October 3, 2025 • 32 mins
In 1976, the recently paroled assassin went back to prison after being arrested in Charlottesville. He was acquitted on the charge of being naked in a stranger's living room, but he'd violated his parole. He's tried to stay out of the spotlight ever since. Decades later, his son wrote that he was a changed man. His comments after the 2017 Unite the Right rally say otherwise.
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/2017/08/21/the-shadow-of-an-assassinated-american-nazi-commander-hangs-over-charlottesville/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1996/12/15/the-accounting/22c75ac3-d752-4339-bccb-dcce7e3a999f/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1997/07/18/man-found-guilty-in-15-year-old-murder/95c86fe6-2f03-4043-a7f3-5d49c89c2b13/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. In nineteen seventy six, James Mason was
just twenty four years old. He was fresh office sentence
in Ohio jail for spraying mace ad, a black fourteen
year old girl in a dairy Queen parking lot. It
would be a few more years before he started working
(00:23):
on his most lasting legacy, the Newsletters that would become Siege,
a beloved text for neo Nazi terrorists, but he was writing.
He was the editor of the newsletter for the newly
formed National Socialist Movement, and the August nineteen seventy six
issue contained a write up about a hated enemy from Charlottesville, Virginia.
(00:47):
Word reaches us that the sneak murderer of Rockwell, John
pat Solos, is in trouble again, this time with the
law for disorderly conduct. In the nude pat Solos aka Patler,
and two other men were a did in charge with
trespassing and possession of marijuana while conducting an orgy with
one woman who is still being sought. Rockwell is dead
(01:08):
and his murderer carouses reason enough to destroy any system
that would permit it. Keep turning up this way, buddy boy,
so that we may keep track of you. Whether or
not James Mason kept track of John Patler in the
years that followed, I couldn't tell you. But here's the
rest of his story. I'm Molly Coner, and this is
(01:33):
where the little guys. When we left off last time,
it was nineteen seventy six, and I was apologizing for
(01:57):
writing without a plan. I could probably be more organized,
but I think that would mean cutting out the side quests,
and to be honest, I'd rather die than live a
life without my rabbit holes. So as my apology to you,
you're getting this a little bit early, this being the
(02:18):
second half of the third part of a series that
I thought was going to be a single episode. Is
there more? I actually don't know. I'll find out about
ninety six hours before you do. At the very least,
I know we aren't quite moving on next week. I
(02:39):
still need to tell you about the legal battle over
George Lincoln Rockwell's corpse that ended in an all day
standoff with the army. But back to the orgy. In
the summer of nineteen seventy six, John Patler was out
of prison. He'd been released on parole after serving barely
five years of his twenty years sentence for the murder
(03:00):
of America Nazi Party commander George Lincoln Rockwell. He was
close to finishing a degree at Radford College, having taken
a year of classes through the Study Release program while
he was still in prison, but in June of nineteen
seventy six, he wasn't enrolled in summer classes. He says
he was in Charlottesville that summer looking for a job. Now,
(03:26):
for my non Virginians, Radford is about one hundred and
fifty miles away from Charlottesville. It's hard to say what
brought him here or what sort of job he was
looking for. His brother was living about an hour north
of Charlottesville, and it's hard to say with certainty what
someone's address was fifty years ago. But it seems like
(03:48):
both of his ex wives, each of them raising two
of his sons, were living in the central Virginia area
at the time as well, although in opposite directions, and
none of them were actually in the Charlotteville area directly,
and it doesn't appear he was in contact with them.
So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't know
why he was looking for a job here, but that's
(04:10):
what he told the cops. On a Wednesday evening in
June of nineteen seventy six, a man got home from work.
He opened his front door, and he walked inside, and
he found four naked strangers engaging in some unspecified group
sex act in his living room. He ordered the naked
(04:35):
people to leave, obviously, and to their credit, they did.
As they were leaving. He wrote down the license plate
number of the car they piled into, and he called
the police. No reporting that I could find ever identified
the woman, but all three men were quickly arrested. A
Charlottesville police officer spotted the car half an hour later
(04:58):
and arrested John Patler and the other two men. I
have nothing but questions about this. How did these men meet?
What was the conversation leading up to this? How do
you end up having an orgy in someone else's house.
(05:19):
The other two men's names are in the newspaper, but
I don't want to get too deep into who they were.
One of them would later get arrested after an armed
stand off with police when he barricaded himself inside of
his psychiatrist's home, which he'd broken into after being released
from a psychiatric hospital, and the other man had a
(05:39):
fair number of drug charges that pre date nineteen seventy six,
but in the two decades after this, he committed such
a staggering number of horrific sexual crimes that I don't
really want to talk about it. But back to this
evening in June of nineteen seventy six, presumably they were
(06:02):
all clothed by the time the officer pulled them over.
All three of them were wanted in connection with the
reported trespassing, and the officer reported finding a pipe with
marijuana residue, as well as a small quantity of marijuana
on Patler's person, So he was charged with possession of
marijuana as well. So now he has three problems. He's
(06:25):
been charged with two crimes, he's very embarrassed, and he's
recently been parolled after serving just five years of a
twenty year sentence for murder. Well, I guess he has
four problems. It's probably going to be pretty hard to
find a job in Charlottesville now. Patler told reporters with
(06:49):
the local newspaper shortly after this arrest that the entire
incident had been blown out of proportion. He said he
didn't know anything about any kind of orgy, and he
claimed that he and the other men had been invited
guests of the home's other occupant. The man who came
home to find the orgy in his living room did
(07:09):
have a roommate, and that man was the brother of
one of these naked people, so it's not impossible that
they were his guests. But he wasn't home, and police
say the group entered the house through a window. I mean,
that's not something I would do at my brother's house,
(07:29):
but people are different. The story received a lot more
press than the average trespassing charge, and Patler was probably
right when he told the local newspaper that all this
attention was quote due to the identities of the people involved.
