In the third episode of the story of George Lincoln Rockwell's assassin, Rockwell finally dies and his assassin goes on trial.Sources:Schmaltz, William H. (2013). For Race And Nation: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. River's Bend PressSimonelli, Frederick J. (1999). American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/25/shocking-neo-nazis-fly-swastika-salute-at-shopping-center-where-leader-was-killed/ https://www.fcnp.com/2017/08/25/nazis-swoop-arlington-mark-50th-anniversary-rockwell-shooting/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
On this podcast Incels, we unpack an emerging mindset.
I am a loser.
If I also woman I want to dame me out there.
A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at a deadly tipping point.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
The day in which I will have my revenge.
This is Incels.
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It was an unimaginable crime.
It's four consecutive live terms for Brian Koberger who killed the four University of Idaho students.
Nearly 30 months of silence until Bombshell Development Brian Koberger has agreed to plead guilty.
No trial, no testimony.
The defense are on a sinking ship.
This isn't the justice you wanted, but this is justice.
Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
Someone was posting photos.
It's just me naked.
Well, not me, but me with someone else's body part.
This is Levit Town, a new podcast from iHot Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deep fate pornography and the battle to stop it.
Listen to Levit Town on Bloomberg's Big Tate podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Sacred Scandal is back.
The hit true crime podcast that uncovers hidden truths and shattered faith.
For 19 years, Elena Sada was a nun for the Legion of Christ.
This season, she's telling her story.
When I first joined the Legion of Christ, I felt chosen.
I was 19 years old when Marcel Massey, the leader of the Legionaries, looked me in the eye and told me I had a calling.
Surviving meant hiding.
Escaping took courage, risking everything to tell her truth.
Listen to Sacred Scandal, The Many Secrets of Marcial Maciel on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media.
On August 25th, 2017.
A man getting a haircut at Tom's barber shop in Arlington, Virginia saw something strange.
Outside in the parking lot, a man in a short-sleeve collared shirt and a black tie was setting up a small wreath on the sidewalk next to a trash can.
When this makeshift memorial was situated to his liking, the man called his audience to attention.
His brief remarks were heard only by the assembly of six of his fellow neo-Nazis, one of whom was holding a comically large Nazi flag.
They held their right arms out in a stiff-armed Nazi salute as he bowed his head for 88 seconds of silent reflection.
This wasn't the first time that a man in the barber's chair at Tom's barber shop had glanced up to see a Nazi in the parking lot.
As the man getting his hair cut walked over to the window to snap the only photograph of this gathering.
It was 50 years to the minute since a barber at that same shop ran outside to find George Lincoln Rockwell lying in a pool of his own blood.
This tiny gathering of white-haired men in short-sleeved shirts had returned to the very spot where the commander of the American Nazi Party had been murdered.
They were there to pay their respects.
The men in the parking lot in 2017 weren't members of the American Nazi Party.
Not anymore, anyway.
No one was.
It didn't exist anymore.
But the man being saluted next to that trash can was the leader of what it became, after another attempt at rebranding in the 1980s.
A group called The New Order.
And the man leading that tiny band of Nazis in the parking lot in 2017 was Martin Kerr, a gray-haired man in his 60s.
He joined the American Nazi Party in high school, after reading an interview with George Lincoln Rockwell published in Playboy magazine.
But he was still a teenager when his hero died.
The remnants of the American Nazi Party were forced to relocate to the Midwest decades ago.
But this memorial service in Virginia wasn't a great inconvenience for them.
They were forced to relocate to the Midwest decades ago.
group was already in the area in August of 2017.
Just two weekends earlier, they'd made an appearance at the Unite the Right rally in nearby Charlottesville.
That man in the parking lot, the man who keeps George Lincoln Rockwell's ashes in a white urn on an altar, told reporters that if Rockwell could have seen those Nazis marching in Charlottesville, he would have been pleased.
On the 50th anniversary of Rockwell's death, and in the immediate aftermath of a shocking and deadly Nazi rally, George Lincoln Rockwell's successor told reporters that Rockwell's legacy was more alive now than ever.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys On the morning of the last day of his life, George Lincoln Rockwell was up early.
He stripped the sheets from his bed and threw a bundle of laundry into the back of the blue and white Chevy sedan in the driveway.
He spent most of the morning alone in his room with the American Nazi Party barracks, a house he'd nicknamed Hatemonger Hill.
Several party members were downstairs, making final preparations for that afternoon's excursion into Washington, D.C. After months of internal struggle over the party's rebranding, the first issue of a newspaper called White Power was hot off the presses, and the Nazi stormtroopers were going to try and stir up some publicity by handing it out to the national press outside the halls of Congress.
All press is good press, I guess.
And the stunt was an effort to generate interest in Rockwell's newest book, also called White Power.
