Wales’ unsolved murder shows what we don’t know about these threats

Oct. 25, 2026 at 8:00 am Updated Oct. 25, 2026 at 8:01 am

Twenty-five years ago, on a Thursday evening in October, a federal prosecutor named Tom Wales sat working at his desk in the basement of his Seattle home. At 10:40 p.m., a man crept into Wales’ backyard, avoided the motion-sensor lights and shot Wales through the window . He died the next day, at the age of 49.

Tom Wales is widely believed to be the only federal prosecutor in the 156-year history of the Department of Justice to be killed for doing his job.

There is a difference between being killed while doing your job and for doing your job. For 18 years, Wales served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Seattle, specializing in white-collar and fraud cases. The FBI never named a suspect, though it reportedly looked closely at a defendant in a fraud case that Wales prosecuted. In 2018, the FBI said it believed the killing was the work of a hired gunman.…