Over 600 Tips In Judge Murders

Police say they have received more than 600 tips from the public about the unsolved Feb. 28th shooting deaths of the husband and elderly mother of federal Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow.

Police did not say how many tips had come in since the Chicago murders were featured Saturday on the television show "America's Most Wanted," but on Friday, they reported receiving 230 tips.

FBI officials have said they don't have a suspect and Friday, they asked the public's help in solving the crime, offering a $50,000 reward to try to shake loose information in the case.

Meanwhile, parents of imprisoned white supremacist Matthew Hale said Sunday they look forward to seeing their son this week in their first regularly scheduled visit with him since the shooting deaths.

In separate telephone interviews, Russell Hale and Evelyn Hutcheson said they are worried authorities will cancel their visits to their son, who is awaiting sentencing next month for soliciting an FBI informant to kill Judge Lefkow.

They are limited to one phone call with Hale each week and visits to the Metropolitan Correction Center in Chicago every other Tuesday.

Russell Hale said two FBI agents questioned him Friday for 15 or 20 minutes, asking if he had any idea who might have killed Judge Lefkow's husband and mother.

Hale's parents both said members of Hale's group are not capable of murder.

"They're scared the government's going to do something to them like they did to Matt," Hutcheson said. "They've all run. They're scared to death... They're scared puppies is all they are."

Hale has denied any involvement in the slayings, or of soliciting the judge's murder. But FBI Agent Robert D. Grant has said Hale and his associates are being looked at as part of the investigation.

Prosecutors alleged in the solicitation case that Hale targeted the judge because he was angry that she had ordered him to stop using the name World Church of the Creator in a trademark lawsuit.

A friend of Hale's, Kathleen Robertazzo, told The New York Times and Chicago Tribune in Saturday's editions that authorities seized 100 letters Hale sent her from prison and made copies of her computer hard drive.

Robertazzo told the Times the idea that Hale would be involved "defies logic." In the letters, she said, Hale describes singing opera in jail, taking Prozac and being buoyed by the presence of a man with the same name as Adolf Hitler's boyhood friend.

"Judge Lefkow is old news. If his people were going to target anybody, it would be his attorney," she said.

Funeral services for the judge's husband, Michael Lefkow, 64, were held Saturday in Evanston, Illinois, with tight security and hundreds of mourners.

The line to enter St. Luke's Episcopal Church stretched down the block. Funeral services for Judge Lefkow's mother, 89-year-old Donna Humphrey, are expected to take place in Denver.

On Friday, Lefkow issued a statement thanking the thousands of people who had offered condolences to her family and said she plans to return to her job and will not be intimidated.

"We will never allow evil deeds to overcome the goodness and decency which inspired you to reach out and touch us and to help sustain us in our hour of need," she said.

Experts are analyzing several pieces of evidence, including a broken window with a fingerprint, a bloody footprint and cigarette butts.

Investigators' work is drawing attention from the highest levels of federal government. Agents are updating FBI Director Robert Mueller three times a day.

Many people have been questioned, and "we have varying degrees of cooperation from different people," Grant said. But he said the investigation was still "very broadly based, broadly scoped" and no one had been arrested.