Unthinkable crime

last updated 8 January 2015

Evanston, Ill.

Investigators this week sifted through hundreds of tips to determine whether white supremacists killed a judge’s family in Illinois. U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow found her husband and mother dead in her basement, each with two gunshots to the head. A white supremacist, Matthew Hale, was convicted in 2004 of plotting to kill Lefkow after she ordered him to stop calling his organization by a name, World Church of the Creator, that already belonged to another group. The judge said she never thought anything would come of the threats. “It’s so unthinkable,” she said. Detectives suspect that Hale’s supporters followed through. Hale said his friends would never commit “such a heinous crime.”