In 2007, a white nationalist known for his addiction to causing drama claimed he saw Ron Paul at a nazi supper club. Ron Paul supporters, including those on nazi message boards, pushed back. The feud that ensued led to Curtis Maynard's fall from grace as a holocaust denial blogger - he'd been keeping a secret from his readers. Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/us/politics/ron-paul-disowns-extremists-views-but-doesnt-disavow-the-support.html https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/ron-pauls-new-organization-reportedly-stacked-extremists/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jan/16/guiltbyassociation https://web.archive.org/web/20071226150527/themedium.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/the-ron-paul-vid-lash/ https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/pageoneplus/corrections.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071221222229/ http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=28341_Neo-Nazis_Say-_Ron_Paul_is_One_of_Us&only https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/local/sarasota/2018/10/01/alleged-white-nationalist-peter-gemma-resigns-from-sarasota-gop-executive-committee/9732609007/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2005/04/07/for-holocaust-denier-theres-no-telling/057d4471-7668-4bf2-ba59-6e7f9666bb18/ http://new.wymaninstitute.org/2004/12/former-senior-aide-to-pat-buchanan-spoke-at-holocaust-deniers-meeting/ https://www.mediamatters.org/white-nationalism/white-nationalist-writer-peter-gemma-resigns-sarasota-gop-executive-committee https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/conservativism-and-foreign-policy/182250 https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/world/americas/21iht-hate.4.17140643.html See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
He was a Boy Scout leader, a husband, a father, but he was leading a double life.
He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best.
Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
It was big news.
I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery.
Big, big news.
A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.
I like saw hoping that happened.
An arrest, trial, and conviction soon follow.
He did not kill her.
There's no way.
Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free?
Did you kill her?
Listen to The Real Killer, Season 3, on the iHeartRadio app.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremorchi.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
He was a freaking crazy man.
He was my father, and I had no idea about any of this until now.
From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, Crook County is available Tuesday, February 11th.
Listen for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On February 1st, 2007, Elie Wiesel had just finished speaking at a conference at San Francisco's Argent Hotel.
He was taking the elevator down to the lobby when a man accosted him, demanding an interview.
The 78-year-old Holocaust survivor was planning to catch a flight home to New York that evening, but he agreed to speak with the man in the lobby.
As an author, activist, and Nobel laureate, he'd given thousands of interviews over the decades.
And he could tell right away that this man was no journalist.
Instead of being placated by this offer, though, the man stopped the elevator on the sixth floor.
Eric Hunt had been stalking Wiesel for weeks, following him all the way out to California.
Hunt didn't want to interview Wiesel.
He wanted to interrogate him.
Eric Hunt's plan was to get Wiesel into his hotel room.
and force him to confess that Knight, Wiesel's memoir about his time in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, had been a work of fiction.
He calls the book a fairy tale, not just because he disbelieves individual claims made in one man's memoir, but because he does not believe the Holocaust happened at all.
He dragged Wiesel out of the elevator and down the hallway toward a hotel room, all the while shouting, Why don't you want people to know the truth?
Hunt claims he abandoned the plan at this point because he feared Wiesel was going to have a heart attack, which would render him useless in the search for answers.
Wiesel would later testify that Hunt stood over him, completely expressionless, and said, You're afraid of the truth.
Before just walking away, leaving his victim lying there on the floor in the hallway.
Having accomplished...
Nothing.
Hunt left California.
A week later, his estranged father picked him up at a bus station in Scranton and drove him home to New Jersey, where his mother checked him into a substance abuse clinic.
He may never have been caught at all, if not for the apparent confession that appeared online a few days after the attack.
After Hunt's arrest, a San Francisco police lieutenant assured the public, he is a lone wolf.
And not part of any organization or group.
But what do I keep telling you?
There are no lone wolves.
Not really.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This is not an episode about Eric Hunt.
For all the side stories, digressions, and tangents, this is still a story about Curtis Maynard, the Holocaust denial blogger who murdered his ex-wife and then died by suicide in 2010. But if I'm being entirely honest with you, it's really only barely about Curtis Maynard.
His story, told on its own, is quite short, and you already know most of it.
It was in Part 1. He was a Holocaust denier who hoped to make a career as a white supremacist writer.
He had a short rise to minor fame in his niche online space, and then a sudden fall from grace.
He spiraled after his second divorce, and he shot himself in the head while fleeing from the police after murdering the mother of his children.
But I'm not really interested in a straightforward true crime narrative about an act of domestic violence.
In the story about Curtis Maynard that I think is more interesting, he's only a bit player.
The stories playing out all around him in the last few years of his life are full of weird little guys.
Guys like Eric Hunt.
There's no reason to believe that those two men were even aware of each other's existence.
Aside from their shared doubts about the Holocaust, they don't really have much in common.
In 2007, Hunt was a 22-year-old recent college graduate in New Jersey.
Curtis Maynard was a 40-year-old husband and father in Texas, working part-time as a nurse while he pursued his true passion, blogging about how the Holocaust never happened.
Well, that's not entirely true.
They did have one other thing in common.
For both men, the ugliest chapter of their lives somehow involved A man named Bill White.
Bill White is not a man I'm really ready to explain.
His role in this story makes him unavoidable.
But he's a man I've spent years pondering and hundreds of hours reading, mostly by way of his voluminous, vexatious court filings from federal prison.
