WEBVTT - Death of a Demagogue, Pt. 3.5 0:00:01.680 --> 0:00:10.520 Col Zone Media. In nineteen seventy six, James Mason was 0:00:10.600 --> 0:00:14.320 just twenty four years old. He was fresh office sentence 0:00:14.360 --> 0:00:17.560 in Ohio jail for spraying mace ad, a black fourteen 0:00:17.640 --> 0:00:21.640 year old girl in a dairy Queen parking lot. It 0:00:21.680 --> 0:00:23.919 would be a few more years before he started working 0:00:23.960 --> 0:00:28.040 on his most lasting legacy, the Newsletters that would become Siege, 0:00:28.840 --> 0:00:33.440 a beloved text for neo Nazi terrorists, but he was writing. 0:00:34.360 --> 0:00:36.480 He was the editor of the newsletter for the newly 0:00:36.560 --> 0:00:41.200 formed National Socialist Movement, and the August nineteen seventy six 0:00:41.280 --> 0:00:46.920 issue contained a write up about a hated enemy from Charlottesville, Virginia. 0:00:47.080 --> 0:00:50.400 Word reaches us that the sneak murderer of Rockwell, John 0:00:50.440 --> 0:00:53.440 pat Solos, is in trouble again, this time with the 0:00:53.560 --> 0:00:58.400 law for disorderly conduct. In the nude pat Solos aka Patler, 0:00:58.680 --> 0:01:00.760 and two other men were a did in charge with 0:01:00.800 --> 0:01:04.520 trespassing and possession of marijuana while conducting an orgy with 0:01:04.720 --> 0:01:08.560 one woman who is still being sought. Rockwell is dead 0:01:08.600 --> 0:01:12.959 and his murderer carouses reason enough to destroy any system 0:01:12.959 --> 0:01:16.080 that would permit it. Keep turning up this way, buddy boy, 0:01:16.240 --> 0:01:20.520 so that we may keep track of you. Whether or 0:01:20.600 --> 0:01:23.040 not James Mason kept track of John Patler in the 0:01:23.120 --> 0:01:27.840 years that followed, I couldn't tell you. But here's the 0:01:27.840 --> 0:01:33.840 rest of his story. I'm Molly Coner, and this is 0:01:33.880 --> 0:01:53.320 where the little guys. When we left off last time, 0:01:53.440 --> 0:01:56.640 it was nineteen seventy six, and I was apologizing for 0:01:57.240 --> 0:02:02.360 writing without a plan. I could probably be more organized, 0:02:02.440 --> 0:02:05.720 but I think that would mean cutting out the side quests, 0:02:06.200 --> 0:02:09.320 and to be honest, I'd rather die than live a 0:02:09.360 --> 0:02:14.560 life without my rabbit holes. So as my apology to you, 0:02:14.560 --> 0:02:18.720 you're getting this a little bit early, this being the 0:02:18.760 --> 0:02:22.480 second half of the third part of a series that 0:02:22.560 --> 0:02:26.400 I thought was going to be a single episode. Is 0:02:26.440 --> 0:02:30.919 there more? I actually don't know. I'll find out about 0:02:31.040 --> 0:02:35.200 ninety six hours before you do. At the very least, 0:02:35.520 --> 0:02:39.000 I know we aren't quite moving on next week. I 0:02:39.040 --> 0:02:41.239 still need to tell you about the legal battle over 0:02:41.280 --> 0:02:44.480 George Lincoln Rockwell's corpse that ended in an all day 0:02:44.560 --> 0:02:50.960 standoff with the army. But back to the orgy. In 0:02:50.960 --> 0:02:54.240 the summer of nineteen seventy six, John Patler was out 0:02:54.280 --> 0:02:58.320 of prison. He'd been released on parole after serving barely 0:02:58.360 --> 0:03:00.920 five years of his twenty years sentence for the murder 0:03:00.919 --> 0:03:05.840 of America Nazi Party commander George Lincoln Rockwell. He was 0:03:05.840 --> 0:03:09.000 close to finishing a degree at Radford College, having taken 0:03:09.040 --> 0:03:11.320 a year of classes through the Study Release program while 0:03:11.320 --> 0:03:14.720 he was still in prison, but in June of nineteen 0:03:14.760 --> 0:03:20.639 seventy six, he wasn't enrolled in summer classes. He says 0:03:20.720 --> 0:03:26.040 he was in Charlottesville that summer looking for a job. Now, 0:03:26.080 --> 0:03:29.760 for my non Virginians, Radford is about