Death of a Demagogue, Pt. 3.5

He was the editor of the newsletter for the newly formed National Socialist Movement, and the August nineteen seventy six issue contained a write up about a hated enemy from Charlottesville, Virginia. Word reaches us that the sneak murderer of Rockwell, John pat Solos, is in trouble again, this time with the law for disorderly conduct. In the nude pat Solos aka Patler, and two other men were a did in charge with trespassing and possession of marijuana while conducting an orgy with

one woman who is still being sought. Rockwell is dead and his murderer carouses reason enough to destroy any system that would permit it. Keep turning up this way, buddy boy, so that we may keep track of you. Whether or not James Mason kept track of John Patler in the years that followed, I couldn't tell you. But here's the rest of his story. I'm Molly Coner, and this is where the little guys. When we left off last time, it was nineteen seventy six, and I was apologizing for

writing without a plan. I could probably be more organized, but I think that would mean cutting out the side quests, and to be honest, I'd rather die than live a life without my rabbit holes. So as my apology to you, you're getting this a little bit early, this being the second half of the third part of a series that I thought was going to be a single episode. Is there more? I actually don't know. I'll find out about ninety six hours before you do. At the very least,

I know we aren't quite moving on next week. I still need to tell you about the legal battle over George Lincoln Rockwell's corpse that ended in an all day standoff with the army. But back to the orgy. In the summer of nineteen seventy six, John Patler was out of prison. He'd been released on parole after serving barely five years of his twenty years sentence for the murder

of America Nazi Party commander George Lincoln Rockwell. He was close to finishing a degree at Radford College, having taken a year of classes through the Study Release program while he was still in prison, but in June of nineteen seventy six, he wasn't enrolled in summer classes. He says he was in Charlottesville that summer looking for a job. Now, for my non Virginians, Radford is about one hundred and

fifty miles away from Charlottesville. It's hard to say what brought him here or what sort of job he was looking for. His brother was living about an hour north of Charlottesville, and it's hard to say with certainty what

someone's address was fifty years ago. But it seems like both of his ex wives, each of them raising two of his sons, were living in the central Virginia area at the time as well, although in opposite directions, and none of them were actually in the Charlotteville area directly, and it doesn't appear he was in contact with them. So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't know why he was looking for a job here, but that's

what he told the cops. On a Wednesday evening in June of nineteen seventy six, a man got home from work. He opened his front door, and he walked inside, and he found four naked strangers engaging in some unspecified group sex act in his living room. He ordered the naked people to leave, obviously, and to their credit, they did. As they were leaving. He wrote down the license plate number of the car they piled into, and he called the police. No reporting that I could find ever identified

the woman, but all three men were quickly arrested. A Charlottesville police officer spotted the car half an hour later and arrested John Patler and the other two men. I have nothing but questions about this. How did these men meet? What was the conversation leading up to this? How do you end up having an orgy in someone else's house. The other two men's names are in the newspaper, but I don't want to get too deep into who they were.

One of them would later get arrested after an armed stand off with police when he barricaded himself inside of his psychiatrist's home, which he'd broken into after being released from a psychiatric hospital, and the other man had a fair number of drug charges that pre date nineteen seventy six, but in the two decades after this, he committed such a staggering number of horrific sexual crimes that I don't

really want to talk about it. But back to this evening in June of nineteen seventy six, presumably they were all clothed by the time the officer pulled them over. All three of them were wanted in connection with the reported trespassing, and the officer reported finding a pipe with marijuana residue, as well as a small quantity of marijuana on Patler's person, So he was charged with possession of

marijuana as well. So now he has three problems. He's been charged with two crimes, he's very embarrassed, and he's recently been parolled after serving just five years of a twenty year sentence for murder. Well, I guess he has four problems. It's probably going to be pretty hard to find a job in Charlottesville now. Patler told reporters with the local newspaper shortly after this arrest that the entire

incident had been blown out of proportion. He said he didn't know anything about any kind of orgy, and he claimed that he and the other men had been invited guests of the home's other occupant. The man who came home to find the orgy in his living room did have a roommate, and that man was the brother of one of these naked people, so it's not impossible that they were his guests. But he wasn't home, and police

say the group entered the house through a window. I mean, that's not something I would do at my brother's house, but people are different. The story received a lot more press than the average trespassing charge, and Patler was probably right when he told the local newspaper that all this attention was quote due to the identities of the people involved.

