Posted on 03/11/2005 2:40:43 AM PST by Pharmboy
CHICAGO (AP) - A DNA match from a cigarette butt convinced police that a Chicago electrician was the killer of a federal judge's husband and mother, authorities said. The cigarette butt found in Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow's house was matched to the electrician, Bart Ross, who killed himself during a traffic stop in Wisconsin this week, and the evidence points to him as the lone killer, police spokesman David Bayless said.
Ross, whose rambling lawsuit over his cancer treatment was dismissed by Lefkow, had claimed responsibility for the killings in a suicide note found in his minivan.
"The DNA match, with all the other evidence, certainly convinces us that Ross is the offender in the Lefkow family homicide," Bayless said Thursday night.
The judge had returned home from work on Feb. 28 to find her husband and 89-year-old mother fatally shot in the basement. She described Ross as "a very pathetic, tragic person," in an interview with The New York Times published in Friday's editions.
"I guess on one level I'm relieved that it didn't have anything to do with the white supremacy movement, because I feel my children are going to be safer," the judge said. "It's heartbreaking that my husband and mother had to die over something like this."
The judge and her daughters have been in protective custody since the slayings.
Authorities initially focused on associates of white supremacist Matt Hale, who was convicted last year of soliciting Judge Lefkow's murder. But a letter found Wednesday night after Ross's suicide instead tied him to the killings, police Superintendent Phil Cline said.
Hale's father, Russell, said he felt terrible for the Lefkow family but "great relief" for his own family when he learned of Ross' link to the slayings.
Lefkow last fall dismissed a rambling lawsuit in which Ross claimed that cancer treatments had disfigured his face and that the U.S. judicial system, which dismissed his medical malpractice claims, "is the Nazi style criminal and violator" of his civil rights. Lefkow's ruling was upheld by a federal appeals court in January.
Ross, a 57-year-old Polish immigrant with no known ties to extremist groups, shot himself to death on a suburban Milwaukee street after an officer pulled him over for broken brake lights.
"We came upon a note, written presumably by the victim, where he implicated himself in the murders of Michael Lefkow and Donna Humphrey," Cline said. "In the note, the offender outlined in some detail the events of Monday, February 28th."
"We're satisfied that there's information in the letter that would point us to Ross being in Lefkow's house," he said.
Besides the suicide note, police were reviewing a handwritten letter received by WMAQ-TV on Thursday and signed by a Bart Ross; the writer described breaking into the Lefkow home before dawn on Feb. 28 with a plan to kill the judge.
The letter said he killed Lefkow's husband and mother around 9 a.m. after they discovered him hiding in the basement.
"After I shot husband and mother of Judge Lefkow, I had a lot of time to think about life and death. Killing is no fun, even though I knew I was already dead. I gave up further killings on about 1:15 p.m. on Feb. 28, 2005, and left Judge Lefkow's house," the station quoted the letter as saying.
Neighbors said Ross, who changed his name from Bartlomiej Ciszewski after he emigrated from Poland in 1982, lived alone with his dog and kept to himself. They described him as intelligent but increasingly angry as his legal fight over his treatment for mouth cancer repeatedly failed.
After Ross's suicide, federal marshals also began calling judges named in a letter found in his van.
Authorities said they didn't know why Ross was in the Milwaukee area on Wednesday. Two federal appeals court judges who upheld dismissals of his lawsuits have offices in Milwaukee. One of those, Terence Evans, said marshals called at 3 a.m. to inform him of the situation.
"As any federal judge who may be involved in a decision, we have concerns, and we took those concerns seriously and acted upon them," said U.S. Marshal William Kruziki.
Federal Judge David H. Coar, who also dismissed a Ross lawsuit, was working out in a gym at 6 a.m. when his wife called to say the marshals had telephoned with the news.
"I don't think security is adequate and I never have thought security is adequate," Coar said. Two other federal judges in Chicago said the same in the wake of the shootings.
In the lawsuit Lefkow dismissed, Ross said his cancer treatments had disfigured his face and caused his teeth to fall out. He accused four doctors of committing "a terrorist act" in giving him radiation therapy.
Ross compared his radiation and surgery with the experiments Nazi doctors performed in concentration camps, demanded the impeachment of judges who had ruled against him, and asked for $250 million in damages from the federal government.
"As his legal remedies were becoming fewer, as he had less success, he became more angry, more agitated," said lawyer Thomas Browne, who represented an attorney Ross was suing.
More setbacks came in the last two months as the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Lefkow's decision to dismiss his latest lawsuit and his landlady began proceedings to evict him from the home he once owned.
A hearing in the eviction case had been scheduled for Thursday.
It certainly would be interesting to read the exchanges that took place. Especially the comments made to Ross by Judge Lefkow.
I noticed that too - what the hell?
""I guess on one level I'm relieved that it didn't have anything to do with the white supremacy movement, because I feel my children are going to be safer," the judge said."
Stay alert.
Yeah, what a headline. I suppose we should have pity on the man if he's a victim of suicide, which is kind of like the joke about the definition of chutzpah.
