The Slatest

Aide to Missouri Politician Who Committed Suicide Is Found Dead in Apparent Suicide

Schweich in 2006.

Bronwen Roberts/AFP/Getty

An upsetting story out of Missouri: A former aide to a political figure named Tom Schweich—who died Feb. 26 in an apparent suicide—has been found dead in what is also thought to have been a suicide. Spence Jackson, 44, was the media director for Schweich, a former Bush administration official and state auditor who was “a frontrunner,” per the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to be the Republican party’s nominee in the 2016 Missouri governor’s race.

Schweich and Jackson were both recently involved in a strange scandal involving allegations of an “anti-Semitic ‘whisper campaign’” against Schweich perpetrated by fellow Missouri Republican John Hancock. Schweich was not, in fact, Jewish.