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About this Episode
A closer look at the second novel by the man who wrote The Turner Diaries reveals that it isn't just about serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin... it's the author's fantasy about the man he wishes he could have been.
Sources:
Pierce, Kelvin. Sins of My Father, Growing Up with America's Most Dangerous White Supremacist. Independently Published, 2020
Thomas Martinez, Brotherhood of Murder: The Shocking Inside Story of The Order. McGraw Hill, 1988
Griffin, R. S. (2001). The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds. 1st Books Library.
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Transcript
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Authors are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.
Calls are media.
On a Sunday evening in late June of 1980,
a small group of supporters took their seats in little office space in Arlington, Virginia.
The meeting wasn't anything particularly special.
At least not as far as history remembers.
There were certainly meetings in that office on other evenings that would change the course
of the white power movement. But this wasn't one of them.
I couldn't even tell you who all was there. I don't think it matters.
On that summer evening in June of 1980, William Luther Pierce was giving a long-winded speech
to a handful of assembled members of his neo-Nazi organization.
This wasn't special either. He was hardly a man known for his brevity.
He'd just returned from a few out of town speaking engagements,
addressing a Holocaust denial organization in New York,
and visiting supporters in Chicago.
And he recounted for his little audience in the office how successful the events had been.
But he was frustrated.
In his public appearances, he was walking a very thin rhetorical line of plausible deniability.
And the crowds just couldn't quite parse it.
He seemed to be discouraging any kind of radical action,
advocating for a movement of newsletters and speech-making, and not much else.
But what are we supposed to actually do the crowds had asked?
He was spreading the message of his organization,
National Alliance, and talking about his novel, The Turner Diaries.
In New York, he explained that The Turner Diaries was, of course, only a novel.
It wasn't really a plan for revolution. It's just a way of conveying certain ideas,
certain values.
Earl Turner, the novel's terrorist hero, brings about white revolution through massive bloodshed.
Don't do what Earl Turner did,
Pierce told the audience.
But believe as he believed, and act accordingly,
the mixed message left the crowd puzzled.
In private, surrounded by his closest supporters,
he was free to express his frustration that his thinly veiled call to arms had gone
right over their heads in New York.
Of course, the business of National Alliance was ideas, education,
consciousness-racing, newsletters, and flyers, and essays, and radio programs.
Of course, here in private, he explained that obviously changing hearts and minds comes first.
There are other ways of changing people's minds. Terrorist activities carried out by front groups
that works too. But they weren't there yet. The time hadn't yet come.
Some of his disciples were impatient. Some of the men who heard his message couldn't wait for
the time to be right for permission to be given. And there, in his office, on a Sunday evening
in June of 1980, he acknowledged the actions of one of those men.
He didn't say the man's name, but he described a very particular murder.
One that, technically, remains unsolved to this day. But on that day, in particular,
that murder was only a few days old. And yet he seemed to know who the killer was,
and why he had killed. Months before Joseph Paul Franklin was arrested,
months before he was identified as the sniper killer targeting interracial couples,
and just days after one of his attacks. His former mentor was talking about him.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Grifold Guys.
This is a story about a book. Sort of. Two months ago, I told you another story about a book.
I feel like I'm constantly talking about the Turner Diaries, so I finally gave the damn thing
at its own episode. But really, I only did that so I could talk about the sequel.
The Turner Diaries gets all the attention, and for good reason, it's still widely read by
white supremacist terrorists. It still shows up in the suggested reading lists mass shooters have
started including at the end of their manifestos. It still shows up in the evidence logs when the
FBI searches the home of some aspiring mass murderer. It's a book with a body count. It shows up everywhere.
Timothy McVeigh was carrying his favorite passages of the book, with him.
On the morning, he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City.
Affa Davids described the copies of the book found in the bedrooms of people like Sarah
Beth Glendale, the girlfriend and partner in crime of Adam Waffand founder Brendan Russell,
or Timothy Hill Coosinelli, the January 6th writer with a Hitler mustache.
You hear about it all the time on this show. It's just part of their lives. Part of their world.
When I was poking around my own notes, looking to see how often I'm writing about that stupid book,
I was reminded of a very funny side quest we took during the month and a half I spent writing
about Klansmen and serial bomber Dennis Mayhahn. His twin brother Daniel Mayhahn once unsuccessfully
sued American Airlines for anti-white discrimination after he was fired from his job as an aircraft
mechanic for showing up to a meeting wearing a Turner Diaries t-shirt. You just can't avoid it.
