WA WA - Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Wales, 49, murdered, Seattle, 11 Oct 2001

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This COLD CASE involving the murder of Thomas C. Wales is thawing out after 5 years. Overshadowed by 9-11, new info in the case has stirred the FBI into zoning in on the murderer. A possible murder for hire, or 'hit' is the scenario in the death of this 18 year veteran of the US Federal Prosecutors office serving in Seattle, who fought for justice by prosecuting freud cases involving government property.

I always cheer for solving of COLD CASES, and it seems now the FBI is on the threashold of putting this case to bed:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601154.html

Snipet
"Five Years After Killing of Prosecutor, A Stumped FBI Asks the Public for Help

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 17, 2006

SEATTLE -- Alone in the basement of his house and sitting in front his computer monitor, Thomas C. Wales was shot to death here five years ago. An assistant U.S. attorney, he specialized in prosecuting white-collar crime and was an ardent advocate of gun control.

The shooter stood in Wales's back yard at 10:40 p.m., fired several times through a window and disappeared. It may have been the first time in U.S. history that a federal prosecutor was killed in the line of duty.

But after interviewing more than 4,000 people in all 50 states and half a dozen countries, after chasing down about 1,800 silver gun barrels of a kind that ballistics experts say was affixed to the shooter's pistol and after abruptly transferring control of the investigation out of the Seattle office of the FBI, law enforcement officials still cannot say for certain whether Wales was killed because he was a prosecutor.

Instead, to mark the fifth anniversary of the crime, an FBI task force leader insisted last week that the case has not gone cold, and authorities released for the first time a composite sketch of a "person of some interest" who was seen wandering around Wales's neighborhood on Seattle's Queen Anne Hill before the killing. . . .
"

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Here is an article from October 11th, 2006 that shows a photo of the sketch. The killer was seen in the neighborhood wandering around for a few days before the murder, and was also seen running away from the shooting:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003299731_webwales11.html


Snipet
"FBI releases sketch in Wales killing
By Steve Miletich and Mike Carter
Seattle Times staff reporters


The FBI today released a sketch of a man they want to talk to about the 2001 killing of Seattle federal prosecutor Thomas Wales, while announcing a new Web site to take tips in the investigation.

The new steps came on the fifth anniversary of Wales' killing, who was shot to death in his Queen Anne home on Oct. 11, 2001.

No one has been arrested in the slaying, although the FBI has focused on an airline pilot who had been prosecuted by Wales in a fraud case.

At a news conference today, FBI officials declined to discuss any suspect but said they are determined to obtain an indictment.

"We will not give up," said Bob Jordan, special agent in charge of the Portland FBI office. Jordan was given oversight of the investigation in June when the head of the Seattle office tried to reduce the number of agents assigned to the case.

Jordan said if Wales was killed because of his work, it would be the first time in U.S. history that a federal prosecutor had been slain in the line of duty.

In that case, Jordan added, Wales was "murdered because he was representing us" and "we are all victims in a sense."

The sketch, the officials said, is of a man seen in Wales' neighborhood weeks before the killing. Investigators have not been able to identify him. . . .




"The FBI today released this sketch of a man sought for questioning in the 2001 killing of Seattle federal prosecutor Thomas Wales. He was seen in Wales' neighborhood in the weeks before the shooting, pulling a small black nylon suitcase. He is described as a white male, late 30s to early 40s, 5'7" to 5'10" with a slim build, black hair, and a chipped left front tooth.

2003299710.jpg
 
And to complete the picture of Mr Wales' murder, here is a photo of his daughter and a look into the other side o this good man:


http://archives.seattletimes.nwsour...eb/vortex/display?slug=wales08m&date=20061008


Snipet
"I believe in justice and due process. I am my father's daughter."

By Steve Miletich and Mike Carter
Seattle Times staff reporters




Amy Wales, daughter of Thomas Wales, fondly remembers her father's "goofball" side as well as the principles by which he lived.

Amy Wales had graduated from college and was living in London when she got word that her father had been fatally shot in Seattle in 2001. She now once again lives in Seattle.

The premonition came in early October 2001. Amy Wales dreamed that her father — federal prosecutor Thomas Wales — had been shot.

She was living far from home, in London, after graduating from college. The 9/11 terrorist attacks against the U.S. had occurred only weeks earlier and she was feeling unsettled.

She called home to Seattle and left a message on her dad's answering machine.

When he called back, he said, "I'm very much alive. Don't you worry."

He joked that Amy and her older brother, Tom, would someday be caring for him in old age, wondering what to do about his flirting with old ladies at a rest home.

