It wasn't too long ago that Bill Sparkman's body was found, and even "mainstream" news sources did everything but say, outright, it was almost certainly some "right winger" who killed him. For example, ABC larded up their coverage with helpful hints like this:

The most deadly attack on federal workers came in 1995 when the federal building in Oklahoma City was devastated by a truck bomb, killing 168 and injuring more than 680. Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the bombing, carried literature by modern, ultra-right-wing anti-government authors.... "Even as illustrated in town hall meetings today, there is a distinct hostility in a large segment of the population toward people who work for their government," Ruch said.

Of course, the "Tea Protests" weren't at all against government workers but rather against unrestricted spending by elected officials. But um, any brick to hurl, eh? If only the media were similarly interested in drawing inferences about actual, known cases where people attempted murder for partisan reasons — Bill Ayers springs to mind, for some reason.

And let's not overlook the irony of the same group of publications, several weeks later, insisting we shouldn't leap to conclusions about Nidal Hasan's motivations — never mind that they'd just done so in the Sparkman case, even before a suspect was known!

So, um, unsurprisingly:

On the surface it all seemed like a gruesome hate crime in a rural part of Kentucky with a history of disdain for the government: a census worker found bound with duct tape and hanging from a tree, the word "fed" scrawled across his chest.

But investigators noticed the foot-tall letters scrawled in black felt-tip pen looked like they could have been written by the victim himself, and they soon found out that he believed he had cancer, had two insurance policies worth $600,000, and had an adult son in need of money.

Investigators said Tuesday what they had been hinting at for weeks, that Bill Sparkman's hanging was a ruse to mask his suicide for a big insurance payout.