A Klansman in Berlin: Dennis Mahon, Pt. 2

so they could see her on aerial surveillance. They said it was January of two thousand and eight, when Rebecca visited that Missouri compound owned by Robert Joe's. He chatted idly about bomb making as he gave her a tour of his property, pointing out hidden entrances to the caves where he stored caches of weapons and survival foods. He told her that if anybody ever betrayed his confidence, they'd

just disappear into one of those caves. As the ice crunched softly under her boots in the woods, Rebecca wondered if that pink ribbon in her hair was only there to help identify her body. This was her first of several visits with Robert Joe's, a man preaching a dangerous mix of apocalyptic Christianity and sovereign citizen anti government extremism from his compound in the Ozarks. In nineteen ninety four, of his followers shot a Missouri state trooper who had

arrested Jo's on a misdemeanor charge. In two thousand four, the morning a bomb went off inside the Office of Diversity and Dialog in Scottsdale, Arizona, Robert Joe's was the first person the bomber called, and it was that bomber Dennis Mayhon who had introduced Rebecca to Robert Joe's as Becca Stevens. She'd developed a close friendship with Dennis Mayhon and his twin brother Daniel, so close, in fact, that Dennis had fallen desperately in love with her. He begged

her to let his twin brother impregnate her. He was impotent, but he reasoned that if his identical twin got her pregnant, the resulting baby would still be his biological child. Over the years on this undercover assignment, the brothers had told her on several occasions that if things ever got bad for them, this is where they would go. They could hole up in those caves where no one would ever find them. Rebecca Williams was not the first ATF informant

Dennis Mayhon had fallen in love with. It was his relationship with Carol Howe, a Tulsa debutante turned Nazi turned in foremant turned Nazi again that inspired ATF agent Tristan Morland to hire an exotic dancer to woo Mayhon into confessing to that two thousand and four bombing in Arizona. But unlike Carol Howe's testimony about Mahon's possible ties to the Oklahoma City bombing. Rebecca's work paid off. She put Dennis Mayhon in federal prison for building a bomb. I'm

Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys. When we left off last week, it was nineteen ninety. Dennis Mayhon was leading a clan splinter group called the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and he was Tom Metzker's right hand man in the White Arean Resistance. After spending most of the nineteen eighties underground years he spent by his own account, carrying out minor acts of terror for the clan, bombing federal office buildings, abortion clinics, and synagogues.

He'd emerged as a figure of some importance in the clan. He'd just won a legal battle against the city council in Kansas City over his right to broadcast a public access television show called Klansas City Cable, and public access television wasn't the only medium the White Knights of the KKK were using to reach people in Missouri. Mayhon's fondness for telephone hotlines will come up again a bit later. He was known to run a dial a racist operation.

It's not an uncommon tactic, particularly in the pre internet days. Someone with a message she wants to get out can set up a voicemail box and pass out flyers or business cards with the phone number on it. Interested party call the number and listen to the recording. It's sort of like a private on demand radio show. The original podcast I guess it came up in the Very Black episodes back in October two. Black's clan hotline was used

for clan announcements about upcoming events. But in October of nineteen ninety, Dennis Mayhon wasn't handing out his clan hotline number to white guys at bars that he hoped to recruit his organization. He was targeting children. According to his statement from the director of the Kansas City YWCA, students at area elementary and middle schools were given a number to call to hear a message from the host of a popular children's television show. Nothing I could find elaborated

on that at all. It's unclear if flyers had been posted at or near schools or playgrounds, or if someone had actually physically approached elementary schoolers with this material. Either possibility unsettling, but however, they got it. The children called a number to hear a message from the host of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Mister Rogers himself after a tiny rendition of the theme song from the TV show. The children

did not hear the warm, familiar voice of Fred Rogers. Instead, it was a clansman imitating his voice and mannerisms, delivering a foul message of bigotry. In one message, this false mister Rogers mocks gay people, calling aid's divine retribution from God to punish them. In another, the voice tells a story about a young black boy on a playground. The message is riddled with racial slurs and racist stereotypes, and the story ends with the description of the little boy

