The loneliest man in America: How Russell Moore became the only indigenous Aussie on death dow
Russell Moore was condemned to the electric chair in America for the brutal murder of a rich socialite. This is what he told us from there.
Florida prison inmate number 083475, James Hudson Savage, Race Unknown, knew he’d never get out of his jail cell except in a body bag.
In reality he was Russell Thomas Moore, a Yorta Yorta and Wemba Wemba Aboriginal from Murray River territory, who had been locked up on Florida’s death row.
Incarcerated 16,000km from the home he never knew but had come to yearn for since being sentenced to die in Florida’s infamous electric chair, Russell feared he was doomed never to set foot on Australian soil again.
In the end, he would instead be lowered into it, in a coffin surrounded by relatives who had never met him, but knew his tragic story.
Even 20 years ago, in the cellblock of one of the 20 prisons he was shuttled between in the decades he spent in Florida’s prison system, Russell told me he didn’t expect to get out alive.
At that point all hope had not yet drained from his distinctly Aboriginal face.
The smiling Russell Moore spoke gently in an accent that he described as pure “redneck Florida panhandle”.
At that point he had been locked up since the evening of thanksgiving Friday, 1988, two days after he had brutally murdered his polar opposite, a wealthy divorcee and former debutante of the old Florida South.
Barbara Ann Barber’s brutal rape and murder at the hands of Russell Moore was a tragedy for her family.
But it would also be a disaster for Russell’s, and expose the diabolical circumstances which led him to her door.
The only Aborigine in North America
At the time of the murder, an eminent social justice lawyer later said, he was “probably the only Aborigine in North America … transplanted and at stress and risk under which he ultimately snapped”.
In August 2001, at Northwest Florida Correctional Institute, Russell Moore smiled and shrugged and told me in his soft drawl, “I ain’t getting out.”
Never? “No, I got three life sentences … mandatory 25 years and two natural lifes.”
Russell had been imprisoned as James Savage — the name given to him by white missionaries who adopted him virtually at birth, took him from Australia and then abandoned him in the US.
Russell’s prison then, like many he was shunted between, was in “God’s country”, the Florida Panhandle Bible belt where “family and church” were paramount.
It didn’t really matter where Russell was because he had never fit in, inside any prison or outside on any street, or in the adoptive family that had taken him from his birth family.
That tragic fact is plain throughout his story, repeated by relatives, police officers, inmates, and transient associates who he met.
White Americans thought he was black, blacks thought he was white, either thought he was Indian or Latino and most inmates, who referred to him as “a gang of one” shunned him.
He’d hang with Klansmen and Aryan brotherhood
Outside he’d hang with bikers, inside with the Aryan brotherhood or Klansmen, or just alone.
“I don’t talk too much to anybody,” he told me.
Moore’s Florida prison papers called him “Race Unknown” and he was repeatedly asked after he was transferred to yet another jail what was his actual culture and background, which for years he didn’t know.
In reality he had been rejected by everyone, including at one fatal point the very prison system which was now his tomb.
Russell was born on January 31, 1963 in the Fitzroy North home for unwed mothers.
At the time, the “stolen generation” policies of removing indigenous children overlapped a period of forced adoptions of infants given birth to by young single women.
From the moment he was taken from his 14-year-old mother as a newborn, Russell Moore was an outcast.
Forbidden from living in his own indigenous community, he was adopted into a white missionary family who dressed up their little black boy in immaculate white clothes.
But at home they disciplined him and then, aged barely six, took him to the US, where he may as well have been transported to Mars.
Then the missionaries quit the country and left Russell behind.
It was the eminent lawyer Hal Wootten – also a judge and royal commissioner into Aboriginal deaths in custody – who told news.com.au that Russell “was probably the only Aborigine in North America”.
Left to fend for himself, he was an already convicted offender with zero friends, relatives or community.
In Russell’s final prison mug shots, hopelessness and dejection is etched on his face.
Better off dead
His late birth mother Beverly Whyman – who died in 2017 – said in 1989 after she had met her long lost son following his death sentence, “I do wish he was dead.
“Then he would not have to sit in a prison cell, locked in chains, for years and years.
“I would be happier if he was dead somehow, then there is no pain.”
That death came a few weeks ago, after a short, unexplained “medical emergency”.
Russell died at Apalachee Correctional Institution, yet another prison along that 300km stretch of land known as the Panhandle.
His body was returned to Australia 52 years after he had been taken from his country just as he was turning six years old, with 100 people gathered to finally lay him to rest.
Had no identity
Chris Loorham is the lawyer who had tracked down Beverly in 1988 and informed her the son she hadn’t heard of for 25 years was now on death row in Florida.
“Russell, he didn’t know who he was. He had no sense of identity,” Mr Loorham told Nine newspapers after Russell’s funeral.
