CHICAGO (AP) – The big break in the mysterious shooting deaths of a federal judge’s husband and mother came not from a shadowy white supremacist cell, but from a grimy minivan with broken taillights.

A Wisconsin police officer pulled the suspicious-looking van over, and as he walked up to the vehicle, the driver put a gun to his head and shot himself to death.

Police searched the van and found a suicide note in which the man, an electrician who filed bizarre lawsuits over his cancer treatment, claimed responsibility for the killings, authorities said Thursday.

Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline stopped short of declaring the slayings of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow’s relatives solved. But he said: “We’re satisfied that there’s information in the letter that would point us to Ross being in Lefkow’s house.”

Cline also said authorities believe the driver of the van, Bart Ross, is the same person seen by a witness near the Lefkow home on Feb. 28, the day the judge came home to find her 64-year-old husband and 89-year-old mother shot to death in the basement.

Until now, investigators had suspected the slayings may have been the work of white supremacists angry over another of Lefkow’s rulings. But Ross had no known connections to extremist groups.

Last fall, the judge had dismissed a lawsuit in which Ross accused doctors of disfiguring him when they treated him for cancer in the early 1990s. Among other things, he claimed doctors committed a “terrorist act” by giving him radiation without his consent.

The police superintendent would not speculate on what Ross, 57, was doing in the Milwaukee area. But at least one other judge who ruled against him lived there. And a source close to the investigation told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that the suicide note, found in Ross’ van, contained the names of judges.

Cline said that after Ross killed himself, police and federal agents found a note in which he implicated himself in the murders of Michael Lefkow and Donna Humphrey and recounted the details.

WMAQ-TV in Chicago said it also received a hand-written letter signed by a Bart Ross on Thursday in which the writer describes breaking into the Lefkow house around dawn. The writer said he planned to wait in the basement all day for the judge, and kill her.

But he said the judge’s husband discovered him around 9 a.m., so he shot him, then killed Lefkow’s mother after she heard the gun and called out to her son-in-law, the TV station reported.

“After I shot husband and mother of Judge Lefkow, I had a lot of time to think about life and death. Killing is no fun, even though I knew I was already dead. I gave up further killings on about 1:15 p.m. on Feb. 28, 2005, and left Judge Lefkow’s house,” the station quoted the letter as saying.

Ross emigrated from Poland in 1982 as Bartlomiej Ciszewski, changed his name and became a U.S. citizen in 1988, according to the government.

Ross had waged a decade-long legal fight over his cancer treatment, which left his face disfigured. He battled with doctors, lawyers and judges, likening his treatment to the ghastly medical experiments done by the Nazis.

In a lawsuit dismissed by Lefkow last September, Ross claimed doctors at the University of Illinois-Chicago Hospital and its clinic had damaged his mouth and caused him to lose his teeth when they treated him for cancer from 1992 into 1995. He also blamed the justice system for his problems and demanded Congress impeach four judges.

The hospital released a statement saying Ross consented to and received conservative treatments after a “grave diagnosis of metastatic head and neck cancer.”

Court records show Ross was also being evicted from his North Side home and was due Thursday in housing court.

The police superintendent cautioned that authorities were still analyzing evidence from the crime and searching his home. “We are not prepared at this time to definitely say that any one person is responsible for these homicides,” Cline said.

After the slayings, suspicion immediately turned to white supremacist Matthew Hale, who was in prison for trying to have Lefkow killed for ruling against him in a trademark dispute. Hale denied having anything to do with the killings.

Investigators were also going through Lefkow’s other cases for clues. Cline said Ross’ name had been on the list, but the task force had not yet interviewed him because of the sheer volume – more than 600 leads and hundreds of names.

Terence Evans, who lives in the Milwaukee area and was on a federal appeals court that ruled against Ross in January, said U.S. marshals called him before dawn Thursday to alert him about the suicide note in the van.

Neighbors and acquaintances said Ross lived alone with his dog and kept to himself. They also described him as an intelligent man who grew increasingly angry and paranoid after he felt doctors had destroyed his life when they treated him for cancer of the mouth.

“He became obsessed with this,” said Don Rose, a political consultant who met Ross when he did electrical work on a friend’s house. “His health was deteriorating, his money was going away, he couldn’t make any headway in the legal system.”

Rose said he never expected Ross could be violent, but says when he first heard his name on Thursday connected to Lefkow and the murders, “it all fell in place, it all fit together. … When she dismissed the case, that was like a death sentence.”

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Associated Press writers Nicole Ziegler Dizon and Juliet Williams in West Allis, Wis., and Mike Robinson in Chicago contributed to this report.

AP-ES-03-10-05 2018EST