one hundred and 0:03:29.760 --> 0:03:34.000 fifty miles away from Charlottesville. It's hard to say what 0:03:34.160 --> 0:03:36.640 brought him here or what sort of job he was 0:03:36.680 --> 0:03:40.840 looking for. His brother was living about an hour north 0:03:40.880 --> 0:03:44.400 of Charlottesville, and it's hard to say with certainty what 0:03:44.480 --> 0:03:48.200 someone's address was fifty years ago. But it seems like 0:03:48.440 --> 0:03:51.000 both of his ex wives, each of them raising two 0:03:51.000 --> 0:03:54.040 of his sons, were living in the central Virginia area 0:03:54.080 --> 0:03:57.800 at the time as well, although in opposite directions, and 0:03:58.400 --> 0:04:01.080 none of them were actually in the Charlotteville area directly, 0:04:01.480 --> 0:04:04.960 and it doesn't appear he was in contact with them. 0:04:05.360 --> 0:04:07.520 So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't know 0:04:07.560 --> 0:04:10.680 why he was looking for a job here, but that's 0:04:10.680 --> 0:04:15.480 what he told the cops. On a Wednesday evening in 0:04:15.560 --> 0:04:19.160 June of nineteen seventy six, a man got home from work. 0:04:20.279 --> 0:04:24.240 He opened his front door, and he walked inside, and 0:04:24.279 --> 0:04:30.360 he found four naked strangers engaging in some unspecified group 0:04:30.520 --> 0:04:35.279 sex act in his living room. He ordered the naked 0:04:35.279 --> 0:04:39.400 people to leave, obviously, and to their credit, they did. 0:04:40.760 --> 0:04:42.839 As they were leaving. He wrote down the license plate 0:04:42.920 --> 0:04:45.440 number of the car they piled into, and he called 0:04:45.440 --> 0:04:50.640 the police. No reporting that I could find ever identified 0:04:50.680 --> 0:04:54.839 the woman, but all three men were quickly arrested. A 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:57.680 Charlottesville police officer spotted the car half an hour later 0:04:58.279 --> 0:05:02.960 and arrested John Patler and the other two men. I 0:05:03.000 --> 0:05:08.960 have nothing but questions about this. How did these men meet? 0:05:09.720 --> 0:05:14.320 What was the conversation leading up to this? How do 0:05:14.400 --> 0:05:17.320 you end up having an orgy in someone else's house. 0:05:19.560 --> 0:05:22.159 The other two men's names are in the newspaper, but 0:05:22.240 --> 0:05:24.760 I don't want to get too deep into who they were. 0:05:25.520 --> 0:05:27.839 One of them would later get arrested after an armed 0:05:27.839 --> 0:05:31.320 stand off with police when he barricaded himself inside of 0:05:31.360 --> 0:05:35.359 his psychiatrist's home, which he'd broken into after being released 0:05:35.400 --> 0:05:39.760 from a psychiatric hospital, and the other man had a 0:05:39.800 --> 0:05:43.599 fair number of drug charges that pre date nineteen seventy six, 0:05:44.640 --> 0:05:48.440 but in the two decades after this, he committed such 0:05:48.440 --> 0:05:54.440 a staggering number of horrific sexual crimes that I don't 0:05:54.440 --> 0:05:57.800 really want to talk about it. But back to this 0:05:57.880 --> 0:06:02.880 evening in June of nineteen seventy six, presumably they were 0:06:02.880 --> 0:06:05.200 all clothed by the time the officer pulled them over. 0:06:07.000 --> 0:06:09.039 All three of them were wanted in connection with the 0:06:09.080 --> 0:06:12.919 reported trespassing, and the officer reported finding a pipe with 0:06:13.000 --> 0:06:15.960 marijuana residue, as well as a small quantity of marijuana 0:06:16.400 --> 0:06:20.160 on Patler's person, So he was charged with possession of 0:06:20.200 --> 0:06:25.839 marijuana as well. So now he has three problems. He's 0:06:25.839 --> 0:06:31.080 been charged with two crimes, he's very embarrassed, and he's 0:06:31.160 --> 0:06:35.320 recently been parolled after serving just five years of a 0:06:35.400 --> 0:06:40.480 twenty year