Thomas Wales was only 49 when he said that. A week later, he was shot to death. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2006/10/06/2003292423.jpg
2003292423.jpg
 
VICTIM - THOMAS CRANE WALES


THE DETAILS SURROUNDING THE CRIME

On the night of October 11, 2001, at approximately 10:40 p.m., Thomas Crane Wales was killed in his home in Seattle, Washington. Wales worked for the Western District of Washington as an Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) for over 18 years, prosecuting white collar crime cases on behalf of the United States of America. The shooter stood in the backyard of AUSA Wales' home and shot him several times through a basement window as he sat at his desk typing on his computer. It has been reported that a lone male suspect was seen fleeing the scene. Wales died at a hospital the next day.


REWARD
Submit a Tip Online

The United States Department of Justice is offering a reward of up to $1,000,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the murder of AUSA Thomas Crane Wales.


REMARKS

Born in 1952, Thomas Wales grew up in Southborough, Massachusetts. Tom was a graduate of Harvard University ('74) and Hofstra Law School ('79), where he was the Editor-in-Chief of the law review. In 1983, Tom became an Assistant United States Attorney in Seattle, Washington, where he specialized in fraud prosecutions.

In addition to his work as a prosecutor, Tom was very active in civic organizations and public service. Tom served as a member of the Seattle Planning Commission, and was on the Mayor's Citizen Advisory Committee. Tom was the president of Washington CeaseFire, a firearm-safety organization.

Thomas Wales is survived by two adult children.



More info, pictures and sketch of POI...
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seekinfo/wales.htm
 
Hi I heard about this case a while ago! I'm glad someone has posted his info/case on this website as he seemed like a good man, who did not deserve to pass this way!
 
Additional case details, found from internet:

He was shot in the side of the neck on a thursday night, was supposed to be going out with his girlfriend but cancelled, staying home to work and was emailing people/reading his emails when he was shot, he was 49 years old, A neighbor, Emily Holt, said she heard the shots on Thursday night and saw a man walking away. "He wasn't running, just walking real fast," Ms. Holt said. She said he got into a car parked about a block away under a tree and a streetlight. Mr. Wales was a member of the fraud unit in the United States attorney's office here, specializing in prosecution of banking and business crime. A spokesman for the office, Lawrence Lincoln, said he had been a prosecutor since 1983.

Mr. Wales was president of the board of Washington Ceasefire, a gun control group in Seattle that sponsored a failed initiative in 1997 that would have would have required handgun owners to undergo safety training and use trigger locks on their weapons. The National Rifle Association mounted a $2 million campaign against Initiative 676, which had the support of Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, and other prominent residents of the state.

Federal agencies were helping the Seattle police in the investigation. Mr. Wales's former wife, Elizabeth, a former Seattle School Board member, was in Europe with the couple's adult son and daughter, The Seattle Times reported, quoting. The couple divorced a few years ago but were on friendly terms, neighbors said.
 
We believe the shooter stood in Wales’ backyard at about 10:40 p.m. on October 11, 2001, and fired several shots through the basement window at Wales. He died early the next morning. He was shot with a 9x18mm Makarov pistol with a replacement barrel distributed by the Federal Arms Corporation of America.

An anonymous letter was sent to FBI regarding his murder:

Re: Thomas C Wales
OK, so I was broke and between jobs I got an anonymous call offering $xxxx to shoot the guy, so I drove to Seattle to do the job. I did not even know his name. Just got laid off from a job. Nice talking lady, I didn’t know her name, she called me, talked to me by name, and asked if I needed some money. I agreed to pursue the matter, hell, I was going bankrupt.Go to Seattle, heck I lived there once, no big deal. Hang out in this guy’s backyard, she even gave me the address. Stop off at a place, pick up our gun, and drop it off at a specified location when you are done. THEN, you will be directed to where your money is. The wife was out of town, I had no witnesses here, I was curious about who knew me so well. I used cash to pay for all my expenses to avoid an audit trail. No cell phone. I was directed to a place to pick up the gun, they wanted me to use, and an address. The gun was there. I drove to the address, and then parked some distance away, north of downtown. I kind of camped out in the backyard of this house, and waited for the guy to settle in at his computer. Once he was there, I took careful aim. I shot two or possibly more times, and watched him collapse. I absurdly waited a few minutes and then left. I was sure he was dead. Retracing my steps, I dropped off the gun, found my money, and returned to Vegas. I feel bad about it, but I needed the money, and there were no witnesses. I really don’t know who fronted the money, but the $xxxx was there, and I sure needed it.
(A portion of the letter has been omitted to ensure investigative integrity.)

The return address on the letter was: Gidget, 2400 W. Chaterton, Las Vegas, NV 88120 - which was fake.

But the name Gidget is thought to be somehow related to the 1959 film of the same name or the 1965 tv show. The original Gidget was created by Frederick Kohner in his 1957 novel Gidget, The Little Girl With Big Ideas

published seven sequels to this novel, five of them original novels: Cher Papa (1959), The Affairs of Gidget (1963), Gidget in Love (1965), Gidget Goes Parisienne (1966) and Gidget Goes New York (1968), plus two novelizations: Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) and Gidget Goes to Rome (1963),adapted by Kohner from films of the same titles based on original stories by Ruth Brooks Flippin
 
Investigators believe that the letter may have been typed at a Kinko’s, or somewhere similar. No traces of DNA were found on the letter or on the envelope.