It's in all of these stories. But you don't often hear about the sequel.
In 1989, William Luther Pierce published his second novel, Hunter.
Hunter didn't sell as well. It's largely forgotten. It turns up here and there.
It's harder to keyword search federal court filings for this title since it's just a word.
But I did find it in filings for another case we've already talked about.
It was found on a bookshelf at Nicholas Young's house. He was the DC transit cop who loved dressing
up as an SS officer and ended up going to prison for texting Google Play gift cards to a guy who
was pretending to be in ISIS. A complicated situation. That episode was from July of last year,
if you missed it. But Hunter is more of a deep cut, even in the community.
It's in the manifesto left behind by the broadest lava terragram shooter.
A story I covered on this show back in September of 2024.
That manifesto includes the Turner Diaries as well. And it calls that book, legendary.
But it describes Hunter as, quote, more relevant to us right now than even the Turner Diaries.
And while Timothy McVeigh was carrying around the Turner Diaries,
FBI agents found a well-worn copy of Hunter when they searched the home of his co-conspirator,
Terry Nichols. I don't know why it never got the same kind of traction with the movement that
Turner Diaries did. Pierce himself regarded Hunter as the superior work, but fans didn't agree.
Personally, I find both books equally unpleasant to read. Pierce clearly made no effort
to hone his skills as a fiction writer in the decade between the two books.
And I promise I'm not just being a hater. I'm not just saying this because it's Nazi literature.
It's just bad. I can't quite sort out why David Mills reviewed Hunter for the Washington Post in 1993.
But the man who would later win Emmys writing and producing HBO shows with David Simon agrees with me.
Of Pierce's writing, he wrote in 1993, quote,
quote, his pro-styles' dense, flat, artless. His imagination is bloodthirsty yet drained of passion.
And I think that's exactly the right way to describe it. Bloodthirsty, but
bloodless, right? It's cold. Truthfully, until this month, I had only actually skimmed it.
I'm sorry. That's a terrible thing to admit. I'm supposed to be your Nazi literature subject matter
expert guiding you on this journey. And I was only skimming the murder manuals? I know. I'm sorry.
I feel like I had the gist of it though. You know, protagonist kills interracial couples,
gets caught up in some drama with a corrupt FBI agent, has a weird scheme involving conning
the audience of a prominent televangelist, kills the evil FBI agent, goes back to his passion
project of murdering interracial couples. I get it. I knew what I needed to know.
But this month, I sat down and I read every word of it. I did an actual close reading of the text
and I took notes on it. I was trying to get into the mind of the man who wrote it.
And I can say, I hate it even more now. David Mills was right. The prose is a fucking nightmare.
The sex scenes are so uncomfortable. The dialogue is weird and stiff. The dialogue about sex?
Reads like it was written by a space alien. In one scene, the protagonist's girlfriend says she's
going to lie about having the flu to call out of work. And he says to her,
how will you explain your usual gorgeous, exuberant bouncing self at the office on Wednesday?
If you're just over the flu, you should look pale, tired, and listless.
And she replies to him, quote,
I'm counting on you to produce the desired effect by screwing me half to death Tuesday night,
lover. And he replies,
Hey, sweetheart, you know that I'll do my very best for you, but you thrive on it.
The more often we make love at night, the better you look the next morning and the paler I am.
Total abstinence is the only way to make you look pale.
What? There are about half a dozen very awkward sexual encounters in the book.
And the contrast between the stiff, strange way he speeds through a description of sucking on a
woman's nipple and the whole pages of florid, erotic prose devoted to describing things like
how a man pissed himself as he was being grotted to death in a bathroom stall.
I don't know. I missed a lot of that when I was just skimming it, but it was an unwelcome
journey into this man's psyche. I would love to get cloused through a light
depending on Pierce's attempt at fiction. He's the German sociologist whose book Male Fantasies
examined the personal writings of members of the Freikor in Weimar, Germany. Sort of a
horrible psychoanalytic journey into the fantasies of sex and violence in the minds of the
men who became the first Nazis. I feel like Hunter is very firmly in that territory.
I don't know. The dialogue, especially the dialogue he has with his girlfriend is just
a hot. I mean, people don't talk like that. It's not good dialogue. It doesn't make sense.