He'll have his day.
We'll...
Get to Bill White.
But until then, he will continue to pop up in a lot of other people's stories.
He's kind of everywhere.
You may even remember his name from a brief aside a few months ago in one of the Ethan Melzer episodes.
It was Bill White who turned out to be right about a federal informant in the movement.
He'd been saying for years that Joshua Caleb Sutter was working for the FBI. And after Sutter led the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen deeper into its involvement with a satanic cult, the Order of Nine Angles, it came out that he had been.
Bill White is a Nazi.
That much is probably obvious by now.
Why else would we be talking about him?
But he's also kind of a drama queen.
Before he became a jailhouse lawyer, he was an incessant.
And in his decades in the movement, he had beef with everybody.
He was stirring up shit in a way that can only be described as pathological.
And that may be because it kind of was.
Normally, it might be unfair for me to opine on a man's mental health based on his blog.
But in Bill's case, I've got some backup here.
For some reason, he once filed a complete copy of his own psychological evaluation as an exhibit in a court case.
So I can tell you that several different psychologists and psychiatrists have, over the years, diagnosed Bill White with narcissistic personality disorder.
That's a term that's seen a lot of abuse in popular discourse in recent years, reducing it to a meaningless epithet hurled at someone who's behaving badly online, but it does actually mean something.
Quoting directly from one of his psyche vows, a doctor wrote, While antisocial traits refer to engaging in activities that run counter to mainstream social norms.
To be clear, I'm not saying that everyone with a personality disorder is a bad person.
Having a personality disorder does not make you a Nazi.
It does not make you a criminal.
It just so happens that Bill White is all of those things.
It's a difficult condition to live with.
There's no cure, and the nature of the condition often means that those living with it don't feel that they need treatment.
But there are people who manage to live relatively normal lives with the support of things like dialectical behavior therapy.
I'm not trying to slander everyone with a personality disorder, but I do think this diagnosis sheds some light on Bill White's behavior.
He needs to be right.
He needs to be the center of attention.
He'll do almost anything to get that attention, positive or negative, it barely matters.
And any perceived slight against him is justification to go absolutely nuclear in response.
The white power movement is full of men who attack their enemies.
And there's no shortage of men in the movement going after each other.
There are power struggles, ideological disagreements, and just plain friction between guys with no social skills.
But even in that milieu, Bill White stands out.
He had beef with everybody.
In Eric Hunt's story, Bill White's role is a little unclear.
Both men claimed to have never met, which is probably technically true, I don't know.
I don't think they met in person.
In February of 2007, 16 days passed between Hunt's assault on Elie Wiesel in San Francisco and his arrest in New Jersey.
And during that time, a 3,000-word confession was posted online, signed by someone calling himself Eric Hunt.
Years later, Hunt would claim he could not possibly have written the post because he was already locked up when it was made, but that's just not true.
I have a day-by-day timeline.
But as to the possibility that someone else wrote it, I guess anything is possible, right?
But it could not have been authored by someone just hoping to smear Hunt's name, which is what he would later allege.
Makes a snide remark that Elie Wiesel hadn't called the police after the incident because he somehow knew that if he did call the police, they would question him about the Holocaust and then arrest him for lying.
But in truth, Wiesel had called the police immediately after the attack.
But there was no media coverage of the incident until after the confession was posted online.
And with no media coverage predating that post, the details it contains, the specific details of the attack, could only have been written by someone who witnessed it, or a close associate with whom he'd shared the details.
The original post was a user-submitted essay on an anti-Semitic site hosted in Australia.
But a few days after it first appeared, a Blogspot account was created.
And the same essay was posted again.
The blog's author also claimed to be Eric Hunt.
On his profile page, he says he's a member of the American National Socialist Workers' Party, the ANSWP. That was Bill White's neo-Nazi group back then.
And Hunt said he was acting with, quote, That same week, Bill White posted on his own blog that he had confirmation that Wiesel's attacker, who had by this point still not been identified or arrested,
was a supporter, though not a member, of the ANSWP. White then followed up by posting the home address of Elie Wiesel and several of his family members, in case anyone was looking for him.
And the blog purportedly run by Hunt then reposted that content.
After Hunt was arrested, White issued a statement that read, in part, Insofar as my views may have played a role in motivating Mr. Hunt, I can only say that I hope I inspire a hundred more young white people to sacrifice themselves for our collective racial whole.
The only thing more noble than sacrifice is victory.
Heil Hitler.
When Eric Hunt was convicted in 2008 for attacking Wiesel, his lawyer said that those online comments were the result of mental illness, not a reflection of their clients' beliefs.
They didn't deny he'd made those posts, only that he was not really responsible for their content.
He wasn't really a Holocaust denier.
He wasn't really an anti-Semite.
He was just having a bit of a mental break after his grandfather's death.
He just needed treatment.
So at the time these actual events were unfolding, Bill White happily claimed Hunt as a supporter.
He was proud to take credit for motivating the attack.
And Eric Hunt was not denying having made those posts.
It wasn't until after Hunt was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury that indicted Bill White on charges of threatening and harassing other people that both men changed their stories.
They both claimed that they'd been framed.
Perhaps some sinister Jewish cabal had hacked them and made those incriminating posts in their names.
But that's really neither here nor there.
Bill White's ever-changing stories would take us weeks to sort out, and I'm not ready.
