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At two forty six pm on March first, nineteen sixty seven, a baby girl was born at a small hospital in Maine. Her mother had been admitted to the maternity ward under a fake name, and the man in the waiting room knew he wasn't the father. The baby seemed healthy, and when the woman felt confident that her daughter was free from the mysterious affliction that had claimed the life of her first child, she revealed the baby's existence to her real father. For a brief moment that summer, they were
a family. A man who had abandoned an entire family twice over already now seemed overjoyed to have this baby in his life. But the summer of nineteen sixty seven had a series of unhapp be endings for George Lincoln Rockwell. He spent the last week of his own life mourning the death of his infant daughter, and after his assassination, his mistress burned all the evidence that their daughter had ever existed, including the birth certificate signed by her dead
lover's closest friend, Frank Smith. I'm Molly Conger, and this is where little guys. Early on in this roundabout process of figuring out who Frank Smith was. I was reading the transcript of his testimony at John Patler's trial. In those rambling pages, he told the court that he was the closest friend Commander Rockwell had. That's a pretty bold statement from a guy whose name really only appears in passing and even the most comprehensive biographies of George Lincoln Rockwell.
But like I said earlier in this series, it was Frank's testimony at that trial that got me interested in his story in the first place, because he had a way of speaking that I've heard before. He testified like a man with a lot of practice lying to the cops. So I read his testimony with interest, but not necessarily for the truth. And then I found a pair of recordings. It's always such an incredible treasure to have actual audio
of my weird little guy. I don't always get that, especially when it comes to stories that are further in the past or stories about more obscure figures, and Frank is both. But I lucked into more than two hours of actual audio of Frank talking to a reporter back in nineteen sixty eight, and I found another hour from a conversation he had with a Nazi podcaster in twenty sixteen.
In that pair of interviews, nearly fifty years apart, he describes himself again as the best friend Rockwell had during the two years they knew each other from nineteen sixty five until Rockwell's death in August of nineteen sixty seven. Repeating the same claim over and over again doesn't make it any truer, obviously, But what an odd thing to
insist upon for decades, isn't it. Male friendship can be a tricky thing to understand, even under normal circumstances, but the brief, tragic life of Rockwell's infant daughter points to the possibility that Frank really was one of George Lincoln Rockwell's closest friends in the final years of his life. Not many men would sign their name on the birth certificate of someone else's illegitimate child just to ease their
emotional burden. I don't think so anyway, And we'll get to the secret pregnancy of Rockwell's mistress in a bit, But I think this idea sort of sets the stage for the kind of relationship these men had. There's so little evidence of it that survives on paper, and Frank is an unreliable narrator, but I think the bond they formed over the course of those two years must have been real. When we left off last week, Frank Smith was in the hospital in March of nineteen sixty five.
He was shot five to by two men who were never identified. The shooting was never officially soft and Frank's version of events varies depending on his mood, but he was almost certainly an attempted hit carried out by associates of the Patriarcha crime family. There was an ongoing gang war in Boston and Frank had gotten in over his head. Just days before Frank was shot, a wire tap captured Raymond Patriarcha in a rage after he found out that
Frank had been sanctioning hits without his permission. Frank barely survived the shooting, and he spent a month in the hospital. When he was finally well enough to appear in court, he had to answer for the loaded revolver and brass knuckles. Police founded his car on the night of the shooting. At his arraignment, a Boston Globe reporter saw him having a whispered conversation with an unnamed man described only as
his business partner in a land deal in Maine. This has to be the land that he had just promised to the American Nazi Party for their whites only church, But the paper doesn't offer any hint as to who that man might have been. I don't think it could have been George Lincoln Rockwell, though for one thing, the
reporter would have recognized him. But even if that particular journalist didn't know what the famous Nazi looked like, George Lincoln Rockwell was a famous enough man that he usually ended up in the newspaper wherever he went, so it's almost possible to put together a day by day accounting of his whereabouts if you're willing to pick through enough local newspapers. On the day of Frank's hearing, April sixteenth, nineteen sixty five, I can't tell you exactly where Rockwell was,
but I can play him elsewhere. In the days before and after, newspapers in Ohio reported that an auditorium full of college students laughed at him on April fourteenth when he announced for the first time that he planned to run for governor of Virginia, and reporters in Virginia photographed him on April nineteenth when he marched into an office in Richmond to file paperwork for his campaign. So it
