October 2, 2025 • 48 mins
In the third episode of the story of George Lincoln Rockwell's assassin, Rockwell finally dies and his assassin goes on trial.
Sources:
Schmaltz, William H. (2013). For Race And Nation: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. River's Bend Press
Simonelli, Frederick J. (1999). American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/25/shocking-neo-nazis-fly-swastika-salute-at-shopping-center-where-leader-was-killed/
https://www.fcnp.com/2017/08/25/nazis-swoop-arlington-mark-50th-anniversary-rockwell-shooting/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
On August twenty fifth, twenty seventeen, a man getting a
haircut at Tom's barber Shop in Arlington, Virginia saw something
strange outside in the parking lot. A man in a
short sleeve, collared shirt and a black tie was setting
up a small wreath on the sidewalk next to a
trash can. When this makeshift memorial was situated to his liking,
(00:30):
the man called his audience to attention. His brief remarks
were heard only by the assembly of six of his
fellow neo Nazis, one of whom was holding a comically
large Nazi flag. They held their right arms out in
a stiff armed Nazi salute as he bowed his head
for eighty eight seconds of silent reflection. This wasn't the
(00:53):
first time that a man in the barber's chair at
Tom's barber Shop had glanced up to see a Nazi
in the parking lot. As the man getting his haircut
walked over to the window to snap the only photograph
of this gathering, it was fifty years to the minute
since a barber at that same shop ran outside to
find George Lincoln Rockwell lying in a pool of his
(01:13):
own blood. This tiny gathering of white haired men in
short sleeved shirts had returned to the very spot where
the commander of the American Nazi Party had been murdered.
They were there to pay their respects. The men in
the parking lot in twenty seventeen weren't members of the
(01:34):
American Nazi Party, not anymore anyway, No one was. It
didn't exist anymore. But the man being saluted next to
that trash can was the leader of what it became
after another attempt at rebranding in the nineteen eighties, a
group called the New Order. And the man leading that
(01:58):
tiny band of Nazis in the parking lot twenty seventeen
was Martin Kerr, a gray haired man in his sixties.
He joined the American Nazi Party in high school after
reading an interview with George Lincoln Rockwell published in Playboy magazine,
but he was still a teenager when his hero died.
The remnants of the American Nazi Party were forced to
(02:19):
relocate to the Midwest decades ago, but this memorial service
in Virginia wasn't a great inconvenience for them. Their group
was already in the area in August of twenty seventeen.
Just two weekends earlier, they'd made an appearance at the
Unite the Right rally in nearby Charlottesville. That man in
the parking lot, the man who keeps George Lincoln Rockwell's
(02:42):
ashes in a white urn on an altar, told reporters
that if Rockwell could have seen those Nazis marching in Charlottesville,
he would have been pleased. On the fiftieth anniversary of
Rockwell's death, and in the immediate aftermath of a shocking
and deadly Nazi rally, George Lincoln Rockwall's successor told reporters
(03:03):
that Rockwell's legacy was more alive now than ever. I
am Molly Conger in This is Weird, Little Guys. On
(03:31):
the morning of the last day of his life, George
Lincoln Rockwell was up early. He stripped the sheets from
his bed and threw a bundle of laundry into the
back of the blue and white Chevy sedan on the driveway.
He spent most of the morning alone in his room
with the American Nazi Party barracks, a house he'd nicknamed
Hatemonger Hill. Several party members were downstairs making final preparations
(03:55):
for that afternoon's excursion into Washington, d C. After month
of internal struggle over the party's rebranding, the first issue
of a newspaper called White Power was hot off the presses,
and the Nazis storm troopers were going to try and
stir up some publicity by handing it out to the
National press outside the halls of Congress. All press is
(04:16):
good press, I guess, and the stunt was an effort
to generate interest in Rockwell's newest book, also called White Power.
But Rockwell had no plans to join his men on
the trip to DC that day. Perhaps he was anxious
to avoid another disorderly conduct arrest given his ongoing legal
troubles in Chicago. Maybe he was looking forward to an
(04:39):
opportunity to have the house to himself, to spend a
few quiet hours privately grieving the infant daughter he'd just
buried a few days earlier. Or maybe he'd just wanted
to do his laundry. He certainly didn't expect to die,
not on that day in particular. Anyway, A little before now,
(05:00):
he made the short drive down the hill to the
laundromat across the street. He'd already put a load of
dirty clothes into the machine when he realized he'd forgotten
something back at the house. If the assassin's aim had
been better, Rockwell never would have seen it coming. He
was looking behind him backing out of his parking spot
(05:20):
when the first shot came through the windshield. This one
only nicked him. In the instant between the first shot
and the second one. He probably looked up at the
rooftop searching for the shooter, and maybe he saw him
before the second shot pore a hole in his aorda.
(05:41):
His trademark corn cob pipe, the one he'd once poked
to the face of Martin Luther King Junior, fell from
his mouth as he crawled across the front seat of
the sedan, tumbling out the passenger side door onto the ground.
His still running car rolled slowly away as he bled
to death there in the parking lot. Inside the laundromat,
(06:02):
his dirty clothes were still sitting inside the washer, waiting
for George Lincoln Rockwell to return with the bleach. He
dedicated his life to making the world a wider place,
right up to the end. It was John Patler up
there on the roof of the Econawash Laundromat in Arlington, Virginia,
(06:24):
that Friday in August of nineteen sixty seven, John Patler
murdered George Lincoln Rockwell. That's the official story, and it's
the one I still believe. Piecing together the exact details, though,
has been a sort of nightmarish Nazi rashamon comparing these
different versions of the same event as told by too
(06:47):
many people with their own secrets to keep in what
has been probably a failed effort to try to sort
things out. I read the better part of two biographies
of Rockwell. I read the relevant passages from William Luther
Pears's biography. I read issues of Nazi newsletters like the
Rockwell Report, White Power, National Socialist World, National Socialist Observer,
(07:09):
Stormtrooper Magazine, and the World Union of National Socialist Bulletin.
I read old Stormfront posts. I read pseudonymously published open
letters by disgruntled neo Nazis. I read grainy old photocopies
of FBI files and stacks of memos to Jay Edyrhover.
I read most of the fifteen hundred page, four volume
(07:33):
appellate record in John Patler's criminal case. He did it,
but not everybody believes that.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Are you saying Petla didn't kill Rockwell.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Absolutely, I'm saying it, and I always have said it.
That's Frank Smith. Last week I opened the episode with
the strange tale a shootout in Maine between two men
on either side of this debate. In nineteen sixty eight,
Christopher Vidnyevitch drove to Maine and he got into a
(08:10):
gunfight with Frank Smith. Both men were members of the
American Nazi Party, and both men had testified at John
Patler's trial, Vidnyevitch for the prosecution and Smith for the defense.
And in March of nineteen sixty eight, a few months
after that trial ended, Smith believed that Vidnyevitch had been
(08:33):
sent to kill him to keep him from getting to
the truth of what really happened to George Lincoln Rockwell.
And that clip is from an interview Frank Smith gave
in two thousand and sixteen at the age of ninety five,
nearly fifty years after Rockwell was killed. He's sticking to
(08:55):
that story. Listeners with a keen ear might have noticed
that the man Frank Smith is talking to in that
interview as a South African accent. And if you've listened
to every episode of this show. It's a voice you've
heard before. That is South African neo Nazi Yan Lamprecht.
(09:18):
At some point earlier this year, during the three months
I spent writing about white supremacist terrorism in apartheid South Africa,
I played a portion of an interview Yan Lamprecht did
with the main subject of those episodes, a woman named
Monica Huggett Stone, and further proving my point that this
show is just one very long story told out of order.
