Posted on 03/16/2005 3:22:04 AM PST by ajolympian2004
By Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News March 16, 2005
University of Colorado investigators are looking into a letter sent last summer by professor Ward Churchill to his late wife's mother.
Rhonda Kelly, 41, the sister of Leah Kelly, Churchill's late wife, said she turned over the letter to CU lawyer Louise Romero, who is working on a university investigation being led by interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano.
Initially expected to be done this week, DiStefano's report - which will help CU officials decide if there is cause to fire the tenured Churchill - has been pushed back to March 28.
Churchill has been under scrutiny since late January, when his essay comparing victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to Adolf Eichmann came to light.
Rhonda Kelly said she contacted investigators, who told her they wanted a copy of the May 14 letter. Neither DiStefano nor Romero would comment.
In the letter to Barbara Kelly, a copy of which was supplied to the News by Rhonda Kelly, Churchill explains why he has decided not to accept an invitation to visit the Kellys in Canada later that month, around the anniversary of Leah Kelly's death.
Leah Kelly, Churchill's third wife, died June 1, 2000, at the age of 30 when a car hit her while she was walking on Arapahoe Road in Boulder. Her blood alcohol level was 0.350, more than four times the 0.08 level of legal intoxication in Colorado.
Churchill wrote that a German woman named Marta Kline had been harassing his family, placing calls to his mother, sister and brother. The woman also had been asking questions about the circumstances of Leah Kelly's death, he said.
"It gets uglier," he wrote. "She's been saying that she's been 'hired by Leah's family' to prove that I'm responsible for Leah's death."
He wrote that he believed Rhonda Kelly, now a second-year law student, was supplying his personal information - including family phone numbers and official reports on the crash - to the German woman. He had the only report, but had given a copy to the Kelly family, he said.
"So, here's what I'm going to do," he wrote. "I'm going to have a couple of my German connections pay a visit to this Marta Kline and get things straightened out (let's just say that her little telephone campaign is coming to an abrupt halt, and that I should have done this long ago).
"If there's any evidence at all that Kline is in possession of anything resembling an official document from Boulder County, then I'm holding Rhonda Kelly equally responsible for what's been happening to my family.
"Especially my mother.
"Where that leads, I'll decide later. But it won't be pretty."
Rhonda Kelly said her family viewed that statement as threatening to them and to the German woman, who actually goes by the name Marina Klein, although she has said Klein is an alias she uses "for security reasons."
But Churchill's attorney, David Lane, discounted any interpretations of the letter as threatening.
Lane said Klein has been on a campaign to discredit Churchill for years. He said Churchill's reference to German "connections" meant friends at a publication who could help him take legal action against her.
"Those are his German friends. They're not the Hells Angels of Germany," said Lane. "There's no threat of violence. It's about legal action. Ward felt she was threatening his family, including his mother. There is no threat of physical violence anywhere in this letter."
Klein, 46 and unemployed, has spent years researching Churchill's past. She said she may write a book about him.
In his letter, Churchill calls her a "nut" who responded like a "jilted lover" when he denied her request to be his literary representative in Germany.
Klein acknowledges offering to help Churchill find German publishers early in their acquaintance, but said all communication between the two stopped some time ago.
Klein said she became fixated on Churchill after seeing him portrayed in a 1996 documentary, All Power to the People. But the more she learned the more she came to question his life story, she said.
Rhonda Kelly said she felt it was important for investigators to see the letter.
"I've been threatened, both verbally and in writing, by Churchill, that if I say anything I'm going to be sued," she said. "But this is the first opportunity I've had where people are going to listen. The opportunity arose, and so I'm taking advantage of it."
Also threatened the UC lady in charge of naming the new dorms. She was recommending that they be named after some former housing director; he wanted them to be named after tribes. She reported his threat ( it was physical harm) to UC security; they did nothing.
No way this guy deserves one penny of taxpayers money !
Wonder how many like WC are all over this country.
If they are still around....
>>>Like to hear what wives one and two have to say about him.<<<<
Try this, and follow some of the links
ONE OF WARD CHURCHILL'S EX-WIVES SPEAKS (Michelle Malkin provides the latest on this Serial Loser)
Michelle Malkin's Blog ^ | March 13, 2005 | Michelle Malkin
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1362238/posts
"From the start, he has sounded paranoid. Delusions of grandeur combined with delusions of persecution?"
Paranoia and delusions betray the inner truth of his guilty mania.
Ward Churchill certainly behaves like an oppressive Nazi stormtrooper, doesn't he? His oratory has Hitlerian flare. IMO, he's probably threatened or blackmailed half of the UC faculty and administrators - like if HE goes down, so do they.
If pronouncely anti-American Churchill did travel to Libya to meet with Gadahfi(sp) to solicit cash funds for the Indian militant movement AIM, isn't that a questionable act of treason? I am sure the FBI and the CIA have thick investigative files on Ward Churchill.
No need to ask how if THOSE funds alleviated any poverty
in the Rosebud Reservation.
"Churchill may have a hard time getting published in Germany. The Germans have very strong laws against racial defamation and the like. Take that out of Churchill's writing, and what do you have left?"
The RAT that roared...
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