It was picked up as a wire story and ended
(07:51):
up published in newspapers all over the country, which is
probably how word ended up getting back to his old associates.
All three men were acquitted on the trustpassing charge. The
judge found that there was insufficient proof they'd been in
the home because they only had the home occupant's word
on the matter. Typically, a trustpassing charge involves a police
(08:14):
officer seeing you do it, but Patler was unable to
attend his own trial for truspassing because he was already
back in jail somewhere else. Getting arrested is a parole violation.
The prosecutor in Charlottesville ultimately dropped the marijuana possession charge
entirely likely because there was no point prosecuting the case
(08:37):
if the defendant was already incarcerated somewhere else for something
more serious. Getting arrested at all, even if you're ultimately
acquitted or the charges are dropped, is what's called a
technical violation, which can lead to problems for someone on
probation or parole. If he had been in perfect compliance
(08:57):
with his conditions, otherwise, the technical violation may have been resolvable,
it might not have caused problems for him, But according
to newspaper reports, his probation conditions required him to remain
in the Radford area, so it looked like he was
trying to move to and get a job in Charlottesville,
which was a violation, and that sent him back to
(09:19):
prison in the fall of nineteen seventy six. In January
of nineteen seventy eight, from jail, he filed a petition
with the court to legally change his name back to Patsalos.
Like those articles from the early seventies. The first time
he was in jail, he says he's changed his ways,
and he understands now that his hateful ways were really
(09:41):
just misdirected hatred of himself. In early nineteen seventy eight,
those articles say that he wouldn't be released for another
six years, and I can't find any newspaper stories that
definitively put him in or out of prison in the
next few years. But a footnote in Frederick Simonelli's biography
(10:03):
of Rockwell says that he was paroled again for good
in October of nineteen seventy eight, and then he sort
of disappears. I read in a few sources that he
moved back to New York City immediately after being released,
but it does look like he stayed in the Richmond,
Virginia area for a few years. In nineteen eighty eight,
(10:27):
he legally changed his name back to John Patsalos in
the Richmond Circuit Court. I found a marriage license for
him in Manhattan in nineteen ninety, but the woman moved
across the country just a few years later, and she
ultimately filed for divorce from the West Coast. So his
third marriage didn't last long and doesn't seem to have
(10:47):
produced any children. In twenty seventeen, a reporter from the
Washington Post went looking for him. He refused to be interviewed,
but at the time he was living on the Lower
East Side. At the age of seventy nine, Butler was
still earning a living as a freelance cartoonist. But the
article doesn't say who's buying his art. I mean, freelance
(11:11):
cartooning is probably a pretty tough way to pay the
rent in Manhattan, so I imagine he's selling those drawings to
anyone who would buy them. But I was only able
to pin down the details for one High Times magazine.
I found a couple of issues from that era and
(11:31):
flipped through them, but I never found his name in
the magazine itself. He's not credited as the artist anywhere
that I can find, so it's not unlikely that his
art appears elsewhere also without attribution. But I know he
was working for High Times, that magazine about marijuana, because
in twenty seventeen it was sold to a private equity firm.
(11:54):
As a part of that sale, documents were filed with
the Securities and Exchange Commission they're all very boring, and
they're not the kinds of documents I usually look at.
But in one endless pdf of assets and liabilities and
financed gibberish, there's a list of the magazine's current freelance contracts.
(12:18):
John Patsalos is listed as a monthly contributor to the magazine,
earning five hundred dollars a month as an illustrator. In
his Misspent Nazi Youth, he illustrated the quarterly magazine of
the American Nazi Party. There's one issue that has a
multi page comic called white Man, a superhero with a
(12:39):
swastika on his chest who does battle with what I
can only assume is a non copyright infringing version of
Superman because he's referred to only as the Jew from
outer Space. In the nineteen sixties, in a converted henhouse
with a giant swastika on the roof, he labored over
(12:59):
a rinting press, watching us thousands of copies of his
racist caricatures landed in a pile. And now in his
old age, he's drawing little cartoons of people smoking weed.
That's the last place John Patler appears in any record
I can find. Every August. His name appears in a
(13:23):
few newspapers running stories about the anniversary of Rockwell's death,
but it's always the same story, just a reminder of
that moment in history, just to remember when about that
day in nineteen sixty seven. There's no obituary that I
can find, and data broker sites show that he still
lives in that apartment on the Lower East Side, but
(13:46):
that doesn't mean much. If he is still alive, he'll
turn eighty eight in January. If he isn't, then his
passing didn't make the news and wasn't mourned by anyone,
at least not pup alive or dead. The last years
of his life were spent in obscurity. He's just a strange,
(14:09):
sad footnote in the story of the man he says
he didn't kill. A listener posted a question a few
weeks ago on the show's subreddit about Patler's younger brother. Ordinarily,
I would probably leave him out of a story like this.
There's no indication I could find that they were particularly close,
and nothing I found hinted that he was involved in
(14:32):
similar political activities, at least not the Nazi stuff. There
is a new story about him getting arrested for cross
burning in nineteen eighty five, but it looks like the
case was dropped because the victim was also white. Puzzling.
But in any case, I think for this story it
(14:54):
is actually relevant to talk a little bit about George Patsalos.
Back in the first episode, I talked a little about
their childhoods. They were born a year and a half apart,
so George wasn't quite four years old when their father
murdered their mother in nineteen fifty eight, the year John
(15:16):
Patler enlisted the Marines to avoid going to jail for
a probation violation, George was arrested for setting a school
on fire in the Bronx in nineteen sixty seven. When
John Patler wrote his own autobiography in his final issue
of Stormtrooper magazine, he dismissed the idea that his troubled
home life had played any role in the man he became,
(15:38):
considering his brother was nothing like him, He wrote, quote,
the environmentalists and the jew oriented psychiatrists will no doubt
attribute my political activity and extremist beliefs to my unfortunate
childhood experiences. But my brother, who experienced the exact environment
I did, and who underwent the same hardships, lives an
(16:01):
opposite life than mine. He is today a happily married man,
a peaceful, non political citizen, and the owner of a
small business he built up himself, And maybe in nineteen
sixty seven, John Patler believed that that was true. It
was around this time that his brother George moved down
(16:23):
to Virginia from New York. I couldn't tell you what
prompted the move for exactly when it was. Articles about
George that were written much later say that he moved
to Virginia in the early seventies, but birth records for
his children show one born in New York in nineteen
sixty three, followed by one born in Virginia in nineteen
(16:45):
sixty seven. So he was living in Virginia at least
as early as nineteen sixty seven, and the happy marriage
Tatler wrote about seems to have been anything. But he
married his first wife in nineteen sixty three, at eight
months before their first daughter was born. When his wife
filed for divorce, she cited both cruelty and wilful abandonment.
(17:11):
By the time the divorce was finalized in nineteen seventy four. George,
who was in his mid thirties and a father of four,
was already living with a girl he met a year earlier,
when he was married and she was in high school.
(17:40):
Her name was Ava DeHart. By nineteen eighty two, she
wasn't a teenager anymore. They'd been together for almost a decade.
She worked at the motorcycle shop he ran in Fredericksburg, Virginia,
and they lived together in a trailer in a small
town about halfway between Fredericksburg and Charlottesville. In the summer
(18:01):
of nineteen eighty two, Ava confided in her sister that
she was afraid of George, that he'd been hurting her,
and she was afraid that if she tried to leave,
he would find her and kill her, or worse, that
he'd kill her family. She told her sister that he'd
killed before, but she wouldn't say anymore, and then she disappeared.
(18:30):
George Patsalos had already moved on to another woman before
Ava disappeared in nineteen eighty two, and in nineteen eighty
five he married Barbara Campfield, the woman he'd started seeing
a year before. Ava de Heart vanished. That marriage was
over before it even really began. They married in March,
(18:52):
had a baby in May, and they were separated by July,
though they didn't officially divorce until nineteen eighty seven. On
the divorce decree, the legal grounds for the divorce is
listed simply as cruelty. You can't really know what goes
on behind closed doors. But shortly before Barbara filed for
(19:13):
the divorce, her brother shot George in the neck during
an argument that took place at her mother's house. For
fourteen years, Ava Dehart's sister, Debbie, investigated the disappearance on
her own. She hired a private investigator, but she kept
pursuing the best lead on her own. Barbara Campfield hadn't
(19:38):
to know something. She was George Patsalos's girlfriend when Ava disappeared,
and it's a small town people talk, so she took
advantage of that, and she talked too. Debbie would stop
by the grocery store where Barbara was working, just a chat.
Every now and then. She'd ask Barbara her sister. She
(20:01):
asked her about George. She asked what happened in nineteen
eighty two, and slowly Barbara opened up to her. Barbara
hired a lawyer shortly after She led on to Debbie
that she'd helped George clean up a lot of blood
one night in July of nineteen eighty two, and her
lawyer negotiated a deal for immunity, and then she took
(20:26):
the police to the well. Barbara said for all those
years she'd been too afraid to talk. She was afraid
that George would do the same thing to her. But
in nineteen ninety six, she finally confessed to helping George
Potsollos throw a body down a well. She claimed that
(20:47):
she never knew whose body it was. A forensic examination
confirmed that the skeletal remains at the bottom of an
abandoned well were those of Ava DeHart. A forensic anthropologist
had testified that of the thirty five fractures detected on examination,
twenty seven of them happened while she was still alive.
(21:10):
George Potzalos beat her to death. George Pozzalos was convicted
of the first degree murder of Ava de Hart in
nineteen ninety seven. He was sentenced to life in prison,
where he died in two thousand and six. So in
nineteen forty three, Cristos Pazzalos shot his wife Athena in
(21:32):
the throat, leaving John and George without a mother. John
Patler was right almost when he wrote in nineteen seventy
six that it isn't fair to attribute his political leanings
entirely to his violent childhood. It is possible to grow
up in a violent home and not become a Nazi.
(21:53):
It is possible to be the son of a domestic
abuser and not grow up to beat women to death.
But it is still true to say that that's what
happened here, that the sons of a murdered mother grew
into men who murdered too. One killed a man he
loved like a father, and the other killed a woman
(22:17):
who'd once carried his child. I don't know what that means,
if it means anything, All I know is that's what happened.
In twenty thirteen, John Patler's youngest son, Nicholas Patler, contributed
the afterward to William Schmaltz's biography of George Lincoln Rockwell.
(22:40):
Nicholas was not quite a year old when his father
shot Rockwell, and he wrote that he had no contact
with his father from the time he was six until
he was thirty four. He's the only one of Patler's
four children who seems to have made any public statement
about their father, So he's the only one I'll talk about.
He has a master's degree in history. His first book
(23:04):
was a history of the massive protest movement that emerged
in opposition to the forced segregation of the federal workforce
during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. For several years he
was an adjunct professor teaching African American history. His second
book actually just came out a few weeks ago, a
biography of Pinkney Bent and Stewart Pinchback. Pinchback was the
(23:25):
son of an enslaved woman and was briefly the governor
of Louisiana in eighteen seventy two. Nicholas Butler has clearly
worked hard to put something into the world that his
father was trying to take away from it. Look at
his life, his work, interviews he's given over the years.
(23:46):
He is the opposite of the man his father was
in the nineteen sixties. In that afterward, he writes compassionately
about the father he got to know as an adult.
He describes his father's traumatic childhood, and he understands how
a damaged young man came to be drawn in by
the fatherly attention he got from Rockwell. He's trying to understand,
(24:12):
and he's careful to emphasize that his goal is not
to excuse. When he wrote this in twenty thirteen, he'd
spent a little over a decade getting to know his father,
and at the time he had also recently enrolled in
a master's program at Bethany Theological Seminary. And I think
that does help me understand the tenor of the essay
(24:33):
in a way. He's writing earnestly about finding peace and
being opened to the possibility of transformation. He wrote that
his father really was a changed man. His father had
told him once that he regretted his time in the
Nazi movement, and even expressed that he now realized he'd
(24:54):
been marching with the wrong side during the Civil Rights movement.
Nicholas Butler ends that afterward on a hopeful note, writing quote,
I want to encourage the reader not to give up
on those trapped in cycles and situations of violence and distortion,
whether in her own back yard or across the globe.
(25:17):
The one thing that I have seen personally and witnessed
over and over in many contexts that can transform hatred
and the hater is love, courageous, visionary, and uncompromising love.
In twenty thirteen, when he wrote that his father was
(25:38):
proof of this message, that he'd been transformed. Four years later,
in twenty seventeen, after the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville, Virginia,
every news outlet in the country was running front page
stories with pictures of Nazis. Hundreds and hundreds of neo Nazis,
(26:01):
men flying Swastika flags, men with Swastika tattoos, men in
Nazi uniforms, men with torches, men with weapons, Videos of
men chanting you will not replace us blood and soil,
videos of men shouting Rockwell's most famous slogan, white power.
(26:24):
A changed man, a man who regretted inciting violent racist
mobs all those years ago, What would he say when
he saw it happening again. Two days after that rally,
(26:51):
after a young neo Nazi murdered a peaceful demonstrator in
the streets, John Patler posted on Facebook that there's nothing
wrong with white pride. He wrote, it was a peaceful parade,
a couple of hundred white men, neatly attired, expressing their
right to free speech and objection to the removal of
the statue of General Lee. A reporter from The Washington
(27:16):
Post made several attempts to contact him, even visiting his
apartment in Manhattan, but he refused to be interviewed. His son,
the same son who wrote so proudly, so lovingly in
twenty thirteen about his father's transformation, told The Washington Post
in twenty seventeen that his father had started to change
(27:37):
again around twenty fifteen. Quote, I don't know what the
climate is doing to him now. It seems like little
by little he's becoming poisoned again. You can't know what's
in a man's heart. You can judge his actions, you
(27:57):
can interpret his words, but there isn't any one who
can tell you for sure whether John Patler's heart changed
twice or not at all? Was he a changed man
from nineteen seventy until twenty fifteen and then he changed back?
Did the love and understanding of a once estranged sun
(28:19):
help him come to terms with the hurt in his
own soul and the ways that pushed him to inflict
pain on the world, only then to hear the siren
song of a new fure during the twenty sixteen election.
Was that hate, just lying dormant, waiting for the right
moment to march again. There are a few times in
(28:43):
the last few weeks as I've been writing this story
that something reminded me of what I think is one
of the greatest episodes of television ever produced. The fourth
episode of the fourth season of The Twilight Zone aired
in January of nineteen sixty three. It starred a young
Dennis Hopper as Peter Fulmer, the leader of a small
(29:05):
group of neo Nazis. I don't know that Rod Serling
ever stated outright that he was thinking of George Lincoln
Rockwell when he wrote the character of Peter Fulmer, a small,
angry man desperate to command the respect of his followers,
but struggling to pay the rent on his Nazi headquarters.
When it is so precisely Rockwell that I can't believe
(29:28):
there's any other explanation. As Peter Fulmer is struggling to
put on his little Nazi rallies and grow the ranks
of his Nazi party, a mysterious figure appears to him
and offers him money and advice. And when the man
finally steps out of the shadows, it's Adolf Hitler. Himself.
(29:51):
The episode aired four years before Rockwell died in real life,
but at the end of the episode, his on screen
stand in is leading out in an alley. As Rod
Serling narrates the closing monologue, you see Hitler's ghost walk
off into the night in search of a new apprentice,
and we're left with a warning. He's alive. He's alive
(30:17):
because we keep him alive.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that
when he comes to Ururtan. Remember it when you hear
his voice speaking on through others. Remember it when you
hear a name called a minority, attack, any blind, unreasoning
assault out a people, or any human being. He's alive
because through these things we keep them alive.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
George Lincoln Rockwell is dead. Almost all of the men
who marched behind him sixty years ago are dead. But
only the men died. The thing that drove them, the
thing that's still drives men like them today. It's alive,
and too many people are keeping it alive. Weird Little
(31:26):
Guys is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our
executive producers are Sophy Lettterman, and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Ry Gagan that the
music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me
at Wardly Guy's 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
(31:48):
with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subred it.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Col Zone Media. In nineteen seventy six, James Mason was
just twenty four years old. He was fresh office sentence
in Ohio jail for spraying mace ad, a black fourteen
year old girl in a dairy Queen parking lot. It
would be a few more years before he started working
(00:23):
on his most lasting legacy, the Newsletters that would become Siege,
a beloved text for neo Nazi terrorists, but he was writing.
He was the editor of the newsletter for the newly
formed National Socialist Movement, and the August nineteen seventy six
issue contained a write up about a hated enemy from Charlottesville, Virginia.
(00:47):
Word reaches us that the sneak murderer of Rockwell, John
pat Solos, is in trouble again, this time with the
law for disorderly conduct. In the nude pat Solos aka Patler,
and two other men were a did in charge with
trespassing and possession of marijuana while conducting an orgy with
one woman who is still being sought. Rockwell is dead
(01:08):
and his murderer carouses reason enough to destroy any system
that would permit it. Keep turning up this way, buddy boy,
so that we may keep track of you. Whether or
not James Mason kept track of John Patler in the
years that followed, I couldn't tell you. But here's the
rest of his story. I'm Molly Coner, and this is
(01:33):
where the little guys. When we left off last time,
it was nineteen seventy six, and I was apologizing for
(01:57):
writing without a plan. I could probably be more organized,
but I think that would mean cutting out the side quests,
and to be honest, I'd rather die than live a
life without my rabbit holes. So as my apology to you,
you're getting this a little bit early, this being the
(02:18):
second half of the third part of a series that
I thought was going to be a single episode. Is
there more? I actually don't know. I'll find out about
ninety six hours before you do. At the very least,
I know we aren't quite moving on next week. I
(02:39):
still need to tell you about the legal battle over
George Lincoln Rockwell's corpse that ended in an all day
standoff with the army. But back to the orgy. In
the summer of nineteen seventy six, John Patler was out
of prison. He'd been released on parole after serving barely
five years of his twenty years sentence for the murder
(03:00):
of America Nazi Party commander George Lincoln Rockwell. He was
close to finishing a degree at Radford College, having taken
a year of classes through the Study Release program while
he was still in prison, but in June of nineteen
seventy six, he wasn't enrolled in summer classes. He says
he was in Charlottesville that summer looking for a job. Now,
(03:26):
for my non Virginians, Radford is about one hundred and
fifty miles away from Charlottesville. It's hard to say what
brought him here or what sort of job he was
looking for. His brother was living about an hour north
of Charlottesville, and it's hard to say with certainty what
someone's address was fifty years ago. But it seems like
(03:48):
both of his ex wives, each of them raising two
of his sons, were living in the central Virginia area
at the time as well, although in opposite directions, and
none of them were actually in the Charlotteville area directly,
and it doesn't appear he was in contact with them.
So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't know
why he was looking for a job here, but that's
(04:10):
what he told the cops. On a Wednesday evening in
June of nineteen seventy six, a man got home from work.
He opened his front door, and he walked inside, and
he found four naked strangers engaging in some unspecified group
sex act in his living room. He ordered the naked
(04:35):
people to leave, obviously, and to their credit, they did.
As they were leaving. He wrote down the license plate
number of the car they piled into, and he called
the police. No reporting that I could find ever identified
the woman, but all three men were quickly arrested. A
Charlottesville police officer spotted the car half an hour later
(04:58):
and arrested John Patler and the other two men. I
have nothing but questions about this. How did these men meet?
What was the conversation leading up to this? How do
you end up having an orgy in someone else's house.
(05:19):
The other two men's names are in the newspaper, but
I don't want to get too deep into who they were.
One of them would later get arrested after an armed
stand off with police when he barricaded himself inside of
his psychiatrist's home, which he'd broken into after being released
from a psychiatric hospital, and the other man had a
(05:39):
fair number of drug charges that pre date nineteen seventy six,
but in the two decades after this, he committed such
a staggering number of horrific sexual crimes that I don't
really want to talk about it. But back to this
evening in June of nineteen seventy six, presumably they were
(06:02):
all clothed by the time the officer pulled them over.
All three of them were wanted in connection with the
reported trespassing, and the officer reported finding a pipe with
marijuana residue, as well as a small quantity of marijuana
on Patler's person, So he was charged with possession of
marijuana as well. So now he has three problems. He's
(06:25):
been charged with two crimes, he's very embarrassed, and he's
recently been parolled after serving just five years of a
twenty year sentence for murder. Well, I guess he has
four problems. It's probably going to be pretty hard to
find a job in Charlottesville now. Patler told reporters with
(06:49):
the local newspaper shortly after this arrest that the entire
incident had been blown out of proportion. He said he
didn't know anything about any kind of orgy, and he
claimed that he and the other men had been invited
guests of the home's other occupant. The man who came
home to find the orgy in his living room did
(07:09):
have a roommate, and that man was the brother of
one of these naked people, so it's not impossible that
they were his guests. But he wasn't home, and police
say the group entered the house through a window. I mean,
that's not something I would do at my brother's house,
(07:29):
but people are different. The story received a lot more
press than the average trespassing charge, and Patler was probably
right when he told the local newspaper that all this
attention was quote due to the identities of the people involved.