(09:44):
In twenty sixteen, when Lamprecht got interested in the legacy
of George Lincoln Rockwell, it was Monica Huggett Stone who
put him in touch with Frank Smith because they know
each other.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
But I wanted to get people who knew him personally,
if anyone was still alive. And when Monica said you
knew him, I thought, wow, that is so lucky. I've
just got to speak to you.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
It's a small world, I guess. But we'll come back
to Frank's theories. If you read about John Patler's criminal trial,
you'll almost always see it mentioned that the bulk of
the evidence against him was circumstantial. And that's true, but
that word doesn't mean what the average person seems to
(10:37):
think it means. Circumstantial evidence isn't evidence that is less
good than its counterpart, direct evidence, although it is often
characterized that way, But in fact, most evidence is circumstantial,
and the most common kind of direct evidence, eyewitness testimony,
(10:58):
is shockingly unreliable. Imagine for a moment that you're a
juror if you're sitting on a jury in a criminal trial,
whatever it may be, what kind of evidence would you
like to see? What sort of evidence would make you
feel sure? Fingerprints, ballistics, cell phone data showing that a
(11:20):
defendant's phone was hanging off a tower near the crime
scene the night of the crime, some kind of so
called smoking gun, right, that would be ideal. But those
are all circumstantial evidence, because while they may present a fact, right,
it can be concretely stated that it is a fact
(11:42):
that this is evidence of a defendant's fingerprint on a gun,
or this evidence shows that their cell phone pinged off
this tower at this time. Those are facts, but what
they're being shown to prove is a fact that you
then have to infer. So you have to draw an
inference based on what is being shown to you. So
(12:05):
when you see circumstantial evidence that a defendant's DNA was
found on an object at the crime scene. You then
have to infer what that means, and what you could
infer that it means is that the person whose DNA
that was was there. In John Patler's case, there was
(12:26):
eyewitness testimony from people who saw him fleeing the scene.
But it's true, the strongest evidence in this case was circumstantial.
No one saw the shooter, not in the act anyway.
The sound of the gunshots in the parking lot brought
people out of the laundromat and other stores at the
(12:46):
shopping center, but no one actually witnessed the murder. No
one saw a man fire a gun, and Patler never confessed.
As far as I can tell, he has always maintained
his innocence. But the circumstantial evidence really stacks up here.
(13:08):
Within minutes of arriving on the scene after the shooting,
officers with the Arlington County Police had a description of
a man. Several witnesses told officers that when they came
outside after hearing the gunshots, they saw a man running
away from the shopping center, and within about a half
an hour of the shooting and a mile away, officers
(13:30):
saw a man who matched that description. The man was
wearing the clothes the witnesses had described, and he was
soaked in sweat, pacing anxiously back and forth at the
bus stop as he wipes dirt and sweat from his
face with a towel. Based on those eyewitness accounts and
the fact that the officer already knew who Patler was
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and that he was a member of the American Nazi Party,
he was taken into custody, but he didn't have a
gun on him. The officers who arrested him suspected that
if this is their shooter, he must have ditched the
gun somewhere along his route between the crime scene and
the bus stop, and that route would have taken him
(14:13):
through a nearby park. So officers searched until nightfall on Friday,
but it wasn't until Saturday morning that a gun was
found in a creek under a footbridge in the park.
The gun they found in that creek was a ballistic
match to the bullet in Rockwell's body, but it was
also a match to bullets that were dug out of
(14:34):
a tree at the edge of some property owned by
Patler's father in law. A witness testified to seeing Patler
shooting at that particular tree for target practice a month
before the murder. The serial number on the gun matched
a sales record for a local gun shop, and the
owner of the shop testified to the authenticity of records
(14:55):
showing that he'd sold the weapon to a Missus Robert A.
Lloyd Junior in nineteen six sixty two. Missus Robert A.
Lloyd Junior had purchased the gun for her son, Robert
Lloyd the Third. Robert Lloyd the Third is a member
of the American Nazi Party who testified that he'd let
Patler borrow the gun in nineteen sixty four, and when
(15:18):
he asked for it back, Patler told him it was stolen.
So just to recap what we have so far, people
who heard the gunshots walked outside to see a man
lying in a pool of blood and another man running away.
A man wearing the same outfit and matching those physical
characteristics described by the witnesses was found half an hour
(15:41):
later a mile away, soaked in sweat and very anxious.
The murder weapon was found in a creek under a
footbridge that he would have crossed on his route between
the crime scene and where officers encountered him, and the
last known location of that weapon was in his possession.
He claims to have lost it years earlier, but he
(16:04):
was seen using it just a month before the murder.
When the officers took Patler into custody. He wasn't just
wet from perspiration. His shoes were soaking wet, and his
pants were visibly wet from the knees down. Later examination
of his shoes found roofing tar on the soles. A
(16:28):
maintenance technician who worked for the property manager of the
shopping center testified at trial that due to blocked drains,
there was several inches of standing water on the roof
that day because of heavy rain the night before, anyone
who'd been climbing around on the roof that day would
have gotten very wet. The trial lasted three weeks, and
(16:54):
jurors were forced to come in on Saturdays to squeeze
in testimony from nearly one hundred witnesses. After the jury
was selected on November twenty seventh, each member of the
jury was driven home by a sheriff's deputy who watched
them while they packed a suitcase. For three weeks, those
jurors were driven to and from a motel by deputies.
(17:17):
They had no access to newspapers, magazines, radios, or TV.
Any communication with their families had to go through the
Sheriff's office. Now, if I hadn't read this transcript myself,
I would have trouble believing that a judge would send
a jury into deliberation at eight pm on a Friday night.
(17:40):
I've never heard of such a thing. That is a
wild choice. I mean, judges have very broad discretion when
it comes to pretty much anything that goes on in
their courtroom. But from what I've seen, there's a sort
of unspoken understanding that if it's already past last dinner time,
(18:01):
you should wait until the following morning to send the
jury out. But it was almost Christmas, and these jurors
had already endured a grueling three weeks of ten hour
days of testimony. So on Friday night they deliberated. They
deliberated for four hours, returning their verdict just after midnight.
(18:25):
And in those four hours, they didn't just decide his guilt.
The law changed a couple of years ago, but until
twenty twenty one, jurys in Virginia made sentencing recommendations as well.
At twelve twelve am, the jury foreman told the court
that John Patler should serve twenty years for the first
(18:46):
degree murder of George Lincoln Rockwell. At trial, his defense
was obviously that he didn't do it. Not only did
he not do it, he simply could not have done it.
His wife and father in law testified that he'd spent
the morning running errands with his wife, Alice, and their
(19:08):
two sons, ages one and three. Alice testified that between
ten am and eleven forty am, she and her husband
and their two children were in the car together running errands.
They went to the bank, and the post office and
an office supplies door, and they stopped off at Safeway
(19:28):
to pick up some chicken for dinner. The couple both
testified that immediately upon arriving home around a quarter to noon,
they got into an argument over how to appropriately discipline
their three year old son. When John Patler took the stand,
he said his wife had gotten angry with him after
he quote got a little rough with the toddler, and
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after some heated words were exchange, he stormed out of
the house and was just walking around the neighborhood. To
calm down. All three of the adults who lived in
that house testified that it was eleven forty five eleven
fifty something like that for sure when he walked out
of the house, and he didn't take the couple's only car.
(20:17):
He didn't have a driver's license, although he did know
how to drive, but he was on foot, and his
defense was that it just wasn't possible for him to
have walked the three miles from his house to that
shopping center in the time between when his wife last
saw him at eleven forty five and when Rockwell was
shot at noon. And if all of that is true,
(20:43):
I agree he could not have traveled over three miles
on foot in less than fifteen minutes. Obviously, the jury
was not convinced it was true, but it's hard to
say which part of it they do don't believe. Before
I found and read the transcripts, I thought it was
(21:06):
pretty possible that the entire story was just a fabrication.
You know. I'd saw these stories in the newspaper about
his wife talking about, well, we were together running errands,
and it's not that hard to believe that his wife
might lie for him. And in nineteen sixty seven. It's
not like there were digital bank records showing timestamped credit
card transactions or security camera footage from the bank. You
(21:30):
could just say stuff. But the transcript shows that the
defense did put on witnesses who testified to seeing the
Padlers at the various stops they made that morning on
their errands. A gas station attendant, a bank teller, a
postal clerk. They all saw the Pallors, but no one
could remember exactly when, and despite his father in law's
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dead certainty by the time he got on the witness
stand that the couple had arrived home at eleven to
four on the day of the murder. When detectives first
spoke to him on the day of the murder, his
initial statement put that time closer to eleven, which would
leave Patler nearly an hour to travel those three miles,
either by foot or by bus. The other angle hammered
(22:19):
by the defense at trial was how could Patler have
even found Rockwell that day? How could he have known
where the victim would be. For the defense, the argument
is just he couldn't have known, therefore he did not know.
