His ex-wife said that she believed he’d killed himself.
Webb’s ex-wife, Susan Bell, told reporters that she believed Webb had died by suicide. “The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide,” she said. According to Bell, Webb had been unhappy for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper. He had sold his house the week before his death because he was unable to afford the mortgage.
Here’s a story from a local paper which is the cite. Unless the details reported are purely made up, it seems like an actually pretty compelling set of facts leading to the suicide being genuine. I literally just learned this; until yesterday, I thought they killed him too.
There’s plenty of criminal behavior by the US government adjacent to Webb and his reporting without needing to exceed what’s actually true about it.