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.
Federal Judge Robert Vance was killed by a mail bomb sent to his home in Alabama in 1989.
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.
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.