Therefore he couldn't have been there and didn't do it
(22:40):
for members of the movement who aren't satisfied with the
official story. This is a huge question. Going to the
laundromat at noon on Friday wasn't planned, It wasn't part
of Rockwell's usual routine. He didn't even usually do his
own laundry, So how can an assassin have known where
(23:01):
to position himself to take that shot. The idea is
that Patler didn't act alone, that Rockwell's death was part
of a larger conspiracy, this grand act of betrayal, and
this idea still has some purchase in the movement Nazis
(23:23):
like Frank Colin, who you might recognize as the guy
behind the Nazi march that led to the Supreme Court
case National Socialist Party v. Skokie, Illinois. He believed that
Patler was involved in some unspecified way, but that he
wasn't the trigger man, and that ultimately he was just
the fall guy. James Mason, the author of Siege, told
(23:45):
one of Rockwell's biographers that he does think Patler pulled
the trigger, but only as a pawn in a larger conspiracy,
a conspiracy by whom he doesn't say. Carl Allen, the
leader of a group that had splintered from the Nazi
Party several years before Rockwell's death, was very sure that
(24:07):
Patler was innocent and was himself just another victim of
this Jewish conspiracy to kill Rockwell. Obviously, it makes perfect
sense that Rockwell's friends would believe that there was some
nebulous Jewish plot to kill their Nazi leader, but they're
always a little thin on the specifics. To this day, though,
(24:28):
there are young men in the white supremacist movement who
don't actually know anything specific about this period of history,
but they'll tell you with certainty that the Jews did it.
When it comes to conspiracy theories with named players, the
theory with a little heft to it, one that does
(24:50):
make you ask a follow up question. There is a
conspiracy that was much closer to home. This one's pretty straightforward.
Hatler knew where Rockwell would be because someone told him,
and the only people who could have told him were
the people who were home that morning at the Nazi
(25:12):
party barracks. Rockwell's mistress, Barbara von Getz, believed it. Frank
Smith believed it until he died in twenty twenty. Robert Surrey,
the head of the American Nazi Party, office in Dallas
used the party's mailing list to send every member a
copy of a letter he wrote outlining what he believed
to be the evidence proving it. A twenty eighteen memoir
(25:35):
by a former member calling himself Leon Dilios also advances
this theory. Floyd Fleming, George ware Hal Kaiser, all men
whose names I haven't bothered to tell you before, but
who were high ranking members of the Nazi Party. They
all believed that someone had masterminded this assassination, and pretty
(25:57):
much all of them were pointing the finger at one man,
Matias Cole. Now, like I said, as far as conspiracy
(26:20):
theories go, at least this one has a sort of
logic to it. Cole is often described as Rockwell's number
two man, but he wasn't actually officially deputy commander. Rockwell
had rather pointedly been keeping that position vacant. So even
(26:42):
though Cole was in every way except title, functioning in
secondest command, he didn't get to call himself that. At
the party's convention in June, Rockwell had extended an offer
of reconciliation to Carl Allen, and it's generally believed that
he intends to name Allan as his successor if he
(27:02):
agreed to return to the party, because he had successfully
led a splinter group, the White Party for several years
and that was impressive to Rockwell. That final meeting between
Rockwell and Carl Allen was allegedly scheduled to take place
at the end of August, just a few days after
Rockwell died, and Rockwell's body was barely cold before Cole
(27:26):
stepped up to take control of the party. One former
member recounted to Rockwell's biographer a screaming argument between Rockwell
and Cole the night before the murder, and claims that
Rockwell said he was going to expel him from the
party over this ongoing disagreement about whether Rockwell was betraying
(27:47):
Hitler's legacy by ditching the swastika and focusing on a
message of white power rather than aryan superiority. When you're
digging around in this conspiracy muck, you'll often see claims
that no one knew that Rockwell planned to go to
the laundromat that day until just as he was leaving
the house, which really narrows the window of time during
(28:11):
which this conspiracy could have taken place. Right It just
leaves mere minutes for this possible phone call to the
shooter to have happened. But it turns out Matias Cole
did know, and he'd known for hours because Rockwell's laundry
was already in the back seat of the car when
Cole took the car out that morning to run errands.
(28:35):
So it's intriguing, it's got a little meat to it.
Matia's coal was unhappy with the direction the party was going,
and he had been very vocal about that for a year.
Multiple sources reported that Cole was likely to be pushed
out of favor or even out of the party entirely
(28:55):
in the very near future, so he had a lot
to gain if Rockwell died. But if motive is enough evidence,
thousands of people must have shot George Lincoln Rockwell because
a lot of people had a reason to want him dead.
One of Rockwall's biographers, Frederick Simonelli, interviewed several former members,
(29:20):
some of whom shared these theories with him, and he
does give those theories some ink in his book, but
he buries an important caveat in the footnotes writing quote.
While Arlington police and prosecutors were aware of a growing
hostility between Rockwell, and Coal in the months before Rockwell's assassination,
(29:41):
they inexplicably did nothing to pursue that issue. In fairness, however,
it must be kept in mind that the fractious radical
right is fraught with feuds and vendettas, with the interactants
alternating frequently between ally and enemy. The American Nazi Party
was no ea exception, and He's right. These Nazi groups
(30:06):
are always having these little power struggles. Everybody wants to
be the Hitler, so this kind of feud isn't unique,
and it doesn't even really stand out as a particularly
egregious one. Overall, the theory of some last minute call
from inside the house to John Patler just doesn't work
(30:27):
for me. First of all, they had someone testify to
phone records from the house that day, and there's no
mention of any calls in the morning. Is it possible
that Matius Cole made contact with the assassin while he
was out running errands all morning? I guess so, But
there's nothing more than insinuation and possibility here. The more
(30:51):
likely scenario is really boring. No one called John Patler
to alert him to Rockwell's movements. He probably didn't know
that Rockwell would be at the laundromat. He didn't actually
even need to know that Rockwell would be at the
laundromat to have found him there. It didn't make sense
(31:14):
to me at first looking at this area on Google
Maps today, But the streetscape of Arlington, Virginia was very
different in nineteen sixty seven. It was significantly less developed,
and in the sixties, if you were standing outside the
Nazi Party barracks, you could actually see this shopping center.
(31:37):
It was just down the hill and across the street.
So if Patler had gone to the house looking for Rockwell,
he may have seen him leave, or he could have
actually spotted the car already in the parking lot at
the shopping center, which he would have had to pass
if he was going to the house. All of the
men living at the American Nazi Party Barracks only had
(32:00):
access to a single working vehicle, and it was a
pretty distinctive looking, older blue and white car, So if
we saw it in the parking lot, No, there's far
less intrigue in this explanation, but it's a very simple
one that I've never seen addressed in any of these
(32:21):
accusations against coal. Overall, reading that trial transcript. I was
plagued with this particular anxiety that I always feel when
I'm sitting through a trial in person. It's definitely worse
in person, because they'll put you in jail if you
shout in a courtroom. But I'm constantly fighting back this
(32:45):
urge to interject. I just want to raise my hand
and ask a question, because they're not asking the questions
I would like answered. Sometimes it's because they can't. Right,
A trial is meant to answer one question, did this
defendant commit this crime? You can't just go probing around
(33:06):
asking witnesses about anything you want and potentially unrelated matters,
And sometimes they just don't want to ask those questions.
A prosecutor comes into a trial with a particular theory
of the case, and they're trying to solicit testimony that
convinces the jury of that particular version of events because
(33:29):
it is legally sound in their mind and likely to
result in a conviction. So anything else, even more complicated
versions of the truth, it just muddies the water and
confuses the jury. So I understand what I'm looking at
as I read this, but it doesn't mean I have
(33:50):
to like it. I wish they'd gotten more on the
record about exactly where everyone was at particular moments in
time of days leading up to the shooting and what
their phone records look like. Not because I think anyone
called John Paller. I'm just nosy inside the courtroom. Though
(34:13):
conspiracy theories aren't much use in a criminal appeal. Once
he was convicted, Patler could only argue that the trial
had been legally flawed in some specific way, and for
years he did. He appealed his conviction to the Virginia
Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court of Virginia.
(34:33):
When both of those courts upheld his conviction, he tried
appealing to the Supreme Court, but they declined to hear
his case in nineteen seventy two. So after that he
filed a rid of habeas corpus in the Federal Court
in the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging that several decisions
made by the trial court had violated his constitutional rights
standard fair And when he lost that, he appealed that
(34:56):
decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and he
lost again. So in December of nineteen sixty seven, at
that original trial in Arlington. The jury found him guilty
and sentenced him to twenty years, and at every stage
of this appeals process, every court from Arlington County up
(35:18):
to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is upholding that
conviction and that sentence. But he really only ever served
about five He was released on bond in February of
nineteen sixty eight, so about three months after his conviction
when he filed his first criminal appeal, and he remained
(35:40):
out on bond for three years until the Virginia Supreme
Court ultimately upheld the conviction of the end of nineteen seventy,
So he's three courts deep at this point and still guilty,
and by the fall of nineteen seventy newspaper stories about
Paller usually say he's changed his ways. One story published
(36:02):
shortly before oral argument before the Virginia Supreme Court quoted
him saying, it seems to shock people that I've changed
from a hater of blacks to a lover of them.
