DA found murdered with wife on gun alert after aide killed

A district attorney found murdered along with his wife had armed himself after one of his assistants was gunned down two months ago, it has emerged.
By The Newsroom
Published 2nd Apr 2013, 01:00 BST

Mike McLelland said he carried a gun everywhere he went and took extra care when answering the door at his north Texas home.

“I’m ahead of everybody else because, basically, I’m a soldier,” the 63-year-old army veteran said in an interview less than two weeks ago.

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But on Saturday, the Kaufman County DA and his wife Cynthia, 65, were found murdered in their rural home just outside the town of Forney, about 20 miles from Dallas.

While investigators gave no motive for the killings, Forney mayor Darren Rozell said: “It appears this was not a random act.

“Everybody’s a little on edge and a little shocked.”

The killings came less than two weeks after Colorado’s prison chief was shot dead at his front door, apparently by a white supremacist ex-convict, and two months after Kaufman County assistant district attorney Mark Hasse was killed in a car park a street away from his court office on January 31. No arrests have been made.

Mr McLelland is the 13th prosecutor killed in the US since the National Association of District Attorneys began keeping count in the 1960s.

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Sheriff David Byrnes would not give details of how the killings unfolded and said there was nothing to indicate whether the district attorney’s murder was connected to Mr Hasse’s.

Colorado’s corrections director Tom Clements was killed on March 19 when he answered the doorbell at his home outside Colorado Springs. Evan Ebel, a former Colorado inmate and white supremacist who authorities suspect shot Mr Clements, died in a shootout with Texas deputies two days later about 100 miles from Kaufman.

Sgt Joe Roybal, El Paso County sheriff’s spokesman, said investigators had found no evidence so far connecting the Texas killings to the Colorado case, but added: “We’re examining all possibilities.”

In the interview shortly after Mr Clements’s murder in Colorado, Mr McLelland raised the possibility that Mr Hasse had been gunned down by a white supremacist gang. The McLellands’ murders raised fears for prosecutors across Texas.

Related topics:Texas