It was picked up as a wire story and ended up published in newspapers all over the country, which is probably how word ended up getting back to his old associates. All three men were acquitted on the trustpassing charge. The judge found that there was insufficient proof they'd been in the home because they only had the home occupant's word

on the matter. Typically, a trustpassing charge involves a police officer seeing you do it, but Patler was unable to attend his own trial for truspassing because he was already back in jail somewhere else. Getting arrested is a parole violation. The prosecutor in Charlottesville ultimately dropped the marijuana possession charge entirely likely because there was no point prosecuting the case if the defendant was already incarcerated somewhere else for something

more serious. Getting arrested at all, even if you're ultimately acquitted or the charges are dropped, is what's called a technical violation, which can lead to problems for someone on

probation or parole. If he had been in perfect compliance with his conditions, otherwise, the technical violation may have been resolvable, it might not have caused problems for him, But according to newspaper reports, his probation conditions required him to remain in the Radford area, so it looked like he was trying to move to and get a job in Charlottesville, which was a violation, and that sent him back to

prison in the fall of nineteen seventy six. In January of nineteen seventy eight, from jail, he filed a petition with the court to legally change his name back to Patsalos. Like those articles from the early seventies. The first time he was in jail, he says he's changed his ways, and he understands now that his hateful ways were really

just misdirected hatred of himself. In early nineteen seventy eight, those articles say that he wouldn't be released for another six years, and I can't find any newspaper stories that definitively put him in or out of prison in the next few years. But a footnote in Frederick Simonelli's biography of Rockwell says that he was paroled again for good in October of nineteen seventy eight, and then he sort

of disappears. I read in a few sources that he moved back to New York City immediately after being released, but it does look like he stayed in the Richmond, Virginia area for a few years. In nineteen eighty eight, he legally changed his name back to John Patsalos in the Richmond Circuit Court. I found a marriage license for him in Manhattan in nineteen ninety, but the woman moved across the country just a few years later, and she

ultimately filed for divorce from the West Coast. So his third marriage didn't last long and doesn't seem to have produced any children. In twenty seventeen, a reporter from the Washington Post went looking for him. He refused to be interviewed, but at the time he was living on the Lower East Side. At the age of seventy nine, Butler was still earning a living as a freelance cartoonist. But the

article doesn't say who's buying his art. I mean, freelance cartooning is probably a pretty tough way to pay the rent in Manhattan, so I imagine he's selling those drawings to anyone who would buy them. But I was only able to pin down the details for one High Times magazine. I found a couple of issues from that era and flipped through them, but I never found his name in the magazine itself. He's not credited as the artist anywhere that I can find, so it's not unlikely that his

art appears elsewhere also without attribution. But I know he was working for High Times, that magazine about marijuana, because in twenty seventeen it was sold to a private equity firm. As a part of that sale, documents were filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission they're all very boring, and they're not the kinds of documents I usually look at. But in one endless pdf of assets and liabilities and financed gibberish, there's a list of the magazine's current freelance contracts.

John Patsalos is listed as a monthly contributor to the magazine, earning five hundred dollars a month as an illustrator. In his Misspent Nazi Youth, he illustrated the quarterly magazine of the American Nazi Party. There's one issue that has a multi page comic called white Man, a superhero with a swastika on his chest who does battle with what I can only assume is a non copyright infringing version of Superman because he's referred to only as the Jew from

outer Space. In the nineteen sixties, in a converted henhouse with a giant swastika on the roof, he labored over a rinting press, watching us thousands of copies of his racist caricatures landed in a pile. And now in his old age, he's drawing little cartoons of people smoking weed. That's the last place John Patler appears in any record

I can find. Every August. His name appears in a few newspapers running stories about the anniversary of Rockwell's death, but it's always the same story, just a reminder of that moment in history, just to remember when about that day in nineteen sixty seven. There's no obituary that I can find, and data broker sites show that he still lives in that apartment on the Lower East Side, but that doesn't mean much. If he is still alive, he'll

turn eighty eight in January. If he isn't, then his passing didn't make the news and wasn't mourned by anyone, at least not pup alive or dead. The last years of his life were spent in obscurity. He's just a strange, sad footnote in the story of the man he says he didn't kill. A listener posted a question a few weeks ago on the show's subreddit about Patler's younger brother. Ordinarily, I would probably leave him out of a story like this.

There's no indication I could find that they were particularly close, and nothing I found hinted that he was involved in similar political activities, at least not the Nazi stuff. There is a new story about him getting arrested for cross burning in nineteen eighty five, but it looks like the case was dropped because the victim was also white. Puzzling. But in any case, I think for this story it is actually relevant to talk a little bit about George Patsalos.