But it's really not all that strange. I finally realized
just how close I am to blacks and browns and
other depressed people. I'm Greek, I have dark eyes, dark hair,
(36:26):
and here in America. That can work against you. You
can grow up like the black to think you just
don't fit in. That's the reason I became a Nazi.
I hated my name, I hated my nationality, and I
wanted to strike back at my hate. The Nazis seemed
like a good place to do it.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Special form of suicide. I guess the Nazis were out
to eliminate alien stock. I was out to eliminate my
alien past, so I put on the swastika. But now
I know that all of them, myself too, were sick.
He doesn't have the language quite right, but it was
(37:05):
nineteen seventy But other than that, it sounds fairly genuine.
I mean, I hope it was true. It's also the
kind of thing you might say if you're hoping the
State Supreme Court sees it right before they hear oral
argument in your appeal. But I believe people can change.
(37:26):
In June of nineteen seventy two, he'd been in jail
for over a year and the Supreme Court had declined
to hear his case, and he told the Washington Daily
News that month that he was a changed man. He's
learning and growing in prison. He just finished reading Charles
Reich's The Greening of America and Jermaine Greer's The Female Eunuch.
He was learning about feminism and counterculture, the kinds of
(37:50):
things he spent the nineteen sixties trying to destroy. He
told the reporter quote, I was committing a special form
of suicide, trying to eliminate the things I cant hated,
namely me noticed that is an almost identical quote given
to a different reporter two years later. I don't know
(38:10):
if that means it's from the heart or it was rehearsed,
but it's a remarkably self aware assessment, and I think
it's something that is true on some level for many
of the men he marched within the sixties and their
counterparts today. I want to believe that he believed it,
but you can't know what's in a man's heart. In
(38:45):
nineteen seventy four, his wife, Alice, divorced him. He'd been
in prison for four years and it wasn't entirely clear
when he might get out. One of his sons would
later write that after the age of six or seven,
he didn't see as far for decades, and that sort
of lines up with this timeline. Alice must have stopped
taking the boys to visit sometime around here, and in
(39:10):
nineteen seventy four he finally exhausted all possible avenues for appeal.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision of
the federal court in Virginia that had upheld his conviction
the year prior. But it wasn't all bad news in
nineteen seventy four. I mean, his wife left him, and
(39:31):
he has no more appeals, and he hasn't seen his
children in a year. But in the fall of nineteen
seventy four, he was allowed to leave prison during the
day to attend art classes at nearby Radford University, although
it was still just called Radford College at the time.
He attended classes there for an entire school year. It
(39:52):
appears before administrators of the college realized that the school
was participating in the study release program. In August of
nineteen seventy five, the Roanoke Times ran the headline College
denies knowing student was assassin, although court records do show
that he didn't actually legally change his name back to
(40:14):
Patzalos until nineteen eighty eight. He'd reverted back to using
his birth name in interviews around nineteen seventy, and he
apparently gave that name when he enrolled at the college.
I guess things were different in the seventies. You could
just tell the registrar a fake name and they wouldn't
notice that your address was prison. At the time the
(40:38):
story broke, officials from the Department of Corrections said that
the study Release program had been operating for years at
state colleges, universities, and community colleges all over Virginia without incident,
and according to the program guidelines, participating schools were notified
about students enrolling through the program, and only people very
(40:58):
close to their parole deay were eligible to participate. Inmates
participating in the program had to meet strict guidelines in
order to qualify, although the paper doesn't say really what
those were, but the administrators at Radford College were adamant.
They said nobody had told them that there was a
murderer taking drawing classes on campus. There was a lot
(41:25):
of publicity around this at the time, and the college
responded to the public embarrassment by announcing that until they
could conduct a thorough review of all of their policies,
they were just going to enact a blanket ban on
all inmates, parolees, and people on probation, and that seems
like a huge overreaction. People on probation and parole are
(41:48):
out in the world, they've served their time, and they've
been released. It seems like a clear cut case of
discrimination to prevent them from attending a state funded school.
I think the same could be said about banning current
inmates from the Study Release program, but the legal argument
there is different than it was the seventies. But this
(42:11):
put Patler personally in a pretty bad position, not just
because he was getting close to completing his degree, he
was also close to his parole date, but the parole
board had indicated that if he wasn't enrolled in school,
that would count against him in deciding whether or not
he would be released. The ACLU stepped in quickly and
(42:35):
the college backs down. Patler couldn't roll, but he couldn't
live in a dorm. The college would continue to accept
students from the Study Release program, but incarcerated students would
face stiffer regulations. As a parolee, Patler was just bored
from dormitories, but incarcerated students wouldn't be allowed to enter
(42:56):
dormitories or the student center. They were restricted to a
specific dining hall and were banned from participating in extracurricular activities.
But with his enrollment assured, Patler was granted parole and
he was released from prison in August of nineteen seventy five.
He had served less than five years since he actually
(43:19):
began serving that twenty year sentence. In December of nineteen seventy,
after he lost his appeal, the ACLU announced their intention
to sue the school over Patler's right to live in
a dormitory, but by the end of nineteen seventy five,
a spokesman for the ACLU announced, somewhat cryptically, quote, we
(43:39):
have decided not to pursue it any further. The matter
is closed. In later years, Radford College refused to disclose
any records or even comment on Patler's time at the school,
and accounts vary as to whether he even enrolled in
the spring semester, but by the summer of nineteen seventy
six he definitely wasn't in school anymore. I think the
(44:04):
ACLU probably dropped their threat to sue because they weren't
sure Patler would be a good plaintiff. If they couldn't
guarantee he was going to stay enrolled in school. He
has no standing and there's no reason to sue. A
few months after he stopped going to school, he shows
(44:24):
back up in the newspaper. This one knocked me on
my ass. I mean, I'm usually pretty prepared for a
strange twist. I'm literally looking for the stuff that makes
these guys weird, right, I'm on the hunt for it.
But clicking through newspaper archives is tedious work.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
You know.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
You just pick a keyword and then you click through
hundreds of pages of possible matches. Chronologically. A lot of
the results are just the same story. They got picked
up by twenty different newspapers. But nothing could have prepared
me for the whiplash I experienced when I'm just halfheartedly
clicking through mountains of wire stories I've already read, and
(45:08):
suddenly I'm confronted with the headline Rockwell killer arrested after
alleged orgy. Pardon me, arrested where and doing?
Speaker 1 (45:21):
What?
Speaker 2 (45:23):
You heard me? Rockwell killer arrested after alleged orgy. The
body of that article goes on to specify that it
was a nude orgy. I didn't know you needed to specify,
but it does okay. I know that this is just
(45:45):
cruel at this point, Like this piece of the story
isn't even that important. It's just such a silly, little
shocking piece that I have accidentally ended up teasing you
with repeatedly. It's just a weird bump in the road
that I had to write down the second I started
writing the script for the first episode. And the problem is,
(46:08):
I'm making this show in real time. There's no planning ahead,
there's no backlog, there's no writing all of the parts
before the first one comes out. The episode you hear
on a Thursday was recorded Monday morning and edited by
Wednesday afternoon. And I never know where I'm going until
I get there.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
I spend all week reading and researching and making my
little timelines and writing my little biography of side characters
and translating Yugoslavian war tribunal records, and you know how,
I get distracted. And then I sit down and start writing.
And I probably shouldn't admit this, but I don't make
(46:49):
an outline, and I'm not in control of where the
story goes once I start writing. So sometimes the sun
is coming up on a Monday morning, and I realized
that I accidentally stopped writingading around three AM because I
got distracted by something very exciting but entirely irrelevant. And
my very patient editor is waiting on an audio file
and I haven't even started recording yet. I think I'm
(47:13):
going to end up having to spend my day off
trying to figure out why Rockwell's number one guy in
Dallas was called to testify in front of the Warren Commission. So,
for Rory's sake, because I'm already late and this is
already long, I have to leave you in nineteen seventy six,
(47:34):
but I'm going to try and make it up to you.