being lynched. It's a horrifying thought that a child would hear that at all, But if you're old enough to have watched Mister Rogers Neighborhood TV when you were a kid, you know that adds a whole extra layer to this. The show ran for over thirty years from the late sixties until two thousand and one. Generations of kids loved

and trusted mister Rogers. The show talked to kids like they were people, tackling difficult subjects gently and in a way that was appropriate for preschoolers and older kids alike. Often through song, mister Rogers talked to kids about divorce, death, anger, grief, and friendship. And even if you've never seen the show, you've surely heard one of his more enduring lessons to

look for the helpers, telling kids in uncertain times. When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, look for the helpers. You'll always find people who are helping. And he wasn't afraid to make waves in his own

gentle way. In nineteen sixty nine, when public swimming pools in much of the country were still segregated in practice, if not by law, mister Rogers shared a waiting pool with Francois Clemons, one of the first African American actors to have a recurring role on a children's TV show.

break on TV in nineteen sixty nine. All that to say, Fred Rogers was probably very upset when he heard children were hearing hateful words in his voice. Within days of the story reaching the media, mister Rogers himself had filed a lawsuit against the clan. There was a press conference in Kansas City on a Friday afternoon, with local civil rights groups and faith leaders condemning the messages, and by Monday morning, an army of entertainment lawyers had descended on

the Federal Court House in Kansas City. The ACLU didn't rush to the clan's defense. This time they were on their own. Had the Klan not used the theme song from Mister Rogers Neighborhood, this may have dragged on and become another battle over free speech. But the suit wasn't about the vile and offensive content of the messages. It was about copyright infringement. You can trick children into hearing violent racist propaganda, but you can't mess with the corporation's

intellectual property. Klansman Edward Stevens, Fourth, Adam Troy Mercer, and Michael Brooks settled almost immediately. Dennis Mayhon wasn't sued by name, but he signed the settlement agreement as the representative for the White Knights. The court ordered the men to destroy all copies of the tapes they'd used to record and

disseminate the messages. Not long after making that trip to the Federal court House in Kansas City to sign the paperwork, Dennis Mayhon appeared again in federal court, but this time it was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it wasn't for his own case. He took the stand as a character witness at a detention hearing for a friend. It isn't unusual to have someone testify on your behalf at this sort

of thing. When the government wants to hold someone in custody before they go to trial, all party involved appear

before a judge and make their case. The government explains why they think pretrialed attention is necessary, whether because they believe the defendant will fail to show up for court or because there's a significant chance they'll commit another crime, and the defendant's lawyer may put on a parent or an employer to vouch for him, offering testimony about their ties to the community, their responsibilities at home and work,

and things like that. I'm not a lawyer. We've been over that, so maybe there's a strategy here that I'm just not getting. But if I were choosing character witnesses to convince a judge that I'm not a danger to the community, I wouldn't pick a prominent leader of the Ku Klux Klan. But that's just me though, because Daniel

Rouche did. When Dennis took the stand in December of nineteen ninety, he called Daniel Ruche quote the most honorable, non violent, decent young man I've ever met in my life, and he said his friend probably would prefer not to live around minorities, but quote, I don't think he'd hurt them. Daniel Rouge was one of fifteen members of a Nazi skinhead group arrested in Oklahoma in nineteen ninety on hate

crime charges. For years, the skinheads had been harassing patrons at Club Nitro, a punk club in Tulsa owned by Khaled Rahal, a Lebanese immigrant. In nineteen eighty nine, they waited in the parking lot until the bar closed and attacked Rahl, beating him with a brick. A month later, they set fire to the club with Molotov cocktails. Later that year, Rush and at least a dozen others jumped a patron in the parking lot, kicking him with their

steel toed boots until the teenager lost consciousness. This particular act, a group assault with a heavy emphasis on kicking the victim in the head, is called a boot party, and the kind of guy who likes to have a boot party is sometimes called a boot boy, which is why Rouge's band was called the Midtown boot Boys, a name you may remember from last week. The Midtown boot Boys were the headline act at Aaryan Fest nineteen eighty eight that racist woodstock that Tom Metzger held on a farm

in Oklahoma. And it turns out that concert in nineteen eighty eight wasn't a one off thing. When I mentioned it last week, it was really just because I saw it in an old issue of Metzger's newsletter, and I thought the name was funny. I didn't expect to spend all week learning about an OI band from Oklahoma, But apparently Metzger was a huge supporter of the Midtown boot Boys.

