KAUFMAN, Tex. — After the daylight assassination of his deputy two months ago, Mike McLelland, the district attorney in largely rural Kaufman County, responded with a flash of angry bravado, denigrating the perpetrators as “scum” and vowing to hunt them down.
A former Army officer who served in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, Mr. McLelland carried a gun and refused to be intimidated, according to a friend and the local news media, even as his wife expressed unease, worrying that her husband, too, could be in danger.
“I hope that the people that did this are watching, because we’re very confident that we’re going to find you,” he said at a news conference hours after his deputy was killed. “We’re going to pull you out of whatever hole you’re in. We’re going to bring you back and let the people of Kaufman County prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”
On Saturday evening, the authorities found Mr. McLelland, 63, and his wife, Cynthia, 65, shot to death inside their home in Forney, Tex., in Kaufman County. The killings galvanized law enforcement officials and frightened and bewildered local residents, many of them still shaken by the shooting of the deputy, Mark E. Hasse, 57, on Jan. 31. That case remains unsolved.
The police said Sunday that they had increased security for local elected officials and would tighten security at the county courthouse. The courthouse was scheduled to be open Monday, but Mr. McLelland’s office will be closed.
“It’s unnerving to the law enforcement community, to the community at large,” Sheriff David A. Byrnes said at a news conference on Sunday. “That’s why we’re striving to assure the community that we are protecting public safety and will continue to do that.”
The authorities said it was too early to say if the deaths of Mr. McLelland and his wife were connected to the shooting of Mr. Hasse, the county’s lead felony prosecutor. But the killings of two prosecutors in a county of 106,000 people in less than eight weeks appeared to many officials to be more than a coincidence.
“I’m really trying to stress for people to remain calm,” said Mayor Darren Rozell of Forney, about 15 miles northwest of Kaufman, the county seat. “This appeared to be a targeted attack and not a random attack.”
A law enforcement official said investigators believed that the shootings of the two prosecutors were related, but appeared to have been carried out by different people, perhaps from the same group or with the same affiliation. Shell casings were recovered in the shootings of the McLellands, but not in the shooting of Mr. Hasse, indicating that his killer or killers had more experience, the official said.
Officials from several local, state and federal agencies — including the F.B.I., the Texas Rangers and the Kaufman County sheriff’s office — were working on the case. Sheriff Byrnes told reporters that deputies had been called to Mr. McLelland’s residence shortly after 6 p.m. Saturday, and that the bodies were discovered inside. He would not say if there were any signs of forced entry.
In the shooting of Mr. Hasse, the authorities said, one or two gunmen got out of a gray or silver sedan, opened fire and fled. Witnesses told investigators that the killer or killers appeared to have had their faces covered and wore black clothing and tactical-style vests. No arrests have been made, and investigators from nine agencies had been searching for leads.
Mr. McLelland told The Associated Press less than two weeks ago that he carried a gun at all times since Mr. Hasse’s killing, even when he walked his dog. He said he had urged his employees to remain alert. “The people in my line of work are going to have to get better at it, because they’re going to need it more in the future,” he said in the interview with The A.P.
“I’m ahead of everybody else because, basically, I’m a soldier,” he said, referring to his 23-year career in the Army.
Tonya J. Ratcliff, the Kaufman County tax assessor and a friend of the McLellands, said the couple was vigilant, but did not obsess over their security.
“I didn’t have a sense that they were looking over their shoulders at any moment,” she said.
The McLellands had five children, one of whom is a Dallas police officer.