Roy K. Moore
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[Roy K. Moore, 94, died Sunday, Oct. 12, 2008, at St. Catherine's Village in Madison, Miss.
A funeral service was 2 p.m. Friday, Oct. 17, 2008, in the chapel of Wright and Ferguson Funeral Home in Ridgeland with burial following in Parkway Memorial Cemetery. Visitation was at 12:30 p.m. Friday at the funeral home.
Mr. Moore was born in 1914 in Hood River, Oregon, and raised on the family farm in Harrisburg. Upon graduating from high school, he joined the United States Marine Corps in 1933, and was assigned to the Marine base at Quantico, Va., where the FBI Academy also is located. In 1935, he became a firearms instructor and began teaching firearms to newly hired FBI Special Agents who received firearms training at the academy.
Through this interaction he became interested in the FBI and joined the FBI ranks as a clerk in the Richmond, Va., office. He later transferred to the Miami, Fla., office and eventually obtained an accounting degree from the University of Miami. This qualified him to become a Special Agent of the FBI and he was promoted to the Agent position in 1940.
During his 34 year stint as a Special Agent, he moved approximately 21 times as a result of promotions and special cases. Mr. Moore built a reputation as a highly capable law enforcement officer and was called upon to assist in special cases around the country.
His reputation was solidified in 1955, when he helped solve the mid-air explosion of an airliner near Denver, Colo., in which 44 persons died. A young man had placed a bomb in his mother's suitcase before she boarded the plane in order to collect her life insurance.
Examples of other special cases in which he was called upon to supervise or serve as a consultant were helping solve the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., a series of killings on the island of St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, the kidnapping of the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, the Wounded Knee, S.D., Indian uprising and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army in San Francisco, Calif.
In 1964, Mr. Moore was hand picked by then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to open an FBI office in Jackson, Miss., to stem the wide-spread reign of civil rights terror in the state.
Mr. Moore and the Special Agents under his command aided by state and local law enforcement eventually broke the back of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan organization in the late 1960s. He retired from the FBI in 1974 and joined Deposit Guaranty National Bank where he served as Chief of Security until 1981.
He was a member of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, American Society for Industrial Security and Rotary Club of Jackson.
Mr. Moore married Lucille Morgan in 1936, and they had one son and two daughters. His son, Roy Jr., pursued a life in the private sector and currently resides in Florida. Both their daughters, Mrs. Carol Weston and Mrs. Sandra Giglio, married men who also became Special Agents and are now retired from the FBI. Mrs. Weston and her husband reside in San Jose, Calif., and Mrs. Giglio and her husband reside in Burke, Va., near Washington, D.C. Mr. and Mrs. Moore resided on Ross Barnett Reservoir and were married 58 years.
Mr. Moore is survived by his son, two daughters, nine grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.
Memorials may be made to the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Inc., P.O. Box 1027, Quantico, Va. 22134-1027.