself taking that last, long walk down a hallway to the electric chair.

The questioning didn’t stop with the O’Ferrells. He says whenever a customer wrote a check for O’Ferrell’s merchandise, an investigator would show up on the customer’s doorstep asking whether O’Ferrell was capable of killing. One regular customer, a man who owned rental units he furnished with goods from O’Ferrell’s store, told him he couldn’t take the intrusion anymore and would have to go elsewhere for his purchases. O’Ferrell’s income withered until he could no longer pay the lease on the store.

The typewriter never surfaced—it may have simply been sold at O’Ferrell’s store—and the O’Ferrells never confessed, so the feds and the journalists finally left town. They turned their attention to another man who’d lost a criminal appeal at the 11th Circuit: Walter Leroy Moody Jr. In November 1990, the Rex, Ga., man was indicted for the mail-bomb deaths. He was later convicted.

Through all of that, O’Ferrell waited for an apology, but it never came. After the Moody conviction the FBI offered O’Ferrell $10,000 for his trouble, but O’Ferrell turned it down, saying that would not even cover the cost of caring for the bleeding ulcers for which he was hospitalized in 1990. Not even then did anyone apologize.

O’Ferrell filed a pro se suit in federal court in Montgomery seeking an apology, plus $20 million for himself and his ex-wife, but his court-appointed lawyer fears that most, if not all of it, will be thrown out on summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds.

As for culpability, even if Thornburgh and other law enforcement sources had exercised more restraint in alerting the press, reporters would have found their way to Enterprise anyway, given the intensity of the news coverage of the pipe-bomb investigation.

And in focusing on O’Ferrell, the feds had every reason to believe they were on to something big, and the press had every reason to cover it.

“They absolutely had the right typewriter,” says Moody’s lead defense counsel, Edward D. Tolley of Athens.

Between the typewriter and some of O’Ferrell’s seemingly suspicious connections, Tolley says, “O’Ferrell looked guilty as hell.”

But he wasn’t.

* * *

G. Watson Bryant Jr. was strolling down Techwood last Tuesday afternoon, savoring the Olympic spirit, when a headline in a special edition of The Atlanta Journal stopped him cold: “FBI suspects ‘hero’ guard may have planted bomb.”

The story reported that Jewell had become the focus of the Olympic bomb investigation. The article contained no attribution, not even to unnamed law enforcement sources. But it stated that Jewell “fits the profile of the lone bomber,” and that three undercover law enforcement cars were staked out at Jewell’s apartment.

“I was stunned. I could hardly speak,” says Bryant, a business lawyer who has known Jewell since the two worked together at the Small Business Administration in the 1980s.

Bryant says he called his office and learned that Jewell had tried to call him. He left no return phone number, but a legal assistant had pressed *69 to get the phone number from which Jewell had called. Bryant called the number. The FBI answered.

Bryant says the agency denied Jewell was there until the lawyer insisted he knew otherwise. Then he was told the agents had invited Jewell to come do a training videotape on what to do in a bomb scare.

Bryant says he told the FBI that the interview was over: “I want him the hell out of there.”

By then, national and international news organizations in town for the Olympics—some of which were already on to the Jewell story, some of which weren’t—were rushing to cover the stunning new accusation about the 33-year-old security guard.

The next day, Jewell spent a humiliating day hunkered down on the staircase to his apartment while federal agents and trained dogs scoured his apartment. More than 100 journalists from around the world interviewed his neighbors, crowded the apartment complex’s parking lot and swimming pool and beamed around the world the shots they could steal of him through the slats in the staircase.

Says Bryant, “He’s got the world media and all the resources of the United States of America crushing him.”

He adds, “What if they’re wrong?”