![\"fall09-magazine-vance\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2009\/12\/fall09-magazine-vance.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAt the time, Vance was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Birmingham, Ala., office. In the investigation, she worked with agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, then trained at an ATF school in Georgia that teaches prosecutors about arson and explosives.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a week of hands-on training,\u201d Vance says. \u201cI know my way around explosive devices.\u201d A former colleague, John Earnest, is more emphatic: Vance\u2019s technical knowledge of bombs is \u201cjaw-dropping.\u201d<\/p>\n
She put this expertise to use on Jan. 29, 1998, joining the investigation after a bomb exploded outside a Birmingham abortion clinic, killing a policeman and critically injuring a nurse. \u201cI could hear it go off,\u201d Vance says. \u201cWe were on the scene almost immediately.\u201d The bomber turned out to be Eric Robert Rudolph, who had also set off the 1996 blast at Centennial Olympic Park during the Atlanta Olympics.<\/p>\n
In the years since, Vance has investigated or prosecuted similar cases: gun trafficking between Alabama and the Northeast, bank robberies and bank fraud, and a man killed by a bomb planted in his riding lawnmower. Perhaps her most important prosecution was a civil rights conspiracy in Boaz, Ala., in which a police captain had his entire night shift taking money from Hispanics targeted for traffic stops.<\/p>\n
Vance, who moved to the appellate division in 2002 and was later division chief, is a tough, seasoned prosecutor, says Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Others call her intense and tenacious. \u201cIn the office, she has the personality you need to be an effective leader,\u201d Jones says, \u201ca sense of where she wants to go, what the law is, and how facts apply to that law.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
“She has an iron will and, once she has developed her positions, well-nigh unshakeable convictions.\u201d<\/p>\n
And she\u2019s cool under pressure. On Dec. 16, 1989, her father-in-law, U.S. Circuit Judge Robert Vance Sr., was assassinated by a bomb disguised as a Christmas present that was sent to his home. His wife, Helen Vance, was severely injured. Joyce Vance\u2019s longtime friend Leslie Proll recalls Vance being a \u201crock. She was very, very cool under very difficult circumstances.\u201d Proll saw the same strength when Vance\u2019s second son was born with DiGeorge syndrome, a genetic disorder, and needed immediate open-heart surgery.<\/p>\n
Vance has professional zeal, say her friends, but she\u2019s no modern-day Eliot Ness, professionally consumed and personally bereft. She is the mother of four children, ages 6 to 19. She grows herbs in the yard of her Birmingham home. She\u2019s an avid artist and knitter who dyes yarns to fantastic colors. Indeed, time at home, she says, isn\u2019t spent cleaning. \u201cMy mother-in-law,\u201d Vance says, \u201csaid that my children will never remember if there are dust bunnies in the corner.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vance learned to knit at age 4 \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m from a family of knitters,\u201d she says \u2014 and when a friend needed yarn of a certain color, she rejuvenated a childhood hobby of dyeing yarn and fabrics. Her grandmother had taught her batik and tie-dyeing in the late 1960s, and Vance\u2019s own approach to low-immersion fabric dyeing, which she calls \u201ccrackle dye,\u201d is artistically and technically thorough, as evidenced by a detailed online article she wrote in 2006.<\/p>\n
In this sense, Vance finds satisfaction in the intricacy of the process, whether it\u2019s dyeing fabric or creating a collage. \u201cIt\u2019s the process that allows my subconscious to relax,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n