And to be fair to Curtis Maynard, the actual subject of this episode, none of this has anything really to do with him.
Not directly, anyway.
I chose to open this story with Eric Hunt because it's a clear picture of the state of the Holocaust denial movement during the years Maynard was writing his blog.
It wasn't just blog posts and riverboat dinner cruises with David Irving.
This rabid search for some kind of proof to justify their hatred wasn't just taking place on forum threads and conferences in Idaho.
Men like Eric Hunt were driving cross-country.
To abduct elderly Holocaust survivors.
And for the sake of my narrative, it's lucky that Hunt's story introduces us to Bill White.
Because it was Bill White and his insatiable need for attention that drew Curtis Maynard into an online argument in December of 2007. And it was Bill White's irresistible urge to lash out at anyone who crossed him.
That ruined Curtis Maynard's reputation among the racists who read his Holocaust denial blog.
On December 19, 2007, Bill White made a pretty big claim.
He logged on to Vanguard News Network, a neo-Nazi forum, and started a thread with the title, Ron Paul lies about lack of involvement with white nationalists.
The post read, Comrades, I have kept quiet about the Ron Paul campaign for a while because I didn't see any need to say anything that would cause any trouble.
However, reading the latest release from his campaign spokesman, I am compelled to tell the truth about Ron Paul's extensive involvement in white nationalism.
Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, and the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia.
Usually on Wednesdays.
This is part of a dinner that was originally organized by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, and Joe Sobron, and has been mostly taken over by the Council of Conservative Citizens.
I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.
For his spokesman to call white racialism a small ideology, and claim white activists are wasting their money, Trying to influence Paul is ridiculous.
Paul is a white nationalist of the stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position.
I don't know that it is necessarily good for Paul to expose this.
However, he really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism, and for him to deny that and the belief he will be more respectable by denying it is outrageous.
And I hate seeing people in the press who denounce racialism.
Merely because they think it is not fashionable.
Bill White, Commander, American National Socialist Workers' Party.
Now, is that true?
The short answer is, legally?
No, I won't say that this Nazi is telling the truth.
Is it possible?
Kinda, yeah.
Probably not entirely true, but maybe a little.
There are elements of truth to this.
But we'll get to that.
So Bill White posted this on a Nazi forum on a Wednesday evening.
And almost instantly, I mean with a curious quickness, conservative blogger Charles Foster Johnson picked up the story, getting a post up on his site, Little Green Football's, within hours.
And Johnson quickly dug up what looked like pretty damning receipts.
Paul's campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission do show that someone used campaign funds at a restaurant called Tara Thai in Arlington 11 times in 2007, spending about $40 once a month or so.
Now, there's no proving anything here.
It's too many years ago, and...
No one who could tell the truth has any incentive to do so.
But I can tell you what I think happened here.
Bill White made this up.
But he made up a pretty convincing story because it has a lot of elements of truth.
He did flub a couple of key details, though.
The white nationalist dinner meetings he's talking about were real.
But he got the name of the restaurant wrong.
Before his death in 2005, white supremacist writer Sam Francis did host a monthly get-together at a Thai restaurant in Northern Virginia.
But the restaurant was called Salatai, not Taratai.
Both restaurants do exist, or did at the time, in Arlington, Virginia.
And Taratai, as it happens, was about a quarter mile away from Ron Paul's campaign headquarters in 2007. So far from being a smoking gun proving Ron Paul was going to monthly Nazi dinner parties, it kind of looks like that was just the preferred takeout destination for someone on the campaign staff.
But in 2007, those white nationalist dinners at Salatai were still going on.
After Sam Francis died, it was taken over by other organizers.
And in 2007, they were being run by a longtime Council of Conservative Citizens member named Peter Gemma.
And just a quick aside about Peter Gemma.
He was quite publicly associated with this kind of stuff, at least as far back as 2004, when he spoke at the annual Holocaust Denial Conference held by the Institute for Historical Review.
In 2005, the Washington Post ran a story about him hosting a book signing, For David Irving.
But for some reason, it took until 2018 for the Republican Party committee in Sarasota County, Florida, to vote to remove him from their executive committee.
And after Bill White claims that Ron Paul was attending these very real dinners that were being hosted by Peter Gemma, Gemma himself responded to the allegations, writing, I ran those dinners.
Ron Paul was never there.
Nor did we run some sort of neo-Nazi meeting.
We had academics and activists of national repute.
In the audience were people who work in government, businessmen, and grassroots types, too.
If Bill White ever came to the meetings, he didn't use his real name.
He doesn't even get the name of the restaurant correct.
As for Gemma's claims that the dinners were not, Yes, that National Policy Institute, the one that would later appoint Richard Spencer as chairman.
So the dinners Bill White is claiming to have seen Ron Paul attend were real, and they were being attended by these Intellectual giants of the white supremacist world, such that those exist, as well as white supremacists with connections to slightly more mainstream conservative politics.
Peter Gemma himself had been a senior staff member on Pat Buchanan's 2000 presidential campaign.
Did Ron Paul ever attend?
I don't know.
When Virginia Heffernan, writing for the New York Times, picked up this story from the blogosphere, The Ron Paul campaign quickly issued a denial, and the New York Times pulled the story and issued a correction.
