A junk dealer questioned in the mail bomb deaths of a civil rights lawyer and a federal judge who ruled against him insisted Wednesday the FBI has found nothing linking him to the slayings. A law enforcement source in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, said earlier in the day that Robert Wayne O'Ferrell is considered a suspect and had failed a series of lie detector tests administered by the FBI. O'Ferrell, who has seen his home, junk business and other properties pored over since the FBI converged on southeast Alabama Monday, once complained in a legal brief that America's court system ``is corrupt.'' O'Ferrell, who has denied any part in the mail bomb deaths, said agents have not found a typewriter that reportedly links typewritten court correspondence he filed in 1988 with typed material sent by the mail bomber. ``You can't keep looking when you don't find nothing,'' he told reporters as he fed dogs and horses at his rural home. O'Ferrell confirmed he took several polygraph tests this week, but said, ``I have not been told I am a suspect and have not been told I failed a lie detector.'' No charges have been filed against O'Ferrell, and FBI agent Chuck Archer, who has declined to use the term ``suspect'' in referring to O'Ferrell, said no suspects have been taken into custody. Agents are searching for clues in the package bomb deaths of Judge Robert Vance of Birmingham, who died Dec. 16, and black lawyer Robert Robinson, of Savannah, Ga., who was killed two days later. Vance was a member of a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta that ruled last year against O'Ferrell, who was sueing his former employer, Gulf Life Insurance Co. An Atlanta TV station received a letter signed ``Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System'' that claimed responsibility for the mail bombings and included racist comments. The legal brief O'Ferrell filed in 1988 against Gulf Life included a typwritten document that says in part: ``The law and court system in these UNITED STATES is corrupt, that I have had anything to do with. But I know you can help clean it up.... If anyone has been mistreated by Gulf Life ... the Courts, and two Attorneys, I really believe that I have.'' The capitalization and grammar is as it appears in the document. But the court documents O'Ferrell filed do not mention racial topics, considered by many the motivation for the two killings. According to the law enforcement source, O'Ferrell gave answers considered deceptive by a polygraph expert when he failed the lie detector tests. Results of polygraph tests are not always reliable and are inadmissable in criminal trials. It could not be determined what questions the FBI asked O'Ferrell. Agents have searched O'Ferrell's home, junk warehouse, abandoned downtown store and two septic tanks, and more locales were on a list to be searched. ``They are obtaining more (warrants) and will be searching further,'' said Charles Steinmetz, a spokesman at FBI headquarters in Washington. At O'Ferrell's salvage business Wednesday, agents pumped out a septic tank and removed items from the tin-covered building onto a rented truck. Men wearing FBI jackets hung green tarpaulins on the front of the structure, and stacked up boxes to block the view of dozens of reporters and news cameras. The contents of the warehouse's septic tank, located in an adjoining shed, was pumped out after firefighters clad in bright yellow containment-suits tested for any build-up of flammable methane gas in the underground tank. The FBI also has canvassed town businesses asking for information on O'Ferrell's buying habits. O'Ferrell's father, J.C. O'Ferrell, said the FBI questioned him about the activities of both his sons, Wayne and James ``Buddy'' O'Ferrell. ``They were trying to say my two sons had something to do with that bombing up in Birmingham,'' the father told the Birmingham Post-Herald. ``They asked had I ever heard either one talk bad about colored folks, or if my sons ever made threats on any judges. I said, `No, my children weren't raised that way.'''
