Federal judge’s husband, mother killed in family home
CHICAGO – A task force of federal agents and Chicago police detectives fanned out Tuesday through a residential neighborhood, searching for clues in the shooting deaths of the husband and mother of a federal judge who had been targeted for murder by a white supremacist group.
Authorities placed U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow under around-the-clock guard after she returned home from work Monday and found the bodies of Michael F. Lefkow, 64, and Donna Humphrey, 89.
The victims apparently were killed in the basement, where investigators reportedly recovered two .22-caliber shell casings. Jim Molloy, Chicago’s chief of detectives, said the slayings occurred between 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Autopsies conducted Tuesday by Cook County medical examiners confirmed that the victims died from multiple gunshot wounds. Officials said some evidence removed from the Lefkow home would be flown to the FBI’s forensics laboratory in Quantico, Va., for analysis.
Investigators said they were not ruling out any possibilities, but were taking a hard look at any involvement by domestic extremist groups.
“There’s nothing pointing us in that direction,” said David Bayless, spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. “However, we’re actively pursuing that.”
Police said that deadly home invasions do not fit the community profile in Edgewater, a north-side Chicago neighborhood of stylish brick and wood-frame houses where the Lefkows lived for nearly 20 years.
The FBI was drawn into the case because killing relatives of a federal judge is classified as a federal crime, punishable either by the death penalty or life imprisonment. But the statute can only be invoked if the killing was an attempt to impede or retaliate against the judge.
“The crime has to be aimed at affecting a judge’s official duties,” said Scott Mendeloff, who helped lead a team of federal prosecutors in the conviction of Timothy J. McVeigh for the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing.
A Justice Department official in Washington confirmed Tuesday that FBI agents were “looking at any possible connection related to any case that the judge has handled. There’s a clear history there. But we haven’t excluded any scenarios either.”
White supremacist leader Matthew Hale, 33, was found guilty in April 2004 of soliciting someone to murder Judge Lefkow. He is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
Lefkow, 61, had been singled out by Hale and his followers after she presided over a civil case in which his group – World Church of the Creator – was sued by a similarly named group for copyright infringement.
Lefkow initially had ruled that Hale could keep the name. But a federal appeals court reversed her, and in November 2002 she told Hale that she had no choice but to order him to stop using World Church of the Creator on his Web site and in all printed material.
Hale’s backers railed against the judge and her family in Internet messages, even posting their photographs and address.
“She and her family were singled out for demonization. Law enforcement clearly has a lot to look at there,” said Devin Burghart, who monitors white supremacist groups for the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based activist organization.
Friends of the Lefkows said that the judge and her husband, a veteran labor lawyer, endured monitoring by security cameras and federal undercover teams during Hale’s murder solicitation trial.
“They both handled it courageously,” said Thomas F. Geraghty, an associate dean at Northwestern University Law School and a close acquaintance.