Judge’s Enemy Cut Off From Family

CHICAGO —  The parents of white supremacist Matthew Hale said Tuesday that their jailhouse visits and phone calls had been suspended indefinitely as the investigation continued into the killing of a federal judge’s husband and mother.

Hale was convicted last year of plotting to murder Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow after he lost a trademark infringement case. He is awaiting sentencing.

Russell Hale and his former wife, Evelyn Hutcheson, said that they had been preparing for a bimonthly visit with their son when a counselor contacted them late Monday and told them not to come.

“I was so shook up by it all, I didn’t have the sense to ask why,” Russell Hale said. Officials with the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago declined to comment.

Also Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune reported that DNA found on a cigarette butt inside the Lefkow home -- where the judge found the bodies -- did not match any family member or any known criminal profile in the United States.

The deaths of Michael F. Lefkow, 64, and Donna Humphrey, 89, have rocked this city’s legal community and raised concerns nationwide about protection for the judiciary.

In 2002, Lefkow presided over an Oregon group’s lawsuit against Hale and his racially focused movement.

Lefkow initially ruled in Hale’s favor, but a federal appeals court reversed her. So Lefkow ordered Hale to stop using World Church of the Creator on his website and in printed material.

Then came two years of taunts -- with the judge’s personal information and family photographs posted on racist websites -- before Hale, 33, was convicted of soliciting her murder.

Hal Turner, a New Jersey man who hosts a white supremacist shortwave radio program, had posted on his website the names and work addresses of three appellate court judges connected to Hale’s copyright case.

On Tuesday, he removed the material. But he left an electronic link to a court ruling listing their names, along with this statement: “I believe it is time to put the judges named above [in the ruling] into the arena of public scrutiny.”

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, testifying Tuesday before the House Appropriations Committee, assured lawmakers that the Lefkow case would be solved.

“We will find them,” Mueller said. “They will be arrested and they will do time for this. We are working 24 hours. We will leave no stone unturned, no piece of forensic evidence unanalyzed. Every lead will be tracked down, and [we] absolutely believe that we will identify the individual, and that person will be arrested and prosecuted.”

The task force dedicated to the case is made up of federal marshals, FBI agents and Chicago police detectives.

The investigation led FBI officials to Michael Lefkow’s Chicago law offices Tuesday, where they questioned staff about past cases.

Attorney William Spielberger, who shared office space with Michael Lefkow, said FBI investigators picked up some address books last week. He would not say what they asked him about.

“They’re in there right now, interviewing the secretaries,” said Spielberger. “I looked up to him [Lefkow]. He was a mentor in many ways.”

Authorities have not publicly described the evidence they are collecting. But newspaper accounts have said the items taken from the Lefkow home include the cigarette butt, a soda can, .22-caliber shell casings and a bloody shoeprint.