It was picked up as a wire story and ended
(07:51):
up published in newspapers all over the country, which is
probably how word ended up getting back to his old associates.
All three men were acquitted on the trustpassing charge. The
judge found that there was insufficient proof they'd been in
the home because they only had the home occupant's word
on the matter. Typically, a trustpassing charge involves a police
(08:14):
officer seeing you do it, but Patler was unable to
attend his own trial for truspassing because he was already
back in jail somewhere else. Getting arrested is a parole violation.
The prosecutor in Charlottesville ultimately dropped the marijuana possession charge
entirely likely because there was no point prosecuting the case
(08:37):
if the defendant was already incarcerated somewhere else for something
more serious. Getting arrested at all, even if you're ultimately
acquitted or the charges are dropped, is what's called a
technical violation, which can lead to problems for someone on
probation or parole. If he had been in perfect compliance
(08:57):
with his conditions, otherwise, the technical violation may have been resolvable,
it might not have caused problems for him, But according
to newspaper reports, his probation conditions required him to remain
in the Radford area, so it looked like he was
trying to move to and get a job in Charlottesville,
which was a violation, and that sent him back to
(09:19):
prison in the fall of nineteen seventy six. In January
of nineteen seventy eight, from jail, he filed a petition
with the court to legally change his name back to Patsalos.
Like those articles from the early seventies. The first time
he was in jail, he says he's changed his ways,
and he understands now that his hateful ways were really
(09:41):
just misdirected hatred of himself. In early nineteen seventy eight,
those articles say that he wouldn't be released for another
six years, and I can't find any newspaper stories that
definitively put him in or out of prison in the
next few years. But a footnote in Frederick Simonelli's biography
(10:03):
of Rockwell says that he was paroled again for good
in October of nineteen seventy eight, and then he sort
of disappears. I read in a few sources that he
moved back to New York City immediately after being released,
but it does look like he stayed in the Richmond,
Virginia area for a few years. In nineteen eighty eight,
(10:27):
he legally changed his name back to John Patsalos in
the Richmond Circuit Court. I found a marriage license for
him in Manhattan in nineteen ninety, but the woman moved
across the country just a few years later, and she
ultimately filed for divorce from the West Coast. So his
third marriage didn't last long and doesn't seem to have
(10:47):
produced any children. In twenty seventeen, a reporter from the
Washington Post went looking for him. He refused to be interviewed,
but at the time he was living on the Lower
East Side. At the age of seventy nine, Butler was
still earning a living as a freelance cartoonist. But the
article doesn't say who's buying his art. I mean, freelance
(11:11):
cartooning is probably a pretty tough way to pay the
rent in Manhattan, so I imagine he's selling those drawings to
anyone who would buy them. But I was only able
to pin down the details for one High Times magazine.
I found a couple of issues from that era and
(11:31):
flipped through them, but I never found his name in
the magazine itself. He's not credited as the artist anywhere
that I can find, so it's not unlikely that his
art appears elsewhere also without attribution. But I know he
was working for High Times, that magazine about marijuana, because
in twenty seventeen it was sold to a private equity firm.
(11:54):
As a part of that sale, documents were filed with
the Securities and Exchange Commission they're all very boring, and
they're not the kinds of documents I usually look at.
But in one endless pdf of assets and liabilities and
financed gibberish, there's a list of the magazine's current freelance contracts.
(12:18):
John Patsalos is listed as a monthly contributor to the magazine,
earning five hundred dollars a month as an illustrator. In
his Misspent Nazi Youth, he illustrated the quarterly magazine of
the American Nazi Party. There's one issue that has a
multi page comic called white Man, a superhero with a
(12:39):
swastika on his chest who does battle with what I
can only assume is a non copyright infringing version of
Superman because he's referred to only as the Jew from
outer Space. In the nineteen sixties, in a converted henhouse
with a giant swastika on the roof, he labored over
(12:59):
a rinting press, watching us thousands of copies of his
racist caricatures landed in a pile. And now in his
old age, he's drawing little cartoons of people smoking weed.
That's the last place John Patler appears in any record
I can find. Every August. His name appears in a
(13:23):
few newspapers running stories about the anniversary of Rockwell's death,
but it's always the same story, just a reminder of
that moment in history, just to remember when about that
day in nineteen sixty seven. There's no obituary that I
can find, and data broker sites show that he still
lives in that apartment on the Lower East Side, but
(13:46):
that doesn't mean much. If he is still alive, he'll
turn eighty eight in January. If he isn't, then his
passing didn't make the news and wasn't mourned by anyone,
at least not pup alive or dead. The last years
of his life were spent in obscurity. He's just a strange,
(14:09):
sad footnote in the story of the man he says
he didn't kill. A listener posted a question a few
weeks ago on the show's subreddit about Patler's younger brother. Ordinarily,
I would probably leave him out of a story like this.
There's no indication I could find that they were particularly close,
and nothing I found hinted that he was involved in
(14:32):
similar political activities, at least not the Nazi stuff. There
is a new story about him getting arrested for cross
burning in nineteen eighty five, but it looks like the
case was dropped because the victim was also white. Puzzling.
But in any case, I think for this story it
(14:54):
is actually relevant to talk a little bit about George Patsalos.