wasn't rockwell, but whoever it was. Despite his bullet wounds, Frank was still trying to move forward with the plan to start a Nazi church on his property in Maine. A few days after his arraignment, Frank was convicted on the pair of weapons charges in Massachusetts. The Boston Globe described him looking pale and weak in the courtroom, obviously
still recovering from his brush with death. During the hearing, his attorney yanked the shirt right off Frank's back to show the judge how serious his injuries were, and pleading with the judge to go easy on him. They weren't arguing his innocence at that point. They were begging for his life. If he stayed in Massachusetts, the people who shot him would try again, and he wouldn't survive a second hit. His lawyer told the court that if they let him walk free, he would quote leave the state
to protect himself and society. If there is another attempt on his life, we don't want it in mis jurisdiction. This worked, apparently, despite finding him guilty on both charges, the judge suspended the two years sentence, and Frank was free to go. Pulling his clients shirt off in the middle of the courtroom was a little dramatic, but I don't think his attorney was lying. Frank had to get out of town. The Boston gang war wasn't over, and
somebody obviously wanted him dead. He'd lost his right eye entirely several years earlier in some unspecified accident, and the shooting had left him half blind in his remaining eye. He wouldn't regain full use of his left arm for another two years. He was weak, wounded, and he didn't know who his friends were anymore. Now I know. I said the shooting was never solved, and it wasn't not technically. Nobody was ever arrested, charged, tried, or convicted for it.
But two months after Frank was shot, an FBI wiretap recorded a conversation about shooting him again. In May of nineteen sixty five, a hit man named Jimmy Flemy told Providence mob boss Raymond Patriarcha that if he ever saw Frank again, he would finish him. Patriarcha gave Flemy his blessing in part because he was very upset to hear that Frank had been referring to made men as guineas, an anti Italian slur that he seems to have been
pretty sensitive about. You might remember that this is the same Jimmy Flemy who was recorded meeting with Patriarcha a few days before Frank was shot, and that conversation had been about how Frank was becoming a problem. It seems pretty clear to me, at least, that there's a strong case to be made that Jimmy Flemy shot Frank shortly after their first conversation about killing Frank and before their
second conversation about killing Frank. Jimmy Flemy became an FBI informant, and that could explain why there was no real investigation into who shot Frank. We know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jimmy Flemy's handler was protecting him. That happens. We don't usually find out the nitty gritty details, but the FBI does have a pretty messy history when it comes to looking the other way when their informants commit crimes and the agent handling Jimmy Flemy knew he was
a hitman. That is sometimes the cost of doing business. When you're trying to flip mobsters, you have to make a deal with the devil, so to speak, if you want to catch the guy further up the chain. But Agent Paul Rico very famously took this way too far. In a memo dated June of nineteen sixty five, j Edgar Hoover was informed that Lemmy had the tential to be an excellent informant in building a case against Raymond Patriarca.
The same memo notes that Jimmy Flemy is known to have committed at least seven murders and quote from all indications, he is going to continue to commit murder. There were allegations for decades there was a lot of rot, and a lot of people could smell it. There were dirty cops and protected informants. The corruption ran deep. It wasn't until decades later that there was proof of just how deep.
In two thousand and three, the House Committee on Government Reform adopted a report called Everything Secret Degenerates the FBI's Use of murderers as informants. This report is about Jimmy Flemy mostly. Its specific focus is the murder of a man named Teddy Degan in March of nineteen sixty five. But because Teddy Degan was murdered three days before Frank was shot, Frank's name pops up a few times in
this report. The exhibits that were preserved in the Congressional Record are some of the only unredacted pages of those FBI files, so it offered me some more insight into the events surrounding the shooting. The whole story is much more than we can get into here, but it's pretty shocking. Teddy Degan was murdered the same day that agent Rico started developing Jimmy Flemy as an informant, which was several days after the FBI overheard him planning Deagan's murder on
that wiretap. Agent Rico didn't just look the other way while his informant went about his business. No, he actively covered up a murder committed by his informant, and then he arranged for innocent men to be framed for that murder by coaching other informants to provide false testimony at trial. He paid people to perjure themselves, and people died in prison so the FBI could keep this informant on the streets.
When Rico was called before Congress more than thirty years later to testify about his role in this cover up. He had no remorse when he was asked about the four men he'd sent to prison for a murder he knew they didn't commit, He said, what do you want tears? By the time Rico was sitting in front of Congress testifying about it, two of those four men he framed had already died in prison. The other two were released in two thousand one when they won their wrongful conviction lawsuits.