The campaign flatly denied that Ron Paul had ever attended such a dinner, or that he'd ever met Bill White.
Oddly, they did admit that Norm Singleton, Paul's legislative director and someone who'd worked for Ron Paul for many years, had met White, quote, At a dinner gathering of conservatives several years ago, after which Singleton expressed his indignation at the views espoused by White to the organizer of the dinner.
So perhaps the nugget of truth in Bill's post is that he had met Ron Paul's legislative director at one of these dinners, but it had been so many years that he maybe forgot the name of the restaurant.
And the timing here tells us something about Bill White's decision to post this story.
December 19, 2007, was the exact same day that the Ron Paul campaign issued a statement that they would not be returning a $500 campaign donation made by Don Black, the webmaster of the Nazi site Stormfront.
Don Black was a vocal supporter of the Paul campaign, as were many Stormfront posters.
Black boasted on Stormfront that dozens of members were active campaign volunteers and donors.
A photo had recently surfaced of Paul and Black at a campaign event in Fort Lauderdale in September.
If you look at Don Black's Wikipedia page right now, actually, the photo of his face on that page is actually cropped from this picture.
So it's just a picture of Don Black, but Ron Paul is there just out of frame.
And so by December, there were calls for Ron Paul to return the Nazis' money and denounce him.
It's obvious that this is the story Bill White is responding to.
He quotes directly from the campaign statement that had been issued just hours before his post.
A Paul aide said, If someone with small ideologies happens to contribute money to Ron, thinking he can influence Ron in any way, he's wasted his money.
Paul himself refused to disavow the support of white nationalists, saying, quote, If they want to endorse me, they're endorsing what I do or say.
It has nothing to do with endorsing what they say.
So he kept the money.
He was a Boy Scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father.
He went to a local church.
He was going to the grocery store with us.
He was the guy next door.
But he was leading a double life.
He was certainly a peeping Tom, looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about what he could do.
He then began entering the houses.
He could get into their home, take something, and get out and not be caught.
He felt very powerful.
He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.
Someone killed four members of a family.
It just didn't happen here.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best.
Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, everything from poisoners and pirates to art thieves and snake oil products and those who made and sold them.
We uncover the stories and secrets of some of history's most compelling criminal figures, including a man who built a submarine as a getaway vehicle.
Yep, that's a fact.
We also look at what kinds of societal forces were at play at the time of the crime, from legal injustices to the ethics of body snatching, to see what, if anything, might look different through today's perspective.
And be sure to tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in custom-made cocktails and mocktails inspired by the stories.
There's one for every story we tell.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It was big news.
I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery.
Big, big news.
When a young woman is murdered, a desperate search for answers takes investigators to some unexpected places.
He believed it could be part of a satanic cult.
I think there were many individual treasures.
I don't know.
We'll pull the trigger.
A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.
I like saw, hoping that happened.
An arrest, trial, and conviction soon follow.
He just saw his body just kind of collapsing.
Two decades later, a new team of lawyers says their client is innocent.
He did not kill her.
There's no way.
Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free?
Are you capable of murder?
I definitely am not.
Did you kill her?
Listen to The Real Killer, Season 3, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It takes one guy out there to say, who's that f***ing Kyle who thinks he can just get on a f***ing microphone on a podcast and start publicizing this?
From iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV comes a new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit.
And that was my mission, to snuff the...
Life out of this guy.
He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Torn between two worlds.
I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing.
He was a freaking crazy man.
We don't know who he is, really.
He is my father.
And I had no idea about any of this until now.
Welcome to Crook County.
Series premiere February 11th.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I think the best explanation is that Ron Paul hurt Bill White's feelings.
That small ideologies comment clearly got under his skin.
Disrespected.
Nazi money is good enough for Ron Paul, but Ron Paul thinks he's too good for Nazis?
So he lashed out.
He wanted to hurt Ron Paul right back.
And he was media savvy enough to understand that Paul was particularly vulnerable at that moment when it came to stories about his associations with white supremacists.
My best guess here is that the claim he's making up is not technically true.
I do not think that Bill White ever had dinner with Ron Paul at a meetup organized by the Council of Conservative Citizens at a Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia.
I am less inclined to dismiss outright his claim that he had met Paul's legislative director, Norm Singleton, at one of those dinners in 2002, because that does align with the campaign's own admission.
So he was taking...
Kernels of truth, and capitalizing on the headline news of the day to stroke his own ego by creating a shitstorm that he could be in the middle of.
But he didn't actually need to make up stories if he wanted to remind everyone that Ron Paul was palling around with white supremacists.
Just two months before this post, in October of 2007, Ron Paul had in fact been the guest of honor at a different Nazi supper club.
And this time there's no doubt at all about whether or not he accepted that invitation.
Because in addition to the 200-some people packed standing room only into the Boulevard Wood Grill in Arlington, Virginia, there were cameras.
A C-SPAN camera crew filmed the entire event.
Before we begin, I'd like to thank the other members of the executive board, Dan McCarthy and Kevin Deanna and Marcus Epstein, who actually founded the club just around a year and a half ago.
And their Tyler's efforts are invaluable.
Thank you.
Oh, do you recognize that voice?
You can't see the video, you're just listening to it, but does it sound familiar?
I think it might for some of you.
Maybe I've spent too much time among people who share my same obsessions, so maybe that 15-second audio clip didn't make you drop your phone in surprise as you demanded to know.