But this isn't some teenage virgin imagining what it's like to be with a woman.
Pierce was in his 50s when he wrote this. By the time this book was published, he had two grown
adult sons and he was married to his third wife. He is presumably seen a naked woman before.
But when he describes the imaginary naked woman in this book, there's a full paragraph
about her body and it includes some normal type stuff like perfect thighs and magnificent breasts.
But most of it is devoted to describing things like, quote, a graceful neck of extraordinary length.
And a longer quote, a face so lovely, so pure, so childishly peaceful and innocent
that looking at it nestled gently there in the pillow, half obscure to the tangle of her long,
golden red hair, made his heart ache with desire the way it ached when he watched an unusually
spectacular sunset in the desert or came upon an especially glorious vista while hiking in the mountains.
One benefit of having a head absolutely bursting with garbage is that I've been listening to
Nazi podcasts and taking notes on them for close to a decade now. Not always, even with any particular
purpose in mind, I just do it. I have a whole notebook full of half thoughts that, I don't know what
they mean anymore, but they're very upsetting. But as I was reading this, it reminded me of something
I heard an old associate of Pierce's say in an interview a couple of years ago. I went back to my
strange notebook full of half finished thoughts. And I found it. This is from a podcast episode
about five years ago. Yeah, I knew Pierce and I mixed feelings about him. I admired him a great
deal. He's a brilliant man. Just, you know, his mind was a fascination to me the way he could
absorb material and he was also kind of strange guy. I mean, he seemed very uncomfortable
around women and he was also, you know, I ultimately concluded he was too negative. I felt
he emphasized too much negativity and he sort of gave into these fantasies I regarded them as
the violence. Now, as always, if you're keeping up with your red string board at home, the voice you
just heard was Marilyn based attorney Glenn Allen. You may remember him from past episodes as one
of the lawyers currently representing members of Patriot Front in one of the federal civil rights
lawsuits filed against the group. You may also remember him as an old friend of Merlin Miller.
The anti-Semite with broken dreams of making it in Hollywood who tried to run for president in 2012
on the American third position party ticket. Glenn Allen was revealed to have been a long time
member of national alliance when internal documents were leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center in
2016. He tried unsuccessfully to sue the SPLC for outing him and getting him fired from his job as
an attorney for the Baltimore Police Department, but the facts of the facts. I can place him quite
close to Pierce at least as far back as the early 90s. So he definitely knew the man.
And he seems to agree with my assessment based on the weird way the narrator talks in the novel.
William Luther Pierce was weird about women. He's uncomfortable in the presence of a woman
and he's preoccupied with fantasies of violence. This isn't clumsy dialogue. This isn't just
unskilled writing. It's who he is. He's horny for death and confused about the female body.
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But what is the novel actually about?
A murder. Mostly, it's mostly about murder.
The protagonist is a man named Oscar Yeager. Yeager spelled Y-E-A-G-E-R.
But it's a little play on words, because the German word Yeager spelled J-A with an
umlaut G-E-R is pronounced the same way, but it means hunter.
So Oscar Yeager is Joseph Paul Franklin. That is a kind of true thing that I could say.
The book was dedicated to Franklin. Oscar Yeager loved killing interracial couples,
just like Franklin. Oscar Yeager eventually moves on to higher profile assassination targets,
which is something that Franklin tried to do but did not succeed at. Remember he tried and failed
to kill Larry Flint and Vernon Jordan. And the novel opens with a description of one of Oscar
Yeager's murders that very closely mirrors real-life details of one of Franklin's murders.
Yeager shoots and kills an interracial couple in a parking lot without even getting out of his car,
which is very similar to Franklin's first murder in the parking lot of a shopping mall in
Madison, Wisconsin in 1977. And it's not a stretch at all to say that Pierce was certainly
thinking of Franklin when he wrote it. I mean, he put Franklin's name on it.
He would deny actually basing the character on Franklin if you asked him and many people did.
But the dedication page on the first edition read, quote, dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin,
the lone hunter who saw his duty as a white man and did what a responsible son of his race must do
to the best of his ability and without regard for the personal consequences.
So Joseph Paul Franklin is the lone hunter. Capital L, capital H, right there on the dedication
page, he is the hunter, the Yeager, Oscar, Yeager. I mean, it's all right there. There's no subtext.