A year after that inaugural riyan Fest, Metzger invited them to headline an event he was calling aryan Woodstock in Napa, California. The event ended a day early due to poor attendance and cold, and the band played Arianfest again a few months later. In nineteen eighty nine, issues of Metzger's White

Arian Resistance newsletter offered the band's tapes for sale. In his cultural history of the Skinhead movement, professor Jack Moore describes a nineteen eighty eight recording of Metzger hawking the tapes in one of his weekly addresses, writing that Metzger sounds hopelessly square when he describes the album as a hot tape. A local paper in Tulsa noted in nineteen eighty eight that the Midtown boot Boys weren't just a

punk band. They were the center of skinhead organizing and recruitment in the Tulsa area, and the skinheads they rolled with called themselves war Skins, denoting their affiliation with Metzgers White Arian resistance. That article refers to the local skinhead leader as a man named Rip, which was the pseudonym

used by Daniel Rusche. The Oklahoma Separatist, a racist magazine published by Oklahoma clansman Joe Grego, named Daniel Rusche Racist of the Month in their July nineteen eighty eight issue, offering praise for his music, artwork, and propensity for violence.

in the movement. Tiffany Travis's History of the American Skinhead Movement notes that skinheads in Tulsa were the first to openly affiliate with paramilitary groups and the Aryan Nations. She doesn't name the Midtown boot Boys in particular, but she's talking about Tulsa in nineteen eighty eight. She's talking about Daniel Rusche. In nineteen eighty seven. Tom Metzker started trying

to organize skinheads in California. The first chapter of War Skins started out there in nineteen eighty seven, and a year later we're seeing these local news reports in Oklahoma about Tulsa's Skins calling themselves war Skins. Travis's book credits Metzker as being the first big name white supremacist to embrace the potential of skinhead culture and welcome them into the movement. Metzger has quoted saying, I give them guidance on the law to stay out of trouble, and I

give them our ideology. They have their own subculture and tampering with it would destroy it. Metzger helped skinhead groups set up post office boxes to use for recruitment and networking with other racist organizations, and he set up White Arean resistance phone lines in their cities. By the late eighties, leaderless resistance was the name of the game, and Metzger

thought he could use Race's skinheads to his advantage. They would spread his message, attract rowdy, youthful audiences he could recruit from, and they would carry out acts of racist violence that wouldn't trace directly back to him. He quickly realized he'd made a mistake, though, In nineteen eighty eight, war Skins in Portland murder Mulagetta Sarah. By nineteen eighty nine, war Skins in California, Texas, and Oklahoma were committing hate crimes at an alarming rate, and the FBI was starting

to round them up. He'd been trying to quietly extricate himself from the skinhead movement when a lawsuit brought by Mulagetta Sara's family took him for everything. He had a jury in Oregon didn't buy the leaderless resistance defense. Travis's book attributes this effort to organized skinheads directly to Metzger personally, and that's fair, it's accurate. It was being done at his direction, and when it started in California, he had

a personal role in it. But the person actually directly responsible for organizing the Skins in Oklahoma was almost certainly Metzger's Midwest lieutenant Dennis Mayhon. By nineteen ninety, Dennis Mayhon had moved to Catusa, just outside of Tulsa, and all sudden, the local skinheads have ties to the clan, the Aryan Nations and White Aryan Resistance, just like Dennis. And when Tulsa's Skinheads got rounded up by the FBI, there's Dennis on the witness stand, testifying that he'd been friends with

