Agents Target Followers of Supremacist

Bearing down with grand jury subpoenas and teams of interrogators, federal agents and Chicago police sought two men for questioning Thursday in connection with the execution-style slayings of a federal judge’s husband and mother, pressing for information from followers of a white supremacist who insisted from jail that he had no involvement in the killings.

Federal agents seized telephone and computer records from a residence in the Chicago area and interrogated relatives and supporters of Matthew Hale, the leader of an extremist faction known as the World Church of the Creator.

Chicago police released a sketch of two men wanted for questioning and sifted through photographs of Hale’s followers in an attempt to identify the pair, who were reportedly spotted in a car parked near the judge’s home in the hours before the slayings.

Hale, held at a federal detention facility while awaiting sentencing for a 2004 conviction for trying to arrange the murder of U.S. District Court Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, told his mother in a telephone call Thursday that none of his followers played any part in Monday’s killings of Lefkow’s husband, Michael F. Lefkow, 64, and her mother, Donna Humphrey, 89.

“There’s simply no way that any supporter of mine would commit such a heinous crime. I totally condemn it,” Hale told his mother, Evelyn Hutcheson, in a 15-minute phone conversation that was monitored and taped by FBI agents. Hutcheson said Hale told her that the day after the slayings he was moved to a new cell “that didn’t have anything in it.”

Authorities said they were seeking information from anyone connected with Hale, but stopped short of describing him or any of his supporters as suspects.

But according to sources close to the investigation and several people questioned by federal agents, investigators are concentrating on Hale’s relatives and a hard-core group of his supporters in Chicago and in his base in East Peoria, Ill., as well as white supremacist sympathizers from as far off as northern New Jersey.

“They’re shaking the trees for anyone and anything they can possibly find,” said a source familiar with the investigation. “They’re clearly heading down the hate group angle.”

The source said investigators were questioning Hale supporters who attended his two-week murder solicitation trial last year.

Hale was convicted in April of soliciting his group’s security chief to kill Lefkow after she enforced a federal appeals court ruling that ordered Hale’s church to change its name. He is scheduled to be sentenced in April.

Hutcheson said Thursday that a team of federal agents who showed up at her home in East Peoria asked her about recent conversations with Kathleen Robertazzo, a supporter of Hale’s whose house in the north Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates was searched by agents late Wednesday and early Thursday.

According to Hutcheson, agents sought Robertazzo’s phone records, searched for firearms and seized the home computer she used as a freelance court reporter.

Several telephone calls to Robertazzo’s home went unanswered, but Hutcheson said Robertazzo told her that agents “wanted to know why Kathy and I talk so much. They think Matt’s getting his message out in code.”

Under government restrictions designed to curtail his communication with the outside world, Hale is isolated from other inmates in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago and can speak only to his parents by telephone every two weeks.

Police gave little background about the sketches they released of two white men -- one believed to be in his 50s and the other in his 20s -- who were wanted for questioning. Authorities would not say if they were witnesses or suspects, but the source said investigators had reviewed photos of Hale’s supporters looking for matches.

A worker in a nearby church reportedly noticed the two men sitting in a red Ford Escort idled in a no-parking zone near the Lefkow home several hours before the bodies were discovered. The church worker told police that he notified the men that they were parked illegally, and they drove off.

Chicago Police Chief of Detectives Jim Molloy said the slayings were committed sometime between 10:30 a.m. Monday, when Humphrey spoke to a granddaughter by phone, and 5:30 p.m., when Lefkow found the bodies of her mother and husband in the basement.

Investigators have amassed evidence that is being analyzed by forensics experts for fingerprints and DNA traces, officials said. Authorities have not publicly described the evidence, but newspaper accounts detailed the items as a cigarette butt, a soda can and a plastic sheet apparently used to cover muddy ground near where a window was broken from the outside.

Ballistics experts are examining at least two .22-caliber shell casings found in a room where investigators believe the shootings took place. Analysts also are scrutinizing a bloody shoeprint found inside the house and a shard of glass where the killers apparently entered the house.

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Lefkow said she could not say whether the killings had “anything to do with Matt Hale or any of his followers, but I do believe it was a hit -- not a random thing.”

Protected by federal marshals and hidden with her four daughters, Lefkow promised Wednesday to return to the bench.

“Nobody is going to intimidate me off my duty,” she said.

Police continued to cordon off the quiet residential street where Lefkow lives on the city’s north side, and they were still knocking on neighbors’ doors for information. One resident of a nearby apartment house said he had been questioned six times by FBI agents and police.

In Bergen County, N.J., a team of government agents visited Hal Turner, who has a white supremacist radio program that airs on shortwave frequencies. Turner said the agents, who work for the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, asked him if he “had any idea who did this, why they might go after the judge’s family.”

Turner said he told the agents: “I have nothing to say.” The phrase is the standard response white supremacists encourage their supporters to give government interrogators.

Turner said Thursday that he had provided air time to Hale before his conviction last year.

According to a transcript from an April 2003 broadcast provided by Adam Schupak, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith in Chicago, Turner said Lefkow was “worthy of being killed. It wouldn’t be legal in my opinion, but it wouldn’t be wrong.”

Turner said Thursday he was not advocating Lefkow’s slaying. “If I had the intent to do something bad, I wouldn’t broadcast it,” Turner said.

*

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this report.