It's just text. But I think Oscar Yeager is also a Mary Sue, or Marty Stew? What do you call
it when the Mary Sue was a grown man? A Mary Sue is a certain kind of character often seen in amateur
fiction, in fan-ficked type writing. A Mary Sue is a perfect, brilliant, strong, capable and brave
protagonist who often has extraordinary abilities. The term has sort of a pejorative connotation.
Most of the time it's being used in the context of a young woman writing this spectacular heroine
as the protagonist of her fan-fick as a sort of idealized self-insert. The Mary Sue is the author's
fantasy version of themselves. And I think Oscar Yeager is absolutely William Luther Pierce's Mary
Sue. I mean, Oscar Yeager is Joseph Paul Franklin. Sure, he's based on Franklin. He's doing
Franklin type activities. But beyond the surface level, he's William Luther Pierce.
I mean, Franklin was an unemployed drifter who scared the sex workers he picked up.
He wore thick glasses and was vulgar and crass and off-putting and he drove beat up cars he
bought out of classified ads. But Oscar Yeager has a graduate degree from the University of Colorado.
Coincidentally, so does William Luther Pierce. Oscar Yeager is in his 40s, which is how old Pierce
was during Franklin's killing spree. Franklin himself was in his 20s at the time.
Oscar Yeager is a tinkerer, an inventor. He's great with machines and equipment,
and he makes his money in defense contracting. William Luther Pierce had a tinkering workshop
in his basement. And before he quit his day job to write Nazi newsletters full-time,
he was working on government contracts at Pratt & Whitney, an aerospace company.
Oscar Yeager has a girlfriend, a beautiful younger woman named Adelaide, who has a degree in
mathematics. And Pierce began writing this novel shortly after abandoning his first wife,
a math professor. I think Oscar Yeager is the man Pierce wishes he could have been.
A man who is so much like himself, but who is actually willing and able to go out and do the
kinds of things Pierce only encouraged other men to do. Oscar Yeager is Pierce's fantasy
of being an even deadlier Joseph Paul Franklin, of being a man who takes action and doesn't just
write about it. And I have no issue calling this a Mary Sue situation because the whole book has
all the hallmarks of a teenager's first fanfic. It's not creative. He's writing what he
knows and he struggles to get beyond that. I mean, I can tell he finished writing it in 1989
because the president of the United States and the world of the novel is a man named president
Heges. Heges is in like a large bush and in our world, George Bush was elected president in 1988.
In Chapter 7, Oscar Yeager meets Harry Keller, the head of a Nazi organization called the National
League. National League is obviously national alliance and Harry Keller is a fragment of Pierce's
own psyche. Harry Keller doesn't think the time is right for action. He's very knowledgeable,
but the kinds of things a Nazi would be impressed by. And everyone laughs very hard at his racist
jokes. He's very clever. He knows a lot about antisemitism and he helps shape Oscar Yeager's
understanding that his true enemies are the Jews. But Harry is skeptical about all of Oscar's plans.
He's cautious and he wants to focus on newsletters and radio addresses. He doesn't think the masses
are ready for revolution yet. Better to just wait in the wings than expose himself to that kind of
unnecessary risk. Harry Keller is saying the kinds of things in the book that Pierce was saying
to members of national alliance at that meeting in June of 1980. Right? There are two ways of going
about things, but the time is not here yet for terrorism. And in the book, Harry has a beautiful
wife who works in the National League office. And I think this is another curious peek into Pierce's
own relationships. When he started writing the novel in 1984, he'd recently left his first wife,
the mother of his sons, for a much younger woman who was his secretary in the National Alliance office.
But by the time he published the book in 1989, not only had this second wife left him,
he'd already married and divorced a third wife.
Most of the characters have a pretty clear real-world counterpart. There is a televangelist named
Jerry Coldwell, who hosts a TV program called The New Time Gospel Hour, which is a very obvious
fictionalized version of Jerry Fallwell and his old time Gospel Hour. They're passing references
to other televangelists. Billy Gresham is Billy Graham. Jimmy Braggert is Jimmy Swagert. Pat Robinson
is Pat Robertson and I was almost stumped by a character called Moral Richards, but I think that's
oral Roberts. The National League member who runs the local chapter of the group and works as a
broadcast engineer is named Kevin Linden. And that's just Kevin's throne, the weird little guy
from the first episode of this show. Kevin's throne, in addition to his very troubling love of child
sexual abuse material, was very knowledgeable about radio broadcasting. He ran the National Alliance
Radio Show and several illegal pirate radio stations that broadcast Nazi propaganda.