sentence for murder. Well, I guess he has 0:06:40.520 --> 0:06:44.200 four problems. It's probably going to be pretty hard to 0:06:44.200 --> 0:06:49.000 find a job in Charlottesville now. Patler told reporters with 0:06:49.040 --> 0:06:52.320 the local newspaper shortly after this arrest that the entire 0:06:52.520 --> 0:06:56.120 incident had been blown out of proportion. He said he 0:06:56.120 --> 0:06:59.640 didn't know anything about any kind of orgy, and he 0:06:59.680 --> 0:07:01.920 claimed that he and the other men had been invited 0:07:01.960 --> 0:07:06.120 guests of the home's other occupant. The man who came 0:07:06.160 --> 0:07:09.160 home to find the orgy in his living room did 0:07:09.200 --> 0:07:12.280 have a roommate, and that man was the brother of 0:07:12.320 --> 0:07:16.720 one of these naked people, so it's not impossible that 0:07:16.760 --> 0:07:21.280 they were his guests. But he wasn't home, and police 0:07:21.280 --> 0:07:25.920 say the group entered the house through a window. I mean, 0:07:25.920 --> 0:07:28.559 that's not something I would do at my brother's house, 0:07:29.280 --> 0:07:35.200 but people are different. The story received a lot more 0:07:35.280 --> 0:07:39.840 press than the average trespassing charge, and Patler was probably 0:07:39.920 --> 0:07:42.920 right when he told the local newspaper that all this 0:07:42.960 --> 0:07:47.560 attention was quote due to the identities of the people involved. 0:07:48.960 --> 0:07:51.080 It was picked up as a wire story and ended 0:07:51.120 --> 0:07:54.640 up published in newspapers all over the country, which is 0:07:54.720 --> 0:07:57.720 probably how word ended up getting back to his old associates. 0:08:00.440 --> 0:08:03.960 All three men were acquitted on the trustpassing charge. The 0:08:04.040 --> 0:08:07.000 judge found that there was insufficient proof they'd been in 0:08:07.040 --> 0:08:10.120 the home because they only had the home occupant's word 0:08:10.120 --> 0:08:14.000 on the matter. Typically, a trustpassing charge involves a police 0:08:14.000 --> 0:08:18.520 officer seeing you do it, but Patler was unable to 0:08:18.560 --> 0:08:22.160 attend his own trial for truspassing because he was already 0:08:22.240 --> 0:08:27.960 back in jail somewhere else. Getting arrested is a parole violation. 0:08:29.520 --> 0:08:33.240 The prosecutor in Charlottesville ultimately dropped the marijuana possession charge 0:08:33.360 --> 0:08:37.199 entirely likely because there was no point prosecuting the case 0:08:37.360 --> 0:08:41.000 if the defendant was already incarcerated somewhere else for something 0:08:41.000 --> 0:08:47.040 more serious. Getting arrested at all, even if you're ultimately 0:08:47.040 --> 0:08:50.520 acquitted or the charges are dropped, is what's called a 0:08:50.559 --> 0:08:53.720 technical violation, which can lead to problems for someone on 0:08:53.760 --> 0:08:57.920 probation or parole. If he had been in perfect compliance 0:08:57.920 --> 0:09:02.920 with his conditions, otherwise, the technical violation may have been resolvable, 0:09:03.040 --> 0:09:06.360 it might not have caused problems for him, But according 0:09:06.360 --> 0:09:10.199 to newspaper reports, his probation conditions required him to remain 0:09:10.240 --> 0:09:13.440 in the Radford area, so it looked like he was 0:09:13.480 --> 0:09:16.439 trying to move to and get a job in Charlottesville, 0:09:16.920 --> 0:09:19.200 which was a violation, and that sent him back to 0:09:19.240 --> 0:09:23.880 prison in the fall of nineteen seventy six. In January 0:09:23.920 --> 0:09:27.559 of nineteen seventy eight, from jail, he filed a petition 0:09:27.600 --> 0:09:30.520 with the court to legally change his name back to Patsalos. 