hactivist judges

ok - so today we read that BartRoss' suicide letter says this:

"I broke into utility room to Judge Lefkow’s house at 4:30am, to spend all day there, and in the evening to get Judge Lefkow."

which is fine except for the fact that i noted yesterday that it was reported that he said he broke in at 6am.

anyways, heres what i quoted yesterday from cnn: "The letter writer said he broke into the Lefkow home about 6 a.m.". i went to check the original and that *same* article now reads "The letter writer said he broke into the Lefkow home about dawn". very interesting - and the original 6am quote has disappeared from news.google and news.yahoo and cnn search etc.

here is the google cache version tho

the actual google search is here

and here is a screengrab of the google return in case it too gets slurped down the memory hole.


i dont know what it means but the story is getting weirder.

ok - so the journo made a mistake - thats fine (altho its not obvious how you mistake 4.30am for 6am) and then the article was retrospectively altered, without any mention that it had been corrected, which presumably is contrary to some journalistic ethical standard (as if we have any of those any more). and then rather than properly correct the story to say 4.30am, they do a semi-fudge and change it to 'dawn'. (surely 4.30am in chicago in march doesnt qualify as dawn) and then to add another twist, the orignal article gets scrubbed from news.google and the cnn website - *including* the search feature, which presumably requires *specific* *intentional* scrubbing. (ive seen other examples at news.google where even though the article was changed, the search function still picked up the original text - even if newsgoogle then linked to the new article because it had the same url)

so lets go back to Ross' words:

"“I broke into utility room to Judge Lefkow’s house at 4:30am, to spend all day there, and in the evening to get Judge Lefkow. But Mr. Lefkow discovered me in the utility room about 9:00am. I had no choice but to shoot him. …I saw an older woman. I had to shoot her too."

i havent seen anyone actually question this logic. she was at home on the night in question. he successfully breaks into her house when she is asleep and he could have killed her then, but for some reason he decides to wait till she came home at some unknown hour the next day? surely the risks would have been much greater in the evening - the husband was probably going to be around, and the daughters and all that. what was he thinking?

"Superintendent Philip J. Cline of the Chicago police said Mr. Ross resembled one of two composite sketches released two days after the killings, and that his account of leaving the Lefkows' home at 1:15 p.m. on Feb. 28 matched witness reports."

(link) ok - so apparently Ross breaks into the house at 430am so that he can kill mslefkow when she gets home at least 13 hours later. he gets busted at 9am and has to kill mrlefkow. and then he gets busted by the mother at some later point (apparently between 10.30 & 11.30) and has to kill her. he didnt try to escape immediately, he sits around for another couple of hours, and eventually gets nervous, or bored or something, and decides to leave without having achieved his primary mission. heres his apparent take "I gave up further killings about 1:15pm. on Feb. 28, 2005, and left Judge Lefkow’s house." - luckily that is the exact time he was seen outside.

his words again - "unedited"

"But Mr. Lefkow discovered me in the utility room about 9:00am. He had an office next to the utility room in the basement. I had no choice … but to shoot him. Then I heard voice “Michael, Michael” so I looked to the hallway … and saw an older woman. I had to shoot her too. I followed with a 2nd shot to the head in both cases to minimize their suffering."

this seems to suggest that the grandmother's “Michael, Michael” was in response to the first shots, and probably contemporaneous - however the grandmother made a phonecall at 10.30am


fwiw, we also had this "LATE MORNING: Neighbor sees Michael Lefkow, who had injured his Achilles tendon, enter the home on crutches through the side door." i know that eyewitnesses are dodgy, and people get their times mixed up - but it would seem to counter ross' claim that he killed mtlefkow at 9am

and we've still got this:

"One puzzle is a series of phone calls the Lefkows received Sunday night. Caller ID suggested the calls came from inside a correctional facility, a police report said. When Joan Lefkow answered the first call, she heard nothing. Investigators were seeking the source of those calls and were focusing on the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, where white supremacist Matt Hale is being held, a source said."

is it possible they were trying to set up Hale, and then they figured they couldnt make that stick any more for some reason so they patsied this Ross character?

and this
"Investigators have called the cigarette butt a key piece of evidence because it was found in the kitchen sink."
if you were gonna murder someone (or just had), would you leave a cigarette butt in the sink? presumably he wasnt suicidal at this point, cos he didnt kill himself for another 10 days.

i wonder if they'll release the full letter...

none of this means anything particular of course - but its kinda curious. the whole story is curious. i'd been trying to not notice this story, but the 'coincidence' of Ross getting picked up for a broken taillight on the same day that he'd sent his suicide letter to the radio station kinda piqued my interest. in fact, he first attracted the cop's attention because he was reading in his parked car (!) and was subsequently stopped by the cop because the light was out. isnt that kinda odd?

and while im at it, thecommonills points to jodi wilgoren at the nyt and defends her reporting on the case. apparently some illers had argued that she was too reluctant to point the finger at the Hales. i havent been following this case at all really, and dont know jodi from soap, and i commend any journo for not jumping to conclusions. however, im kinda surprised that jodi (and the nyt) actually quoted a white-hate website - and if that isnt enough, they actually linked to it! it seemed totally gratuitous. its not everyday that the nyt links to a site in an article... whiterevolution.com - maybe she is an apologist?

jodi also mentioned WhiteRevolution in an earlier nyt article - the article ends with this seemingly inexplicable quote "I don't feel bad that Judge Lefkow's family was murdered today. In fact, when I heard the story, I laughed." which doesnt seem to even have a point.

more questions than anything... i havent got a clue what is going on, but it all seems quite suspicious. if it is a setup, then it isnt preposterous to suggest that mrlefkow was actually the target - for some as yet unknown reason. perhaps the bigger question is why nobody has pointed out the incongruities - specifically the fact that Ross was in the house, with the judges, when they were asleep, and yet he planned to wait till the evening to murder her, when it would have necessarily been much messier, and much more risky. his words again: "Judge Lefkow was my No. 1 to kill because she finished me off and deprived me to live my life through outrageous abuse of judicial power." and yet he was apparently concerned about waking her up? i dont geddit.