Wales lived north of downtown, he was in his basement, and the shooter shot him from the back yard

An analysis of the letter by the Behavioral Sciences unit of the F.B.I. suggested that the author could be connected to the crime. The authorities also determined that Anderson was in Las Vegas at the time the letter was sent. (“He did not write the Las Vegas letter,” Larry Setchell, Anderson’s lawyer, told me.)

On December 7th, McKay (connected to prosecution/investigation of wale’s killers), along with six other U.S. Attorneys, was fired. - Several of the fired U.S. Attorneys had declined to prosecute Democrats in electoral disputes. Many Democrats have suggested that the prosecutors were dismissed by Gonzales and the Bush White House in retaliation for failing to advance Republican political objectives. - McKay might have been fired because he had been too aggressive in his advocacy of the investigation of Tom Wales’s murder.

Mary Aylward, Wales’s next-door neighbor and a witness to some of the events of October 11, 2001, died in a car accident last year. Jerry Diskin, the acting U.S. Attorney, who came to the hospital after Wales was shot, has also died.
Tom Wales was not supposed to be home on the night of October 11, 2001. Wales, an Assistant United States Attorney in Seattle, had planned to have dinner and spend the evening with his girlfriend, Marlis DeJongh, a court reporter who lived downtown. But that afternoon Wales called DeJongh and said that he had projects he needed to work on at home.

When he worked late, which was often, he would tell his family and friends, “I’m here at my post, serving my sovereign.” The phrase was partly a joke,

He took satisfaction in mustering the resources of the federal government to take on criminals, especially those with white collars who abused their privileged status

On the night of October 11th, Wales arrived home after 7 P.M., gave his twenty-year-old cat, Sam, her nightly arthritis medication, and prepared to install some drywall in a stairwell on the second floor. At about ten o’clock, carrying a glass of wine, he went to the basement office that he had been sharing with his ex-wife, Elizabeth. Tom and Elizabeth had met as high-school students at Milton Academy, outside Boston, and married when Tom was an undergraduate at Harvard. They had a son and a daughter, who at the time were both in Britain, attending graduate school, and they had divorced, amicably, in 2000. (Elizabeth had come out as a lesbian, and the marriage was an inevitable casualty.) Under the terms of the divorce, Tom kept the house, though Elizabeth, a literary agent, ran her business from the basement during the day. Tom used a computer there at night, usually to send e-mails to his children and to DeJongh. That night, he had also planned to work on a fund-raising letter for Washington CeaseFire, the leading gun-control advocacy group in the state, of which he was president.

The Waleses had renovated the house during the years that they lived there, and in the basement they had installed a picture window, which provided a view of the small back yard. At 10:24 P.M., Wales sent an e-mail to DeJongh from the computer, which was on a desk in front of the window. About fifteen minutes later, someone shot him three or four times through the window from the back yard. (Investigators won’t divulge the exact number of shots.) Mary Aylward, an elderly woman who lived next door, heard the shots and called 911. An off-duty police officer, who happened to be nearby, arrived within minutes. Wales appeared to be conscious, but he couldn’t speak, and was taken by ambulance to the trauma center at the Harborview Medical Center, in Seattle. Friends and colleagues gathered at the hospital, among them Jerry Diskin, the acting U.S. Attorney, who also lived in Queen Anne and had heard the shots; Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle’s chief of police; Bob Westinghouse, another Assistant U.S. Attorney, and his wife, Kay; and Eric Redman, one of Wales’s closest friends, who had once been married to Elizabeth’s sister. They were told that Wales was in surgery. Just before dawn, a surgeon emerged from the operating room to say that Wales had died.

Tom became a neighborhood activist, fighting overdevelopment and the placement of cell-phone towers, and serving for a couple of years on the Seattle Planning Commission? POSSIBLE MOTIVE?

Tom and Bob Westinghouse had all the big white-collar cases, and they’d just sit there and scream at each other the whole time. They were good friends, but that was how they related.” WERE THEY REALLY?

His children's names were Tommy and Amy

He also had very stringent political views: eg, Wales soon became president of Washington CeaseFire, and in 1997 he led a campaign in favor of a statewide ballot referendum on a proposal to require gun owners to use trigger locks. As an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Wales was prohibited from running for office and from taking sides in partisan elections, but the law permitted him to campaign on issues to be decided by referendum. Among his colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wales’s political activism was considered unusual, but it was also generally accepted.
The proposal brought out the full might of the pro-gun lobby, which spent four million dollars—primarily on television advertisements and direct-mail appeals—and voters rejected the measure, seventy-one to twenty-nine per cent. Nevertheless, the gun initiative established Wales as a public figure in Washington State, and, a few months before he died, he was invited to give the commencement address at a Seattle community college. Wales delivered a manifesto in defense of his liberal politics. “John Lennon said, before he was shot and killed outside the Dakota Apartments in New York, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’ ” Wales told the students. “Be engaged; be involved in what goes on around you. Be present in your own life. Find something you believe in passionately and get into it. Get outraged. Take a stand.