“There was a lot of talk before the trial, before the plea, about how that would have affected a young teenage boy growing up in Florida.
“He did not fit in America.”
Countdown to murder
He was seemingly hurtling headlong to a fateful encounter with the woman who would become his victim, his polar opposite.
In 1988, James Hudson Savage was adrift on the streets of Melbourne, Florida, a town 300km north of Miami named after the city he was born in.
Downtown Melbourne was then undergoing a heritage revival, lifting it from a haunt for prostitutes, thieves and transient drug addicts into a boutique shopping village.
On East New Haven Ave, Barbara Ann Barber had opened a studio designing interiors for Florida’s elite.
Around 900m away, a soup kitchen called the Daily Bread served the poor, homeless and addicted.
James Savage was a customer.
He had washed up in Brevard County, home of the Kennedy Space Centre on Florida’s Atlantic coast, aged 18, alone, already estranged from his adoptive parents, the Reverend Graeme and Nesta Savage.
The Savages had preached and studied divinity in Brevard County, having left the Salvation Army, and gone to the Free Will Baptists.
When Graeme was kicked out for preaching in a black church, they became Southern Baptists, and the moved on again to other denominations.
The Savages had served in the US, the Cayman Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, St. Kitts, Nevis, Guyana, Taiwan and Papua New Guinea.
God at work
By 1982, Graeme was working as Senior Chaplain of Florida State Prison at Starke outside Jacksonville, “where he witnessed God at work”, his obituary says.
In between watching the Almighty hard at it, the Reverend found time to send a parcel to inmate James Savage, incarcerated 250km away in Brevard Correctional Centre.
At that point, James Savage had never heard he was Russell Thomas Moore, or anything about his birth family or indigenous culture, he later told me, because the Savages “didn’t want to talk about it”.
“Way I found out was he sent me a passport and some other stuff and it had my real name on it,” Moore said.
And having rolled that hand grenade into Russell/James’ jail cell with no explanation, the Savages executed their plan to return to Australia after more than a decade in America.
They left Russell behind
In 1983, when James was 21 years old, the Savages left the US taking their two biological children, Grattan-Jon and Glynece, back to Australia, but leaving Russell behind.
They would later say they had no idea where he was, but that’s not true.
Russell said when he received the documents from Graeme Savage, he stared at the name Russell Thomas Moore and “didn’t know who it was”.
He was now utterly alone, but no more than he’d ever been, according to one person who knew him as a child.
Another Australian adoptee of the Savages, Fay Giddins, remembers him as a toddler – the family called him “Huddy” – and already a misfit.
She said even at three he went walkabout and once she found him “among some mallee stumps … eating witchetty grubs, and I cried ‘you poor little bugger, you don’t belong here any more than I do’”.
Ms Giddins said as “a black Australian going to America … they’ve got this stranger who is dark but different to them … he had to have been ostracised”.
Punished and abused
Russell’s Sunday school teacher, Laurel Oglethorpe, who would later write a powerful letter to save him from the electric chair, said “Huddy was a very sensitive child” who shrank from his disciplinarian father.
And whenever he was scolded or abused, he became very quiet and seemed to be affected by it for some time afterwards.
“For some reason or another, the Savages never seemed to scold or punish the other children in the same way.”
In prison, Russell told me that Graeme Savage was never warm and was harder on him than Grattan or Glyn, “I was the only one who ever got into trouble”.
He said Nesta was “OK … I guess she’s scared of my dad”.
When the Savages were posted to Gnowangerup, WA, Russell said the local Noongar Aboriginal people remembered a well-dressed black boy “with white parents” who always seemed to be smacking him.
Drugs and alcohol from 11
After the Savages moved to the US, to California and then Florida, Russell attended church and made it through to the eighth grade.
By age 11, he began trying drugs and alcohol and by 15, he committed sex and robbery offences.
He went to a boys’ home in the Panhandle and the Savages sent him to a Christian ranch for troubled youth.
The late Hal Wootten, who has previously spoken with news.com.au, said that James “from his birth was exposed to great stresses and risks”.
“While still a small child he had the additional stress of being transplanted into a different but also racist community in the United States,” Mr Wootten said.
Snapped under the pressure
“An innocent child was turned into a criminal because he could not cope with the situations created at every point by people who no doubt thought they were doing the best for him.
“In fact they were building cumulative pressures under which he ultimately snapped.”
By February 1981, an 18-year-old James Savage had drifted to Brevard County and had become a regular at the Christ Is The Answer mission in Melbourne.
He led the life of a transient, living in the bushes and on the street, and was sent back to jail, for the first time as an adult, after stealing a car in 1982.
From early 1987, Florida state started dumping thousands of convicted felons back into society to free up its overcrowded prisons.
