On the his blog and his weekly internet radio show, “Yankee” Jim Leshkevich railed bitterly against blacks, Jews Latinos and the apathetic whites who failed to heed the call of “white nationalism” but, in the end it was bitterness of a much more personal kind that consumed him.
Police say sometime after 10:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 18 – the time stamp on a long, rambling blog entry about his wife’s alleged infidelity – Leshkevich, 52, attacked his wife Deborah, a 55-year-old sixth grade teaching assistant at Woodstock Elementary School, in the couple’s home on Morgan Hill Road in Hurley. According to police, Leshkevich beat her about the head with a blunt object and suffocated her. Then, leaving his wife’s lifeless body in the bedroom, he made his way to a large attached garage stuffed with boxes of merchandise for his online auction business, where he hung himself.
Police discovered the apparent murder-suicide around 11 a.m. Tuesday after Deborah Leshkevich’s co-workers became concerned when she didn’t show up for work and called police to ask that they check on her.
On Tuesday, state police investigators donned white protective suits as they prepared to enter the two-story home with a Christmas wreath on the door and a large pile of firewood in the front yard. Police removed evidence from the home, including computers and a number of firearms, and say they’re checking to see if the guns were legally owned.
A double life
At Woodstock Elementary School, where the Deborah Leshkevich worked, crisis teams were deployed on Tuesday and Wednesday, and Onteora Central School District Superintendent Leslie Ford spent days speaking in the classrooms to students and teachers shocked by her death. “I spent the day telling the kids,” said Ford.
The portraits of Deborah Leshkevich that emerged from those who worked with her and the parents of students who came into contact with her were vastly different from the Internet ramblings of her attacker.
“Mrs. Leshkevich was a person who went the extra mile, providing much more than just her daily job to the school,” said Ford. “Our district stands behind Mrs. Leshkevich’s positive reputation, and encourages the community to join us in remembering her warm smile, sense of humor, and legacy of caring.”
Most parents knew her as the person who checked off names of children during dismissal so that the kids would not get lost in the shuffle during pick up time. The children called her “Mrs. L.”
Some parents who knew her were shocked to hear she was even married to the infamous “Yankee Jim,” who gained regional and even national notoriety two years ago as the local agitator whose behind-the-scenes counseling of Rebekah Hedrick, the mother of a young white high school student who had been assaulted and badly beaten in an altercation with a black student, led to the 2005 neo-Nazi rally staged in Kingston by White separatist radio personality (and, as has since been reported, FBI informant) Hal Turner. They said she never spoke about him, and instead poured herself into work while also teaching Catechism at St. John’s Roman Catholic Church in West Hurley.
She was president of the Onteora non-teaching employees association (ONTEA) and ran the student council, was part of the conflict management team, and was on the Site team for many years. She also worked on environmental projects around Woodstock school and helped raise money to buy flowers.
Ford also said that many in the community are sad and angry at the way the media covered it. “We’re taking it one day at a time, and counseling is available for as long as they need it,” she said.
Hanging his flags
Morgan Hill Road neighbors say the Leshkevich house, on a rural road of ranch homes and bungalows, was the site of frequent loud verbal arguments between the couple, but the only time they’d seen police on the scene was a few years back when opponents of Leshkevich’s white supremacist, anti-Semitic views organized a small protest outside his home.
“I didn’t even know who lived there until that happened,” said one neighbor who asked to remain anonymous. “After that I started calling him Adolph Hitler.”
Another neighbor, Casey Bann, said he’d heard the fights, but was unaware of any serious problems in the home until a detective knocked on his door Tuesday morning asking if he’d heard any screams coming from the house. Bann said Deborah Leshkevich was rarely seen outside the house, while her husband spent hours in the front yard chopping firewood.
“I only met him one time,” said Bann, who moved into the home next-door to the Leshkeviches four months ago. “He seemed like kind of an oddball — an ignorant redneck type, for lack of a better terminology. When I told him I was from California he went right into a whole thing about the Mexicans.”
Bann said he was especially disturbed when he realized Leshkevich was expounding on his views to neighborhood kids. According to Bann, one 13-year-old neighbor related James Leshkevich’s reaction to him and his girlfriend moving into the neighborhood. “He told him: ‘Thank God they’re white; if they weren’t white I’d be hanging my flags.’ This is a 13-year-old kid he’s talking to!”
But Jim Leshkevich broadcast his views far beyond Morgan Hill Road. At least as far back as 2002, when he handed out anti-Zionist literature at a pro-Israel rally in Uptown Kingston, Leshkevich has been active in the white power movement. The November 2005 rally Leshkevich helped organize for Turner brought out Neo Nazis from as far away as California, along with hundreds of counterdemonstators and police.
It was on the Internet though, where Leshkevich broadcast his racist views the loudest. He was a frequent visitor to the online reader response forum of the Daily Freeman, where he seemed to delight in the outraged reactions to his rhetoric. On his blog, dubbed – much to the horror of staff at the daily newspaper – “The Hudson Valley Freeman,” he would re-post articles from local media along with commentary from white nationalists from across the country. He also hosted a weekly Internet radio show called “Free Talk Live.”
The final entry on Leshkevich’s blog is dated Monday at 10:30 p.m. under the headline “I Caught My Wife Sleeping With Another Man … .” In it he describes the dissolution of his marriage and his Deborah’s purported relationship with local man. Over the course of 2553 words Leshkevich provides steamy excerpts from a cell phone conversation he says he secretly recorded between his wife and her alleged lover on Jan. 19. He goes on to detail a series of arguments that ensued after he confronted her with the recording. Other passages in the blog entry, which seems to have been drafted sporadically over the past 10 days before being posted on Monday, blame his wife’s alleged affair on the hit TV shows “Sex and the City” and “Desperate Housewives.” More ominously, he rants about recently divorced friends of his wife who blames for egging her on to leave him and pursue the affair.
He also blames his wife for turning the couple’s two grown children against him (Deborah Leshkevich had another child from a previous relationship).
Danger of retaliation
On Wednesday, State Police Capt. Wayne Olsen of the Troop F Major Crime Investigation Unit said police were aware of the blog entry and had contacted all of those identified in the post and some who were not. The angry rantings on the blog, which also identifies Deborah Leshkevich’s alleged lover, are of particular concern because of James Leshkevich’s status as a well-known and popular presence on white racist Internet message forums. On one such forum where tributes to “Yankee Jim” were accompanied by laments that he had not gone out on a “martyrdom operation” after killing his wife, several posts explicitly threatened or encouraged violence against the alleged lover and one poster claims to have called him and left a message.
“We are aware that (the alleged lover) is not on their fan favorite lists and we’re taking appropriate steps,” said Olsen of the danger of retaliation by Leshkevich’s extremist associates.
Olsen added that state police investigators were immediately aware of Leshkevich’s extremist background and carried out a slow, methodical investigation before arriving at the murder/suicide determination.
“We’re fairly comfortable at this point that this is what it appears to be,” said Olsen. “But to be perfectly honest, given his background, we were very careful in coming to that conclusion.”
(Lisa Childers contributed to this report)