Daniel Rouge for years. In his own newsletter later that month, Dennis Mayhon said he was organizing local clansmen to sell their guns to raise money for Ruche's defense, but there would be no defense. Despite Dennis Mayhan's confident statements to the press that the case was pure persecution of the skinheads for their beliefs. Daniel Rushe entered a guilty plea in January nineteen ninety one and was sentenced to forty two months with time served in good behavior. He was

released in November of nineteen ninety three. Unfortunately for the Midtown boot Boys, though they only got their basist back. The band's vocalist, Christopher Jones, received a slightly longer sentence, and he had to serve time for an assault brought by the state of Oklahoma first. One of the other skinheads sentenced alongside them, a man named Michael Lewis Lawrence, was given nine years on top of the four years he was already serving in Texas for a separate hate

crimes case involving skinheads in Dallas. When Lawrence went to trial in Texas, one of his co conspirators testified that they had been attempting to re enact Christallnacht on the fiftieth anniversary of the nineteen thirty eight pograms in Germany. When the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions in the Texas case, the opinion notes that Aryanfest eighty

eight was a pivotal moment writing. After defendants attended an Aryan fest in June nineteen eighty eight, during which various speakers encouraged skinhead groups to become the backbone and foot soldiers of the white supremacist movement, the group became more determined to use violence to achieve its philosophical objectives. That

speaker was Tom Metzker. At that hearing in nineteen ninety to determine if Daniel Rouge could be granted bond on charges of racially motivated assault, he admitted to the judge that he had written the lyrics quote throw a boot party for the left wing commie scum end quote we find a drunken n word and beat him black and blue,

lyrics that do describe the crimes he's accused of. From what I can piece together of the band's discography, the track Tulsa Tonight, which seems to describe the crimes half the band went to prison for, was actually recorded after they served their time An Me Die Tonight.

with titles like blood Will Run and Downright Hateful. When Hitler's deputy fear Rudolph hess died, they honored him with a song called sleep Well Rudolph Hesse, and they praised the crimes of the Nazi terrorist group The Order in their song Free the Order. The band had to go on hiatus in nineteen ninety one because Daniel Ruche, the bassist, and Christopher Jones, the vocalist, both went to prison after

pleading guilty to civil rights violations and hate crimes. When Rouche got out in nineteen ninety three, he and the drummer, a man named Stacy, started a metal band called Berserker, playing under that name until getting the Midtown boot Boys back together. When Jones was released in nineteen ninety six. It's not completely clear when Stacy became the band's drummer, but it must have been after their previous drummer testified

against the Skinheads in Texas. As of twenty thirteen, Christopher Jones owed Daniel Ruche's sister more than sixteen thousand dollars in child support, and I can't find any information about whether or not her restraining order against Jones impacted the band at all. It really was a family affair, though. Shortly after Daniel Rusche got out of prison, he married Boot Boy's guitar as Tony Loretti's sister. But this is an episode about Dennis Mayhon, and I don't think Dennis

Mayhon was ever in a punk band. In footage of the Midtown boot Boys set at arian Fest nineteen eighty nine, the camera pans slowly over a solidly middle aged looking Dennis bobbing his head slightly offbeat. I couldn't find the end of this thread, but it seems like Dennis Mahon

didn't stay friends with the Skinheads forever. An article published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in nineteen ninety nine makes a passing mention of the time that Dennis Mayhon was beaten and stabbed by a group of skinheads in Georgia, but it doesn't say when that happened. In nineteen ninety, a young race assist in Germany wrote Dennis Mayhan a letter. Carston Sepanski was a twenty year old skinhead from Berlin.

He was sharing an apartment with Andreas Pohl, a Nazi skinhead who'd spent most of the eighties as the drummer in one of Germany's oldest skinhead bands, Kraft der Freude, and by the early nineties Pohl was leading the German neo Nazi group Nationalist Front. It's not clear in any of the sources I could find exactly how Sepanski came to write to Mahon, but it's possible that Pole's connections with skinhead bands in Britain and the United States played

a part. Soon after they began exchanging letters, Sepanski began publishing a clan style newsletter called Dos Feuerkreutz or The Fiery Cross. It had a bit of original material information about immigrants in Germany that would be of interest to a German neo Nazi, but it was almost entirely just translated articles taken from Dennis Mayhan's clan newsletter called The