More than 6800 inmates from were released early in the first two years of the program.
In October 1988, Russell was locked up in the maximum-security state prison at Starke, where his father had been prison chaplain, for grand theft and burglary.
He had another seven months to serve, but the state of Florida cut 233 days from his three-year sentence and on October 26, 1988 James Savage walked from prison with $100 and a bus ticket to Melbourne.
When he arrived, he stayed at a local dosshouse, the Colonial, but mostly slept under a bridge.
Barbara Ann Barber
Barbara Ann Barber’s design showroom was set amid palm trees, an antiques mall and next door, the Christmas Cottage.
She was a member of the American Society of Interior Design, and had decorated the home of Melbourne Republican congressman, later a senator and currently the Joe Biden-appointed head of NASA, Bill Nelson.
Barber had renovated the home of Florida Today publisher Frank Vega, and fitted out a local millionaire’s mansion in an Out of Africa theme.
A stylish and industrious woman who whipped between assignment around town in her gold Volvo, Barbara worked with daughter Ginger Nash of Houston on projects and one of her two sons, design engineer Curtis Barber.
Around her showroom on 1010 East New Haven Ave, however, the inner city slum dwellers who had frequented the area since the Great Depression endured.
Melbourne’s Downtown Progress Association had campaigned to “get the bums off the streets”, but the fringe dwellers prevailed.
Crack cocaine
A trend which had surged in similar sections of major cities across the top of the US was now sweeping the south: smoking crack cocaine.
Russell later told me that after leaving prison, he was looking out for a girl he knew through a guy he had met in Starke’s psyche unit, who he was helping out because the man couldn’t read or write.
The girl “was in Daytona on a murder charge (and) if it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t be back in prison”.
Russell said he was drinking every day after his prison release, and had embarked on a new pursuit, smoking crack.
A Brevard offender who remembered Russell as “an intelligent, warm individual when straight” also said that “drugs and alcohol affect him like no other person … he becomes another person”.
Other local transients later interviewed by police, named Wiggie, Tank, Speedy and Dee-Ray, knew him, but couldn’t work out where he was from, one describing him as looking “primitive”.
Always a loner
Russell’s Melbourne Police Department (MPD) file quotes one of the cops saying “James Savage … has always been a loner and has never associated with other transients”.
“In all encounters with Savage, he was always alone … would be found alone, away from them,” he said.
Wednesday November 23, 1988, was a full moon and Barbara Barber was looking forward to the holidays.
She was spending thanksgiving eve at the Fort Lauderdale home her son Curtis, dining with him, her daughter-in-law and her parents.
She was due to lunch on the Friday with her best friends, Alice Corden, Wanda Gray and Betty La Roche, a community stalwart of the local church, heritage council, debutante society and garden club.
Happy holidays
On the Wednesday evening, Barbara was working back late to finish a job before the holidays and in an upbeat mood.
Her friend Marcia Denius dropped into Barber’s shop briefly, while her daughter Christina waited in the car, noticing two transient men loitering who made her feel “very uneasy”.
When Barber did not show up for Thanksgiving dinner, her family went to her residence out of town the next day, but couldn’t find her.
They phoned Marcia Denius, who said she would swing by the shop on Friday.
When she pulled into the car park at the rear, Denius spotted Barber’s purse lying at the foot of the stairs leading up to the shop, its contents strewn on the ground.
Body in the alley
Beyond the purse lay a body, wearing the same clothes Denius had seen Barber in on Wednesday night.
The body did not appear to be breathing, the clothing had been partially removed and around the person’s throat was a semitransparent electrical cord.
Barbara Ann Barber had been strangled twice with human hands and once with the cord of her own designer lamp, beaten, cut, raped and her underwear stuffed into her mouth.
Lying out in the open, detectives said, “the fire ants got to her”. Barber’s designer watch, gold jewellery and cash from her purse were missing.
MPD detectives worked solidly through Thanksgiving Friday, interviewing the transients William “Wiggie” Craft, Dena “Tank” Hutchinson and Donnie “Dee-Ray” Williams.
Wiggie had drunk beer in a room at the Continental paid by James Savage, who he had met a week earlier.
Tank told the cops a man he thought was Savage tried to sell him gold jewellery and a Cartier watch in exchange for crack.
Raped, strangled and beaten
At 6pm on the Friday, detectives Steve Fernez and Dennis Nichols interviewed James Savage at the MPD offices.
They observed blood on his sneakers, swollen knuckles, and scratches on his face, which said was from a fight with Wiggie.
As the interview progressed, Savage admitted he had been there but said another black male had committed the attack on Barber.
Savage said he had retrieved $80 from the victim’s purse and punched the woman, but that the other male had strangled her.
