The murder of prosecutor Mike McLelland and his wife Cynthia has raised the spectre of the Aryan Brotherhood menacing Texas. Philip Sherwell reports.
A battery of heavily armed police guarded the courthouse as Brandi Fernandez arrived to take up her duties as district attorney in the normally sleepy Texan county town of Kaufman.
The menacing mood facing Miss Fernandez, 42, an experienced local prosecutor, is the product of a double murder that has caused fears that criminal gangs are targeting the town's officials.
She has good reason to fear for her security, since she led the prosecution of a senior "enforcer" of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas last year.
The assassination of two of her colleagues and the death of the wife of one of the men has unnerved the ranks of law enforcement.
Mike McLelland, 63, Miss Fernandez's army veteran predecessor, and his wife Cynthia, 65, were killed in a hail of bullets at their ranch-style bungalow. The shooting came just two months after Mark Hasse, the assistant district attorney, was shot dead execution-style under an oak tree near the town square.
Dozens of federal agents have arrived in Kaufman to pursue possible murder motives that range from the role of crime cartels to personal vendettas.
But many locals fear that the murders were the work of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, already under suspicion for the killing of Mr Hasse.
Spawned in the state's prisons as a rival to black and Latino gangs, the white supremacist group has evolved into a feared criminal enterprise. Its members are tied by bonds of blood and extreme violence to a paramilitary-structure operated by "generals," many of them who dispatch orders from behind bars.
In December, the state warned that the Brotherhood had threatened to inflict "mass casualties or death" on law enforcement officials involved in a crackdown on the group.
Kaufman officers helped arrest 34 alleged members. Many of the gangsters have reason to hold a vendetta against county officials.
Miss Fernandez led the prosecution last year of James "Wreck" Crawford, a burly Aryan Brotherhood "enforcer" sentenced to two life terms by a jury in the county. He was captured after a shoot-out with a wayward gang member who was being punished for not attending regular meetings, known as "church".
"I'm just ecstatic about the sentences," Mr McLelland said at the time. "It shows that those people can't come down here and run roughshod over folks in Kaufman county."
In the west of the county, affluent middle-class commuter territory provides a comfortable refuge from the urban sprawl of Dallas. It was here that the McLellands lived on their one-acre property in Forney, a town known as the "antique capital" of Texas.
But heading east along Interstate 20, the county becomes more rural, poorer and predominantly white. Typical of many Southern towns, the main war memorial outside the Kaufman courthouse honours the Confederate soldiers who fought in the 1861-65 Civil War. "There are still a lot of racists in this county," said Cliff Hutcheson, a neighbour of the dead couple. "It's not as bad as it used to be, but some of these folks are raised from birth with these views."
The decaying wooden homes, rocking chairs rotting on the porch, hark back to more prosperous days when cotton was king. One of the Brotherhood's main money-earners is the trade in methamphetamine, or "white man's crack".
The rural areas are now known for a rampant methamphetamine crime problem – abuse, manufacture and trafficking of the illegal stimulant.
Since his election in 2010, Mr McLelland had made tackling drug crime and the Aryan Brotherhood a priority.
"These were assassinations of government officials, based on good surveillance and calmly conducted in a very professional manner by hitmen who knew what they were doing," said Oliver "Buck" Revell, a security consultant and former head of Dallas FBI.
"That all points to a criminal gang as the most likely suspects". Mr McLelland had said that he knew the risks and that he was armed and ready. But not ready enough, it emerged.
His wife was shot dead after apparently opening their front door, while he was killed in his pyjamas near the back of the house where friends think he was trying to retrieve a weapon.
The house was littered with .223 bullet cartridges from an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle, the same weapon used by the killers in the Sandy Hook elementary school and Denver cinema massacres last year. Several neighbours heard shooting on the Friday night or Saturday morning, but in a state where gun ownership is widespread, did not report it.
The murder last month of the prisons chief in Colorado by a newly released inmate who belonged to another white supremacist jail gang has only intensified the nationwide fears about the killings.
If the Aryan Brotherhood has brought terror to Kaufman County, then the gang's operations would have escalated to an alarming new peak. "We're already under attack here," said a local businessman. "That would be war."
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