I was a little confused at first about why Kevin Linden didn't have a wife. Kevin's throne did,
but I went back to my timeline and my Kevin's throne notes and it lines up. At the time Pierce
was writing this novel, he'd only recently introduced Kevin's throne to the woman who would become
his first wife. They didn't marry until the year after Hunter was published. I had a little
trouble with the character of Bill Carpenter, the National League member who works as a corporate
attorney. The only corporate lawyer I can think of who would have been in that social circle in the
1980s is Bill Johnson. Bill Carpenter or Bill Johnson, that could work. William Daniel Johnson,
the lawyer you might remember from the American Third Position Party episodes.
I don't know that he was ever specifically a member of National Alliance though, so maybe that's
not the answer. I mean, Bill Johnson certainly knew Pierce. They would have crossed paths every year
of the area nation's world congress at the very least, but don't hold me to that one.
The book is fiction, of course. No one ever murdered a congressman in a bathroom at a gala,
were assassinated two state governors and a Catholic cardinal all in one go in a church bombing.
That's imaginary. But he is following that old writing advice.
Write what you know. Oscar Yeager spends several pages complaining bitterly about the affirmative
action paperwork he has to fill out as a government contractor. Harry Kelleric stoles the virtues
of Nazi pamphlet writing. Characters spend quite literally dozens of pages at a time discussing the
reasons why they hate the Jews. Every character as either someone Pierce knows,
or some warped reflection of himself. And that's why the timing is so interesting to me.
The book doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's in conversation with the state of the white power movement.
It's expressing ideas its author is too cowardly to own in the pages of his own little Nazi newsletter.
William Luther Pierce would later tell his own biographer that he actually wrote the first chapter
in 1984, although elsewhere in the same book the author puts that date in 1983 without any citation.
And Pierce's son Kelvin also puts the date at 1983 in his memoir, noting that his father began writing
Hunter quote, the same year he abandoned his family, leaving his first wife for that much younger
secretary. But either way, 1983, 1984, he put it on shelf and didn't finish it until 1989.
I do wish we could pin down which one it was. If it was 1984, he's writing that first chapter,
the one that describes Oscar Yeager murdering a couple in a store parking lot.
After Joseph Paul Franklin has publicly confessed to the murders of Tony Schwann and Alphonse Manning in
a mall parking lot in Wisconsin in 1977. If he wrote that in 1983, well, I'd like to see the first draft.
I'd be interested to know how many details of that murder he knew prior to the confession.
And if it was 1983, I'd be curious to know what month he wrote it in.
In September of 1983, at the annual National Alliance conference, a young member Pierce had been
mentoring made a speech, a call to arms if you will. And after that speech, Robert Matthews formed
the order, the Nazi terrorist group modeled and named after the group in Pierce's first novel,
The Turner Diaries. So it would seem odd for him to start writing the novel that gives up on
the idea of organizations just as he's mentoring a young man who's forming an organization,
you know? But if he wrote it in 1984, he may have already seen the failure of the order.
By the end of 1984, the dream was dead. The order didn't work.
Robert Matthews was no Earl Turner and the group had failed to trigger a violent revolution.
And so by the time he's writing Hunter, he's a man retreating into smaller fantasies of more intimate
violence. Just one man on the road with a rifle. Oscar Yeager tells the reader that he kills
because he hates his targets, but also because it's therapeutic. It soothes his need to,
quote, purge himself of the spiritual malaise which had been afflicting him increasingly in the last
few years. I had fully intended for this to be a pretty straightforward discussion of the plot
of the novel, but I got lost again. I mentioned in the Turner Diaries episode in January that
one of the most robust sources of information on Pierce's life is a biography published in 2001
by a man who claimed to be an interested observer and not a member of the movement.
Robert S. Griffin, a professor at the University of Vermont, spent the summer living on Pierce's
Nazi compound in West Virginia in 1998. And he seems to have come away from the experience as a true
believer. The book is utterly incurious. He just takes Pierce at his word and quotes him at length.
He doesn't press him for answers. He doesn't explore contradictions or ask hard questions.
