The Bench Under Siege

Careers in law often make people hard and suspicious. But employment lawyer Michael Lefkow and his wife, U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, seemed to lead unusually open and trusting lives. The couple drove to work together and held hands in public. Michael's bio is displayed on his practice's website. It includes his hobbies: opera, reading about Lincoln, singing in his church choir. At one point--before white-supremacist groups pasted the information onto their own sites--he apparently posted photos of his daughters and even the address of his home, in a tree-lined neighborhood of Chicago. And although the family had been the target of threats, the Lefkows did not have a burglar alarm.

One evening last week, Joan Lefkow came home to find blood seeping out from under a door to the basement office. Inside, she saw her husband, 64, and her mother Donna Humphrey, 89, lying on the floor. Both had been shot in the chest and head with a .22.

In U.S. history, only three federal judges have been assassinated--all since 1979. But officials who track such figures say this is the first time they can recall a judge's family being killed and not the judge. It is, in some ways, worse. "If someone was angry at me, they should go after me," Lefkow told the Chicago Sun-Times two days after the murders. "I'm just furious." Judges get threatened more often than the public might imagine, but the murder of Lefkow's family has rattled courthouses around the nation. This is not supposed to happen in America. "It's news that makes your whole body hurt," says Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, a colleague of Lefkow's. "What an enormous, monstrous evil." The hunt for suspects is relentless because of the symbolic importance of punishing the killers. And the list of possible motives is long. But judges are also asking whether it is possible to better protect those whose work in the justice system makes them targets.

Police and FBI agents say they are chasing every lead in the slayings. They have released sketches of two men who were seen near the house on the morning of the murders. And they are analyzing a rich trove of evidence from the scene, including shell casings and a possible fingerprint. But they say it's too early to draw a clear profile of the killer. Judge Lefkow and her husband were involved in hundreds of cases. Several of hers featured violent characters ranging from Mafia hit men to street thugs. Just last year an angry defendant ranted at her, "You can run, but you can't hide!"

The investigation has included a close look at Matthew Hale, one of the U.S.'s most notorious neo-Nazis, who is awaiting sentencing for soliciting Judge Lefkow's murder in 2002. Hale, 33, is the leader of a white-supremacist group formerly known as the World Church of the Creator. From prison, 10 miles from the Lefkows' home, he issued a statement denying any involvement in last week's murders in his weekly phone call to his mother Evelyn Hutcheson, who read his message to a TIME reporter in the tiny kitchen of her East Peoria home: "I totally condemn it ... Only an idiot would think that I would do this." Hutcheson defends her son: "He's a racist. He has a poison mouth. But he's not guilty of this."