White Beret. This wasn't the first time American clan influence had reached Germany, but most of the earlier hotspots of clan activity in Germany connect back to American service members stationed at US military bases there. In the nineteen sixties, the spokesman for the clan in Germany was a U. S Army officer stationed in Bavaria. In the early eighties, the leader of the clan in Germany was an American Air Force sergeant named Murray Cockel. But in nineteen ninety

one there was a new clan in town. In April of that year, two hundred Neo Nazisan skinheads arrived in the German town of Hereford. They were there to celebrate Hitler's birthday. A few months later, three teenagers were arrested Innuenrata for throwing rocks at a building that was home to Turkish and Albanian immigrants. Police confiscated pistols and Molotov cocktails, and one of them had stickers in his pocket bearing

recruitment information for a clan chapter in Bielefeld. The Beilafeld chapter seems to have been under the direction of bern Schmidt, but in Berlin Carston Sepanski was calling himself the Grand Dragon of the German White Knights of the ku Klux Klan. In the fall of nineteen ninety one, there were more than two hundred arson attacks targeting immigrants in Germany, focused

mainly on housing facilities for asylum seekers. The attacks culminated in the Heierz Verda riots in September, after a group of young Neo Nazis was arrested for attacking a Vietnamese street vendor. The group retaliated by attacking a hostel that housed Mozambicon contract workers. Over the next week, the violence escalated. An apartment building that housed asylum seekers was bombed. The German government responded by evacuating all of the asylum seekers

in Heuierz Verde. Other immigrants left on their own, no longer feeling safe from the town the racist had won. They declared hoyersvada ouslander fry free of foreigners. The violence was contagious. It wasn't just happening in heuers Verde, and the days that followed hundreds of Romanians fled Leipzig. A dozen Neo Nazis were arrested in Hereford after bombing several cars outside of a home for asylum seekers. A Ghanian man was burned to death in saw Louis when his

apartment was firebombed. And that's what was happening in Germany. When Denis Mahon got off a plane in Frankfurt, he took a nine day, twenty five city tour of Germany at the end of September of nineteen ninety one, at the invitation of Carston Sepanski. After visiting the Reichstag building in Berlin, Dennis said, quote, it was very inspiring to walk up the same steps that Adolf Hitler walked up. When Mahon mced a cross burning an hour south of Berlin,

the heiers Verda riots were on going. As the cross burned, he told the assembled crowd of a few dozen German Neo Nazis that the violence in Heerz Verde was a great victory for Germany. He later explained to a reporter that the cross burning quote called up the spirits of the Vaffiness and the Teutonic Knights. The next day, Carson Sepanski drove Dennis Mayhon to Sarbruken, where they attended a

Screwdriver concert. After the show, he met with Ian Stewart Donaldson, the frontman of the Nazi punk band, and gave him a white beret, the symbol of Dennis's clan group. I did find contemporary reporting about this trip from both American and German news outlets. I read accounts of this trip in several books and tracked down the sources those authors cited and read those two. But the most thorough accounting of Dennis Mayhon's trip to Germany was written by Dennis himself.

After an exhaustive effort to locate issues of his newsletter The White Beret, I only found one. I know was published for years, from maybe nineteen eighty nine through at least nineteen ninety five. But I only found one issue, the December nineteen ninety one January nineteen ninety two issue. And I didn't find it in a university special collection or a library database of old extremist literature. I didn't find it on the Internet archive or in some old