“For me, among other things, it’s gun control,” Wales went on. He cited an incident that had occurred two years earlier, in which a gunman shot and killed three people in a Seattle shipyard. “The next day, the papers reported that, within minutes of the shooting, the Seattle School District had been able to lock down every school within a two-mile radius of the shootings,” Wales said. “My first thought was Well, good for the school district for doing a fine job protecting our kids. But wait a minute. Is this Kosovo, Bosnia, Beirut, Rwanda—that we have to lock down our schools to protect our children?” He added, “I’ve spent the past ten years building Washington CeaseFire into an organization that takes on the N.R.A. at every turn.” He went on to denounce the death penalty (which had recently been imposed on Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber), and to express alarm about global warming, which was not yet a mainstream concern.

WAS CEASEFIRE A MOTIVE? AND WHAT ABOUT THE SEATTLE SHIPYARD SHOOTINGS AND HIS COMMENTS – DOES THIS SUPPLY MOTIVE? WAS MURDER COMMITTED BY A NRA ACTIVIST?

Trevor Neilson, the vice-president of Washington CeaseFire at the time, said, “Being a federal prosecutor, he came across as anything but the weak liberal that the N.R.A. likes to characterize as the typical supporter of gun control. We were talking very actively about his running for Seattle City Council. There is no question that Tom would have gone on to be mayor, governor, or senator, and that was likely to happen soon.” IS THIS TRUE AND IF SO IS IT A MOTIVE? WAS HE NOT WANTED TO PROGRESS IN GOVERNMENT? – WAS IT A POLITICAL ASSINATION BY SOMEONE WHO DID NOT AGREE WITH HIS ETHICS?

Despite his job as a criminal prosecutor, Tommy never embraced strict law and order politics. Throughout his life he was a true and unwavering "lefty." He was proud to be a liberal long after the "L" word became unfashionable.
Tommy never hesitated to speak out on the side of criminals when he saw injustice. He opposed the death penalty as a misguided desire for revenge that was primarily imposed on the poor and minorities. He was particularly outspoken about the 3-strike law that required life sentences for multiple offenders. Despite being a tough prosecutor, Tommy never stopped believing in the potential for good in each human being – POSSIBLE MOTIVE, DID HE ANNOY SOMEONE WITH HIS POLITICS OR DID HE TRUST A CRIMINAL AND COME TO REGRET IT?

Paradoxically, Wales’s murder was in some ways a boon for Washington CeaseFire. A month after he was killed, the group held a benefit in his honor, which was attended by more than five hundred people, including many prominent Democratic politicians in the state, and raised five hundred thousand dollars. The featured speaker was the documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, who is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and the sister of Joseph P. Kennedy II, the former Massachusetts congressman, who had been Wales’s roommate at Milton. Wales, who was the president of the student body and the captain of the football team at Milton, roomed with Kennedy the fall after his father was assassinated. KENNEDY ASSOCIATION – POSSIBLE MOTIVE?
Neither John Ashcroft, then the Attorney General, nor any of his top deputies attended Wales’s funeral. The highest-ranking official present was the director of the executive office of United States Attorneys, a mid-level official who coördinates administrative support for federal prosecutors. WHY WAS THIS HAD THEY FALLEN OUT? WAS ALL NOT AS IT SEEMED FOR TOMMY AT WORK?
 
The F.B.I. gave the investigation the code name SEPROM—short for “Seattle prosecutor murder

Two weeks after the murder, the Senate confirmed a new U.S. Attorney for western Washington, John McKay. “When I got there, on October 30th, there was still yellow tape around Tom’s office,” McKay recalled. “It was still considered a crime scene. People still wept. From the prosecutors to the secretaries to the administrative staff, it was a traumatized place. It was not just that they lost somebody, but somebody they all knew and liked very much.” McKay had met Wales several times in the company of other A.U.S.A.s, but knew him mainly by reputation. “Most A.U.S.A.s keep a much lower public profile than Tom did,” he said. “However, he was fully entitled to do what he was doing, and he violated no Department of Justice policies.” He added, “I personally would not be in full agreement with his organization”—Washington CeaseFire—“but I fully supported his right to participate and admired him for his community involvement.”

“The only physical evidence left behind is the bullets and shell casings, nothing else. If you are an investigator in that circumstance, you have to look at motive.” The question, then, was who wanted Tom Wales dead. – PROFESSIONAL HITMAN?

