Kansas shooter admired 'lone wolf' assailants
In the run up to his alleged attack on three Jewish sites in Kansas, suspected gunman Frazier Glenn Cross increasingly celebrated "lone wolf" assailants of the white supremacy world and warned of future attacks.
In online forums, Cross, who also goes by the name Frazier Glenn Miller, celebrated independent killers such as James von Brunn, the 88-year-old white supremacist who killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2009, and Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik, convicted of killing 77 people, mostly teenagers, in a 2011 bombing and shooting attack, according to a new report on Cross released Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate crimes.
"Breivik fired up Aryan blood, and inspired young Aryan men to action," the report quotes Cross as writing on the white supremacist website Vanguard News Network shortly after the Norwiegen assault. "Mark my words."
Cross, 73, was being held Wednesday on $10 million bail, charged with fatally shooting Reat Underwood, 14, Reat's grandfather William Corporon, 69, and Terri LaManno, 53, outside two Jewish sites in Overland Park, near Kansas City, on Sunday.
Cross founded and ran the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s and was involved in forming illegal paramilitary groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. But after being indicted on weapons charges, Cross testified in 1988 against former Klan associates and neo-Nazi leaders, leading to a two-decade exile from the movement.
He resurfaced in the late 1990s, still shunned by the mainstream white supremacist movement, and later turned his focus to "lone wolf" extremists, according to the report.
Lone wolf extremists had been operating in the right-wing underworld since the 1980s, said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a 1983 essay titled "Leaderless Resistance," then Texas Klan leader Louis Beam encouraged individuals to stage attacks without forming groups in order to avoid persecution by the law, he said. "The big lesson was you cannot operate in these large groups or you will be destroyed," Potok said.
Today, lone wolf assailants – operating independently but governed by white supremacist ideology – are extremely difficult for law enforcement agents to detect and combat, said J.M. Berger, a terrorism analyst. The task has become thornier with the advent of social media, as online users send a steady stream of hateful remarks across the Web, he said.
"It presents a lot of challenges for law enforcement," Berger said. "They have a lot of ways to approach this problem but none of them are ever going to be perfect."
In its analysis of Cross' online posts, the Anti-Defamation League report said Cross had a complex opinion of the lone wolf strategy – denouncing the movement's reliance on such acts, while applauding the perpetrators involved.
One such assailant he admired was Keith Luke, who embarked on a murderous rampage in Brockton, Mass., in 2009, killing two West African immigrants and shooting and raping a third, according to the report. Police caught up with Luke as he allegedly planned to resume his attack on a synagogue that evening. Luke received two consecutive life sentences last year.
In early 2010, Cross described Luke as a "super courageous young white man with guts to act," the report said.
Cross also lauded Joseph Paul Franklin, the white supremacist serial killer who committed a number of murders and bombings against blacks, Jews and people involved in interracial relationships in the 1970s, according to the report. On the Vanguard News Network forum, Cross announced he had exchanged phone calls with Franklin as the convicted killer sat on death row awaiting execution in Missouri. He called Franklin a "lone wolf hero."
When Franklin was executed by lethal injection in November, Cross announced his death online and called him a martyr. "Hail Joseph Paul Franklin!" he wrote.
Five months later, Cross traveled to Overland Park, Kan., to perform his own lone wolf assault.