Back in the first episode, I talked a little about their childhoods. They were born a year and a half apart, so George wasn't quite four years old when their father murdered their mother in nineteen fifty eight, the year John Patler enlisted the Marines to avoid going to jail for a probation violation, George was arrested for setting a school

on fire in the Bronx in nineteen sixty seven. When John Patler wrote his own autobiography in his final issue of Stormtrooper magazine, he dismissed the idea that his troubled home life had played any role in the man he became, considering his brother was nothing like him, He wrote, quote, the environmentalists and the jew oriented psychiatrists will no doubt attribute my political activity and extremist beliefs to my unfortunate

childhood experiences. But my brother, who experienced the exact environment I did, and who underwent the same hardships, lives an opposite life than mine. He is today a happily married man, a peaceful, non political citizen, and the owner of a small business he built up himself, And maybe in nineteen sixty seven, John Patler believed that that was true. It was around this time that his brother George moved down to Virginia from New York. I couldn't tell you what

prompted the move for exactly when it was. Articles about George that were written much later say that he moved to Virginia in the early seventies, but birth records for his children show one born in New York in nineteen sixty three, followed by one born in Virginia in nineteen sixty seven. So he was living in Virginia at least as early as nineteen sixty seven, and the happy marriage Tatler wrote about seems to have been anything. But he married his first wife in nineteen sixty three, at eight

months before their first daughter was born. When his wife filed for divorce, she cited both cruelty and wilful abandonment. By the time the divorce was finalized in nineteen seventy four. George, who was in his mid thirties and a father of four, was already living with a girl he met a year earlier, when he was married and she was in high school. Her name was Ava DeHart. By nineteen eighty two, she wasn't a teenager anymore. They'd been together for almost a decade.

She worked at the motorcycle shop he ran in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and they lived together in a trailer in a small town about halfway between Fredericksburg and Charlottesville. In the summer of nineteen eighty two, Ava confided in her sister that she was afraid of George, that he'd been hurting her, and she was afraid that if she tried to leave, he would find her and kill her, or worse, that

he'd kill her family. She told her sister that he'd killed before, but she wouldn't say anymore, and then she disappeared. George Patsalos had already moved on to another woman before Ava disappeared in nineteen eighty two, and in nineteen eighty five he married Barbara Campfield, the woman he'd started seeing a year before. Ava de Heart vanished. That marriage was over before it even really began. They married in March, had a baby in May, and they were separated by July,

though they didn't officially divorce until nineteen eighty seven. On the divorce decree, the legal grounds for the divorce is listed simply as cruelty. You can't really know what goes on behind closed doors. But shortly before Barbara filed for the divorce, her brother shot George in the neck during an argument that took place at her mother's house. For fourteen years, Ava Dehart's sister, Debbie, investigated the disappearance on her own. She hired a private investigator, but she kept

pursuing the best lead on her own. Barbara Campfield hadn't to know something. She was George Patsalos's girlfriend when Ava disappeared, and it's a small town people talk, so she took advantage of that, and she talked too. Debbie would stop by the grocery store where Barbara was working, just a chat. Every now and then. She'd ask Barbara her sister. She asked her about George. She asked what happened in nineteen

eighty two, and slowly Barbara opened up to her. Barbara hired a lawyer shortly after She led on to Debbie that she'd helped George clean up a lot of blood one night in July of nineteen eighty two, and her lawyer negotiated a deal for immunity, and then she took the police to the well. Barbara said for all those years she'd been too afraid to talk. She was afraid that George would do the same thing to her. But in nineteen ninety six, she finally confessed to helping George

Potsollos throw a body down a well. She claimed that she never knew whose body it was. A forensic examination confirmed that the skeletal remains at the bottom of an abandoned well were those of Ava DeHart. A forensic anthropologist had testified that of the thirty five fractures detected on examination, twenty seven of them happened while she was still alive. George Potzalos beat her to death. George Pozzalos was convicted of the first degree murder of Ava de Hart in

nineteen ninety seven. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in two thousand and six. So in nineteen forty three, Cristos Pazzalos shot his wife Athena in the throat, leaving John and George without a mother. John Patler was right almost when he wrote in nineteen seventy six that it isn't fair to attribute his political leanings entirely to his violent childhood. It is possible to grow up in a violent home and not become a Nazi.

It is possible to be the son of a domestic abuser and not grow up to beat women to death. But it is still true to say that that's what happened here, that the sons of a murdered mother grew into men who murdered too. One killed a man he loved like a father, and the other killed a woman who'd once carried his child. I don't know what that means, if it means anything, All I know is that's what happened.

In twenty thirteen, John Patler's youngest son, Nicholas Patler, contributed the afterward to William Schmaltz's biography of George Lincoln Rockwell. Nicholas was not quite a year old when his father shot Rockwell, and he wrote that he had no contact with his father from the time he was six until he was thirty four. He's the only one of Patler's four children who seems to have made any public statement about their father, So he's the only one I'll talk about.