This doesn’t appear to be a random act,” Robert Geeslin, the F.B.I. agent who has been in charge of the Wales investigation for the past year, says. “What motivation was behind it? You are going to look at professional life, social life, personal life.” It was easy to determine that Wales remained friendly with his ex-wife, Elizabeth, who, in any event, was in Germany when he was shot. Since his separation, he had dated several women and, at the time of his death, was seeing Marlis DeJongh. “If we weren’t together at night, Tom would e-mail me before he went to bed,” DeJongh told me. “I printed out his e-mail first thing in the morning, and I thought my world was still bliss. Then I went to my office, where one of Tom’s colleagues called and told me what happened. And I just screamed, by myself, for half an hour.”

In July, three months before his death, Wales had been involved in an altercation at a parking garage near his office. According to Eric Redman, Wales drove his car into a limousine and got into a heated dispute with the limousine’s driver, who had asked him for his insurance card and driver’s license. Wales refused to provide these documents and drove from the garage in anger, hitting a truck on his way out. The limo driver called the police, and Wales was charged with a hit-and-run offense, though the charges were dropped a few weeks later. Neither Wales’s romantic life nor the fender bender yielded promising leads in the murder investigation. WHY DID HE REACT THIS WAY? WAS HE UNDER PRESSURE?

Wales’s work on gun control apparently also failed to produce suspects. The fight over the statewide gun-control initiative had taken place four years before his death, and after that he had not been as involved in controversial issues. “It was kind of like proving a negative, ruling out all these possibilities,” Charles Mandigo, the former F.B.I. special agent, said. “We pursued every possible lead. There were some girlfriends; those were all pursued. We reviewed all the cases that he was involved in, and no stone was left unturned. At the same time, we were pursuing what appeared to be a potentially very logical suspect.”