And Pierce died not long after the book was published, so no one really had a chance to ask a
lot of follow-up questions. In one section of the book, Griffin asks Pierce about his move to
West Virginia in 1985. It's been mentioned in a handful of episodes in the past, but
during the short-lived crime spree carried out by members of the order in 1984,
the group robbed several armored cars, making off with millions of dollars.
And a good chunk of that was distributed to various white supremacist movement leaders around
the country. In August of 1984, Robert Matthews personally delivered a big bag of cash to William
Luther Pierce. This fact is fairly well attested too, although the government never did have to
prove it at trial because Pierce was never charged with anything, and Pierce has always denied it.
There aren't a lot of other explanations, though, for how he came up with the $95,000 in cash
he paid for a large parcel of undeveloped land in West Virginia a few weeks later.
In his biography, Griffin asks Pierce, what prompted the move? Why did you move to West Virginia?
And the answer was meandering and long-winded, which is very typical for Pierce,
and Griffin just quotes him at length. He says he didn't want to live in the city anymore,
you know, he'd lived in the suburbs just outside of Washington DC for nearly 20 years.
He moved down to Arlington to work for George Lincoln Rockwell in the 60s and he never left.
He says he doesn't like crowds, he's not an urbanite. He didn't care for the noise or the pollution,
he hated the traffic. And he'd gotten very tired of seeing so many black people, saying quote,
I was reacting in a very negative way to the sight of all of them around everywhere.
I was doing some things back in Washington that if I had been caught, it would have gotten me
put in jail for the rest of my life. So I figured I'd better get out of town, and I did.
What does that mean? Griffin asks him if that's just a figure of speech. He says,
when you say you were doing some things in Washington that would have put you in jail for the
rest of your life, is that just a figure of speech? Why would it be a figure of speech? That's not
a figure of speech people use. That's not a euphemism I've ever heard anyone use.
People don't say I was doing some things that would send me to jail forever as a figure of speech.
What would that even mean? That's the only question he asks about that statement and the answer
Pierce gave is printed in the book, and this is all it says. There's no follow-up after this.
He doesn't ask another question. So Pierce's response is quote, no, I was doing some crazy things.
I wrote Hunter about what Oscar Yeager was doing and why he was doing it. Yeager was engaged and
what could be called terrorist activity, but he was doing it primarily for therapeutic reasons.
When he started blowing away racially mixed couples, he didn't expect to make a big change in
society. It was just that he couldn't live with himself if he didn't do something to oppose
what he saw happening around him. I didn't do what he did, but I was doing some things that were
ill-advised. Washington is very cosmopolitan and imbued with government spirit. I was drowning in
that goddamn environment. I hated it. I was feeling a sense of desperation and I reacted.
If I'd stayed, I probably would have gotten caught. But fortunately, I was able to get away from there.
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I was doing some crazy things. I was doing things that were ill-advised if I had stayed.
I probably would have gotten caught. What does that mean? What does that mean? What was he doing?
I have no idea. I couldn't even guess. But William Luther Pierce told his biographer
that he had to move to West Virginia. He had to move to the middle of nowhere
because he was worried he was going to get caught doing something.
So in the summer of 1984, William Luther Pierce is doing some unspecified, unspeakable crime.
Joseph Hall Franklin has been in jail for a few years and he's back in the news because
he's confessing to more murders. The order is at the height of their crime spree. They've just
murdered Alan Berg, a Jewish talk radio host in Denver in June. And in July, they robbed a
Brink's truck and made off with millions. Robert Matthews has no idea at this point that he's
going to burn to death hiding in a bathtub by the time the year is out. And he's dolling out
cash to Nazi leaders all over the country. He even tries to put $500 in Joseph Paul Franklin's
commissary fund in prison. And this is the context surrounding that trial we talked about last
week when Joseph Paul Franklin is on trial in July of 1984 in Chattanooga, Tennessee for that
synagogue bombing. He sits quietly for several days while his attorneys defend him.
They did their jobs. They provided a zealous defense of their client, right? And then Joseph
Paul Franklin gets up and gives a bizarre speech about the Jews, right? He admits that he
bombed this synagogue and he uses this as an opportunity to propagandize in front of a roomful
of reporters. And it works. They put it in the newspaper. And again, this is July of 1984.