I think I guess I shouldn't make promises, but I'm
pretty sure we can arrange for the second half of
part three to come out before next week. So think
of this as part three point one until then. For
(47:55):
the love of God, if you're going to break into
a guy's house, don't take your pants off there. Weird
(48:16):
Little Guys is a production of fool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our
executive producers are Sophie Letterman, and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Ory Gagan. If the
music was composed by Brad Dickard, you can email me
at Wirdly Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will
definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it as
nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
(48:38):
with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just
don't post anything that's going to make you one of
my weird Little guys want of time for it.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
On August twenty fifth, twenty seventeen, a man getting a
haircut at Tom's barber Shop in Arlington, Virginia saw something
strange outside in the parking lot. A man in a
short sleeve, collared shirt and a black tie was setting
up a small wreath on the sidewalk next to a
trash can. When this makeshift memorial was situated to his liking,
(00:30):
the man called his audience to attention. His brief remarks
were heard only by the assembly of six of his
fellow neo Nazis, one of whom was holding a comically
large Nazi flag. They held their right arms out in
a stiff armed Nazi salute as he bowed his head
for eighty eight seconds of silent reflection. This wasn't the
(00:53):
first time that a man in the barber's chair at
Tom's barber Shop had glanced up to see a Nazi
in the parking lot. As the man getting his haircut
walked over to the window to snap the only photograph
of this gathering, it was fifty years to the minute
since a barber at that same shop ran outside to
find George Lincoln Rockwell lying in a pool of his
(01:13):
own blood. This tiny gathering of white haired men in
short sleeved shirts had returned to the very spot where
the commander of the American Nazi Party had been murdered.
They were there to pay their respects. The men in
the parking lot in twenty seventeen weren't members of the
(01:34):
American Nazi Party, not anymore anyway, No one was. It
didn't exist anymore. But the man being saluted next to
that trash can was the leader of what it became
after another attempt at rebranding in the nineteen eighties, a
group called the New Order. And the man leading that
(01:58):
tiny band of Nazis in the parking lot twenty seventeen
was Martin Kerr, a gray haired man in his sixties.
He joined the American Nazi Party in high school after
reading an interview with George Lincoln Rockwell published in Playboy magazine,
but he was still a teenager when his hero died.
The remnants of the American Nazi Party were forced to
(02:19):
relocate to the Midwest decades ago, but this memorial service
in Virginia wasn't a great inconvenience for them. Their group
was already in the area in August of twenty seventeen.
Just two weekends earlier, they'd made an appearance at the
Unite the Right rally in nearby Charlottesville. That man in
the parking lot, the man who keeps George Lincoln Rockwell's
(02:42):
ashes in a white urn on an altar, told reporters
that if Rockwell could have seen those Nazis marching in Charlottesville,
he would have been pleased. On the fiftieth anniversary of
Rockwell's death, and in the immediate aftermath of a shocking
and deadly Nazi rally, George Lincoln Rockwall's successor told reporters
(03:03):
that Rockwell's legacy was more alive now than ever. I
am Molly Conger in This is Weird, Little Guys. On
(03:31):
the morning of the last day of his life, George
Lincoln Rockwell was up early. He stripped the sheets from
his bed and threw a bundle of laundry into the
back of the blue and white Chevy sedan on the driveway.
He spent most of the morning alone in his room
with the American Nazi Party barracks, a house he'd nicknamed
Hatemonger Hill. Several party members were downstairs making final preparations
(03:55):
for that afternoon's excursion into Washington, d C. After month
of internal struggle over the party's rebranding, the first issue
of a newspaper called White Power was hot off the presses,
and the Nazis storm troopers were going to try and
stir up some publicity by handing it out to the
National press outside the halls of Congress. All press is
(04:16):
good press, I guess, and the stunt was an effort
to generate interest in Rockwell's newest book, also called White Power.
But Rockwell had no plans to join his men on
the trip to DC that day. Perhaps he was anxious
to avoid another disorderly conduct arrest given his ongoing legal
troubles in Chicago. Maybe he was looking forward to an
(04:39):
opportunity to have the house to himself, to spend a
few quiet hours privately grieving the infant daughter he'd just
buried a few days earlier. Or maybe he'd just wanted
to do his laundry. He certainly didn't expect to die,
not on that day in particular. Anyway, A little before now,
(05:00):
he made the short drive down the hill to the
laundromat across the street. He'd already put a load of
dirty clothes into the machine when he realized he'd forgotten
something back at the house. If the assassin's aim had
been better, Rockwell never would have seen it coming. He
was looking behind him backing out of his parking spot
(05:20):
when the first shot came through the windshield. This one
only nicked him. In the instant between the first shot
and the second one. He probably looked up at the
rooftop searching for the shooter, and maybe he saw him
before the second shot pore a hole in his aorda.
(05:41):
His trademark corn cob pipe, the one he'd once poked
to the face of Martin Luther King Junior, fell from
his mouth as he crawled across the front seat of
the sedan, tumbling out the passenger side door onto the ground.
His still running car rolled slowly away as he bled
to death there in the parking lot. Inside the laundromat,
(06:02):
his dirty clothes were still sitting inside the washer, waiting
for George Lincoln Rockwell to return with the bleach. He
dedicated his life to making the world a wider place,
right up to the end. It was John Patler up
there on the roof of the Econawash Laundromat in Arlington, Virginia,
(06:24):
that Friday in August of nineteen sixty seven, John Patler
murdered George Lincoln Rockwell. That's the official story, and it's
the one I still believe. Piecing together the exact details, though,
has been a sort of nightmarish Nazi rashamon comparing these
different versions of the same event as told by too
(06:47):
many people with their own secrets to keep in what
has been probably a failed effort to try to sort
things out. I read the better part of two biographies
of Rockwell. I read the relevant passages from William Luther
Pears's biography. I read issues of Nazi newsletters like the
Rockwell Report, White Power, National Socialist World, National Socialist Observer,
(07:09):
Stormtrooper Magazine, and the World Union of National Socialist Bulletin.
I read old Stormfront posts. I read pseudonymously published open
letters by disgruntled neo Nazis. I read grainy old photocopies
of FBI files and stacks of memos to Jay Edyrhover.
I read most of the fifteen hundred page, four volume
(07:33):
appellate record in John Patler's criminal case. He did it,
but not everybody believes that.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Are you saying Petla didn't kill Rockwell.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Absolutely, I'm saying it, and I always have said it.
That's Frank Smith. Last week I opened the episode with
the strange tale a shootout in Maine between two men
on either side of this debate. In nineteen sixty eight,
Christopher Vidnyevitch drove to Maine and he got into a
(08:10):
gunfight with Frank Smith. Both men were members of the
American Nazi Party, and both men had testified at John
Patler's trial, Vidnyevitch for the prosecution and Smith for the defense.
And in March of nineteen sixty eight, a few months
after that trial ended, Smith believed that Vidnyevitch had been
(08:33):
sent to kill him to keep him from getting to
the truth of what really happened to George Lincoln Rockwell.
And that clip is from an interview Frank Smith gave
in two thousand and sixteen at the age of ninety five,
nearly fifty years after Rockwell was killed. He's sticking to
(08:55):
that story. Listeners with a keen ear might have noticed
that the man Frank Smith is talking to in that
interview as a South African accent. And if you've listened
to every episode of this show. It's a voice you've
heard before. That is South African neo Nazi Yan Lamprecht.
(09:18):
At some point earlier this year, during the three months
I spent writing about white supremacist terrorism in apartheid South Africa,
I played a portion of an interview Yan Lamprecht did
with the main subject of those episodes, a woman named
Monica Huggett Stone, and further proving my point that this
show is just one very long story told out of order.
(09:44):
In twenty sixteen, when Lamprecht got interested in the legacy
of George Lincoln Rockwell, it was Monica Huggett Stone who
put him in touch with Frank Smith because they know
each other.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
But I wanted to get people who knew him personally,
if anyone was still alive. And when Monica said you
knew him, I thought, wow, that is so lucky. I've
just got to speak to you.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
It's a small world, I guess. But we'll come back
to Frank's theories. If you read about John Patler's criminal trial,
you'll almost always see it mentioned that the bulk of
the evidence against him was circumstantial. And that's true, but
that word doesn't mean what the average person seems to
(10:37):
think it means. Circumstantial evidence isn't evidence that is less
good than its counterpart, direct evidence, although it is often
characterized that way, But in fact, most evidence is circumstantial,
and the most common kind of direct evidence, eyewitness testimony,
(10:58):
is shockingly unreliable. Imagine for a moment that you're a
juror if you're sitting on a jury in a criminal trial,
whatever it may be, what kind of evidence would you
like to see? What sort of evidence would make you
feel sure? Fingerprints, ballistics, cell phone data showing that a
(11:20):
defendant's phone was hanging off a tower near the crime
scene the night of the crime, some kind of so
called smoking gun, right, that would be ideal. But those
are all circumstantial evidence, because while they may present a fact, right,
it can be concretely stated that it is a fact
(11:42):
that this is evidence of a defendant's fingerprint on a gun,
or this evidence shows that their cell phone pinged off
this tower at this time. Those are facts, but what
they're being shown to prove is a fact that you
then have to infer. So you have to draw an
inference based on what is being shown to you. So
(12:05):
when you see circumstantial evidence that a defendant's DNA was
found on an object at the crime scene. You then
have to infer what that means, and what you could
infer that it means is that the person whose DNA
that was was there. In John Patler's case, there was
(12:26):
eyewitness testimony from people who saw him fleeing the scene.