ADL special report. The person who held on to a hard copy of this old clan newsletter for three decades was Dennis Mayhon's twin brother, Daniel Mayhon, and in twenty twenty two, this issue was among the archival materials that Daniel Mayhon provided to an Adam Waffen splinter group that was trying to digitize and preserve important artifacts of right

wing terrorist history. Not to spoil the ending, but Daniel Mayhon was arrested and charged in connection with that two thousand and four bombing in Arizona, but unlike his brother, he was acquitted. Daniel Mayhon is legally speaking, completely innocent. He's never been convicted of a crime. So I'm very intrigued by this relatively recent contact he seems to have had with today's aspiring Nazi terrorists. I wonder how often

they talk. That lone issue of the White Beret that I was able to find goes into great detail about Dennis Mayhon's travels. In September of nineteen ninety one, he describes his visit to the site of the Saxenhausen concentration camp, writing that he quote had a real laugh at the wild stories, and he says that compared to American prisons, the work the camp was closer to a Marriott or a Hilton. He claims to have urinated on a memorial to Holocaust victims that was placed at the site of

the camp's crematorium. The newsletter also includes an advertisement for Bob Matthew's memorial t shirts honoring Robert J. Matthews, the leader of the Order who died in a standoff with the FBI in nineteen eighty four. The shirts cost just fifteen dollars, payable by money order to a man named

Drew in Ontario. Readers were also told that they could send a money order to a PO box in Hayden Lake, Idaho for some quote good news, and they'd receive in return an updated list of celebrities who had contracted HIV. An announcement towards the end of the newsletter recommends subscribing to a new publication from Canada's Heritage Front. That's a

bit of foreshadowing for Dennis. In nineteen ninety three, he would try to visit the publication's author, both gung T, but the Canadian government intercepted him at the airport and deported him. Not long after Jennis Mahon's tour of Germany, his host, Carson Sepanski attacked a schoolteacher from Nigeria at a nightclub in Brandenburg. He and nearly a dozen others surrounded the man, kicking and punching him until he lost consciousness. When a waitress tried to intervene, one of the men said,

we'll kill him. He's not human anyway, and as the beating escalated, Sepanski reportedly tried to get a chant of Ku klux Klan Ku klux Klan going. As the punches landed. They dragged the man outside and tried to set him on fire, but his coat wouldn't catch. They threw him, unconscious into a nearby lake instead. An employee from the nightclub was able to pull him out of the water before he drowned, but the man was in a coma

for days. It was while he was in prison for this attempted murder that Carston Sepansky became an informant for the German police. When he was called to testify in twenty fourteen in the trial for the National Socialist Underground murders, he was asked about that cross burning in nineteen ninety one, he agreed that the point had been to spread fear.

By nineteen ninety two, Dennis Mayhon was living in Tulsa, and he tried his hand at politics again, despite the abject failure to even get any attention when he ran for aldermen in Northmore a few years earlier. Dennis was one of nearly sixty people who threw his hat into the ring for the special election after Tulsa Mayor Roger Randall resigned in nineteen ninety two. He didn't win, obviously.

The county GOP chair said the Republican Party will do anything and everything to distance itself from the message this particular candidate has, adding that it was obvious that Mayhan was only running to get a platform to read his message of Aryan resistance. He's in the paper a few other times that year, mostly related to his efforts to recruit new members to a clan chapter in Madison, Wisconsin,

of all places. He set up a diala racist hotline up there to aid in those efforts, and for some reason, the Capital Times newspaper in Madison published lengthy excerpts from the recorded messages, slurs and all. He also received a cease and desist letter from an attorney representing the company that owns the rights to the Garfield comic strip after he published an issue of The White Beret with the

cartoon cat on the cover. The newspaper doesn't say what Garfield was doing, but I'd be willing to stake at least ten bucks that it's a picture of Garfield wearing a clan robe or giving a Nazi salute, or something distasteful like that. Those articles in Wisconsin quote a local man who disputes genesis claim that the dial of racist

hotline was getting a lot of call. You can't really take him in his word, considering he told the paper that he wasn't a member of any hate groups, despite the fact that he was running the Clan hotline out of his home. But he says he's only received about a dozen calls in total, which is a far cry from the hundreds per week that Maehon was boasting about. So maybe the Nila Rasis hot line wasn't a phenomenally

effective recruitment tool. But we do know at least one person whose entire life changed after she called Dennis's hotline. In nineteen ninety four, Carol Howe got hurt. She would later claim that she'd been pushed off a building by

