# Assassination attempts besides the President **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 19, 2015, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-attempts-besides-the-president/725639 "2015-07-19T21:06:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2015, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-attempts-besides-the-president/725639/21 "2015-07-20T16:06:31Z")
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**Author:** ![SpyOne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/82dd89/32.png) [@SpyOne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SpyOne)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2015, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-attempts-besides-the-president/725639/22 "2015-07-21T02:27:22Z")
Always on the quest for interesting ideas, I found a book once that positied that John F. Kennedy was actually killed by mistake, that the actual target was Governor John Connally. ---
**Author:** ![Accidental\_Martyr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ce7236/32.png) [@Accidental\_Martyr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Accidental_Martyr)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2015, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-attempts-besides-the-president/725639/23 "2015-07-21T03:13:11Z")
Federal Judge Robert Vance was killed by a mail bomb sent to his home in Alabama in 1989. > [@](#): > > On December 16, 1989, Vance was killed at his home in Mountain Brook, Alabama when he opened a package containing a mail bomb. Vance was killed instantly and his wife, Helen, was seriously injured. After an intensive investigation, the federal government charged Walter Leroy Moody, Jr. with the murders of Judge Vance and of Robert E. Robinson, a black civil rights attorney in Savannah, Georgia, who had been killed in a separate explosion. Moody was also charged with mailing bombs that were defused at the Eleventh Circuit’s headquarters and at the Jacksonville office of the NAACP. > **[Robert Smith Vance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smith_Vance)** > > Robert Smith Vance (May 10, 1931 – December 16, 1989) was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He was one of three 20th-century United States federal court judges assassinated because of his judicial service. > Born in Talladega, Alabama, Vance was the youngest of four children born to parents Harrell Taylor Vance Sr. and Mae (née Smith) Vance. He grew up in Birmingham, Ala... ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2015, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-attempts-besides-the-president/725639/24 "2015-07-21T04:35:44Z")
[Joan Lefkow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Lefkow), a US district court judge based in Chicago, was the target of an assassination plot by a plaintiff in a case which she had dismissed. The assassin broke into Lefkow’s house in 2005, and murdered Lefkow’s husband and mother (the judge herself had not been home at the time). At that time, it was theorized that the killings were related to Lefkow’s ruling on a case involving white supremacist Matthew Hale, but it turned out that the killer (who killed himself when pulled over by police in Wisconsin on an unrelated traffic stop) was not connected to the Hale case. ---
**Author:** ![Zsofia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/7bcc69/32.png) [@Zsofia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zsofia)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2015, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-attempts-besides-the-president/725639/25 "2015-07-21T14:26:56Z")
Here in Columbia, SC many people wonder what the monument is near the university that just says “GONZALES”. It’s a memorial to the founder of the local newspaper who was shot dead in 1903 in broad daylight by the Lieutenant Governor (James Tillman, nephew of the infamous governor Pitchfork Ben) because of the newspaper’s endorsement of the other guy. He was totally acquitted even though everybody saw him do it - the monument is placed where it is so it can be seen from the Lieutenant Governor’s office. If you were all watching the flag come down a couple weeks ago, the monument is across the street from the State House on the side that’s to your left looking at the flag. The statue to Pitchfork Ben, which is in some ways sooooo much worse than the flag, is surely visible in some of the shots of the flag removal. Yeah. So there’s a newspaper editor assassinated _by_ a sitting government official, who was acquitted. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/assassination-attempts-besides-the-president/725639.md?page=1)