In two thousand seven, the one hundred million dollar payout was the largest sum ever awarded under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is the law that allows you to sue the federal government. That record has since been broken. In twenty twenty one, the Department of Defense was ordered to pay two hundred and thirty million dollars to the families and survivors of a mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
The Air Force failed to report a court martial conviction that would have prevented the shooter from purchasing the gun that he used to murder twenty six people. In two thousand three, former FBI agent Paul Rico was indicted on murder charges for asking Whitey Bulger to arrange the death of the owner of the World Highlyily Rigo was beaten to death in prison three months later before he could
face trial. I know this is pretty far afield of our main storyline, even for me, But the Congressional report on the FBI's misconduct in New England in the nineteen sixties, it's kind of unique. You don't usually get this kind of peak behind the curtain, this kind of granular deconstruction, this moment by moment chronology of the way the FBI is actively involved in not just shaping the narrative about the crimes they're investigating, but involved in the crimes themselves.
The report is unique, but I'm not sure the underlying conduct is the fact that this report exists just raises more questions about how the FBI was handling their informants in other areas during that same time period. You know, maybe the Mafia wasn't the only group whose members were both under investigation by and sometimes under the direction and
protection of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It reminds me a little bit of the Greensboro massacre in nineteen seventy nine, a group of Nazis and klansmen murdered five communist organizers in North Carolina. An undercover atf agent was at the meeting where the attack was planned, and he failed to report that klansmen had discussed making bombs. The man leading the Nazi caravan had been an FBI informant for a decade. The local police and the FBI knew what was going
to happen, and cesar cause. James Waller, William E. Fan Simpson, Sandra Neelie Smith, and Michael Nathan were murdered. Anyway, one of these days, I'll finally get around telling you about a very modern day example of exactly this sort of thing. It's been weighing heavily on my mind for a couple of years now, but I keep putting off going to the post office so I can get a PO box, so I can write the man in prison. It's only fair in this case to ask him for his side
of things. But we were talking about Frank Smith. Personally, I think Jimmy Flemy shot him, but I guess we'll never know. In late April of nineteen sixty five, Frank was released from jail and he went up to Maine to lay low. When Jimmy Flemy asked for permission to finish him off in May, he mentioned to Patriarca that Frank had been seen up in Maine in the company of someone he identifies only as the Colonel. Okay, now
we're back in my territory. Because it doesn't sound like the mafia guys know who the Colonel is, but I do. That's American Nazi Party member Alan welsh Well.
The Commander sent his deputy, Alan welsh up to Island Falls.
Maine, to meet me and to drive this automobile and myself down to Arlington, Virginia, approximately at the middle of the month of September nineteen sixty five.
By his own telling, Frank was home in Maine licking his wounds all summer in nineteen sixty five, and he didn't have much contact during that time with the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was busy running for governor, Frank was busy hiding from the mafia, but they did exchange a couple of letters. Frank claims he wrote to Rockwell saying he couldn't really be of much help on the campaign trail because of his injuries, but he offered the use
of his car. The American Nazi Party was most of the time dead broke, nobody had a nice car that would look slick pulling up to a campaign stop. But Frank owned a Lincoln Continental, a black convertible with a white top, which he describes as just like the one JFK was riding in when he got assassinated, and he
thought that would look good at campaign stops. Being nearly blind, though, he couldn't very well drive it down to Virginia from Maine, so Rockwell sent a stormtrooper up to bring Frank and the Lincoln down to the Nazi Party barracks in Arlington in September. That's what Frank told the reporter. That's what
he testified to at Patler's trial. And I can't actually place Frank in Virginia any earlier than September, but that FBI memo places Alan Welch in Maine with Frank on May first, barely a week after Frank got out of jail and headed north. And I know Welch didn't spend all summer in Maine because I have him in the newspaper talking to reporters in June and July and he's in Virginia, so he must have made multiple trips up to Maine that summer, a curious omission from Frank's version
of events. When Frank Welsh and the convertible finally did make it down to Virginia in September, they stopped off at the Nazi head quarters in Arlington and then continued to their final destination, Richmond. The election was just two months away, and George Lincoln Rockwell had set up a campaign headquarters in downtown Richmond, just a few blocks from the capitol. I found an old newspaper ad that the campaign ran in the Richmond Times Dispatch to announce the
grand opening of that office in August. The ad read the only party and the only candidate not afraid to deal forthrightly with the race problem and the Communist subversion of our Christian constitutional Republic. One hundred percent for segregation, States rights, anti communism. Get your free copy of the inspiring program that will insure White Christian supremacy in Virginia.