0:09:32.320 --> 0:09:35.000 Like those articles from the early seventies. The first time 0:09:35.040 --> 0:09:37.920 he was in jail, he says he's changed his ways, 0:09:38.400 --> 0:09:41.600 and he understands now that his hateful ways were really 0:09:41.679 --> 0:09:47.600 just misdirected hatred of himself. In early nineteen seventy eight, 0:09:48.120 --> 0:09:50.360 those articles say that he wouldn't be released for another 0:09:50.440 --> 0:09:54.480 six years, and I can't find any newspaper stories that 0:09:54.559 --> 0:09:58.560 definitively put him in or out of prison in the 0:09:58.600 --> 0:10:03.079 next few years. But a footnote in Frederick Simonelli's biography 0:10:03.080 --> 0:10:06.600 of Rockwell says that he was paroled again for good 0:10:06.960 --> 0:10:12.200 in October of nineteen seventy eight, and then he sort 0:10:12.200 --> 0:10:17.280 of disappears. I read in a few sources that he 0:10:17.320 --> 0:10:20.040 moved back to New York City immediately after being released, 0:10:20.880 --> 0:10:22.720 but it does look like he stayed in the Richmond, 0:10:22.760 --> 0:10:26.840 Virginia area for a few years. In nineteen eighty eight, 0:10:27.040 --> 0:10:30.079 he legally changed his name back to John Patsalos in 0:10:30.160 --> 0:10:34.560 the Richmond Circuit Court. I found a marriage license for 0:10:34.640 --> 0:10:38.000 him in Manhattan in nineteen ninety, but the woman moved 0:10:38.000 --> 0:10:40.800 across the country just a few years later, and she 0:10:40.920 --> 0:10:44.840 ultimately filed for divorce from the West Coast. So his 0:10:44.880 --> 0:10:47.800 third marriage didn't last long and doesn't seem to have 0:10:47.800 --> 0:10:53.120 produced any children. In twenty seventeen, a reporter from the 0:10:53.200 --> 0:10:57.520 Washington Post went looking for him. He refused to be interviewed, 0:10:58.000 --> 0:10:59.560 but at the time he was living on the Lower 0:10:59.600 --> 0:11:03.280 East Side. At the age of seventy nine, Butler was 0:11:03.280 --> 0:11:06.840 still earning a living as a freelance cartoonist. But the 0:11:06.960 --> 0:11:11.600 article doesn't say who's buying his art. I mean, freelance 0:11:11.640 --> 0:11:14.640 cartooning is probably a pretty tough way to pay the 0:11:14.679 --> 0:11:17.920 rent in Manhattan, so I imagine he's selling those drawings to 0:11:17.920 --> 0:11:21.559 anyone who would buy them. But I was only able 0:11:21.600 --> 0:11:26.920 to pin down the details for one High Times magazine. 0:11:29.240 --> 0:11:31.640 I found a couple of issues from that era and 0:11:31.679 --> 0:11:34.360 flipped through them, but I never found his name in 0:11:34.400 --> 0:11:38.880 the magazine itself. He's not credited as the artist anywhere 0:11:38.880 --> 0:11:41.960 that I can find, so it's not unlikely that his 0:11:42.080 --> 0:11:46.560 art appears elsewhere also without attribution. But I know he 0:11:46.640 --> 0:11:50.360 was working for High Times, that magazine about marijuana, because 0:11:50.400 --> 0:11:54.600 in twenty seventeen it was sold to a private equity firm. 0:11:54.960 --> 0:11:57.360 As a part of that sale, documents were filed with 0:11:57.440 --> 0:12:02.040 the Securities and Exchange Commission they're all very boring, and 0:12:02.120 --> 0:12:04.360 they're not the kinds of documents I usually look at. 0:12:05.400 --> 0:12:10.200 But in one endless pdf of assets and liabilities and 0:12:10.679 --> 0:12:16.760 financed gibberish, there's a list of the magazine's current freelance contracts. 