But it's true, the strongest evidence in this case was circumstantial.
No one saw the shooter, not in the act anyway.
The sound of the gunshots in the parking lot brought
people out of the laundromat and other stores at the
(12:46):
shopping center, but no one actually witnessed the murder. No
one saw a man fire a gun, and Patler never confessed.
As far as I can tell, he has always maintained
his innocence. But the circumstantial evidence really stacks up here.
(13:08):
Within minutes of arriving on the scene after the shooting,
officers with the Arlington County Police had a description of
a man. Several witnesses told officers that when they came
outside after hearing the gunshots, they saw a man running
away from the shopping center, and within about a half
an hour of the shooting and a mile away, officers
(13:30):
saw a man who matched that description. The man was
wearing the clothes the witnesses had described, and he was
soaked in sweat, pacing anxiously back and forth at the
bus stop as he wipes dirt and sweat from his
face with a towel. Based on those eyewitness accounts and
the fact that the officer already knew who Patler was
(13:51):
and that he was a member of the American Nazi Party,
he was taken into custody, but he didn't have a
gun on him. The officers who arrested him suspected that
if this is their shooter, he must have ditched the
gun somewhere along his route between the crime scene and
the bus stop, and that route would have taken him
(14:13):
through a nearby park. So officers searched until nightfall on Friday,
but it wasn't until Saturday morning that a gun was
found in a creek under a footbridge in the park.
The gun they found in that creek was a ballistic
match to the bullet in Rockwell's body, but it was
also a match to bullets that were dug out of
(14:34):
a tree at the edge of some property owned by
Patler's father in law. A witness testified to seeing Patler
shooting at that particular tree for target practice a month
before the murder. The serial number on the gun matched
a sales record for a local gun shop, and the
owner of the shop testified to the authenticity of records
(14:55):
showing that he'd sold the weapon to a Missus Robert A.
Lloyd Junior in nineteen six sixty two. Missus Robert A.
Lloyd Junior had purchased the gun for her son, Robert
Lloyd the Third. Robert Lloyd the Third is a member
of the American Nazi Party who testified that he'd let
Patler borrow the gun in nineteen sixty four, and when
(15:18):
he asked for it back, Patler told him it was stolen.
So just to recap what we have so far, people
who heard the gunshots walked outside to see a man
lying in a pool of blood and another man running away.
A man wearing the same outfit and matching those physical
characteristics described by the witnesses was found half an hour
(15:41):
later a mile away, soaked in sweat and very anxious.
The murder weapon was found in a creek under a
footbridge that he would have crossed on his route between
the crime scene and where officers encountered him, and the
last known location of that weapon was in his possession.
He claims to have lost it years earlier, but he
(16:04):
was seen using it just a month before the murder.
When the officers took Patler into custody. He wasn't just
wet from perspiration. His shoes were soaking wet, and his
pants were visibly wet from the knees down. Later examination
of his shoes found roofing tar on the soles. A
(16:28):
maintenance technician who worked for the property manager of the
shopping center testified at trial that due to blocked drains,
there was several inches of standing water on the roof
that day because of heavy rain the night before, anyone
who'd been climbing around on the roof that day would
have gotten very wet. The trial lasted three weeks, and
(16:54):
jurors were forced to come in on Saturdays to squeeze
in testimony from nearly one hundred witnesses. After the jury
was selected on November twenty seventh, each member of the
jury was driven home by a sheriff's deputy who watched
them while they packed a suitcase. For three weeks, those
jurors were driven to and from a motel by deputies.
(17:17):
They had no access to newspapers, magazines, radios, or TV.
Any communication with their families had to go through the
Sheriff's office. Now, if I hadn't read this transcript myself,
I would have trouble believing that a judge would send
a jury into deliberation at eight pm on a Friday night.
(17:40):
I've never heard of such a thing. That is a
wild choice. I mean, judges have very broad discretion when
it comes to pretty much anything that goes on in
their courtroom. But from what I've seen, there's a sort
of unspoken understanding that if it's already past last dinner time,
(18:01):
you should wait until the following morning to send the
jury out. But it was almost Christmas, and these jurors
had already endured a grueling three weeks of ten hour
days of testimony. So on Friday night they deliberated. They
deliberated for four hours, returning their verdict just after midnight.
(18:25):
And in those four hours, they didn't just decide his guilt.
The law changed a couple of years ago, but until
twenty twenty one, jurys in Virginia made sentencing recommendations as well.
At twelve twelve am, the jury foreman told the court
that John Patler should serve twenty years for the first
(18:46):
degree murder of George Lincoln Rockwell. At trial, his defense
was obviously that he didn't do it. Not only did
he not do it, he simply could not have done it.
His wife and father in law testified that he'd spent
the morning running errands with his wife, Alice, and their
(19:08):
two sons, ages one and three. Alice testified that between
ten am and eleven forty am, she and her husband
and their two children were in the car together running errands.
They went to the bank, and the post office and
an office supplies door, and they stopped off at Safeway
(19:28):
to pick up some chicken for dinner. The couple both
testified that immediately upon arriving home around a quarter to noon,
they got into an argument over how to appropriately discipline
their three year old son. When John Patler took the stand,
he said his wife had gotten angry with him after
he quote got a little rough with the toddler, and
(19:53):
after some heated words were exchange, he stormed out of
the house and was just walking around the neighborhood. To
calm down. All three of the adults who lived in
that house testified that it was eleven forty five eleven
fifty something like that for sure when he walked out
of the house, and he didn't take the couple's only car.
(20:17):
He didn't have a driver's license, although he did know
how to drive, but he was on foot, and his
defense was that it just wasn't possible for him to
have walked the three miles from his house to that
shopping center in the time between when his wife last
saw him at eleven forty five and when Rockwell was
shot at noon. And if all of that is true,
(20:43):
I agree he could not have traveled over three miles
on foot in less than fifteen minutes. Obviously, the jury
was not convinced it was true, but it's hard to
say which part of it they do don't believe. Before
I found and read the transcripts, I thought it was
(21:06):
pretty possible that the entire story was just a fabrication.
You know. I'd saw these stories in the newspaper about
his wife talking about, well, we were together running errands,
and it's not that hard to believe that his wife
might lie for him. And in nineteen sixty seven. It's
not like there were digital bank records showing timestamped credit
card transactions or security camera footage from the bank. You
(21:30):
could just say stuff. But the transcript shows that the
defense did put on witnesses who testified to seeing the
Padlers at the various stops they made that morning on
their errands. A gas station attendant, a bank teller, a
postal clerk. They all saw the Pallors, but no one
could remember exactly when, and despite his father in law's
(21:55):
dead certainty by the time he got on the witness
stand that the couple had arrived home at eleven to
four on the day of the murder. When detectives first
spoke to him on the day of the murder, his
initial statement put that time closer to eleven, which would
leave Patler nearly an hour to travel those three miles,
either by foot or by bus. The other angle hammered
(22:19):
by the defense at trial was how could Patler have
even found Rockwell that day? How could he have known
where the victim would be. For the defense, the argument
is just he couldn't have known, therefore he did not know.