Alan Berger's dead. The Brink's robbery is in a few days. The order is out there and he's not
talking to the jury. He's talking to Robert Matthews. He's talking to William Luther Pierce.
He's in conversation with the movement. And here in 1984, Pierce should have been on top of the
world. Two men who had hung on his every word for years went out there and did it. They did what
he wouldn't do, what he wished he could do. There isn't much written about how well Pierce
knew Franklin. I mean, it actually doesn't even come up in most of the writing about either of them.
Pierce's biographer doesn't even ask if he knew Franklin at all.
But there's no way they didn't know each other. Remember, back in 1969, Franklin was a member of
the National Socialist White People's Party. And for some time, he lived at the party barracks in
Virginia. Pierce was still a high-ranking officer in the party at the time. And he might think,
okay, but would someone in leadership necessarily know every member of the party? Isn't that kind of
a leap? But it's really not. There were not a lot of members of the National Socialist White
People's Party in 1969, especially not ones who lived on the premises.
I mean, they were having regular events, but they were getting maybe a dozen guys at these rallies
in DC. And Franklin was there every time in uniform and he lived at the barracks, they could not
have not known each other. It would be impossible for them to have avoided one another even if they
wanted to. But oddly, I can't find any place where either of them has ever asked about it.
And of course, Robert Matthews had been actively corresponding with Pierce for years before
forming the order. And again, Pierce washes his hands of what his young protege ends up doing,
but I'm not in the business of believing a Nazi when he says he didn't know about the terrorism,
you know? Which is why I never believed Pierce when he said Hunter wasn't about Joseph
Paul Franklin. I mean, obviously it's about him. It's not even worth relitigating. His name is
on the dedication page, but I just had a funny feeling that there was more than that,
that there's more he's not saying. In every interview I could find every quote, every scrap
of writing after the fact, he just shuts the conversation down. No, it's not about him. Next question.
He doesn't elaborate. And nobody pushes. Nobody probes. Nobody asks, well, did you know him?
Did you keep in touch? So he is lying, but I wish he would say more, even if that was a lie too.
Whether he started the book in 1983 or 1984, doesn't change the fact that by the time he put the
character of Oscar Yeager on the page, Joseph Paul Franklin was already in jail. He could have gotten
most of the details he needed from the newspaper. There's no reason to suspect he knew more than that.
I didn't like that answer. It didn't feel true to me, but it seemed like the best I was going to get.
But I was scrounging. And in one last desperate search for clues, I looked back over a book I
skimmed ages ago, last year maybe. I think at some point I'll circle back and do maybe a fun
episode reviewing the made for TV movie made about this book. It features a lesser Baldwin brother
as a very sympathetically portrayed neo-nazi. But in his memoir about his time in the order,
a man named Tom Martinnes writes about the day he met Robert Matthews.
Now, just for the record, it has spelled Martinez, but he apparently likes to pronounce it
Martinnes because it makes him sound less Hispanic, which is kind of a big deal if you're a neo-nazi,
you know. But Tom Martinnes first met Bob Matthews at the September 1981 national alliance convention.
Two years before Matthew formed the order and invited Martinnes to join.
And so he's describing sort of his early years in national alliance before joining the order.
And the chapter mixes in his own recollections about being a member of national alliance with
some sort of general historical facts about the group and its founder. It runs through the broad
strokes of William Luther Pierce's biography. And Martinnes describes Pierce's newsletters as,
quote, filled with long dull articles of a pseudo-scholarly nature designed to prove variance of
superiority, which I have to admit is extremely correct. I mean, Tom was kind of cooking there.
I am getting a permanent crease between my eyebrows from squinshing up my face reading these stupid
articles. But Martinnes goes on to say that Pierce was much more explicit about his actual beliefs,
his actual desire for real violence when he wrote in his members only bulletin.
And Martinnes cites one issue in particular, a July 1980 issue that quotes from a speech Pierce had
given the month before in June of 1980. And the line Martinnes quotes in the book, the
singular line he chose from the literally thousands of essays he could have chosen to illustrate
this point was this one quote, some may engage in individual activities like the Pennsylvania
sniper who dispatched interracial couples with his rifle. We certainly don't want to discourage that
last activity. Honestly, I don't think Martinnes realized what this was about. I don't think he chose
this for a particular reason. I think this was just the random snippet he picked to demonstrate how
much Pierce liked the idea of shooting people. I don't think he knew what this was.