a gang of black men. Other versions of the story have her jumping off a roof to escape, but still she's claiming it's because she was being chased by these mysterious and frightening black men, conjuring the ultimate boogeyman in the mind of the racist, a beautiful white woman coming to harm at the hands of black men. This is her origin story. She told this version of events to explain why she became a Nazi, and this is the

version of Carol's story that exists almost everywhere. Even sources that note that you should view this with some skepticism don't offer any alternative explanation for Carol Howe's broken feet, and those were real. She was on crutches for most of that year. In an audible original miniseries published last year,

investigative journalist John Ronson finally solved this mystery. Carol Howe's ex husband, Gregg, explains to Ronson in an interview that they'd been drinking in a public park around Easter of nineteen ninety four. A local Catholic church was putting on their annual Passion play in the park, so there was

a bit of set dressing set up. They saw a group of kids climbing the scenery and jumping off of it, and Carol thought it looked fun, so she tried it, but she landed badly, breaking bones in both of her feet. Greg doesn't specify exactly what it was that Carol jumped off of, just that it was something set up in the park for the Passion play. A Passion play, if you're not familiar, depicts the story of the crucifixion and

resurrection of Jesus Christ. I've never been to a live Passion play, so I can't tell you with ironclad certainty what the most common pieces of set decoration might be if you were to put one on in a public park. But the only thing I can think of that would be big enough to jump off of and hurt yourself like that is the cross itself. So the question I'm asking myself is, did Carol Howe break her feet drunkenly

jumping off of a cross? Is her racist origin story of white victimhood and martyrdom just a cover for goofing off on a giant cross? Because that would be very funny. If you grew up in Tulsa and you ever went to the Easter pageant at Chandler Park, do let me know what you think. Carol jumped off of After her injury,

Carol Howe didn't leave the house for weeks. She had to have surgery to repair the damage to her feet, and Greg says her doctor's prescribed her any kind of pills she asked for, so she laid in bed all day, taking pain pills and calling in to the dial a racist hotline to listen to the messages. And after a few weeks of doing this, she decided she needed to meet the man whose voice she had been listening to every day. They spoke on the phone a few times

before meeting in a restaurant in Tulsa. Carol left her husband soon after. Carol Howe was twenty years younger than Denis Mayhon, and if you ignore the giant swastika tattoo, she was very beautiful. She was the daughter of a very wealthy man and had been a debutante in Tulsa. Dennis Mayhon told John Ronson that he really did try not to fall in love with Carol. He saw a lot of potential in her. He wanted to mold her into the perfect mouthpiece for the movement. She was a

beautiful and intelligent young woman, educated and well spoken. He wanted to get her on TV. After he showed her how to make bombs, they set some off in the woods together. Dennis said she was so thrilled by the explosions that they had sex immediately, but the relationship soured quickly. In August, just four months after they met, Carol went to the courthouse in Tulsa to take out a restraining

order against him. She'd gone to the police after he raped her, she says, and then he started leaving her threatening messages, saying if she pulled away from the movement, he'd have to neutralize her. And he really did leave Carol how threatening messages. In August of nineteen ninety four, John Ronson was able to get access to some of those,

and they're included in that audible miniseries. But two weeks after she filed for the restraining order, she didn't show up to court for the hearing, so the judge dismissed the petition, and that was okay with Carol. She was ready to get close to Dennis again, but not because she'd forgiven him for sexually assaulting her. Two days after she reported the assault, she was approached by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The next time

she saw Dennis, Carol Howe was an ATF informant. By this time, Dennis was already a fixture around a little spot out in the country about two hours southeast of the city. He was still living in Tulsa, but for a few years now he'd been spending weekends down there in his airstream trailer. And in nineteen ninety four Dennis Mahon and Carol Howe started spending a lot more time together down in Elleheim City. And that I'm afraid is

a story you'll have to come back for. Wee Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Special thanks this episode goes to doctor Michelle Kahn for pointing me in the direction of Carston Spanski. Most of the material about his relationship with Dennis Mahon was in German and I would not have been able to find it without his name as a starting point, So thank you, Michelle.

Our executive producers are Sophie Lettterman 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 Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably will not answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show. We have their listeners on the Weird

Little Guy Supred Hit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys