Killer in Chicago Slayings Had a Hit List, Police Say

As he annoyed judges with droning arguments and demonized opposing lawyers as architects of a vast conspiracy, the man identified Friday as the killer of a federal judge’s relatives always managed to get one more day in court.

Bart Ross kept his stacks of legal documents in crisp order. He cared about his appearance, wearing tidy turtlenecks to court -- even if he showed up later in workman’s overalls and once took out his mouth prosthesis and waved it in the air to demonstrate how his face had been disfigured by what he said was poor medical care.

“Sure, he filed wild pleadings and he never made much sense,” lawyer Barry G. Bollinger said. “But he was never a raging, crazy person in court. How could you predict?”

As police and federal forensics teams here shored up the evidence Friday linking Ross to the Feb. 28 murders of Judge Joan Lefkow’s husband and mother, Bollinger learned that he was on a long list of judges, lawyers and doctors drawn up by Ross as possible targets.

The list was found, along with a suicide note, in the minivan where Ross shot himself to death Wednesday night outside the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis, Wis.

As FBI agents notified those whose names Ross had left behind, investigators were seeking to determine whether he had driven from the Lefkows’ Chicago home to Milwaukee to stalk two federal appeals court judges who dismissed one of his legal actions in 2003.

Ross’ Plymouth minivan was ticketed in downtown Milwaukee on Wednesday, just three hours before he killed himself.

Cecilia Gilbert, a spokeswoman for the Milwaukee Department of Public Works, said the $20 ticket was issued for an expired meter.

Gilbert said Ross had parked about a half-mile from the federal courthouse where the two appeals judges were based.

Chicago Police spokesman David Bayless said Friday that detectives were trying to nail down a timeline for Ross’ movements; they were not certain why he drove north after killing the judge’s husband, Michael Lefkow, 64, and her mother, Donna Humphrey, 89.

“We still don’t know what his state of mind was,” Bayless said. But ballistics links and a genetic match between Ross’ DNA and traces on a cigarette butt left at the Lefkow house “tell us he was the lone killer,” Bayless said.

Police have not found the .22-caliber weapon or a silencer Ross claimed to have used in the murders.

On Friday, detectives searched the roof of the judge’s north side home, coming up empty, Bayless said.

Federal firearms experts linked the bullets that killed the pair to a box of 150 .22-caliber shells found in the van, said Thomas Ahern, a spokesman for the Chicago office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In his handwritten suicide note, Ross indicated that after the murders, he drove to the northern Chicago suburbs of Glencoe and Northbrook and neared the homes of a doctor and a judge on his list.

Police were unsure when Ross made the approaches -- and whether he had made similar moves against anyone else.

“It’s unnerving to learn you’re on a death list,” said another lawyer, Karie J. Valentino, who defended against Ross in two hearings before Lefkow last year.

“The judge was so patient with him. So was the whole legal system. No one could imagine he would end it the way he did.”

In those two appearances before Lefkow, Ross -- who was suing a group of doctors he said had mistreated him -- did not threaten her or display any antagonism, Valentino said.

Because the federal civil rights lawsuit mirrored a case Ross had filed earlier with another federal judge, Lefkow had the option of summarily dismissing it without allowing Ross to make an argument in person.

Instead, she gave him about an hour to list his complaints against the doctors who had treated his mouth cancer with radiation and the lawyers who had represented them.

His monologue spiraled into a rant -- with references to Nazi concentration camps, slave labor and terrorists.

At one point, Ross passed out snapshots of his cancer-ridden jaw, interspersed with photographs of the World Trade Center in flames.

Lefkow listened, finally telling Ross he had made his case.

“The irony in all this was that when Judge Lefkow finally dismissed his complaint a few weeks later, she wrote in her order that she had real sympathy for his condition,” said Thomas L. Browne, a lawyer who was told by FBI agents that he had been targeted.

“She didn’t have to go that far, but that’s the kind of judge she is. In his paranoid state, all [Ross] saw was the last judge who closed the door on him.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Lefkow described Ross as “a very pathetic, tragic person.”

She added: “It’s heartbreaking that my husband and mother had to die over something like this.”

The judge and her four daughters flew late Thursday to Colorado, where family members and friends were gathering in the town of Littleton for a memorial service for her mother scheduled for today.