The next day, with Savage in custody for violating his parole, detectives visited him Brevard County Jail and advised him they were charging him with murder.
‘I did it’
Read his Miranda rights, which he promptly waived, James Savage admitted he had lied and confessed to the murder.
He said he had “smoked rock cocaine and consumed alcohol” prior to robbing, beating and strangling Barber, although he denied sexually assaulting her.
James Savage was charged with murder, robbery and sexual battery.
Back in the Murray Valley around Swan Hill and Deniliquin, the relatives of Russell Moore were unaware of his arrest, or in some cases, of his very existence.
And then an Australian lawyer working in the US saw a story about a 26-year-old man accused of the vicious rape and murder of a prominent member of southern Florida society.
If convicted, the man would be sentenced to death.
The lawyer recognised the accused’s features as distinctly indigenous Australian and set the ball rolling.
James Hudson Savage was publicly identified for the first time as Russell Thomas Moore.
‘Your son is on death row’
Lawyers tracked down Beverly Whyman in Victoria and broke the news that her son was in prison in the US and facing probable execution by the electric chair.
As a storm of support for Russell and opposition to the death penalty took off in Australia, the forces of resistance were gathering in Florida.
The Australian government would pay for Beverly, Aboriginal Legal Service lawyer Terry Malone and family members to fly to America for Russell’s trial.
Media in each country were fired up, with massive debate in newspapers by columnists and ordinary citizens.
One Florida Today citizen columnist described the “pre-trial circus” and lambasted the idea of “the drifter” being allowed to serve time in Australia as pleaded by Aboriginal activists.
It was not lost on Russell’s supporters that in the “southern racist state” the judge chosen to preside over Russell’s trial was a friend of Barbara Barber, who had contributed to his election.
In November 1989, the trial opened before Brevard Circuit Judge Lawrence Johnston, who said he gave little weight to arguments that Savage was victimised by Australian adoption policy.
‘You will be put to death’
The dreadful crime James Savage had unquestionably committed was relayed.
Hal Wootten, among others, gave evidence and the jury voted 11-1 for Savage to get life in prison.
Immediately afterwards, Barber’s daughter Ginger Nash was outraged that taxpayer’s money would keep him alive in jail and said she hoped Judge Johnston would send him to the electric chair.
On January 23, 1990, Judge Johnston did, rejecting the jury vote and sentencing James Hudson Savage to death.
Cuffed and shackled, and under guard by 11 bailiffs, Russell stood as Johnston pronounced, “You will be put to death in the manner and means provided by the law.
“May God have mercy on your soul.”
In the court, Barber’s family was jubilant.
‘They called him N***er’
Beverly Whyman angrily told American reporters, “He wasn’t born a savage. He was turned into one.
“Do you know his nickname (in his adoptive family)? They called him N***er.”
An appeal would be lodged, but Russell Thomas would be transported as James Savage to death row in Florida State Prison at Starke.
In October 1991, a Florida judge overturned the death sentence and Russell was jailed for 25 years to life.
His years of shuttling between prisons all over Florida had begun.
In 2000, Australia drafted legislation supporting a Commonwealth Transfer of Prisoners Act.
In 2003, Graeme Savage died, aged 69, with the Salvation Army tribute saying Savage’s favourite prayer had been, “Pray the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.”
Nesta Savage would not die until 2017.
Moore’s US-based lawyer spent years working to help return Russell to Australia.
Never get out of here alive
Successive Florida governors had sworn never to let him leave the prison system alive.
Despite the support of the Australian and Victorian governments, Russell’s transfer applications to serve his life sentence in Australia were denied in 2007 and 2012.
A third application was deferred by the Covid-19 pandemic.
After Russell’s death in June, Mr Bourke said he was “profoundly saddened by Russell’s passing … my heart goes out to his family and his community”.
He told Nine newspapers, “Their loss (is) made all the more bitter by our inability to have his sentence transferred and have him returned home before his death.”
At Russell’s funeral, relative Hewitt Whyman recalled hugging Russell during his Florida trial.
“I embraced him and whispered in his ear, ‘This is from the mob at home’,” he said.
He told mourners, “He had a family here. He was removed from here. He died in custody in a foreign land.”
Explosive caravan update no one saw coming
Police say criminals were behind a ‘fabricated plot’ after a series of raids after a caravan packed with explosives and a list of synagogues was found in outer Sydney.
‘Rain hell’: Lehrmann’s shock rape case move
Bruce Lehrmann has made a shock move ahead of a pending criminal trial in Toowoomba, where he is set to defend two counts of rape.
Payday after NRL star’s charges withdrawn
Police have been ordered to pay more than $20,000 in legal costs for an exiled NRL star after domestic violence allegations against him were withdrawn at the last minute.