But Rockwell had no plans to join his men on the trip to DC that day.
Perhaps he was anxious to avoid another disorderly conduct arrest, given his ongoing legal troubles in Chicago.
Maybe he was looking forward to an opportunity to have the house to himself, to spend a few quiet hours privately grieving the infant daughter he'd just buried a few days earlier.
Or maybe he just wanted to do his laundry.
He certainly didn't expect to die.
Not on that day in particular, anyway.
A little before noon, he made the short drive down the hill to the laundromat across the street.
He'd already put a load of dirty clothes into the machine when he realized he'd forgotten something back at the house.
If the assassin's aim had been better, Rockwell never would have seen it coming.
He was looking behind him, backing out of his parking spot when the first shot came through the windshield.
This one only nicked him.
In the instant between the first shot and the second one, he probably looked up at the rooftop, searching for the shooter.
And maybe he saw him before the second shot tore a hole in his aorta.
His trademark corn cob pipe, the one he'd once poked to the face of Martin Luther King Jr. fell from his mouth as he crawled across the front seat of the sedan, tumbling out the passenger side door onto the ground.
His still-running car rolled slowly away as he bled to death there in the parking lot.
Inside the laundromat, his dirty clothes were still sitting inside the washer, waiting for George Lincoln Rockwell to return with the bleach.
He'd dedicated his life to making the world a whiter place.
Right up to the end.
It was John Patler, up there on the roof of the Ocono Wash Laundromat in Arlington, Virginia that Friday in August of 1967.
John Patler murdered George Lincoln Rockwell.
That's the official story, and it's the one I still believe.
Piecing together the exact details, though, has been a sort of nightmarish Nazi Roschaman, comparing These different versions of the same event as told by too many people with their own secrets to keep.
In what has been probably a failed effort to try to sort things out, I read the better part of two biographies of Rockwell.
I read the relevant passages from William Luther Pierce's biography.
I read issues of Nazi newsletters like The Rockwell Report, White Power, National Socialist World, National Socialist Observer, Stormtrooper Magazine, and the World Union of National Socialist Bulletin.
I read old Stormfront posts.
I read pseudonymously published open letters by disgruntled neonazis.
I read grainy old photocopies of FBI files and stacks of memos to J. Edgar Hoover.
I read most of the 1,500-page four-volume appellate record in John Pattler's criminal case.
He did it.
But not everybody believes that.
Are you saying Patler didn't kill Rockwell?
Absolutely I'm saying it and always have said it.
That's Frank Smith.
Last week I opened the episode with the strange tale of a shootout in Maine between two men on either side of this debate.
In 1968, Christopher Vidnevich drove to Maine, and he got into a gunfight with Frank Smith.
Both men were members of the American Nazi Party.
And both men had testified at John Patler's trial.
Bidnevich for the prosecution, and Smith for the defense.
And in March of 1968, a few months after that trial ended, Smith believed that Vidnievich had been sent to kill him to keep him from getting to the truth of what really happened to George Lincoln Rockwell.
And that clip is from an interview Frank Smith gave in 2016, at the age of 95.
Nearly 50 years after Rockwell was killed, he's sticking to that story.
Listeners with a keen ear might have noticed that the man Frank Smith is talking to in that interview has a South African accent.
And if you've listened to every episode of this show, it's a voice you've heard before.
That is South African neonazi Jan Lamprecht.
At some point earlier this year, during the three months I spent writing about white supremacist terrorism in apartheid South Africa, I played a portion of an interview Jan Lamprecht did with the main subject of those episodes, a woman named Monica Huggett Stone.
And further proving my point that this show is just one very long story told out of order.
In 2016, when Lumprecht got interested in the legacy of George Lincoln Rockwell, it was Monica Huggett Stone who put him in touch with Frank Smith.
Because they know each other.
But I wanted to get people who knew him personally, if anyone was still alive.
And when Monica said you you knew him, I thought, wow, that is so lucky.
I've just got to speak to you.
It's a small world, I guess.
But we'll come back to Frank's theories.
If you read about John Pattler's criminal trial, you'll almost always see it mentioned that the bulk of the evidence against him was circumstantial.
And that's true.
But that word doesn't mean what the average person seems to think it means.
Circumstantial evidence isn't evidence that is less good than its counterpart, direct evidence, although it is often characterized that way.
But in fact, most evidence is circumstantial, and the most common kind of direct evidence, eyewitness testimony, is shockingly unreliable.
Imagine for a moment that you're a juror.
If you're sitting on a jury in a criminal trial, whatever it may be, what kind of evidence would you like to see?
What sort of Evidence would make you feel sure.
Fingerprints, ballistics, cell phone data showing that a defendant's phone was hanging off a tower near the crime scene the night of the crime, some kind of so-called smoking gun, right?
