Husband, Mother of Judge Slain in Chicago

A task force of federal agents and Chicago detectives fanned out Tuesday through a neighborhood here, 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 to find the bodies of Michael F. Lefkow, 64, and 89-year-old Donna Humphrey.

The victims apparently were killed in the basement, where investigators reportedly recovered two .22-caliber shell casings. James Molloy, Chicago’s chief of detectives, said the murders occurred between 10:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., when one of the Lefkows’ daughters went to the house but saw no one inside.

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 did 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. “From a violent crime standpoint, this kind of case is pretty rare for the North Side,” Bayless said.

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 in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing case.

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 the murder of Judge Lefkow. He is scheduled to be sentenced next month.

Lefkow, 61, was 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’s group 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 website 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, an activist organization in Chicago.

Friends of the Lefkows’ said the judge and her husband, a veteran labor lawyer, were monitored 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 School of Law and a close acquaintance.

At the height of the trial, the Lefkows cheerily ignored the cameras during dinner parties and refused to cut back on nightly strolls through the neighborhood, recalled Michael Miner, a senior editor with the Chicago Reader newspaper. A U.S. marshal’s service official said Tuesday that the cameras were removed after a few weeks -- with the judge’s approval.

Miner recalled Michael Lefkow as an “intense and idealistic” lawyer who branched out from a poverty law practice into employment cases and mediation in recent years. He ran twice for Cook County judge, but was unsuccessful.

Judge Lefkow was a late entrant in the saga of Hale and his World Church of the Creator -- the extremist group he founded to espouse a doctrine of “racial holy war.”

In 1999, Benjamin Smith, a group follower, went on a shooting spree on Chicago’s North Side, killing two people and wounding nine.

Hale was not linked to those shootings.

But after the judge ordered the World Church of the Creator to change its name and imposed $200,000 in sanctions, Hale allegedly approached one of his aides and urged the judge’s murder. The aide was an FBI informant, and his conversations with Hale were secretly recorded.

Hale’s group, now called Creativity, “is pretty much splintered now,” Burghart said. But he cautioned that white supremacist “lone wolves” were capable of committing violence without direction.

Adam Schupack, associate director for the Anti-Defamation League, said there had been calls for violence against Lefkow on white supremacist Internet and radio sites.

At Stormfront.org -- an Internet discussion site frequented by adherents of white supremacist ideology -- one chat room participant urged in a December 2002 posting: “Post the pictures of her family for all to see.” A second participant promptly posted photographs of the judge, Michael Lefkow and their children, adding snippets of personal data from their church website.

Two weeks earlier, Lefkow had sent a posting to the website of the radio show “A Prairie Home Companion.” It was a brief, loving birthday tribute to her husband.

“Michael Lefkow,” the missive read, “Happy birthday to Michael, the only guy on State Street in a fedora. -- Joan, your bride of 27 years.”

Beckham reported from Chicago and Braun from Washington. Times researcher Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this report.