He didn’t move forward as fast as people wanted. People would say, ‘Hey, let’s get this thing moving.’ There was some frustration on agents’ part if a case got assigned to Tom. ‘I got a good prosecutor,’ they’d say, ‘but when is it going to move?’ ” For almost five years, Wales had been focussed on what he called “the helicopter case.” The Seattle area, the home of Boeing and many of its suppliers, has long attracted aviation buffs who try to turn their hobby into a business. The Vietnam War created one such opportunity. During the war, the workhorse helicopter for the United States military was the Bell UH-1 series, better known as the Huey, which came in various configurations, most of them capable of carrying about a dozen troops. After the war, many of the five thousand or so UH-1s that had been used in the war began to circulate on the secondhand market in the United States. Several local entrepreneurs decided to retrofit the surplus military models for civilian use. Such conversions were legal, as long as they were conducted in accordance with safety rules established by the Federal Aviation Administration.
“There wasn’t much you could do commercially with a military model,” Robert Chadwell, a Seattle defense attorney, told me. “You couldn’t carry passengers, but you could with the civilian model. People started renovating the military models, in hopes of getting certification for civilian use. The issues could get very complicated. Could you rebuild a civilian model with military parts? How much of the original helicopter remained, and how much is rebuilt? How do you trace what happened to the original?” In the mid-nineties, Wales, working with his colleague Bob Westinghouse and a special agent from the F.A.A., began conducting an investigation of several helicopter conversions in the Seattle area. Chadwell represented one such operator, and had several contentious dealings with Wales. “Tom’s idea was that the prosecution was all about safety, that these rebuilt helicopters were unsafe,” Chadwell said. “But the investigation didn’t go well for the government. My client had renovated his helicopter under the supervision of F.A.A. people, and really hadn’t done anything wrong, safety-wise.” After a four-year investigation, Chadwell’s client’s company pleaded guilty to an infraction in its record-keeping, a minor federal offense, and paid a small fine.
By 2000, the investigation of the helicopter-conversion industry was winding down, with disappointing results for Wales and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Only one case remained. In 1997, investigators had searched the premises of a helicopter company owned by two local men, James Anderson and Kim Powell. The firm, called Intrex Helicopter, which was based at Powell’s home, was renovating a single helicopter for civilian use. Still, the stakes were substantial. “A UH-1 that has been reconstituted and for which a certificate to carry passengers has been issued would be a much more valuable helicopter than one that is flying on a certificate that has limited use, by hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Westinghouse told me. (According to a court filing in a related civil case, Anderson and Powell believed that reconfiguring the helicopter would cost six hundred thousand dollars, and that Intrex could sell it for $1.2 million.)
In 2000, Wales obtained an eight-count indictment against Anderson and Powell on charges that included conspiracy to defraud the United States, mail fraud, and making false statements. The government accused the men of falsifying the helicopter’s maintenance records, and submitting them to the F.A.A., as part of an effort to certify the helicopter for civilian use. But the case fell apart the following year, when the prosecution’s expert witness from the F.A.A. decided that he no longer supported the government’s theory. On June 29, 2001, in an act that would be humiliating for any prosecutor, Wales was forced to dismiss the indictment against Anderson and Powell. He said that the expert now believed there was “no inherent safety consideration” in the conversion of the helicopter. (The company pleaded guilty to a “petty offense” and paid a thousand-dollar fine.) “The F.A.A. chief witness went south on him,” Elizabeth Wales says. “Tom felt awful about it.” Marlis DeJongh recalled, “Tom said that in all his years of being a prosecutor it was the most frustrating case that he had ever worked on.”
James Anderson, at the time that the case was dismissed, was a forty-year-old pilot for U.S. Airways, who lived alone in Beaux Arts, a Seattle suburb. On the night of Wales’s murder, Westinghouse told investigators that he thought Anderson should be considered as a suspect. “We were concerned about a number of possibilities, one of which was that the murder might be related to our work, and one subject was the helicopter case,” Westinghouse recalled. For the next several months, he received around-the-clock protection from U.S. marshalsThe F.B.I. has been investigating Anderson during the past six years, but no charges have been brought against him. (Anderson has never agreed to speak to investigators, and he declined to speak to me.) His attorney, Larry Setchell, said, “He is an innocent man and an honest man. Tom Wales was liked by everyone, including us. He did the right thing in our case by dismissing it. We were not mad at him.”
On July 27, 2001, a month after the indictment was dismissed, Anderson filed a motion against the U.S. Attorney’s Office, under an obscure law called the Hyde Amendment. The law, which was enacted in 1997, allows defendants who have been acquitted in federal court to sue the prosecutors in order to recoup their attorneys’ fees and legal expenses, provided they can show that the case was “vexatious, frivolous or in bad faith.” Anderson demanded a hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars. On August 3, 2001, Wales’s office filed a response to Anderson’s lawsuit in federal district court. “We are convinced that he brings this motion in large part to discover the identity of additional witnesses that he imagines may have contributed to his indictment,” the brief stated. “During the course of the investigation, the Government received information from at least two persons indicative of defendant Anderson’s violent and retributive nature.” Other government documents pertaining to the case remain under seal, and the identities of the persons referred to in the brief have not been made public. In any event, Anderson’s motion was dismissed, and that ruling was upheld on appeal.
A month later, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington took place, and, soon afterward, Wales again took a public stand for gun control. “Right after 9/11, the idea started to circulate that airline pilots should be allowed to carry weapons,” Trevor Neilson, the former vice-president of Washington CeaseFire, said. “Tom and I both thought it was a bad idea as a matter of public policy, but I thought it was wrong politically to come out against it at this time. The atmosphere was so strong in favor of doing anything to stop terrorism. But Tom disagreed. He thought arming pilots was a terrible idea, and he was going to say so publicly.” On September 25th, Wales participated in a half-hour debate—which was broadcast several times in the Seattle area, on NorthWest Cable News—about whether airline pilots should be allowed to carry guns in the cockpit. Pilots, he said, “are not trained as Green Berets, they are not trained as law enforcement.” He added, paraphrasing Duane Worth, the president of the Air Line Pilots Association, “It simply is not possible for an airline pilot to be Sky King and Wyatt Earp at the same time.” Sixteen days later, Wales was dead. COULD THESE COMMENTS BE MOTIVE FOR MURDER, AS HE MAY HAVE ANNOYED SOMEONE AFTER 9/11 AND ENDED UP BEING KILLED BECAUSE OF HIS STATEMENTS WHICH COULD HAVE OFFENDED SOMEONE?
 
John McKay’s complaints about the investigation of Wales’s death did produce some changes. The reward was raised to a million dollars; more F.B.I. agents were assigned to the case; and the original government lawyer on the case was eventually replaced by Steven D. Clymer, who had been a senior prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Best known for leading the successful federal prosecution of the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, Clymer had become a professor at Cornell Law School, and he coördinated the investigation from there.
Progress came slowly. Anderson remained the only suspect; in 2004, the Seattle Times reported that the F.B.I. had searched Anderson’s home in Beaux Arts and removed twenty-seven boxes of possible evidence. Agents also searched two houses in the nearby city of Bellingham, one where Anderson used to live and one where he used to visit friends. In his former home, a bullet was removed from a wall, for analysis, and a bullet and a shell casing were taken from the friends’ home. The Times quoted two neighbors of Anderson’s in Bellingham who said that they had sometimes seen him fire a handgun into the ground from his back deck. (The Times, citing a policy of not naming criminal suspects, identified Anderson as a pilot who had been unsuccessfully prosecuted by Wales.)
Anderson’s movements on the night of the murder were traced in detail. In the early evening, he and a friend had attended a showing of “2001: A Space Odyssey” at a movie theatre about ten minutes from Wales’s home, in Queen Anne. After the murder, someone had made telephone calls from Anderson’s home in Beaux Arts, about twenty minutes from Queen Anne. Would Anderson have been able to commit the murder between the time the movie ended and the time the phone calls began? “It would have been very tight, but not impossible,” Charles Mandigo says.