Is that Richard Spencer?
Because it is.
That's Richard Bertrand Spencer, best known for such highlights as getting punched in the face on camera at Trump's first inauguration.
Or having a screeching meltdown because he didn't get to give his speech at a Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Ten years before he helped plan the Unite the Right rally that killed Heather Heyer, he had just dropped out of a PhD program at Duke University to pursue a career in racism.
He was living in Arlington and working as the assistant editor at the American Conservative magazine.
The event Ron Paul was speaking at that night when Richard Spencer introduced him...
was put on by the Robert A. Taft Club, founded a year earlier by Richard Spencer, Kevin Deanna, and Marcus Epstein.
Epstein described the club as a forum for, quote, And while Richard Spencer's name is probably the only one of those three that sounds familiar to you, Deanna and Epstein were, and are, deeply entrenched in white supremacist circles.
Deanna and Epstein had met in college at William& Mary, where they both wrote for a right-wing student newspaper, The Remnant, which was sued after they published the name of a teenage rape victim.
After graduation, they founded a group called Youth for Western Civilization and set about establishing chapters of their white supremacist student group on college campuses.
Future Weird Little Guy subject, Matthew Heimbach, would later act as the president of the chapter at Towson University.
And Kevin Deanna, under the pseudonym Gregory Hood, still writes for American Renaissance, a white nationalist outlet that holds annual race science conferences.
Just a few months before the Ron Paul event, Marcus Epstein was stumbling home drunk one night when he saw a black woman minding her own business.
Apparently just unable to control himself, he screamed the N-word at her before charging at her and...
According to news reports about the incident, trying to karate chop her in the head.
He would eventually plead guilty to assault.
But his boss, Congressman Tom Tancredo, didn't think the incident was serious enough to fire him.
So in the fall of 2007, Ron Paul was photographed with his arm around Don Black.
And he got a standing ovation after an introduction from Richard Spencer.
At a supper club organized by a guy who'd just done a hate crime.
Bill White didn't need to make things up if he wanted to draw attention to Paul's cozy relationships with men who wanted to outlaw interracial marriage.
But he loves to start drama.
So he logged on to that Nazi message board and he posted.
The response was intense.
There were 441 replies to that first thread.
Most of the posters on Vanguard News were ardent Ron Paul supporters, and they were frustrated with Bill for hurting Paul's campaign.
As to whether there was any possibility the claims could be true, opinions varied.
Some users felt confident that Ron Paul was definitely one of them, but they understood that it would be political suicide for him to admit it.
Others were willing to admit that maybe he wasn't completely aligned with them in that way, but they agreed with him about a lot of other issues, and his followers were a great recruiting pool for the movement.
One user posted, quote, Another brushed off Bill's revelation, saying it wasn't even news that...
Everyone in D.C. knows about Ron Paul's white nationalist connections.
Former Klansman and National Alliance organizer Ron Doggett weighed in, saying he was a regular guest at those dinners and he'd never seen Ron Paul there.
Mostly, people were pissed off at Bill.
One poster wrote, You're just a goddamn loose cannon who wants to be in the limelight and you don't care what you have to do to get there.
Why don't you pack up your shit and leave and try to incriminate and poison the well against someone other than Ron Paul?
Another politely chimed in, writing, Bill, while I find this information interesting and intriguing, I have to join the course here in asking, how the fuck does this help Ron Paul or white nationalism?
Todd VanBieber, a man who once nearly blew himself up trying to build bombs he planned to set off at Disney World, was exasperated.
And he asked Bill if all this grandstanding was more important than ending the Federal Reserve.
James Leskovich, a user who posted as Yankee Jim, just seemed like he was having a good time watching the drama unfold.
Every dozen posts or so, there he was again, making wisecracks and posting laughing emojis and making comments like, you sure do know how to get attention, Bill.
Yankee Jim would be dead two months later.
He hanged himself in his garage after beating his wife to death.
Curtis Maynard was an active forum poster and a rabid Ron Paul supporter.
So when he saw the thread later that evening, he made the 142nd post, saying, Sounds like bullshit to me.
I will say that RP isn't afraid of talking with those holding an alternative view.
But it seems a little far-fetched that he'd be knowingly meeting with and shaking the hands of Bill White and any storm fronters.
I'm calling total bullshit for now.
And then he went into action.
He had to do something to defend Ron Paul's honor.
He fired off a blog post that evening accusing Bill White of secretly working for Mossad.
That's right.
The most logical explanation he could come up with was that Bill White was not a real Nazi at all, but a Jewish agent provocateur trying to prevent Nazis from getting Ron Paul elected president.
That picture, Ron Paul with Don Black?
Curtis says it's obviously fake.
Everyone knows Don Black is fat, and that man looks thin.
He frantically scoured the internet for proof that Bill was wrong, posting links to news coverage he felt refuted the claim.
After a couple posts like that, another user warned him, saying, don't egg him on.
If you're not careful, he'll out everyone he knows of.
This is how William works.
Curtis didn't listen.
And Curtis got the last word in that thread.
On Christmas Eve, he wrote, if the elections were held today and the Jews weren't able to manipulate the tally, I don't know if you recall the 2008 presidential election.
I don't know, some guy named Barack Obama won it.
But it wasn't Ron Paul.
Ron Paul did not win.
In another thread on the site, someone linked to Curtis's blog, accusing Bill White of being a Jewish agent.
And that thread got out of hand.
It devolved into an argument between April Gade and Alicia Strom.
Those names aren't relevant to this story, but I think you've heard them before.
Alicia you might remember as the second wife of Nazi pedophile Kevin Strom from the first episode of the show.
April Gade is the mother of the twins who made up the short-lived white power music duo Prussian Blue.
And in this thread, April goes hard after Bill White, and then Alicia pops in to shame her for parading her daughters around in Hitler t-shirts for money, at which point April reminds Alicia that she should have said something about her ex-husband using pictures of the twins for sexual gratification.
It really went off the rails.
Oddly, that conversation ended when...
Curtis replied to a picture of April Gade's daughters in their Hitler t-shirts by writing, quote, The sight was on fire.
For days, multiple threads, hundreds of posts, scores of users were mad at Bill White.
They were yelling at him, making fun of him, calling him names, taking up old allegations and repeating new ones.
And maybe he went after some of those people too.
I don't know.
But I do know that he couldn't forgive Curtis Maynard.
And so a month after this blow-up, it's January 2008. And Curtis Maynard is still needling Bill White.
He can't let it go.
He's outraged that Bill had tried to hurt the Paul campaign.
And so he creates a fake website for Bill White's organization, the ANSWP, and he declares himself the chairman of it.
And he's writing open letters to Bill White on his own blog and on the forums, trying to goad him into a fight.
In March of that year, he gleefully reported that there had been a fire at one of Bill White's rental properties, and then he accused White of having paid an anti-racist organization to set the fire in order to make it look like one of his black tenants had set the fire, I guess to reinforce his reputation as a real racist?
Very convoluted theory here.
And that month, a supporter of Bill's made posts calling for Curtis to be banned from the site.
And other users responded by making a poll.
One of them should be banned, but which one?
And Bill lost.
Overwhelmingly, posters on Vanguard News wanted to ban Bill, not Curtis.
And Bill responded by complaining that Curtis had actually broken one of the forum's most important rules.
On Vanguard News, you are not allowed to accuse other users of being Jewish unless you have proof.
Soon after, Bill responded by claiming that Curtis Maynard isn't even a real person, but it was an account run by a black gay man paid by the Southern Poverty Law Center to make annoying posts. .
And he challenged Curtis to name any white activist he'd ever actually met who could vouch for him.
And Curtis snapped back that he was friends with David Duke.
So they were at each other's throats.
But as 2008 wore on, Curtis Maynard's posts became increasingly paranoid and hostile.
He wasn't just fighting with Bill White.
He was accusing a lot of other people of being secretly Jewish, of working for the government, or both.
He was spiraling.
And for as much as everybody on the forum hated Bill White, they were starting to turn on Curtis Maynard, too.
He was a Boy Scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father.
He went to a local church.
He was going to the grocery store with us.
He was the guy next door.
But he was leading a double life.
He was certainly a peeping Tom, looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about.
What he could do.
He then began entering the houses.
He could get into their home, take something, and get out and not be caught.
He felt very powerful.
He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.
Someone killed four members of a family.
It just didn't happen here.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK. Through the voices of the people who know him best.
Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarchi.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, everything from poisoners and pirates to art thieves and snake oil products and those who made and sold them.
We uncover the stories and secrets of some of history's most compelling criminal figures, including a man who built a submarine as a getaway vehicle.
Yep, that's a fact.
We also look at what kinds of societal forces were at play at the time of the crime, from legal injustices to the ethics of body snatching, to see what, if anything, might look different through today's perspective.
And be sure to tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in custom-made cocktails and mocktails inspired by the stories.
There's one for every story we tell.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It was big news.
I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery.
Big, big news.
When a young woman is murdered, a desperate search for answers takes investigators to some unexpected places.
He believed it could be part of a satanic cult.
I think there were many individuals.
I don't know who pulled the trigger.
A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.
I like saw, hoping that happened.
An arrest, trial, and conviction soon follow.
He just saw his body just kind of collapsing.
Two decades later, a new team of lawyers says their client is innocent.
He did not kill her.
There's no way.
Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free?
Are you capable of murder?
I definitely am not.
Did you kill her?
Listen to The Real Killer, Season 3, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It takes one guy out there to say, who's that f***ing Kyle who thinks he can just get on a f***ing microphone on a podcast and start publicizing this?
From iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV comes a new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit.
And that was my mission, to snuff the...
Life out of this guy.
He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Torn between two worlds.
I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing.
He was a freaking crazy man.
We don't know who he is, really.
He is my father.
And I had no idea about any of this until now.
Welcome to Crook County.
Series premiere February 11th.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And then in September 2008, Bill White made another accusation.
They'd been baselessly accusing each other of being fake white nationalists back and forth for nearly a year at that point.
But this time Bill found something true.
Something that was, in their circles at least, pretty damning.
Curtis Maynard's wife was Latina, which meant that he was guilty of one of the greatest sins in the white nationalist community.
He was a race mixer.
He had mixed-race children.
A few days later, Maynard posted on his blog that he was going to be logging off for a few months.
And he ended the brief message with a shot at Bill White.
And then Curtis Maynard logged off.
On October 3rd, 2008, Bill White took credit for driving Curtis off the internet.
But his celebration didn't last long.
Even if he wasn't blogging, I suspect Curtis Maynard still saw the news when Bill White was arrested by the feds the next week.
He was charged with making threats against the foreman of the jury that convicted white supremacist leader Matt Hale.
But it didn't matter anymore.
Even with Bill White out of the game, everyone in the movement reviled Curtis Maynard, now that they knew the truth about his personal life.
Two months later, his wife Melissa filed for divorce.
I'm sure that there was more going on at home.
It wasn't just this online drama that drove him over the edge.
I don't want to reduce the story to that.
That's just the only part of the story that I have access to.
We know that he was home all day, getting mad online while his wife supported their family as an engineer.
And I'm sure that got under his skin.
We know he had a history of drug and alcohol abuse.
He'd been sober for several years, but it's hard not to imagine that his sobriety was in question at this point.
And if he blamed Melissa, or rather the color of her skin, for his loss of status in the movement, he may have taken out his anger on her or their children.
The divorce moved quickly.
She was almost immediately granted full custody of their daughters after he admitted in court that he'd left the baby home alone when he went to the store.
In 2009, as the divorce was being finalized, he turned his anger towards his own divorce attorney, accusing him of being, quote, a Mexican supremacist and working against him in the case out of loyalty to his own race.
And he started more blogs.
He started a new site for his Holocaust denial blogging, but it failed to attract the same level of interest as it had in the past.
In earlier years, he could count on fellow travelers seeing his content cross-posted on bigger platforms, like his friend David Duke's website or on Vanguard News.
But there was no more free promo from big-name white nationalists.
His essays didn't show up on David Duke's website anymore.
They weren't on Alex Linder's website anymore.
Jeff Rents scrubbed all of the old essays that he'd had on his website.
No, the only time people were talking about Curtis Maynard was in long threads on the forums, making fun of him.
In early 2009, a new account popped up on one of the forums, posting in his defense.
Other users quickly determined that It had to be Maynard himself, using a pseudonym, and they bullied him off the website again.
I don't think he ever admitted that it was his account, but I have to say, in this very limited instance, I do agree with the Nazi forum moderators.
The writing style is very similar to Maynard's.
And he made other blogs, too.
He made several single-issue blogs focused on things like...
Attacking his ex-wife.
And slandering his divorce attorney.
And one of those blogs is entirely gone from the internet.
I can't find a crumb.
I can't find even a ghost of a page.
Because it wasn't up for very long.
Because it broke the law.
References to the blog claim that he was posting revenge porn.
He was posting nude photographs of his ex-wife that he had taken during their marriage and then posted them online after the divorce to humiliate her.
And so after he was pushed off of Stormfront and Vanguard News, it seems he redirected his posting energy into a forum called the Ron Paul Liberty Forest.
And the user rpfan2008 is definitely Curtis Maynard.
He registered on the site a few days after the blow-up with Bill White in December 2007, and he posted 3,000 times before his final post just a few weeks before he died.
One thread in particular makes it very clear that RPFan2008 is Curtis Maynard because he's complaining at length that Google is suppressing results for the search term Curtis Maynard.
His last thread on the Ron Paul Forum started on January 6, 2010, three months before the murder.
And the thread is titled, My Conspiracy-Riddled, Hate-Filled, Weird, Stupid Goodbye.
And I read it like that because all of the modifiers there are in scare quotes, and he spelled the word weird wrong.
The Post is very confusing.
It's quite long.
It seems as though he'd become disillusioned with the Ron Paul revolution, and he was growing concerned that Paul's libertarian policy on drug legalization would result in widespread degeneracy and the destruction of society.
He rambles a bit about pornography and usury, and there are a lot of inexplicable variations in font size, and some things are bold, and sentences sort of trail off without concluding.
There are bullet points that don't make sense.
And then in very tiny font at the bottom, it says, I think RPFan2008 must decease from the forums.
He later edited the post to add a link to a YouTube video called The Eternal Jew.
The link is dead now, but I assume it is the 1940 Nazi propaganda film of the same name, but it could have been something else.
Much of his internet footprint from this time period is gone.
Blogs that were wiped out for terms of service violations before anyone could archive them, links that go nowhere, comments referencing forum posts from websites that haven't existed in 15 years.
People on both sides of the issue, though, both white nationalists and anti-racist activists, were noticing his downward spiral.
He did not seem well.
In May of 2009, a white nationalist podcast host made a passing reference to Maynard's history of accusing his enemies of being secretly Jewish. - His co-host processed the name for a moment, turning it over in his mind, and then he recalls that Maynard had been that guy on VNN who was...
Overtly racist online, but later revealed to have a Latino wife and mixed-race children.
And then he added that, quote, He seems a bit unstable to me.
Plus he calls all his old friends at VNN Jews now.
I wouldn't be surprised if he and his ex end up in a murder-suicide type deal.
Around that same time period, a year before the murder, a poster on an anti-racist message board, I would not be surprised if Maynard loses it and goes on a spree and harms a bunch of innocent people.
I don't know how much you have followed about the guy, but he is a nurse, which means there are people of all races in a vulnerable position under this mentally ill person's care for medications, food, IVs.
That's the part that worries me the most, and it's a piece of why I've sort of kept an eye on the guy.
What if this guy decides that Jews are the reason why his wife won her freedom and was successfully able to save herself and her kids?
And the post ends with a question.
Are his ex-wife and children at risk?
That website has long since crumbled to dust.
The post is preserved only as a quote with a dead link on a defunct blog.
So I don't know who it was that saw this coming.
But I know it must weigh heavily on their heart.
I don't think there was anything they could have done, though.
Who could they have called?
The police?
The police wouldn't have done anything.
They couldn't have intervened.
He hadn't broken the law.
By the time he did anything he could have been arrested for, it was already over.
And I won't tell that part of the story again.
I don't want to.
It's in the last episode.
Digging through hundreds of pages of forum posts and uncovering a 20-year-old C-SPAN video of Richard Spencer trying to make Ron Paul laugh.
Those things are fun for me.
I live for that.
I love a newspaper archive.
I love to dig and make my little notes.
The bloody end, though, with a young mother lying dead in her front yard.
That isn't where I want to dwell.
Curtis Maynard murdered Melissa Meza.
On April 21st, 2010. He died by suicide not long after.
His stepdaughter survived being shot in the face, and his two younger daughters were able to escape the house without being physically harmed.
On the night of the murder, he had very recently remarried.
Just two months before he died, he married his third wife.
And when he died, she was already pregnant with their child.
So four children lost a parent that night.
When the news hit the Nazi forums, reactions were across the spectrum.
The diehard conspiracy theorists jumped right into their comfort zone.
They wrote things like, I doubt the validity of the story is facts and think perhaps he was suicided.
Or, Alex Jones' competitors always seem to die in mysterious events involving guns.
Sounds like a setup to me.
But those comments were in the minority.
For people who'd followed his writing for a long time, there was some sorrow, but little shock.
One long-time reader wrote, I really think that he struggled to maintain perspective and demonstrated more than a little barely controlled anger.
It's unsurprising to me that he met a violent end.
Another said, I regret not having attempted to contact him via email.
The signs of meltdown were there all along, but who expects something like this?
The posters on VNN, the site he'd been bullied off of at least twice, had no pity for him.
One of the site's moderators wrote, and God forgive me for saying this, quote, Guess I won't have to ban him anymore for calling everyone a Jew.
He's banned from life.
One less race mixer and batshit insane white nationalist who made us all look bad.
At least he took his Mexican ex-wife with him.
Most of the posts on that forum celebrated his death as well as his ex-wife's.
Posters who'd feuded with him in the past gloated about having the last laugh.
And some hoped that more mixed-race relationships would end this way.
As is often the case when Nazis are Monday morning quarterbacking a murder, a lot of posters had notes.
Writing things like, Over on Stormfront, where he hadn't posted since 2007, the posts were a little more thoughtful.
Oddly.
Maybe my perspective is warped at this point.
No one is posting thoughtfully on Stormfront.
I was just surprised that anyone there still had the capacity to consider death tragic.
Because even the users who had no problem with a man murdering his ex-wife felt that it was really over the line to shoot the girl.
And across all of these websites...
The people who'd been keeping up with his writing all seemed to agree.
He'd been losing it.
One user posted, I'm afraid he lost all ability to distinguish between lies and truth.
I sent him an email when he started on about the moon landings and tried to rein him back in, but he wanted no part of it.
His response to me was quite extreme, and since I didn't know him personally, there wasn't much else I could do.
The forums lit up for a few days.
But then they moved on.
Curtis Maynard wasn't really missed in the places he'd spent years posting furiously, trying to make a name for himself.
Every now and again, someone remembers him.
In 2018, 8chan users were discussing the strange phenomenon of white supremacists with non-white wives.
Someone who knew the deep lore posted, There was a famous case of a guy on VNN who posed as a tough Nazi and was meanwhile a house husband with a Hispanic wife taking care of their daughter.
Usually you learn of these things after the murder-suicide.
A fellow Holocaust denier that he'd mentored in the early 2000s mentioned him fondly on the 11th anniversary of his death in 2021. The post is a sentimental reflection on his dead friend.
But it's buried deep in the comments section on a conspiracy theory video posted by an anti-Semite in Idaho who has been asked by the Russian Orthodox Church to stop pretending to be a monk.
As for the other characters in this story, Bill White is scheduled to get out of federal prison in 2037. Eric Hunt was ordered to get mental health treatment after blaming bipolar disorder for his attack on Elie Wiesel.
But...
You probably won't be surprised to hear he really was a Holocaust denier.
Just last week, he filed a federal lawsuit against Netflix and Steven Spielberg.
He claims that Netflix's re-release of a 1998 Holocaust documentary produced by Steven Spielberg has caused him intense emotional distress because his family saw the film and believed that the Holocaust was real.
No one has responded to Hunt's complaint yet.
but I'm sure Steven Spielberg has a good lawyer.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Time Media and iHeartRadio.
It's research written and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagin.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing versatile.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show 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.
He was a Boy Scout leader.
A husband.
A father.
But he was leading a double life.
He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.
Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, BTK, through the voices of the people who know him best.
Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
It was big news.
I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery.
Big, big news.
A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.
I like saw hoping that happened.
An arrest, trial, and conviction soon follow.
He did not kill her.
There's no way.
Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free?
Did you kill her?
Listen to The Real Killer, Season 3, on the iHeartRadio app.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
He was a freaking crazy man.
He was my father.
From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, Crook County is available Tuesday, February 11th.