The address listed for the office doesn't exist anymore. I think they've renumbered the street in the intervening decades, and the photos of the office don't match any of the buildings on the block where it used to be, but based on a description of the cross streets nearest the office, I know that I have gotten my credit card stuck in the payment machine at the parking garage built on top of what used to be George Lincoln Rockwall's campaign headquarters.
What a small world it was at the Richmond campaign office where Frank Smith first met Claudia mccullors, a woman half his age who'd come up from Alabama to volunteer as a secretary for Rockwall's campaign. Again, he was nearly blind, so he depended heavily on Allan Welsh to get around, and he later said that when he first saw Claudia, he thought he might prefer the idea of a pretty young lady driving him around. Told her as much, He said, if she would be his secretary, his driver and his eyes,
he'd buy her a new car. They married a year later. George Lincoln Rockwell's campaign for Governor of Virginia was mercifully short. He only announced that he was running in April, barely six months before the election, and he didn't set up the office until August. In those short couple of months, he pulled all manner of grotesque little racist stunts. He
criss crossed the state giving racist stump speeches. At a speech in a public park in Fredericksburg, one so laden with racial slurs that I couldn't cut an acceptable clip of it. He reached under the lectern as he was speaking and pulled out a rifle, waving it around as he ranted about the need to arm white men to keep the black population under control. In the lead up to the election, Nazi stormtroopers disrupted his opponent's campaign events.
When Republican candidate Lynwood Houlton held a black tie fundraiser in DC, Alan Welch interrupted a speech to demand that Holton debate Rockwell. The record indicates that Richard Nixon was in attendance, but doesn't say what he thought of this. When Democratic candidate Mills Godwin held a similar event a few days later, this time it was Matius Cole who interrupted the speeches, asking Godwin, if you believe in equality,
would you debate mister Rockwell. There's an undated photo in an issue of Stormtrooper magazine that shows Frank sitting in the backseat of his Lincoln convertible next to a man in blackface. They were probably on their way to crash a press conference. There were several incidents in a Nazi stormtrooper in blackface confronting one of the other candidates or a TV news camera. One of Rockwell's supporters was arrested in Washington, d C. After bursting into the House chambers
while Congress was in session. He unfurled a Nazi banner, shouting Siegile and long live Rockwell. And in the several minutes that it took for Capital Security to get him under control, he managed to throw hundreds of little flyers over the railing so that they rained down on the congressman. And as these little handbills settled onto the floor, members of Congress saw that they were made up to look
like boat tickets. The text is too crude to repeat, but these novelty tickets claimed to offer any black person a one way boat ride back to Africa. As if there was any doubt about who was behind the stunt, each flyer sat at the bottom and fine print copyright nineteen sixty five, Lincoln Rockwell. A few weeks after the incident at the Capitol, another member pulled the same stunt racist boat tickets and all, but this time at the NAACP state convention in Roanoke. The newspaper reports about both
incidents described the tickets, but not in great detail. An issue of Stormtrooper magazine reproduced the entire image and it is I mean, it's really something. I don't think it's possible to pack in any more racist and per square inch. I mean, these guys were professionals. After the success of those stunts, some members wrote in to ask if the party would mail them a batch so they could hand them out to black people on the street for their
own racist amusement. Subsequent issues of the party's magazine offered the tickets for sale on the back page, where they sold racist literature fifty for a dollar and through it all. Frank Smith was Rockwell's shadow. He says that he was acting as Rockwell's bodyguard, but that seems like an awful idea. He may have been a boxer in his youth, but he's in his mid forties now, I mean, that's not
so old. But he's also recovering from multiple gunshot wounds, and he's had heart surgery, and he has very limited use of his left hand and arm. So not only was he not going to be of any use in a physical fight. He wasn't even going to see a potential threat coming.
I acted as a bodyguid for him. And this is the humor's part about it. I used to stride a side of him with the most determined air, and I used to look people right in the face. And the only thing was that I had to watch. I didn't stumble over the stairs and the people I are looking at. The only thing I could say was the shape of the form. That's how I was actually literally blind twenty two hundred.