He leaves a son, Thomas Crane Wales VII, of Seattle, currently studying at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a daughter, Amy McCutcheon Mueller Wales, also of Seattle and currently residing in London. His brother, Richard Douglas Wales of San Francisco, his sister, Katherine Wales, of Wrentham, Mass., and his parents, Thomas Crane Wales and Sonia (Douglas) Wales of Cambridge, as well as many nieces and nephews, also survive him.

Other family members in Seattle include his former wife, Elizabeth Mueller Wales, Anne Mueller Redman (Elizabeth's sister), Eric Redman (Mr. Wales brother-in-law from his former marriage) and Heather Redman (Eric's wife).
 
Thomas C Wales was also involved in the following case:

For Immediate Release
April 21, 1999



MAN CONVICTED OF THREATENING
FEDERAL JUDGES BY INTERNET E-MAIL


Katrina C. Pflaumer, United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington, announced that CARL EDWARD JOHNSON, 49, of Bienfait, Saskatchewan, Canada, has been convicted on four felony counts of sending threatening e-mail messages via the Internet to federal judges and others. The convictions were announced following a seven-day trial before United States District Judge Robert J. Bryan, in Tacoma, Washington. JOHNSON was convicted of one count of Retaliating Against a Judicial Officer, one count of Obstructing Justice by Making a Death Threat Against a Judicial Officer, and two counts of Transmitting Threatening Communications in Foreign Commerce. The first three charges were based on death threats posted to the Internet naming two federal judges based in Tacoma and Seattle. The fourth charge was based on an e-mail threat sent directly to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. JOHNSON was acquitted on one count of Obstructing Justice.
In announcing his verdict on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, Judge Bryan stated that he had "no doubt" JOHNSON was the author of three threatening messages sent over the Internet. Although JOHNSON had used anonymous remailers and forged e-mail address information in an attempt to disguise his identity, Judge Bryan found that the Government's technical evidence proved JOHNSON’s authorship. In response to the defense contention that the statements constituted "free speech" protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Judge Bryan ruled that the messages were "serious expressions of intention to do harm," and thus "clearly over the line" of protected speech.
The guilty verdicts are the culmination of a two-year investigation by U.S. Treasury agents into anonymous threats posted on the Internet and a scheme to assassinate government officials known as "Assassination Politics." As the testimony and evidence at trial showed, the assassination scheme was first promoted by James Dalton Bell, of Vancouver, Washington, who had proposed to murder IRS employees, had gathered a list of IRS agents' names and home addresses, had contaminated an IRS office with a noxious chemical, and had experimented with other toxic and dangerous chemicals, including nerve agents. JOHNSON had corresponded with Bell about Bell’s "Assassination Politics" concept via Internet e-mail. After Bell’s arrest, JOHNSON vowed in an Internet e-mail message to take "personal action" in support of Bell. On June 23, 1997, JOHNSON anonymously posted a message on the Internet suggesting that specific sums of money would be paid, in the form of electronic cash, for the deaths of a Federal Magistrate Judge in Tacoma, Washington, and Treasury agents involved in the Bell investigation. Additional threatening messages linked to JOHNSON continued to appear on the Internet in the months that followed, and JOHNSON set up a World Wide Web page with a partial prototype of the "Assassination Politics" scheme.
JOHNSON also issued a death threat to several Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, again through an anonymous e-mail message. The Government was able to identify JOHNSON as the author of the threatening messages and the Internet assassination web page through a variety of technical means. In the case of the Ninth Circuit Judges death threat, Treasury agents were able to link the unique characteristics of an encrypted digital signature on the threatening message to encryption "keys" found on JOHNSON's computer.
Treasury investigators received assistance in the case from Canadian law enforcement agencies who were investigating JOHNSON for his Internet activities and an unexploded gasoline bomb found in a courthouse in Estevan, Saskatchewan. The trial featured testimony from officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian Customs, as well as the Canadian Internet Service Provider Sympatico and Canadian telephone company Sasktel. Computer experts from the Treasury Department and Portland Police Bureau also testified.
Sentencing is scheduled before Judge Bryan for June 11, 1999. The retaliation and threatening communication counts each carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison. The obstruction of justice count carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. JOHNSON is currently being held without bail at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac, Washington. JOHNSON also faces additional charges in Canada in connection with the bomb found in the Canadian courthouse.
The case was investigated by the United States Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. In making today’s announcement, U.S. Attorney Pflaumer credited the outstanding investigative work of Special Agent Jeffrey Gordon, particularly for his technical work in proving the identity of the threats’ author. U.S. Attorney Pflaumer also expressed appreciation for the assistance of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, United States Secret Service, Portland Police Bureau, and Canadian Customs.
Assistant United States Attorneys Robb London and Floyd G. Short prosecuted the case.