Back in the first episode, I talked a little about
their childhoods. They were born a year and a half apart,
so George wasn't quite four years old when their father
murdered their mother in nineteen fifty eight, the year John
(15:16):
Patler enlisted the Marines to avoid going to jail for
a probation violation, George was arrested for setting a school
on fire in the Bronx in nineteen sixty seven. When
John Patler wrote his own autobiography in his final issue
of Stormtrooper magazine, he dismissed the idea that his troubled
home life had played any role in the man he became,
(15:38):
considering his brother was nothing like him, He wrote, quote,
the environmentalists and the jew oriented psychiatrists will no doubt
attribute my political activity and extremist beliefs to my unfortunate
childhood experiences. But my brother, who experienced the exact environment
I did, and who underwent the same hardships, lives an
(16:01):
opposite life than mine. He is today a happily married man,
a peaceful, non political citizen, and the owner of a
small business he built up himself, And maybe in nineteen
sixty seven, John Patler believed that that was true. It
was around this time that his brother George moved down
(16:23):
to Virginia from New York. I couldn't tell you what
prompted the move for exactly when it was. Articles about
George that were written much later say that he moved
to Virginia in the early seventies, but birth records for
his children show one born in New York in nineteen
sixty three, followed by one born in Virginia in nineteen
(16:45):
sixty seven. So he was living in Virginia at least
as early as nineteen sixty seven, and the happy marriage
Tatler wrote about seems to have been anything. But he
married his first wife in nineteen sixty three, at eight
months before their first daughter was born. When his wife
filed for divorce, she cited both cruelty and wilful abandonment.
(17:11):
By the time the divorce was finalized in nineteen seventy four. George,
who was in his mid thirties and a father of four,
was already living with a girl he met a year earlier,
when he was married and she was in high school.
(17:40):
Her name was Ava DeHart. By nineteen eighty two, she
wasn't a teenager anymore. They'd been together for almost a decade.
She worked at the motorcycle shop he ran in Fredericksburg, Virginia,
and they lived together in a trailer in a small
town about halfway between Fredericksburg and Charlottesville. In the summer
(18:01):
of nineteen eighty two, Ava confided in her sister that
she was afraid of George, that he'd been hurting her,
and she was afraid that if she tried to leave,
he would find her and kill her, or worse, that
he'd kill her family. She told her sister that he'd
killed before, but she wouldn't say anymore, and then she disappeared.
(18:30):
George Patsalos had already moved on to another woman before
Ava disappeared in nineteen eighty two, and in nineteen eighty
five he married Barbara Campfield, the woman he'd started seeing
a year before. Ava de Heart vanished. That marriage was
over before it even really began. They married in March,
(18:52):
had a baby in May, and they were separated by July,
though they didn't officially divorce until nineteen eighty seven. On
the divorce decree, the legal grounds for the divorce is
listed simply as cruelty. You can't really know what goes
on behind closed doors. But shortly before Barbara filed for
(19:13):
the divorce, her brother shot George in the neck during
an argument that took place at her mother's house. For
fourteen years, Ava Dehart's sister, Debbie, investigated the disappearance on
her own. She hired a private investigator, but she kept
pursuing the best lead on her own. Barbara Campfield hadn't
(19:38):
to know something. She was George Patsalos's girlfriend when Ava disappeared,
and it's a small town people talk, so she took
advantage of that, and she talked too. Debbie would stop
by the grocery store where Barbara was working, just a chat.
Every now and then. She'd ask Barbara her sister. She
(20:01):
asked her about George. She asked what happened in nineteen
eighty two, and slowly Barbara opened up to her. Barbara
hired a lawyer shortly after She led on to Debbie
that she'd helped George clean up a lot of blood
one night in July of nineteen eighty two, and her
lawyer negotiated a deal for immunity, and then she took
(20:26):
the police to the well. Barbara said for all those
years she'd been too afraid to talk. She was afraid
that George would do the same thing to her. But
in nineteen ninety six, she finally confessed to helping George
Potsollos throw a body down a well. She claimed that
(20:47):
she never knew whose body it was. A forensic examination
confirmed that the skeletal remains at the bottom of an
abandoned well were those of Ava DeHart. A forensic anthropologist
had testified that of the thirty five fractures detected on examination,
twenty seven of them happened while she was still alive.
(21:10):
George Potzalos beat her to death. George Pozzalos was convicted
of the first degree murder of Ava de Hart in
nineteen ninety seven. He was sentenced to life in prison,
where he died in two thousand and six. So in
nineteen forty three, Cristos Pazzalos shot his wife Athena in
(21:32):
the throat, leaving John and George without a mother. John
Patler was right almost when he wrote in nineteen seventy
six that it isn't fair to attribute his political leanings
entirely to his violent childhood. It is possible to grow
up in a violent home and not become a Nazi.
(21:53):
It is possible to be the son of a domestic
abuser and not grow up to beat women to death.
But it is still true to say that that's what
happened here, that the sons of a murdered mother grew
into men who murdered too. One killed a man he
loved like a father, and the other killed a woman
(22:17):
who'd once carried his child. I don't know what that means,
if it means anything, All I know is that's what happened.
In twenty thirteen, John Patler's youngest son, Nicholas Patler, contributed
the afterward to William Schmaltz's biography of George Lincoln Rockwell.
(22:40):
Nicholas was not quite a year old when his father
shot Rockwell, and he wrote that he had no contact
with his father from the time he was six until
he was thirty four. He's the only one of Patler's
four children who seems to have made any public statement
about their father, So he's the only one I'll talk about.