But everywhere Rockwell went, Frank Smith went too. In September, the Nazis paid to have a booth at the State Fair outside of Richmond. By all accounts, the display was obscene. They had their usual racist flyers, of course, but the booth also featured a live monkey. The sign on the monkey's cage bore a derogatory remark about Martin Luther King Junior. In the lead up to the State Fair, the local NAACP warned black residents to stay away from the event
entirely citing the possibility of violence. The company that operated the fair went to court to seek an injunction again against the display and terminating the lease for the booth space. Now, this is just a civil proceeding. They're not pressing a criminal charge. But in their petition they did cite a relevant criminal statute in the Virginia Code. It was and still is a felony in Virginia to conspire to incite the population of one race to acts of violence and
war against the population of another race. It is technically a felony in Virginia should try to start a race war. I don't know how that factored into the judge's decision, but he did grant the injunction, and the Nazis were evicted from their booth at the State Fair after losing in court. There wasn't enough daylight left to pack up their things at the fairgrounds. Now, in the normal course of events, exhibitors leave most of their materials the booth overnight.
There's no one there. There's presumably security. You lock up the valuables, but the bulk of your display just sits there until the fair is over. You don't pack it in and out every night. But now that the injunction had been granted, Rockwell was concerned that if he left his items unattended, someone would throw them away before he
had a chance to pack them up. So he spent the night at the empty fair grounds, just George Lincoln Rockwell, Frank Smith, and that poor monkey sitting there in the dark all night, waiting for the Nazi stormtroopers to come pick them up. The Richmond Times Dispatch reported that in their haste to tear down the display, the monkey escaped. There's no other mention anywhere that I could find of what became of this monkey. The article does not say
if it was safely apprehended. George Lincoln Rockwell did not become the governor of Virginia in nineteen sixty five. Obviously, Mills Godwin did, a fact you almost certainly do not remember from a pair of episode's last fall in the story of Pennsylvania Clansmen Berry Black, when I was talking about the history of Virginia's cross burning laws. After Mills Godwin was elected governor of Virginia nineteen sixty five, he declared war on the Klan, and the clan responded by
burning a cross outside the Governor's mansion. But that's neither here nor there today. In that nineteen sixty five election, George Lincoln. Rockwell got about six thousand votes, were one percent of the total cast. His final campaign finance report claimed twenty thousand, six hundred and thirty one dollars in expenses. The newspaper reported that the figure included four thousand dollars for advertising, five hundred for travel, and twenty two hundred
on printing and postage. I could not find any reporting on what the monkey budget was. Rockwell is never going to win. Nobody thought he was going to win. I mean, Frank said he thought there was a chance, and Rockwell told British Nazi Colin Jordan that he thought he had a chance. But I don't think either of them really believed that. But in the mid nineteen sixties, the FBI was deep in the throes of cointelpro and they just
couldn't resist meddling, even when there was no need. A few months before the election, they sent Rockwell a letter purporting to be from a Nazi Party member in Dallas who was concerned about Alan Welch. The letter writer claimed to be a loyal supporter of Rockwell's and he wanted the commander to know that he had a trader in his inner circle. The letter claimed to have witnessed Alan Welsh proposition another party member for a gay sex Act.
The FBI actually loved doing this. There are an unsettling number of co intel operations that are just anonymous letters accusing people of having gay sex. It's something j Edgar Hoover spent a lot of time thinking about. I guess it's hard to say what the measure of success is when it comes to a co intel pro operation. Rockwell read the letter and did not believe that it was true that Alan Welch was having gay sex at The Nazi Party had quarters in Dallas, but he did think
the letter was real. He thought someone in Dallas was trying to drive a wedge between him and Alan Welch, which is what the FBI was trying to do. But Rockwell was so sure there was a problem in his organization that he sent the letter to the FBI to ask them to investigate it. So it kind of worked. In the final days of the campaign, the New York Times published a story about a former Nazi Party member
who'd been hiding his Jewish heritage. I didn't have time to scour the co intel profiles to my satisfaction, but William Schmaltz wrote in his biography of Rockwell that the outing of Daniel Burroughs was not a co intel operation. And maybe that's true, you know, maybe the paperwork had a different operational designation on it and it's not in
a co intel profile. But the FBI did it. The reporter who wrote that story in The New York Times later wrote his own book, and he says he was approached by an FBI agent with information about Daniel Burrows just days before the election in Virginia. The FBI wanted to humiliate and discredit the American Nazi Party by exposing one of its earliest members as a self hating Jew. Daniel Burroughs responded to the story by shooting himself in
the head a few days later. At a press conference after the election, reporters had more questions about Dan Burross than Rockwell's campaign.