For further information please contact Robb London or Floyd G. Short at (206) 553-7970, or Thomas C. Wales, Executive Assistant United States Attorney, at (206) 553-4495.
 
Somewhere a newspaper article or release from the police reported that a small slip of paper with a first name and initial was found outside at the scene of the Thomas Wales murder. I can not find that important piece of information. Can anyone provide me with either the source of that information or the name on the slip of paper?
 
I just posted in an israel keyes thread about an idea I had about the Gidget letter.
e275ccc48cb8134b63e9366f9fbf98de.jpg

I had always wondered why there were two stamps. I think the author did that, and offset them from the right side of the envelope so the postmark would look like tire tracks over the car. Like the wagon ran over the car. Non motor trumps motorized. Possibly an anti - tech kinda statement. Anti-futuristic gun free world pushed by Wales. Or maybe those are just speed lines, the wagon out outrunning the car (FBI). If the dude liked PI novels I'd assume there is reason behind some of the seemingly meaningless characteristics of the letter. I get the feeling like the author is 'playing dumb' but hiding clues in the act. Like maybe hiding a message. An anagram using the letters that are written incorrectly, or the ones not in upper or lower case. Idk. With the stamps I just always thought it was weird that there were two, as if he was nervous about it not getting there, so add two to be 100% sure there is enough postage, but that doesn't vibe with the way he wrote so crazy on the front. Looking at the way it is written makes me cringe because it is written so poorly I would think it might not get mailed. That inconsistency makes me think it is indicating a clue.

AND I just noticed that if you look close after Gidget in the return address it looks like there is a faint postmark, where Gidget ' s last name would be. I had always thought that if it were Keyes that wrote it that gidget was a reference to Gidget Gein from the death metal band Marilyn Manson (or whatever u would call that music, idk). The musician Gidget Gein actually quit music back in the day and went to work for the medical examiner as a 'bag boy'. 'Retreiving and cleaning up after the deceased' according to one site. Did the author put that mark there as a clue? Did the FBI white it out for investigative whatever integrity you call it? It does seem like there should be a last name, and now that I notice a faint postmark where it should be I'm intrigued. Furthermore, from the low resolution picture I have it seems like the faint postmark is only where the last name would be and not through Gidget like it would be if it was from transfer from a freshly inked letter. If that that is a faint mark I see, only in the space to the right of Gidget and above the charleston/chesterton/skeleton whatever word that is, then I would think he is indicating a surname, and the only Gidget I know with a surname ain't that surfer girl.
 
I just posted in an israel keyes thread about an idea I had about the Gidget letter.
e275ccc48cb8134b63e9366f9fbf98de.jpg

I had always wondered why there were two stamps. I think the author did that, and offset them from the right side of the envelope so the postmark would look like tire tracks over the car. Like the wagon ran over the car. Non motor trumps motorized. Possibly an anti - tech kinda statement. Anti-futuristic gun free world pushed by Wales. Or maybe those are just speed lines, the wagon out outrunning the car (FBI). If the dude liked PI novels I'd assume there is reason behind some of the seemingly meaningless characteristics of the letter. I get the feeling like the author is 'playing dumb' but hiding clues in the act. Like maybe hiding a message. An anagram using the letters that are written incorrectly, or the ones not in upper or lower case. Idk. With the stamps I just always thought it was weird that there were two, as if he was nervous about it not getting there, so add two to be 100% sure there is enough postage, but that doesn't vibe with the way he wrote so crazy on the front. Looking at the way it is written makes me cringe because it is written so poorly I would think it might not get mailed. That inconsistency makes me think it is indicating a clue.

AND I just noticed that if you look close after Gidget in the return address it looks like there is a faint postmark, where Gidget ' s last name would be. I had always thought that if it were Keyes that wrote it that gidget was a reference to Gidget Gein from the death metal band Marilyn Manson (or whatever u would call that music, idk). The musician Gidget Gein actually quit music back in the day and went to work for the medical examiner as a 'bag boy'. 'Retreiving and cleaning up after the deceased' according to one site. Did the author put that mark there as a clue? Did the FBI white it out for investigative whatever integrity you call it? It does seem like there should be a last name, and now that I notice a faint postmark where it should be I'm intrigued. Furthermore, from the low resolution picture I have it seems like the faint postmark is only where the last name would be and not through Gidget like it would be if it was from transfer from a freshly inked letter. If that that is a faint mark I see, only in the space to the right of Gidget and above the charleston/chesterton/skeleton whatever word that is, then I would think he is indicating a surname, and the only Gidget I know with a surname ain't that surfer girl.

Does indeed look like a postmark after the name. Faint wavy lines...great catch. jmo
 

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