He has a master's degree in history. His first book was a history of the massive protest movement that emerged in opposition to the forced segregation of the federal workforce during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. For several years he was an adjunct professor teaching African American history. His second book actually just came out a few weeks ago, a biography of Pinkney Bent and Stewart Pinchback. Pinchback was the son of an enslaved woman and was briefly the governor

of Louisiana in eighteen seventy two. Nicholas Butler has clearly worked hard to put something into the world that his father was trying to take away from it. Look at his life, his work, interviews he's given over the years. He is the opposite of the man his father was in the nineteen sixties. In that afterward, he writes compassionately about the father he got to know as an adult. He describes his father's traumatic childhood, and he understands how a damaged young man came to be drawn in by

the fatherly attention he got from Rockwell. He's trying to understand, and he's careful to emphasize that his goal is not to excuse. When he wrote this in twenty thirteen, he'd spent a little over a decade getting to know his father, and at the time he had also recently enrolled in a master's program at Bethany Theological Seminary. And I think that does help me understand the tenor of the essay in a way. He's writing earnestly about finding peace and

being opened to the possibility of transformation. He wrote that his father really was a changed man. His father had told him once that he regretted his time in the Nazi movement, and even expressed that he now realized he'd been marching with the wrong side during the Civil Rights movement.

Nicholas Butler ends that afterward on a hopeful note, writing quote, I want to encourage the reader not to give up on those trapped in cycles and situations of violence and distortion, whether in her own back yard or across the globe. The one thing that I have seen personally and witnessed over and over in many contexts that can transform hatred and the hater is love, courageous, visionary, and uncompromising love. In twenty thirteen, when he wrote that his father was

proof of this message, that he'd been transformed. Four years later, in twenty seventeen, after the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville, Virginia, every news outlet in the country was running front page

stories with pictures of Nazis. Hundreds and hundreds of neo Nazis, men flying Swastika flags, men with Swastika tattoos, men in Nazi uniforms, men with torches, men with weapons, Videos of men chanting you will not replace us blood and soil, videos of men shouting Rockwell's most famous slogan, white power. A changed man, a man who regretted inciting violent racist mobs all those years ago, What would he say when

he saw it happening again. Two days after that rally, after a young neo Nazi murdered a peaceful demonstrator in the streets, John Patler posted on Facebook that there's nothing wrong with white pride. He wrote, it was a peaceful parade, a couple of hundred white men, neatly attired, expressing their right to free speech and objection to the removal of the statue of General Lee. A reporter from The Washington Post made several attempts to contact him, even visiting his

apartment in Manhattan, but he refused to be interviewed. His son, the same son who wrote so proudly, so lovingly in twenty thirteen about his father's transformation, told The Washington Post in twenty seventeen that his father had started to change again around twenty fifteen. Quote, I don't know what the climate is doing to him now. It seems like little by little he's becoming poisoned again. You can't know what's

in a man's heart. You can judge his actions, you can interpret his words, but there isn't any one who can tell you for sure whether John Patler's heart changed twice or not at all? Was he a changed man from nineteen seventy until twenty fifteen and then he changed back?

Did the love and understanding of a once estranged sun help him come to terms with the hurt in his own soul and the ways that pushed him to inflict pain on the world, only then to hear the siren song of a new fure during the twenty sixteen election. Was that hate, just lying dormant, waiting for the right moment to march again. There are a few times in the last few weeks as I've been writing this story that something reminded me of what I think is one

of the greatest episodes of television ever produced. The fourth episode of the fourth season of The Twilight Zone aired in January of nineteen sixty three. It starred a young Dennis Hopper as Peter Fulmer, the leader of a small

group of neo Nazis. I don't know that Rod Serling ever stated outright that he was thinking of George Lincoln Rockwell when he wrote the character of Peter Fulmer, a small, angry man desperate to command the respect of his followers, but struggling to pay the rent on his Nazi headquarters. When it is so precisely Rockwell that I can't believe

there's any other explanation. As Peter Fulmer is struggling to put on his little Nazi rallies and grow the ranks of his Nazi party, a mysterious figure appears to him and offers him money and advice. And when the man finally steps out of the shadows, it's Adolf Hitler. Himself. The episode aired four years before Rockwell died in real life, but at the end of the episode, his on screen

stand in is leading out in an alley. As Rod Serling narrates the closing monologue, you see Hitler's ghost walk off into the night in search of a new apprentice, and we're left with a warning. He's alive. He's alive because we keep him alive.

executive producers are Sophy Lettterman, and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Ry Gagan that the music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me at Wardly Guy's podcast at gmail dot 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 subred it. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys