Imprisoned man gets extra time for graphically violent threats against federal judge
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced an incarcerated man to 10 additional years in prison after he admitted making repeated threats to a judge and former probation officer and threatening to blow up the Thomas F. Eagleton Federal Courthouse in downtown St. Louis.
Richard L. Russell, 58, pleaded guilty to two counts of retaliating against a federal official, two counts of mailing threatening communications, and one count of threatening to destroy a building by fire or explosion.
The case was tried in the U.S. Court for Eastern Missouri, but Steven Weinhoeft, assistant U.S. attorney for Southern Illinois, served as special prosecutor in the case.
In recommending the maximum sentencing allowable, Weinhoeft described Russell as a lifelong criminal who harbors an “obsessional hatred” for the sentencing judge and wrote consistently about “dark fantasies of retribution” against the court officials and other threats including rape, incest, murder and school shootings.
According to court documents, Russell has been in prison since 2013, when he was sentenced to serve 112 months for threatening to murder a U.S. magistrate judge.
But on June 1, 2022, the most recent criminal complaint against him stated, officials at the Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse received two similar handwritten letters containing death threats addressed to a sitting federal judge and retired probation officer. Each were signed by Russell and mailed from the Grady County Criminal Justice Authority, a Bureau of Prisons transfer facility in Chickasaw, Oklahoma.
A deputy U.S. marshal recovered the letters and envelopes, which were included in a sentencing memorandum written by Weinhoeft and filed with the court record.
Russell’s animosity toward the judge and probation officer had been simmering for over a decade “and because he is in prison he is powerless to carry out his threats by any means other than written correspondence,” Weinhoeft wrote in the memorandum to the sentencing judge.
“A lengthy term of imprisonment is required to ensure he remains in prison for a long time,” he wrote.
The threatening letters Russell sent to the judge were graphic in their violent details strewn with profanity.
“I can’t stand the sentencing judge at all,” one said. “I am going to blow that son a bitch (expletive) brains out. I promise you that s—t. I am going to blow your (expletive) brains out. You (expletive) me over in 2013. You gave me 112 months for no reason at all.”
Russell wrote in the letters that he plots “every day” to kill the judge.
“I’ve got nothing to lose,” he wrote.
Other times, Russell graphically described in horrific detail prior crimes that he claims to have perpetrated, such as raping a 60-year old woman in Brinkley, Arkansas in 1994, sentencing referendum said.
Weinhoeft said Russell has suffered a lifetime of psychological issues, but that they do not “affect his thinking ability to follow through on complex tasks.”
“He understands what he’s doing,” Weinhoeft wrote in his memorandum to the judge.
Federal judges, probation officers and prosecutors with the Eastern District of Missouri were recused from this case. The U.S. Marshals Service led the investigation.
“Judges and probation officers serve the public by upholding the rule of law and supervising offenders in the court system. To threaten their lives for doing their jobs in abhorrent,” said U.S. Attorney Rachelle Aud Crowe in a release. “This offender will spend another decade in prison for sending death threats and making threats of violence.”