Burrows killed himself, and there's a chance for a good smear here, I can share.
The candidate to get your more of press.
Dependent Well, if a Nazi has to kill himself and turn out to be a Jew in order to get publicity, things are gotten to be a pretty bad point.
Yet, the campaign had always been a sideshow. There was no need to ask the kinds of questions you'd want answered by a serious candidate running a serious campaign, and so at this press conference, instead of having chance to reflect on his campaign and project strength and talk about next steps, he just had to sit there and pretend he wasn't shocked and a little sad about the news.
And things just kept getting worse. In early December of nineteen sixty five, after the excitement of the election was long gone, the IRS raided the American Nazi Party's headquarters in Arlington. Frank Smith had already gone home to Maine by then. Maybe he had a nose for trouble and knew when to get gone, or maybe he'd just had his fill of life at the Nazi Party barracks. But Rockwell did see this coming. He knew this was coming.
He'd been having tax issues of his own for years, and he'd received a notice of a lean placed on the party a few months earlier. The entire building and its contents were seized, and the men living there full time, one of whom was John Patler, were evicted. Rockwell did manage to arrange to have party member William Luther Pearce purchased most of their things back at the IRS auction later that month. But all the publicity around the IRS
raid led to a horrible discovery. When newspapers reported that IRS agents discovered a woman in the house with all those Nazis, people were curious and they started digging. Barbara Vungetz had been Rockwell's personal secretary for years, but she was more than that. Investigative journalist Jack Anderson published a story in January of nineteen sixty six revealing that five years earlier, eighteen sixty one, Barbara von Getz gave birth
to a baby girl. The story doesn't outright allege anything about the child's paternity, but it does seem rather pointed the way. He notes that the child was given the last name of von Getz's ex husband, but the IRS agents didn't see any children in the house. It was just Nazi stormtroopers and Barbara Laurie Gizla Mapp was born in December of nineteen sixty one, and she died ten months later in October of nineteen sixty two. The paper quotes from the coroner's report saying the baby gagged and
choked to death. Anderson suggested that the child possibly fell ill due to the poor conditions of the home, and maybe he wasn't just being cruel. Maybe he believed that a copy of Laurie's death certificate. I'm always late delivering my episode to the editor because I spent an entire day on some horrible little side quest or another sorry rory, And this week's time wasting side quest was far more
horrible than usual, even by my standards. I spent the better part of a day looking at thousands of death certificates issued for babies under one year old. It took some time to find Lorie's. She died on October twenty fifth, nineteen sixty two, at Falls Church Medical Center. She was ten months and eighteen days old, and her cause of death was listed as unknown natural. The doctors didn't know what was wrong with Laurie, and the death certificate lists
Barbara's x husband as her father. The truth about both of those things would come to life a few years later, when Barbara discovered she was pregnant again in late nineteen sixty six. She was afraid to tell George Lincoln Rockwell, Frank and Claudia Smith spent the month of December down at the party headquarters. Rockwell was writing his newest book, White Power, and he needed Claudia to type while he dictated.
It would turn out to be his final work. But he didn't know that, and when the Smiths left to go back home to Maine in January of nineteen sixty seven, Barbara went with them. She stayed with the Smiths at their home in Maine for months, concealing the pregnancy from Rockwell. She didn't really want to raise a baby at the Nazi barracks, and even more than that, she was terrified of losing another baby. The doctors had no answers for her when Laurie died, So what if the same thing
happened again? If he don't know what it is, how can you stop him. In her later letters to Rockwall's mother, she explained that she hid the pregnancy from him because she couldn't bear to see him grieve another loss. She wanted to wait and see if the child was healthy before she told him. Barbara von Getz stayed with the Smiths for the final months of her pregnancy. When she gave birth, Frank Smith signed the birth certific as the father,
and Gretchen Virginia Smith was born healthy. In April, when Gretchen was a month old, Barbara left her in the care of a housewife in Maine. I'm not sure why she didn't leave the baby with Frank and Claudia Smith, but she didn't. She returned to Virginia, and she waited another month, and the news from Maine was still good. Gretchen was healthy. Laurie had already started to get sick by this age, and Barbara must have been so relieved
that she had been worried for nothing. So sometime in the late spring of nineteen sixty seven, baby Gretchen was brought to Virginia to live with her parents, her real parents. When she started having trouble breathing later that summer, doctors diagnosed her with Verdnig Hoffmann disease, the infant onset subtype of spinal muscular atrophy. The disease was identified in the medical literature as early as the eighteen nineties, but diagnosis
seemed to have been relatively rare until the nineteen sixties. Today, it's thought to be the leading genetic cause of infant mortality, but prior to the advent of genetic testing, the cause of death was often misunderstood, and very young infants babies like Laurie died of respiratory distress or aspiration pneumonia, and
nobody knew why. I looked through so old newspapers to try and get an idea of what the general public understanding of this disease was back then, and I found a few articles from the early to mid nineteen sixties about families who were desperate for answers about losing multiple children to this condition. In nineteen sixty four, a pediatrician told a newspaper in Arkansas that the disease was not hereditary.