But when I saw this, I couldn't believe it. I wasn't sure I did believe it. I mean, the book
has some inconsistencies. It's not a scholarly text. There's no citations. So maybe this is the
wrong date. Maybe it wasn't the July 1980 issue. It's pretty hard to find issues of the
national socials bulging from that era, but I got lucky and I found this one. And Tom Martinnes
wasn't wrong. He was right. This July 1980 issue has that quote from a speech that Pierce gave
the month before in June of 1980. The Pennsylvania sniper who dispatched an interracial couple with his
rifle was Joseph Paul Franklin. On June 15, 1980 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Joseph Paul Franklin
murdered Arthur Smothers and Kathleen McCoolah. And if Pierce gave this speech on a Sunday in June,
that means he's talking about this murder a week after it happened. Months before Franklin's arrest.
And the murders were reported in the newspaper, of course. But based on what I have been able to
find, that story did not appear in a June issue of any newspaper Pierce would reasonably have
been reading. There's no internet, right? So he would have had to read this in a newspaper
that he could get where he lived. It wasn't in his local paper in Northern Virginia. And I couldn't
find it in the archives of the Washington Post or the New York Times. Not the week that it happened.
But he knew. He already knew that someone had killed that couple specifically because he was
black and she was white. He knew that it was a targeted crime, a political act. And he knew
that it had been done by someone in the movement, someone specifically motivated by his work.
The context of the speech makes that plain. He's talking about someone who follows his teachings,
but got impatient.
Was it my intention to be done with this story? Absolutely. Of course it was. I mean,
I always think I'm going to be done. And I rarely am. But I really had it in my head that this
was finally over. I mean, I've spent the entirety of this year so far thinking about this book.
But then I did what I always do and I spent what was supposed to be my writing day,
reading more old Nazi newsletters. Again, I just really wanted to do my due diligence. I wanted to see
everything that William Luther Pierce was writing during the years I was curious about. What was he
writing during the years Joseph Paul Franklin was killing? 1977 through 1980? What was he writing
in his newsletter the year he started writing Hunter in 1984? What was he saying in his
public writings in 1989 when he finally finished the book? What's going on in his world in 1998?
The year he reprinted the book without the dedication page. I wanted some external information
about what's going on in his mind at all these points in time where he's writing, publishing,
and modifying this text. Because, I mean, he's dead, but when he was alive, he was never going to
be honest with us about that. So I'm just left trying to piece it together. And he was a prolific
writer. There was more out there than I could reasonably consume, and 10 times as much that's
just lost a time. I did have a pretty hard time finding archives of his newsletters from the 70s
in 80s, which is maybe for the best or else I'd still be reading. And I lost a day scrounging
around to see if he had any associates in hot water during any of those years. And the answer
was always yes. I do think it's very relevant to his thought process, to his political strategy
in any given year, to know if any of his associates are, I don't know, being indicted for
seditious conspiracy, or if a guy on his way home from a bank robbery stopped at the compound
to give him a bunch of money and then got arrested for building bombs, stuff like that.
And he puts so much of himself in his work that you have to know where his head's at when he's writing,
you know? But it'll have to wait. I lost track of time.
Truthfully, I'm trying to find a way to make this process a little less self-destructive.
I'm so addicted to finding every available crumb of context, but the better I get it,
doing the research, the worse it gets. I kind of assumed that at some point I would get good at
this and then it would take less time, but the opposite has happened. And I love researching so much
that I don't get the actual episode written until the literal 11th hour. I have pulled an all-nighter
writing the script quite literally every week for over a year. And I've been promising my husband
for months that I'm going to stop doing that because it is making me weird. So as this guy starts
to turn a little pink and my dogs are starting to whine for their breakfast, I'm just including
this here for some public accountability. I'm committing to doing like five percent less research.
I'll still read enough Nazi newsletters to get us where we need to go, don't worry. But
we'll all have to wait till next week to figure out where that even is.
Weird Little Guys is a production of cool zone media and I heart radio. It's researched written
and reported by me, Molly Conger. Parcasecutive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Yegan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail.com and we'll definitely read it but I
probably won't answer it's 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.
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to use and provides forecasts for your every need. From storm warnings to pollen levels,
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surprise so you can plan every day with confidence. Download the free weather bug app from the app
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