He has a master's degree in history. His first book
(23:04):
was a history of the massive protest movement that emerged
in opposition to the forced segregation of the federal workforce
during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. For several years he
was an adjunct professor teaching African American history. His second
book actually just came out a few weeks ago, a
biography of Pinkney Bent and Stewart Pinchback. Pinchback was the
(23:25):
son of an enslaved woman and was briefly the governor
of Louisiana in eighteen seventy two. Nicholas Butler has clearly
worked hard to put something into the world that his
father was trying to take away from it. Look at
his life, his work, interviews he's given over the years.
(23:46):
He is the opposite of the man his father was
in the nineteen sixties. In that afterward, he writes compassionately
about the father he got to know as an adult.
He describes his father's traumatic childhood, and he understands how
a damaged young man came to be drawn in by
the fatherly attention he got from Rockwell. He's trying to understand,
(24:12):
and he's careful to emphasize that his goal is not
to excuse. When he wrote this in twenty thirteen, he'd
spent a little over a decade getting to know his father,
and at the time he had also recently enrolled in
a master's program at Bethany Theological Seminary. And I think
that does help me understand the tenor of the essay
(24:33):
in a way. He's writing earnestly about finding peace and
being opened to the possibility of transformation. He wrote that
his father really was a changed man. His father had
told him once that he regretted his time in the
Nazi movement, and even expressed that he now realized he'd
(24:54):
been marching with the wrong side during the Civil Rights movement.
Nicholas Butler ends that afterward on a hopeful note, writing quote,
I want to encourage the reader not to give up
on those trapped in cycles and situations of violence and distortion,
whether in her own back yard or across the globe.
(25:17):
The one thing that I have seen personally and witnessed
over and over in many contexts that can transform hatred
and the hater is love, courageous, visionary, and uncompromising love.
In twenty thirteen, when he wrote that his father was
(25:38):
proof of this message, that he'd been transformed. Four years later,
in twenty seventeen, after the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville, Virginia,
every news outlet in the country was running front page
stories with pictures of Nazis. Hundreds and hundreds of neo Nazis,
(26:01):
men flying Swastika flags, men with Swastika tattoos, men in
Nazi uniforms, men with torches, men with weapons, Videos of
men chanting you will not replace us blood and soil,
videos of men shouting Rockwell's most famous slogan, white power.
(26:24):
A changed man, a man who regretted inciting violent racist
mobs all those years ago, What would he say when
he saw it happening again. Two days after that rally,
(26:51):
after a young neo Nazi murdered a peaceful demonstrator in
the streets, John Patler posted on Facebook that there's nothing
wrong with white pride. He wrote, it was a peaceful parade,
a couple of hundred white men, neatly attired, expressing their
right to free speech and objection to the removal of
the statue of General Lee. A reporter from The Washington
(27:16):
Post made several attempts to contact him, even visiting his
apartment in Manhattan, but he refused to be interviewed. His son,
the same son who wrote so proudly, so lovingly in
twenty thirteen about his father's transformation, told The Washington Post
in twenty seventeen that his father had started to change
(27:37):
again around twenty fifteen. Quote, I don't know what the
climate is doing to him now. It seems like little
by little he's becoming poisoned again. You can't know what's
in a man's heart. You can judge his actions, you
(27:57):
can interpret his words, but there isn't any one who
can tell you for sure whether John Patler's heart changed
twice or not at all? Was he a changed man
from nineteen seventy until twenty fifteen and then he changed back?
Did the love and understanding of a once estranged sun
(28:19):
help him come to terms with the hurt in his
own soul and the ways that pushed him to inflict
pain on the world, only then to hear the siren
song of a new fure during the twenty sixteen election.
Was that hate, just lying dormant, waiting for the right
moment to march again. There are a few times in
(28:43):
the last few weeks as I've been writing this story
that something reminded me of what I think is one
of the greatest episodes of television ever produced. The fourth
episode of the fourth season of The Twilight Zone aired
in January of nineteen sixty three. It starred a young
Dennis Hopper as Peter Fulmer, the leader of a small
(29:05):
group of neo Nazis. I don't know that Rod Serling
ever stated outright that he was thinking of George Lincoln
Rockwell when he wrote the character of Peter Fulmer, a small,
angry man desperate to command the respect of his followers,
but struggling to pay the rent on his Nazi headquarters.
When it is so precisely Rockwell that I can't believe
(29:28):
there's any other explanation. As Peter Fulmer is struggling to
put on his little Nazi rallies and grow the ranks
of his Nazi party, a mysterious figure appears to him
and offers him money and advice. And when the man
finally steps out of the shadows, it's Adolf Hitler. Himself.
(29:51):
The episode aired four years before Rockwell died in real life,
but at the end of the episode, his on screen
stand in is leading out in an alley. As Rod
Serling narrates the closing monologue, you see Hitler's ghost walk
off into the night in search of a new apprentice,
and we're left with a warning. He's alive. He's alive
(30:17):
because we keep him alive.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that
when he comes to Ururtan. Remember it when you hear
his voice speaking on through others. Remember it when you
hear a name called a minority, attack, any blind, unreasoning
assault out a people, or any human being. He's alive
because through these things we keep them alive.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
George Lincoln Rockwell is dead. Almost all of the men
who marched behind him sixty years ago are dead. But
only the men died. The thing that drove them, the
thing that's still drives men like them today. It's alive,
and too many people are keeping it alive. Weird Little
(31:26):
Guys is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our
executive producers are Sophy Lettterman, and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Ry Gagan that the
music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me
at Wardly Guy's 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
(31:48):
with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subred it.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Ruthie's Table 4
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home. On River Cafe Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers. Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt, and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks. Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation. For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/ Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/therivercafelondon/ Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/ For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iheartradio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com