Therefore he couldn't have been there and didn't do it
(22:40):
for members of the movement who aren't satisfied with the
official story. This is a huge question. Going to the
laundromat at noon on Friday wasn't planned, It wasn't part
of Rockwell's usual routine. He didn't even usually do his
own laundry, So how can an assassin have known where
(23:01):
to position himself to take that shot. The idea is
that Patler didn't act alone, that Rockwell's death was part
of a larger conspiracy, this grand act of betrayal, and
this idea still has some purchase in the movement Nazis
(23:23):
like Frank Colin, who you might recognize as the guy
behind the Nazi march that led to the Supreme Court
case National Socialist Party v. Skokie, Illinois. He believed that
Patler was involved in some unspecified way, but that he
wasn't the trigger man, and that ultimately he was just
the fall guy. James Mason, the author of Siege, told
(23:45):
one of Rockwell's biographers that he does think Patler pulled
the trigger, but only as a pawn in a larger conspiracy,
a conspiracy by whom he doesn't say. Carl Allen, the
leader of a group that had splintered from the Nazi
Party several years before Rockwell's death, was very sure that
(24:07):
Patler was innocent and was himself just another victim of
this Jewish conspiracy to kill Rockwell. Obviously, it makes perfect
sense that Rockwell's friends would believe that there was some
nebulous Jewish plot to kill their Nazi leader, but they're
always a little thin on the specifics. To this day, though,
(24:28):
there are young men in the white supremacist movement who
don't actually know anything specific about this period of history,
but they'll tell you with certainty that the Jews did it.
When it comes to conspiracy theories with named players, the
theory with a little heft to it, one that does
(24:50):
make you ask a follow up question. There is a
conspiracy that was much closer to home. This one's pretty straightforward.
Hatler knew where Rockwell would be because someone told him,
and the only people who could have told him were
the people who were home that morning at the Nazi
(25:12):
party barracks. Rockwell's mistress, Barbara von Getz, believed it. Frank
Smith believed it until he died in twenty twenty. Robert Surrey,
the head of the American Nazi Party, office in Dallas
used the party's mailing list to send every member a
copy of a letter he wrote outlining what he believed
to be the evidence proving it. A twenty eighteen memoir
(25:35):
by a former member calling himself Leon Dilios also advances
this theory. Floyd Fleming, George ware Hal Kaiser, all men
whose names I haven't bothered to tell you before, but
who were high ranking members of the Nazi Party. They
all believed that someone had masterminded this assassination, and pretty
(25:57):
much all of them were pointing the finger at one man,
Matias Cole. Now, like I said, as far as conspiracy
(26:20):
theories go, at least this one has a sort of
logic to it. Cole is often described as Rockwell's number
two man, but he wasn't actually officially deputy commander. Rockwell
had rather pointedly been keeping that position vacant. So even
(26:42):
though Cole was in every way except title, functioning in
secondest command, he didn't get to call himself that. At
the party's convention in June, Rockwell had extended an offer
of reconciliation to Carl Allen, and it's generally believed that
he intends to name Allan as his successor if he
(27:02):
agreed to return to the party, because he had successfully
led a splinter group, the White Party for several years
and that was impressive to Rockwell. That final meeting between
Rockwell and Carl Allen was allegedly scheduled to take place
at the end of August, just a few days after
Rockwell died, and Rockwell's body was barely cold before Cole
(27:26):
stepped up to take control of the party. One former
member recounted to Rockwell's biographer a screaming argument between Rockwell
and Cole the night before the murder, and claims that
Rockwell said he was going to expel him from the
party over this ongoing disagreement about whether Rockwell was betraying
(27:47):
Hitler's legacy by ditching the swastika and focusing on a
message of white power rather than aryan superiority. When you're
digging around in this conspiracy muck, you'll often see claims
that no one knew that Rockwell planned to go to
the laundromat that day until just as he was leaving
the house, which really narrows the window of time during
(28:11):
which this conspiracy could have taken place. Right It just
leaves mere minutes for this possible phone call to the
shooter to have happened. But it turns out Matias Cole
did know, and he'd known for hours because Rockwell's laundry
was already in the back seat of the car when
Cole took the car out that morning to run errands.
(28:35):
So it's intriguing, it's got a little meat to it.
Matia's coal was unhappy with the direction the party was going,
and he had been very vocal about that for a year.
Multiple sources reported that Cole was likely to be pushed
out of favor or even out of the party entirely
(28:55):
in the very near future, so he had a lot
to gain if Rockwell died. But if motive is enough evidence,
thousands of people must have shot George Lincoln Rockwell because
a lot of people had a reason to want him dead.
One of Rockwall's biographers, Frederick Simonelli, interviewed several former members,
(29:20):
some of whom shared these theories with him, and he
does give those theories some ink in his book, but
he buries an important caveat in the footnotes writing quote.
While Arlington police and prosecutors were aware of a growing
hostility between Rockwell, and Coal in the months before Rockwell's assassination,
(29:41):
they inexplicably did nothing to pursue that issue. In fairness, however,
it must be kept in mind that the fractious radical
right is fraught with feuds and vendettas, with the interactants
alternating frequently between ally and enemy. The American Nazi Party
was no ea exception, and He's right. These Nazi groups
(30:06):
are always having these little power struggles. Everybody wants to
be the Hitler, so this kind of feud isn't unique,
and it doesn't even really stand out as a particularly
egregious one. Overall, the theory of some last minute call
from inside the house to John Patler just doesn't work
(30:27):
for me. First of all, they had someone testify to
phone records from the house that day, and there's no
mention of any calls in the morning. Is it possible
that Matius Cole made contact with the assassin while he
was out running errands all morning? I guess so, But
there's nothing more than insinuation and possibility here. The more
(30:51):
likely scenario is really boring. No one called John Patler
to alert him to Rockwell's movements. He probably didn't know
that Rockwell would be at the laundromat. He didn't actually
even need to know that Rockwell would be at the
laundromat to have found him there. It didn't make sense
(31:14):
to me at first looking at this area on Google
Maps today, But the streetscape of Arlington, Virginia was very
different in nineteen sixty seven. It was significantly less developed,
and in the sixties, if you were standing outside the
Nazi Party barracks, you could actually see this shopping center.
(31:37):
It was just down the hill and across the street.
So if Patler had gone to the house looking for Rockwell,
he may have seen him leave, or he could have
actually spotted the car already in the parking lot at
the shopping center, which he would have had to pass
if he was going to the house. All of the
men living at the American Nazi Party Barracks only had
(32:00):
access to a single working vehicle, and it was a
pretty distinctive looking, older blue and white car, So if
we saw it in the parking lot, No, there's far
less intrigue in this explanation, but it's a very simple
one that I've never seen addressed in any of these
(32:21):
accusations against coal. Overall, reading that trial transcript. I was
plagued with this particular anxiety that I always feel when
I'm sitting through a trial in person. It's definitely worse
in person, because they'll put you in jail if you
shout in a courtroom. But I'm constantly fighting back this
(32:45):
urge to interject. I just want to raise my hand
and ask a question, because they're not asking the questions
I would like answered. Sometimes it's because they can't. Right,
A trial is meant to answer one question, did this
defendant commit this crime? You can't just go probing around
(33:06):
asking witnesses about anything you want and potentially unrelated matters,
And sometimes they just don't want to ask those questions.
A prosecutor comes into a trial with a particular theory
of the case, and they're trying to solicit testimony that
convinces the jury of that particular version of events because
(33:29):
it is legally sound in their mind and likely to
result in a conviction. So anything else, even more complicated
versions of the truth, it just muddies the water and
confuses the jury. So I understand what I'm looking at
as I read this, but it doesn't mean I have
(33:50):
to like it. I wish they'd gotten more on the
record about exactly where everyone was at particular moments in
time of days leading up to the shooting and what
their phone records look like. Not because I think anyone
called John Paller. I'm just nosy inside the courtroom. Though
(34:13):
conspiracy theories aren't much use in a criminal appeal. Once
he was convicted, Patler could only argue that the trial
had been legally flawed in some specific way, and for
years he did. He appealed his conviction to the Virginia
Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court of Virginia.
(34:33):
When both of those courts upheld his conviction, he tried
appealing to the Supreme Court, but they declined to hear
his case in nineteen seventy two. So after that he
filed a rid of habeas corpus in the Federal Court
in the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging that several decisions
made by the trial court had violated his constitutional rights
standard fair And when he lost that, he appealed that
(34:56):
decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and he
lost again. So in December of nineteen sixty seven, at
that original trial in Arlington. The jury found him guilty
and sentenced him to twenty years, and at every stage
of this appeals process, every court from Arlington County up
(35:18):
to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is upholding that
conviction and that sentence. But he really only ever served
about five He was released on bond in February of
nineteen sixty eight, so about three months after his conviction
when he filed his first criminal appeal, and he remained
(35:40):
out on bond for three years until the Virginia Supreme
Court ultimately upheld the conviction of the end of nineteen seventy,
So he's three courts deep at this point and still guilty,
and by the fall of nineteen seventy newspaper stories about
Paller usually say he's changed his ways. One story published
(36:02):
shortly before oral argument before the Virginia Supreme Court quoted
him saying, it seems to shock people that I've changed
from a hater of blacks to a lover of them.