A doctor with a syndicated advice column told a family in nineteen sixty five that the disease does run in families, but nobody knows any more than that, and articles throughout the nineteen sixties often quote doctors saying that Ferdnig Hoffmann disease is just another name for the condition called amatonia congenita. Life was different before Google, I know, so I can't really blame those doctors with newspaper columns for not being all the way up to date with the medical literature.
But I also looked at some medical journal articles from the forties fifties and sixties, and it seems like as early as the nineteen forties there was a general consensus that Bairding Hoffman disease in a my atonia congenita were two distinct conditions, and it was relatively established fact that this was an inherited condition by the fifties. What I'm getting at here is that it's not surprising that a pediatrician failed to diagnose Bairding Hoffman disease when Laurie got sick.
In nineteen sixty two, an article published in the Miami Herald right around the same time that Louri died, describes a young girl in Florida with the condition, and the article claimed that there are only fourteen known cases of
the disease in the United States. With the benefit of modern science, we know now that spinal muscular atrophy affects about one in ten thousand live births, so it must have been one of many babies whose symptoms were a medical mystery when they just suddenly went limp and had trouble breathing. By the mid nineteen sixties, Jerry Lewis was hosting the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon on TV. Muscular atrophy and muscular dystrophy are separate conditions, but the telethon raised awareness
about a variety of neuromuscular disorders. The average person was more likely to know about the existence of neuromuscular disorders, and more scientific research was being done. Now I know there was a lot more going on behind the scenes. I'm not saying Jerry Lewis's telethon is responsible for advances in medical science, but there does seem to have been a growing public awareness in the nineteen sixties, and it corresponds with an increase in news stories about children being
diagnosed and more medical journal articles about these conditions. So by the time Gretchen got sick in nineteen sixty seven, her doctor knew what it was. It was a progressive fatal genetic condition that only occurs when both parents carry the gene. I can't find any mention of Gretchen, not anywhere. When Frank and Claudia testified at John Patler's trial, they were both asked about the nature of their relationship with
George Lincoln Rockwell. Claudia testified about her friendship with Barbara, but no one ever mentions that she lived with them for months just a few months before they were sitting on the stand testifying. I spent hours hunting for documentation of any kind. A birth certificate in Maine, a death certificate in Virginia, a tombstone, a mention in the newspaper. I couldn't find her. The only place Gretchen Virginia Smith exists is on a single page of Frederick Simon Elli's
biography of George Lincoln Rockwell. And the only reason she still exists on paper anywhere at all is because Rockwell's mother ignored Barbara's request to burn the copy of the birth certificate she'd mailed her. She did exist. She died on August eighteenth, nineteen sixty seven, after two weeks in the hospital. George Lincoln Rockwell buried his infant daughter just days before he was murdered, and Frank Smith kept that
secret until his own death in twenty twenty. I spent way too long this week reading about mob infemans and looking for baby's death certificates. But we have at least reached the point in Frank's story where he leaves the American Nazi Party behind. By the end of nineteen sixty seven, Frank Smith had to find a new direction. George Lincoln Rockwell was dead, and Raymond Patriarca was under federal indictment.
All of this really put a damper on Frank's plans to unite the Nazi Party on the Mafia behind the front of a fake church. But he didn't let the dream die. It would just take him a few more years to get ordained into the Church of White Supremacy. Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Willy Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann 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 almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal. I don't answer any of my emails. 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