That would be ideal.
But those are all circumstantial evidence.
Because while they may present a fact, right, it can be concretely stated that it is a fact that this is evidence of a defendant's fingerprint on a gun, or this evidence shows that their cell phone pinged off this tower at this time.
Those are facts.
But what they're being shown to prove is a fact that you then have to infer.
So you have to draw an inference based on what is being shown to you.
So when you see circumstantial evidence that a defendant's DNA was found on an object at the crime scene, you then have to infer what that means.
And what you could infer that it means is that the person whose DNA that was was there.
In John Patler's case, there was eyewitness testimony from people who saw him fleeing the scene.
But it's true.
The strongest evidence in this case was circumstantial.
No one saw the shooter.
Not in the act, anyway.
The sound of the gunshots in the parking lot brought people out of the laundromat and other stores at the shopping center, but no one actually witnessed the murder.
No one saw a man fire a gun.
And Pattler never confessed.
As far as I can tell, he has always maintained his innocence.
But the circumstantial evidence really stacks up here.
Within minutes of arriving on the scene after the shooting, officers with the Arlington County police had a description of a man.
Several witnesses told officers that when they came outside after hearing the gunshots, they saw a man running away from the shopping center.
And within about a half an hour of the shooting and a mile away, officers saw a man who matched that description.
The man was wearing the clothes the witnesses had described, and he was soaked in sweat, pacing anxiously back and forth at the bus stop as he wipes dirt and sweat from his face with a towel.
Based on those eyewitness accounts and the fact that the officer already knew who Pattler was and that he was a member of the American Nazi Party, he was taken into custody.
but he didn't have a gun on him.
The officers who arrested him suspected that, if this is their shooter, he must have ditched the gun somewhere along his route between the crime scene and the bus stop.
And that route would have taken him through a nearby park.
So officers searched until nightfall on Friday, but it wasn't until Saturday morning that a gun was found in a creek under a footbridge in the park.
The gun they found in that creek was a ballistic match to the bullet in Rockwell's body.
But it was also a match to bullets that were dug out of a tree at the edge of some property owned by Pattler's father-in-law.
A witness testified to seeing Pattler shooting at that particular tree for target practice a month before the murder.
The serial number on the gun matched a sales record for a local gun shop, and the owner of the shop testified to the authenticity of records, showing that he'd sold the weapon to a Mrs. Robert A. Lloyd Jr. in 1962.
Mrs. Robert A. Lloyd Jr. had purchased the gun for her son, Robert Lloyd III.
Robert Lloyd III is a member of the American Nazi Party, who testified that he'd let Pattler borrow the gun in 1964.
And when he asked for it back, Patler told him it was stolen.
So just to recap what we have so far.
People who heard the gunshots walked outside to see a man lying in a pool of blood and another man running away.
Bye.
A man wearing the same outfit and matching those physical characteristics described by the witnesses, was found half an hour later, a mile away, Soaked in sweat and very anxious.
The murder weapon was found in a creek under a footbridge that he would have crossed on his route between the crime scene and where officers encountered him.
And the last known location of that weapon was in his possession.
He claims to have lost it years earlier, but he was seen using it just a month before the murder.
When the officers took Pattler into custody, he wasn't just wet from perspiration.
His shoes were soaking wet, and his pants were visibly wet from the knees down.
Later examination of his shoes found roofing tar on the soles.
A maintenance technician who worked for the property manager of the shopping center testified at trial that, due to blocked drains, there was several inches of standing water on the roof that day, because of heavy rain the night before.
Anyone who'd been climbing around on the roof that day would have gotten very wet.
The trial lasted three weeks, and jurors were forced to come in on Saturdays to squeeze in testimony from nearly a hundred witnesses.
After the jury was selected on November 27th, each member of the jury was driven home by a sheriff's deputy who watched them while they packed a suitcase.
For three weeks, those jurors were driven to and from a motel by deputies.
They had no access to newspapers, magazines, radios, or TV.
Any communication with their families had to go through the sheriff's office.
Now, if I hadn't read this transcript myself, I would have trouble believing that a judge would send a jury into deliberation at 8 p.m. on a Friday night.
I've never heard of such a thing.
That is a wild choice.
I mean, judges have very broad discretion when it comes to pretty much anything that goes on in their courtroom.
But from what I've seen, there's a sort of unspoken understanding that if it's already past dinner time, you should wait until the following morning to send the jury out.
But it was almost Christmas, and these jurors had already endured a grueling three weeks of ten hour days of testimony.
So on Friday night, they deliberated.
They deliberated for four hours, returning their verdict just after midnight.
And in those four hours, they didn't just decide his guilt.
The law changed a couple of years ago, but until 2021, juries in Virginia made sentencing recommendations as well.
At 1212 a.m., the jury foreman told the court that John Pattler should serve 20 years for the first-degree murder of George Lincoln Rockwell.
At trial, his defense was, obviously, that he didn't do it.
Not only did he not do it, he simply could not have done it.
His wife and father-in-law testified that he'd spent the morning running errands with his wife Alice and their two sons, ages one and three.
Alice testified that between 10 a.m. and 11.40 a.m., she and her husband and their two children were in the car together running errands.
They went to the bank and the post office and an office supply store, and they stopped off at Safeway to pick up some chicken for dinner.
The couple both testified that immediately upon arriving home, around a quarter to noon, they got into an argument over how to appropriately discipline their three-year-old son.
When John Pattler took the stand, he said his wife had gotten angry with him after he, quote, got a little rough with the toddler.
And after some heated words were exchanged, he stormed out of the house and was just walking around the neighborhood to calm down.
All three of the adults who lived in that house testified that it was 1145, 1150, something like that for sure, when he walked out of the house.
And he didn't take the couple's only car.
He didn't have a driver's license, although he did know how to drive.
But he was on foot.
And his defense was that it just wasn't possible for him to have walked the three miles from his house to that shopping center in the time between when his wife last saw him at 1145 and when Rockwell was shot at noon.
And if all of that is true, I agree.
He could not have traveled over three miles on foot in less than 15 minutes.
Obviously, the jury was not convinced it was true.
But it's hard to say which part of it they don't believe.
Before I found and read the transcripts, I thought it was pretty possible that the entire story was just a fabrication.
You know, I saw these stories in the newspaper about his wife talking about, well, we were together running errands.
And it's not that hard to believe that his wife might lie for him.
And in 1967, it's not like there were digital bank records showing time-stamped credit card transactions or security camera footage from the bank.
You could just say stuff.
But the transcript shows that the defense did put on witnesses who testified to seeing the Pattlers at the various stops they made that morning on their errands.
A gas station attendant, a bank teller, a postal clerk.
They all saw the Pattlers.
But no one could remember exactly when.
And despite his father-in-law's dead certainty by the time he got on the witness stand that the couple had arrived home at 11.45 on the day of the murder.
When detectives first spoke to him on the day of the murder, his initial statement put that time closer to 11, which would leave Pattler nearly an hour to travel those three miles, either by foot or by bus.
The other angle hammered by the defense at trial was how could Pattler have even found Rockwell that day?
How could he have known where the victim would be?
For the defense, the argument is just he couldn't have known, therefore he did not know, therefore he couldn't have been there and didn't do it.
For members of the movement who aren't satisfied with the official story, this is a huge question.
Going to the laundromat at noon on Friday wasn't planned.
It wasn't part of Rockwell's usual routine.
He didn't even usually do his own laundry.
So how could an assassin have known where to position himself to take that shot?
The idea is that Pattler didn't act alone, that Rockwell's death was part of a larger conspiracy, this grand act of betrayal.
And this idea still has some purchase in the movement.
Nazis like Frank Collin, who you might recognize as the guy behind the Nazi march that led to the Supreme Court case, National Socialist Party v.
Skokie, Illinois.
He believed that Pattler was involved in some unspecified way, but that he wasn't the trigger man, and that ultimately he was just the fall guy.
James Mason, the author of Siege, told one of Rockwell's biographers that he does think Pattler pulled the trigger, but only as a pawn in a larger conspiracy.
A conspiracy by whom?
He doesn't say.
Carl Allen, the leader of a group that had splintered from the Nazi Party several years before Rockwell's death, was very sure that Pattler was innocent, and was himself just another victim of this Jewish conspiracy to kill Rockwell.
Obviously, it makes perfect sense that Rockwell's friends would believe that there was some nebulous Jewish plot to kill their Nazi leader, but they're always a little thin on the specifics.
To this day, though, there are young men in the white supremacist movement who don't actually know anything specific about this period of history.
But they'll tell you with certainty that the Jews did it.
When it comes to conspiracy theories with named players, a theory with a little heft to it, one that does make you ask a follow-up question.
There is a conspiracy that was much closer to home.
This one's pretty straightforward.
Patler knew where Rockwell would be because someone told him.
And the only people who could have told him were the people who were home that morning at the Nazi Party barracks.
Rockwell's mistress, Barbara von Getz believed it.
Frank Smith believed it until he died in 2020.
Robert Surrey, the head of the American Nazi Party office in Dallas, used the party's mailing list to send every member a copy of a letter he wrote outlining what he believed to be the evidence proving it.
A 2018 memoir by a former member calling himself Leon Dilios also advances this theory.
Floyd Fleming, George Ware, Hal Kaiser, all men whose names I haven't bothered to tell you before, but who were high-ranking members of the Nazi Party, they all believed that someone had masterminded this assassination.
And pretty much all of them were pointing the finger at one man.
Matthias Kohl.
The End From the studio who brought you the Pikedon Massacre and Murder 101, this is Incels.
From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset.
If I can't have you, girls, I will destroy you.
A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.
A seed of loneliness explodes.
I just hate myself.
I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.
At a deadly tipping point, Incels will be added to the terrorism guide.
Police say a driver intentionally drove into a crowd killing 10 people.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
I will have my revenge.
This is Incels.
Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
At 19, Elena Sada believed she had found her calling.
In the new season of Sacred Scandal, we pulled back the curtain on a life built on devotion and deception.
A man of God, Marcial Maciel, looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ.
My name is Elena Sada and this is my story.
It's a story of how I learned to hide, to cry, to survive, and eventually how I got out.
This season on Sacred Scandal, hear the full story from the woman who lived it.
Witness the journey from devout follower to the determined survivor, as Selena exposes the man behind the cloth and the system that protected him.
Even the darkest secrets eventually find their way to the light.
Listen to Sacred Scandal, the many secrets of Marcel Maciel, as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network on the iHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It was an unimaginable crime.
It's four consecutive live terms for Brian Koberger who killed the four University of Idaho students.
The defense are on a sinking ship.
It was clear at that point he was out of options.
Nearly 30 months of silence until bombshell development, Brian Koberger appearing set to accept a plea deal just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial was set to start.
No trial, no testimony.
He has pleaded guilty to five criminal counts, one of burglary and then four counts of murder.
In this final season, we returned to Moscow with interviews from those still searching for answers.
Why did the prosecution take this?
They were holding all the cars.
How on earth could you make a deal?
What message does that send?
Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is a tight recorder statement.
Person being interviewed is Christa Gale Pike.
This is in regards to the death of a Colleen Slimmer.
She started going off on me, but I hit her.
I just hit her and hit her and hit her and hit her.
On a cold January day in 1995, 18 year old Krista Pike killed 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row.
The state has asked for an execution date for Krista.
We let people languish in prison for decades, raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable.
How does someone prove that they deserve to live?
Please state your first and last name.
Listen to Unrestorable Season 2.
Proof of Life on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Now, like I said, as far as conspiracy theories go, at least this one has a sort of logic to it.
Cole is often described as Rockwell's number two man.
But he wasn't actually officially deputy commander.
Rockwell had rather pointedly been keeping that position vacant.
So even though Cole was in every way except title functioning in Secondist Command, he didn't get to call himself that.
At the party's convention in June, Rockwell had extended an offer of reconciliation to Carl Allen.
And it's generally believed that he intended to name Allen as his successor if he agreed to return to the party, because he had successfully led a splinter group, the White Party, for several years, and that was impressive to Rockwell.
That final meeting between Rockwell and Carl Allen was, allegedly, scheduled to take place at the end of August, just a few days after Rockwell died.
And Rockwell's body was barely cold before Cole stepped up to take control of the party.
One former member recounted to Rockwell's biographer a screaming argument between Rockwell and Cole the night before the murder, and claims that Rockwell said he was going to expel him from the party over this ongoing disagreement about whether Rockwell was betraying Hitler's legacy by ditching the swastika and focusing on a message of white power rather than Aryan superiority.
When you're digging around in this conspiracy muck, you'll often see claims that no one knew that Rockwell planned to go to the laundromat that day until just as he was leaving the house, which really narrows the window of time during which this conspiracy could have taken place, right?
It just leaves mere minutes for this possible phone call to the shooter to have happened.
But it turns out Matthias Cole did know, and he'd known for hours, because Rockwell's laundry was already in the backseat of the car when Cole took the car out that morning to run errands.
So it's intriguing.
Matthias Cole was unhappy with the direction the party was going.
And he had been very vocal about that for a year.
Multiple sources reported that Cole was likely to be pushed out of favor or even out of the party entirely in the very near future.
So he had a lot to gain if Rockwell died.
But if motive is enough evidence, thousands of people must have shot George Lincoln Rockwell because a lot of people had a reason to want him dead.
One of Rockwell's biographers, Frederick Simonelli, interviewed several former members, some of whom shared these theories with him.
And he does give those theories some ink in his book.
But he buries an important caveat in the footnotes.
Writing, quote, while Arlington police and prosecutors were Aware of a growing hostility between Rockwell and Cole in the months before Rockwell's assassination, they inexplicably did nothing to pursue that issue.
In fairness, however, it must be kept in mind that the fractious radical right is fraught with feuds and vendettas, with the interactance alternating frequently between ally and enemy.
The American Nazi Party was no exception.
And he's right.
These Nazi groups are always having these little power struggles.
Everybody wants to be the Hitler.
So this kind of feud isn't unique, and it doesn't even really stand out as a particularly egregious one.
Overall, the theory of some last-minute call from inside the house to John Pattler just doesn't work for me.
First of all, they had someone testify to phone records from the house that day, and there's no mention of any calls in the morning.
Is it possible that Matthias Cole made contact with the assassin while he was out running errands all morning?
I guess so.
But there's nothing more than insinuation and possibility here.
The more likely scenario is really boring.
No one called John Pattler to alert him to Rockwell's movements.
He probably didn't know that Rockwell would be at the laundromat.
He didn't actually even need to know that Rockwell would be at the laundromat to have found him there.
It didn't make sense to me at first, looking at this area on Google Maps today.
But the streetscape of Arlington, Virginia, was very different in 1967.
It was significantly less developed.
And in the 60s, if you were standing outside the Nazi Party barracks, you could actually see this shopping center.
It was just down the hill and across the street.
So if Pattler had gone to the house looking for Rockwell, he may have seen him leave.
Or he could have actually spotted the car already in the parking lot at the shopping center, which he would have had to pass if he was going to the house.
All of the men living at the American Nazi Party barracks only had access to a single working vehicle.
And it was a pretty distinctive looking older blue and white car.
So if we saw it in the parking lot, we'd know.
There's far less intrigue in this explanation, but it's a very simple one that I've never seen addressed in any of these accusations against Cole.
Overall, reading that trial transcript, I was plagued with this particular anxiety that I always feel when I'm sitting through a trial in person.
It's definitely worse in person, because they'll put you in jail if you shout in a courtroom.
But I'm constantly fighting back this urge to interject.
I just want to raise my hand and ask a question, because they're not asking the questions I would like answered.
Sometimes it's because they can't, right?
A trial is meant to answer one question.
Did this defendant commit this crime?
You can't just go probing around asking witnesses about anything you want and potentially unrelated matters.
And sometimes they just don't want to ask those questions.
A prosecutor comes into a trial with a particular theory of the case, and they're trying to solicit testimony that convinces the jury of that particular version of events, because it is legally sound in their mind and likely to result in a conviction.
So anything else, even more complicated versions of the truth.
It just muddies the water and confuses the jury.
So I understand what I'm looking at as I read this, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.
I wish they'd gotten more on the record about exactly where everyone was at particular moments in time in the days leading up to the shooting, and what their phone records looked like.
Not because I think anyone called John Pattler.
I'm just nosy.
Inside the courtroom, though, conspiracy theories aren't much use in a criminal appeal.
Once he was convicted, Hattler could only argue that the trial had been legally flawed in some specific way.
And for years, he did.
He appealed his conviction to the Virginia Court of Appeals, and then to the Supreme Court of Virginia.
When both of those courts upheld his conviction, he tried appealing to the Supreme Court, but they declined to hear his case in 1972.
So after that, he filed a writ of habeas corpus in the federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging that several decisions made by the trial court had violated his constitutional rights.
Standard fair.
And when he lost that, he appealed that decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and he lost again.
So in December of 1967, at that original trial in Arlington, the jury found him guilty and sentenced him to 20 years.
And at every stage of this appeals process, every court from Arlington County up to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is upholding that conviction and that sentence.
But he really ever served about five.
He was released on bond in February of 1968, so about three months after his conviction, when he filed his first criminal appeal.
And he remained out on bond for three years until the Virginia Supreme Court ultimately upheld the conviction at the end of 1970.
So he's three courts deep at this point and still guilty.
And by the fall of 1970, newspaper stories about Pattler usually say he's changed his ways.
One story published shortly before oral argument before the Virginia Supreme Court quoted him saying, It seems to shock people that I've changed from a hater of blacks to a lover of them.
But it's really not all that strange.
I finally realized just how close I am to blacks and browns and other depressed people.
I have dark eyes, dark hair, and here in America that can work against you.
You can grow up, like the black, to think you just don't fit in.
That's the reason I became a Nazi.
I hated my name, I hated my nationality, and I wanted to strike back at my hate.
The Nazis seemed like a good place to do it.
It was a special form of suicide, I guess.
The Nazis were out to eliminate alien stock.
I was out to eliminate my alien past.
So I put on the swastika.
But now I know that all of them, myself too, were sick.
He doesn't have the language quite right, but it was 1970.
But other than that, it sounds fairly genuine.
I mean, I hope it was true.
It's also the kind of thing you might say if you're hoping the state Supreme Court sees it right before they hear oral argument in your appeal.
But I believe people can change.
In June of 1972, he'd been in jail for over a year, and the Supreme Court had declined to hear his case.
And he told the Washington Daily News that month that he was a changed man.
He's learning and growing in prison.
He just finished reading Charles Reich's The Greening of America and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch.
He was learning about feminism and counterculture, the kinds of things he spent the 1960s trying to destroy.
He told the reporter, quote, I was committing a special form of suicide, trying to eliminate the things I hated, namely me.
Notice that is an almost identical quote given to a different reporter two years later.
I don't know if that means it's from the heart or it was rehearsed.
But it's a remarkably self-aware assessment.
And I think it's something that is true on some level for many of the men he marched with in the 60s and their counterparts today.
I want to believe that he believed it, but you can't know what's in a man's heart.
From the studio who brought you the Pikedon Massacre and Murder 101, this is in cells.
I am a loser.
If also women I wouldn't pay me either.
From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset.
I can't have you, girls, I will destroy you.
A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.
A seed of loneliness explodes.
I just hate myself.
I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.
At a deadly tipping point.
Police say a driver intentionally drove into a crowd, killing 10 people.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
I will have my revenge.
This is Incels.
Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
At 19, Elena Sava believed she had found her calling.
In the new season of Sacred Scandal, we pulled back the curtain on a life built on devotion and deception.
A man of God, Marcial Maciel, looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ.
My name is Elena Sada and this is my story.
It's a story of how I learned to hide, to cry, to survive, and eventually how I got out.
This season on Sacred Scandal, hear the full story from the woman who lived.
Witness the journey from devout follower to the Termin Survivor, as Helena exposes the man behind the cloth and the system that protected him.
Even the darkest secrets eventually find their way to the light.
Listen to Segret Scandal, the many secrets of Marcel Maciel, as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It was an unimaginable crime.
It's four consecutive live terms for Brian Koberger who killed a four University of Idaho students.
The defense are on a sinking ship.
It was clear at that point he was out of options.
Nearly 30 months of silence until bombshell development, Brian Kobiger appearing set to accept a plea deal just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial was set to start.
No trial, no testimony.
He has pleaded guilty to five criminal counts, one of burglary and then four counts of murder.
In this final season, we returned to Moscow with interviews from those still searching for answers.
Why did the prosecution take this?
They were holding all the cars.
How on earth could you make a deal?
What message does that send?
Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is a tape-recorded statement.
The person being interviewed is Krista Gayle Pike.
This is in regards to the death of a Colleen Slimmer.
She started going off on me, but I hit her.
I just hit her and hit her and hit her and hit her.
On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row.
The state has asked for an execution date for Krista.
We let people languish in prison for decades, raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable.
How does someone prove that they deserve to live?
We are starting the recording now.
Please state your first and last name.
Krista Pike.
Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1974, his wife Alice divorced him.
He'd been in prison for four years and it wasn't entirely clear when he might get out.
One of his sons would later write that after the age of six or seven, he didn't see his father again for decades.
And that sort of lines up with this timeline.
Alice must have stopped taking the boys to visit sometime around here.
And in 1974, he finally exhausted all possible avenues for appeal.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision of the federal court in Virginia that had upheld his conviction the year prior.
But it wasn't all bad news in 1974.
I mean, his wife left him and he has no more appeals and he hasn't seen his children in a year, but in the fall of 1974, he was allowed to leave prison during the day to attend art classes at nearby Radford University, although it was still just called Radford College at the time.
He attended classes there for an entire school year, it appears, before administrators at the college realized that the school was participating in the study release program.
In August of 1975, the Roanoke Times ran the headline, College denies knowing student was assassin.
Although court records do show that he didn't actually legally change his name back to Patzalos until 1988, he'd reverted back to using his birth name in interviews around 1970.
And he apparently gave that name when he enrolled at the college.
I guess things were different in the 70s.
You could just tell the registrar a fake name and they wouldn't notice that your address was prison.
At the time the story broke, officials from the Department of Corrections said that the study release program had been operating for years at state colleges, universities, and community colleges all over Virginia without incident.
And according to the program guidelines, participating schools were notified about students enrolling through the program.
And only people very close to their parole dates were eligible to participate.
Inmates participating in the program had to meet strict guidelines in order to qualify, although the paper doesn't say really what those were.
But the administrators at Radford College were adamant.
They said nobody had told them that there was a murderer taking drawing classes on campus.
There was a lot of publicity around this at the time, and the college responded to the public embarrassment by announcing that until they could conduct a thorough review of all of their policies, they were just going to enact a blanket ban on all inmates, parolees, and people on probation.
And that seems like a huge overreaction.
People on probation and parole are out in the world.
They've served their time and they've been released.
It seems like a clear-cut case of discrimination to prevent them from attending a state-funded school.
I think the same could be said about banning current inmates from the study release program, but the legal argument there is different, and it was the 70s.
But this put Pattler personally in a pretty bad position.
Not just because he was getting close to completing his degree.
He was also close to his parole date.
But the parole board had indicated that if he wasn't enrolled in school, that would count against him in deciding whether or not he would be released.
The ACLU stepped in quickly and the college backed down.
Pattler could enroll, but he couldn't live in a dorm.
The college would continue to accept students from the study release program, but incarcerated students would face stiffer regulations.
As a parolee, Patler was just barred from dormitories.
But incarcerated students wouldn't be allowed to enter dormitories or the student center.
They were restricted to a specific dining hall and were banned from participating in extracurricular activities.
But with his enrollment assured, Hattler was granted parole, and he was released from prison in August of 1975.
He had served less than five years since he actually began serving that 20 year sentence in December of 1970, after he lost his appeal.
The ACLU announced their intention to sue the school over Pattler's right to live in a dormitory But by the end of 1975, a spokesman for the ACLU announced somewhat cryptically, quote, we have decided not to pursue it any further.
The matter is closed.
In later years, Radford College refused to disclose any records or even comment on Patler's time at the school.
And accounts vary as to whether he even enrolled in the spring semester.
But by the summer of 1976, he definitely wasn't in school anymore.
I think the ACLU probably dropped their threat to sue because they weren't sure Patler would be a good plaintiff.
If they couldn't guarantee he was going to stay enrolled in school, he has no standing, and there's no reason to sue.
A few months after he stopped going to school, he shows back up in the newspaper.
This one knocked me on my ass.
I mean, I'm usually pretty prepared for a strange twist.
I'm literally looking for the stuff that makes these guys weird, right?
I'm on the hunt for it.
But clicking through newspaper archives is tedious work.
You know, you just pick a keyword and then you click through hundreds of pages of possible matches chronologically.
A lot of the results are just the same story that got picked up by 20 different newspapers.
But nothing could have prepared me for the whiplash I experienced when I'm just half-heartedly clicking through mountains of wire stories I've already read, and suddenly I'm confronted with the headline.
Rockwell Killer arrested after alleged orgy.
Pardon me.
Arrested where?
And doing what?
You heard me.
Rockwell Killer arrested after alleged orgy.
The body of that article goes on to specify that it was a nude orgy.
I didn't know you needed to specify, but it does.
Okay.
I know that this is just cruel at this point.
Like this piece of the story isn't even that important.
It's just such a silly little shocking piece that I have accidentally ended up teasing you with repeatedly.
It's just a weird bump in the road that I had to write down the second I started writing the script for the first episode.
And the problem is, I'm making this show in real time.
There's no planning ahead.
There's no backlog.
There's no writing all of the parts before the first one comes out.
The episode you hear on a Thursday was recorded Monday morning and edited by Wednesday afternoon.
And I never know where I'm going until I get there.
You know, I spend all week reading and researching and making my little timelines and writing my little biographies of side characters and translating Yugoslavian war tribunal records, and you know, I get distracted.
And then I sit down and start writing.
And I probably shouldn't admit this, but I don't make an outline.
And I'm not in control of where the story goes once I start writing.
So sometimes the sun is coming up on a Monday morning, and I realize that I accidentally stopped writing around 3 a.m. because I got distracted by something very exciting but entirely irrelevant.
And my very patient editor is waiting on an audio file, and I haven't even started recording yet.
I think I'm gonna end up having to spend my day off trying to figure out why Rockwell's number one guy in Dallas was called to testify in front of the Warren Commission.
So, for Rory's sake, because I'm already late and this is already long.
I have to leave you in 1976.
But I'm gonna try and make it up to you.
I think I guess I shouldn't make promises, but I'm pretty sure we can arrange for the second half of part three to come out before next week.
So think of this as part 3.1.
Until then, for the love of God, if you're going to break into a guy's house, don't take your pants off in there.
Music Weird Little Guys is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, 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 Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WordLewGyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it as nothing personal.
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.
I don't have time for it.
I don't have time for it.
On this podcast Incels, we unpack an emerging mindset.
I am a loser.
If also women I want to dame me out there.
A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at a deadly tipping point.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
The day in which I will have my revenge.
This is Incels.
Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It was an unimaginable crime.
It's four consecutive live terms for Brian Koberger who killed a four University of Idaho students.
Nearly 30 months of silence until Bombshell Development Brian Koberger has agreed to plead guilty.
No trial, no testimony.
The defense are on sinking ship.
This isn't the justice you wanted, but this is justice.
Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
Someone was posting photos.
That was just me naked.
Well, not me, but me with someone else's body part.
This is Levitt Town, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deep fate pornography and the battle to stop it.
Listen to Levitt Town on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row.
How does someone prove that they deserve to live?
We are starting the recording now.
Please state your first and last name.
Listen to Unrestorable Season 2.
Proof of Life on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