But it's really not all that strange. I finally realized
just how close I am to blacks and browns and
other depressed people. I'm Greek, I have dark eyes, dark hair,
(36:26):
and here in America. That can work against you. You
can grow up like the black to think you just
don't fit in. That's the reason I became a Nazi.
I hated my name, I hated my nationality, and I
wanted to strike back at my hate. The Nazis seemed
like a good place to do it.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Special form of suicide. I guess the Nazis were out
to eliminate alien stock. I was out to eliminate my
alien past, so I put on the swastika. But now
I know that all of them, myself too, were sick.
He doesn't have the language quite right, but it was
(37:05):
nineteen seventy But other than that, it sounds fairly genuine.
I mean, I hope it was true. It's also the
kind of thing you might say if you're hoping the
State Supreme Court sees it right before they hear oral
argument in your appeal. But I believe people can change.
(37:26):
In June of nineteen seventy two, he'd been in jail
for over a year and the Supreme Court had declined
to hear his case, and he told the Washington Daily
News that month that he was a changed man. He's
learning and growing in prison. He just finished reading Charles
Reich's The Greening of America and Jermaine Greer's The Female Eunuch.
He was learning about feminism and counterculture, the kinds of
(37:50):
things he spent the nineteen sixties trying to destroy. He
told the reporter quote, I was committing a special form
of suicide, trying to eliminate the things I cant hated,
namely me noticed that is an almost identical quote given
to a different reporter two years later. I don't know
(38:10):
if that means it's from the heart or it was rehearsed,
but it's a remarkably self aware assessment, and I think
it's something that is true on some level for many
of the men he marched within the sixties and their
counterparts today. I want to believe that he believed it,
but you can't know what's in a man's heart. In
(38:45):
nineteen seventy four, his wife, Alice, divorced him. He'd been
in prison for four years and it wasn't entirely clear
when he might get out. One of his sons would
later write that after the age of six or seven,
he didn't see as far for decades, and that sort
of lines up with this timeline. Alice must have stopped
taking the boys to visit sometime around here, and in
(39:10):
nineteen seventy four he finally exhausted all possible avenues for appeal.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision of
the federal court in Virginia that had upheld his conviction
the year prior. But it wasn't all bad news in
nineteen seventy four. I mean, his wife left him, and
(39:31):
he has no more appeals, and he hasn't seen his
children in a year. But in the fall of nineteen
seventy four, he was allowed to leave prison during the
day to attend art classes at nearby Radford University, although
it was still just called Radford College at the time.
He attended classes there for an entire school year. It
(39:52):
appears before administrators of the college realized that the school
was participating in the study release program. In August of
nineteen seventy five, the Roanoke Times ran the headline College
denies knowing student was assassin, although court records do show
that he didn't actually legally change his name back to
(40:14):
Patzalos until nineteen eighty eight. He'd reverted back to using
his birth name in interviews around nineteen seventy, and he
apparently gave that name when he enrolled at the college.
I guess things were different in the seventies. You could
just tell the registrar a fake name and they wouldn't
notice that your address was prison. At the time the
(40:38):
story broke, officials from the Department of Corrections said that
the study Release program had been operating for years at
state colleges, universities, and community colleges all over Virginia without incident,
and according to the program guidelines, participating schools were notified
about students enrolling through the program, and only people very
(40:58):
close to their parole deay were eligible to participate. Inmates
participating in the program had to meet strict guidelines in
order to qualify, although the paper doesn't say really what
those were, but the administrators at Radford College were adamant.
They said nobody had told them that there was a
murderer taking drawing classes on campus. There was a lot
(41:25):
of publicity around this at the time, and the college
responded to the public embarrassment by announcing that until they
could conduct a thorough review of all of their policies,
they were just going to enact a blanket ban on
all inmates, parolees, and people on probation, and that seems
like a huge overreaction. People on probation and parole are
(41:48):
out in the world, they've served their time, and they've
been released. It seems like a clear cut case of
discrimination to prevent them from attending a state funded school.
I think the same could be said about banning current
inmates from the Study Release program, but the legal argument
there is different than it was the seventies. But this
(42:11):
put Patler personally in a pretty bad position, not just
because he was getting close to completing his degree, he
was also close to his parole date, but the parole
board had indicated that if he wasn't enrolled in school,
that would count against him in deciding whether or not
he would be released. The ACLU stepped in quickly and
(42:35):
the college backs down. Patler couldn't roll, but he couldn't
live in a dorm. The college would continue to accept
students from the Study Release program, but incarcerated students would
face stiffer regulations. As a parolee, Patler was just bored
from dormitories, but incarcerated students wouldn't be allowed to enter
(42:56):
dormitories or the student center. They were restricted to a
specific dining hall and were banned from participating in extracurricular activities.
But with his enrollment assured, Patler was granted parole and
he was released from prison in August of nineteen seventy five.
He had served less than five years since he actually
(43:19):
began serving that twenty year sentence. In December of nineteen seventy,
after he lost his appeal, the ACLU announced their intention
to sue the school over Patler's right to live in
a dormitory, but by the end of nineteen seventy five,
a spokesman for the ACLU announced, somewhat cryptically, quote, we
(43:39):
have decided not to pursue it any further. The matter
is closed. In later years, Radford College refused to disclose
any records or even comment on Patler's time at the school,
and accounts vary as to whether he even enrolled in
the spring semester, but by the summer of nineteen seventy
six he definitely wasn't in school anymore. I think the
(44:04):
ACLU probably dropped their threat to sue because they weren't
sure Patler would be a good plaintiff. If they couldn't
guarantee he was going to stay enrolled in school. He
has no standing and there's no reason to sue. A
few months after he stopped going to school, he shows
(44:24):
back up in the newspaper. This one knocked me on
my ass. I mean, I'm usually pretty prepared for a
strange twist. I'm literally looking for the stuff that makes
these guys weird, right, I'm on the hunt for it.
But clicking through newspaper archives is tedious work.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
You know.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
You just pick a keyword and then you click through
hundreds of pages of possible matches. Chronologically. A lot of
the results are just the same story. They got picked
up by twenty different newspapers. But nothing could have prepared
me for the whiplash I experienced when I'm just halfheartedly
clicking through mountains of wire stories I've already read, and
(45:08):
suddenly I'm confronted with the headline Rockwell killer arrested after
alleged orgy. Pardon me, arrested where and doing?
Speaker 1 (45:21):
What?
Speaker 2 (45:23):
You heard me? Rockwell killer arrested after alleged orgy. The
body of that article goes on to specify that it
was a nude orgy. I didn't know you needed to specify,
but it does okay. I know that this is just
(45:45):
cruel at this point, Like this piece of the story
isn't even that important. It's just such a silly, little
shocking piece that I have accidentally ended up teasing you
with repeatedly. It's just a weird bump in the road
that I had to write down the second I started
writing the script for the first episode. And the problem is,
(46:08):
I'm making this show in real time. There's no planning ahead,
there's no backlog, there's no writing all of the parts
before the first one comes out. The episode you hear
on a Thursday was recorded Monday morning and edited by
Wednesday afternoon. And I never know where I'm going until
I get there.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
You know.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
I spend all week reading and researching and making my
little timelines and writing my little biography of side characters
and translating Yugoslavian war tribunal records, and you know how,
I get distracted. And then I sit down and start writing.
And I probably shouldn't admit this, but I don't make
(46:49):
an outline, and I'm not in control of where the
story goes once I start writing. So sometimes the sun
is coming up on a Monday morning, and I realized
that I accidentally stopped writingading around three AM because I
got distracted by something very exciting but entirely irrelevant. And
my very patient editor is waiting on an audio file
and I haven't even started recording yet. I think I'm
(47:13):
going to end up having to spend my day off
trying to figure out why Rockwell's number one guy in
Dallas was called to testify in front of the Warren Commission. So,
for Rory's sake, because I'm already late and this is
already long, I have to leave you in nineteen seventy six,
(47:34):
but I'm going to try and make it up to you.
I think I guess I shouldn't make promises, but I'm
pretty sure we can arrange for the second half of
part three to come out before next week. So think
of this as part three point one until then. For
(47:55):
the love of God, if you're going to break into
a guy's house, don't take your pants off there. Weird
(48:16):
Little Guys is a production of fool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our
executive producers are Sophie Letterman, and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Ory Gagan. If the
music was composed by Brad Dickard, you can email me
at Wirdly Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will
definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it as
nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
(48:38):
with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just
don't post anything that's going to make you one of
my weird Little guys want of time for it.
Host
Molly Conger
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