Eh? What does this mean?
that was quick.
If he had mouth cancer and was still smoking, he didn't help his health any.
The dangers of smoking continue to be uncovered.
Kerry-Edwards supporter.
HF
No question. And lucky for him, since he's from Chicago and dead, he can STILL vote democrat.
LOL. That is funny.
Lefkow killer doesn't fit our need for symbols
John Kass
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0503110216mar11,1,2685741.column?coll=chi-news-hed
March 11, 2005
You probably don't like to jump to conclusions in homicide cases, either.
But I bet nobody figured that the killer in the Lefkow slayings would turn out to be some crazed Polish electrician with mouth cancer and a grudge.
Instead, many of us thought of the obvious, of young white men, skinny and hateful and poor, with a thing for leather, scrawling swastikas on their shoulders with markers, stacks of magazines under their beds, porn and Soldier of Fortune, speaking with a twang.
"No one would have figured it," a Chicago police detective told me. "[Investigators] had nothing. If he didn't kill himself, if he didn't draw attention to himself with the notes, he'd probably still be out there."
The electrician seems so ludicrous after so many white supremacist theories that it was unsettling. Not as unsettling as the slayings themselves, but almost.
Because the killer of the husband and mother of U.S. District Court Judge Joan Lefkow was supposed to be a white supremacist.
Isn't that so?
That's what was expected. But it didn't happen.
It must have been jarring for many, the news that the killer is not some creepy ideologue, but a lonely, angry man raging against Judge Lefkow because she tossed out his medical malpractice suit.
Bart Ross, who lived on the North Side with his dog and cat, claimed responsibility for the Feb. 28 slayings of Michael Lefkow and Donna Humphrey. He wrote at least two notes of confession and described how he killed them.
He sent one note to the NBC news station in Chicago. He had another with him in his car when he drove to Milwaukee. A local cop stopped him for a minor traffic violation, and Ross decided to put a bullet into his own brain.
The news was disappointing. Most folks weren't ready for something this random. They weren't properly prepared. No one was. How could we have been?
The drumbeat was all about the supremacists. The politics lined up neatly, along with all the theories. And there was this key fact: The deadly white supremacist Matthew Hale was already awaiting sentencing on charges that he conspired to have Lefkow killed.
So it was Matthew Hale this and Matthew Hale that, and white supremacists this and white supremacists that. That was a natural connection to make, and it had to be investigated. But those outside the investigation, those speculating, had proper political cover.
It also fit our need to make the killings of the family of a federal judge something worthy of the deed. It had to be linked to someone like Hale; someone tied to a bitter ideological vine, because by then the victims themselves had also been transformed. They'd become symbols for what is decent.
And it wouldn't do if some babbling maniac wiped out decency. That would leave too much to chance and not enough to reason. Most of us are reasonable people. So it had to be a supremacist.
Then reality showed up and ruined the movie.
It also eclipsed the Big Speech.
The Big Speech is what I call that monologue that concludes a TV crime drama. The Big Speech is given by actors who play a detective or prosecuting attorney or judge, and they speak in a weary voice as prescribed by the cliche. I suppose we should throw in real news people, since we often make the Big Speech, too, although we play ourselves.
The Big Speech in the Lefkow case was so tempting; a few couldn't help but make it before anyone was charged with the crimes. Those who came later would have struck the same tone.
We would have all denounced the racism of the haters and stood confidently on the side of angels. We would have each felt very good about ourselves, wagging our fingers at Hale, comfortable with the moral of the story.
There has to be a moral, at least in bad fiction written by people who probably should know better. It is the lesson, the why. That's the Big Speech.
"That's why I never watch detective shows," the detective told me Thursday, as we talked about the Lefkow case, as we had been doing for several days.
"You know those shows," he said. "First the victim is killed, then there's a commercial, you get a sandwich and at the end, you get a guilty verdict and the boss says something snappy and then another commercial. You don't watch reporter shows, do you?"
Of course not.
"OK. A homicide is either simple, cut-and-dried gang stuff, or domestic stuff, and you figure you know who did it, or it takes some weird twists and you have to backtrack it for a long time," he said. "But in those weird ones, you never focus in on one theory. Otherwise, you get tunnel vision."
And you can't make the Big Speech, I said.
"Whatever," he said.
If they had their heads screwed on right, they would rule that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right and dumnp Illinois' and Wisconsin's gun prohibitions. Then they and everybody else would have plenty of security.
Indeed, one could accurately say that Chicago's prohibition on handgun ownership is probably why Lefkow's family members were murdered. It's really silly for a Federal judge, who's necessarily required to make decisions that will antagonize a lot of people, not to keep a loaded weapon in her home and know how to use it.
AThey were calling him that on fox this morning, and I was wondering about it then... now in print they go with the "suicide VICTIM" thing again. Is this a DNC talking point?
FWIW: I thought that an otherwise professional hit where the hit man leaves a cigarette butt in the kitchen sink shouted that the shooter wanted to get caught.
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