0:12:18.200 --> 0:12:21.840 John Patsalos is listed as a monthly contributor to the magazine, 0:12:22.360 --> 0:12:26.840 earning five hundred dollars a month as an illustrator. In 0:12:26.920 --> 0:12:31.000 his Misspent Nazi Youth, he illustrated the quarterly magazine of 0:12:31.000 --> 0:12:34.880 the American Nazi Party. There's one issue that has a 0:12:35.000 --> 0:12:39.680 multi page comic called white Man, a superhero with a 0:12:39.679 --> 0:12:42.640 swastika on his chest who does battle with what I 0:12:42.640 --> 0:12:46.240 can only assume is a non copyright infringing version of 0:12:46.280 --> 0:12:50.600 Superman because he's referred to only as the Jew from 0:12:50.640 --> 0:12:56.119 outer Space. In the nineteen sixties, in a converted henhouse 0:12:56.160 --> 0:12:59.760 with a giant swastika on the roof, he labored over 0:12:59.760 --> 0:13:03.280 a rinting press, watching us thousands of copies of his 0:13:03.440 --> 0:13:08.680 racist caricatures landed in a pile. And now in his 0:13:08.720 --> 0:13:12.559 old age, he's drawing little cartoons of people smoking weed. 0:13:16.200 --> 0:13:19.560 That's the last place John Patler appears in any record 0:13:19.600 --> 0:13:23.520 I can find. Every August. His name appears in a 0:13:23.520 --> 0:13:26.880 few newspapers running stories about the anniversary of Rockwell's death, 0:13:28.080 --> 0:13:31.160 but it's always the same story, just a reminder of 0:13:31.200 --> 0:13:35.320 that moment in history, just to remember when about that 0:13:35.440 --> 0:13:39.880 day in nineteen sixty seven. There's no obituary that I 0:13:39.920 --> 0:13:43.040 can find, and data broker sites show that he still 0:13:43.080 --> 0:13:46.480 lives in that apartment on the Lower East Side, but 0:13:46.520 --> 0:13:50.760 that doesn't mean much. If he is still alive, he'll 0:13:50.760 --> 0:13:55.280 turn eighty eight in January. If he isn't, then his 0:13:55.360 --> 0:13:58.840 passing didn't make the news and wasn't mourned by anyone, 0:13:59.200 --> 0:14:05.040 at least not pup alive or dead. The last years 0:14:05.040 --> 0:14:09.400 of his life were spent in obscurity. He's just a strange, 0:14:09.760 --> 0:14:12.600 sad footnote in the story of the man he says 0:14:12.640 --> 0:14:16.880 he didn't kill. A listener posted a question a few 0:14:16.880 --> 0:14:21.880 weeks ago on the show's subreddit about Patler's younger brother. Ordinarily, 0:14:22.360 --> 0:14:24.480 I would probably leave him out of a story like this. 0:14:25.600 --> 0:14:28.520 There's no indication I could find that they were particularly close, 0:14:29.080 --> 0:14:31.600 and nothing I found hinted that he was involved in 0:14:32.120 --> 0:14:36.480 similar political activities, at least not the Nazi stuff. There 0:14:36.520 --> 0:14:39.720 is a new story about him getting arrested for cross 0:14:39.760 --> 0:14:43.240 burning in nineteen eighty five, but it looks like the 0:14:43.240 --> 0:14:48.880 case was dropped because the victim was also white. Puzzling. 0:14:50.440 --> 0:14:54.480 But in any case, I think for this story it 0:14:54.680 --> 0:14:58.120 is actually relevant to talk a little bit about George Patsalos. 0:15:01.440 --> 0:15:04.360 Back in the first episode, I talked a little about 0:15:04.400 --> 0:15:07.600 their childhoods. They were born a year and a half apart, 0:15:08.480 --> 0:15:11.480 so George wasn't quite four years old when their father 0:15:11.600 --> 0:15:16.160 murdered their mother in nineteen fifty eight, the year John 0:15:16.200 --> 0:15:18.720 Patler enlisted the Marines to avoid going to jail for 0:15:18.720 --> 0:15:22.680 a probation violation, George was arrested for setting a school 0:15:22.680 --> 0:15:27.080 on fire in the Bronx in nineteen sixty seven. When 0:15:27.120 --> 0:15:30.600 John Patler wrote his own autobiography in his final issue 0:15:30.640 --> 0:15:35.160 of Stormtrooper magazine, he dismissed the idea that his troubled 0:15:35.160 --> 0:15:37.720 home life had played any role in the man he became, 0:15:38.680 --> 0:15:43.040 considering his brother was nothing like him, He wrote, quote, 0:15:43.920 --> 0:15:48.080 the environmentalists and the jew oriented psychiatrists will no doubt 0:15:48.120 --> 0:15:52.240 attribute my political activity and extremist beliefs to my unfortunate 0:15:52.480 --> 0:15:57.400 childhood experiences. But my brother, who experienced the exact environment 0:15:57.480 --> 0:16:01.040 I did, and who underwent the same hardships, lives an 0:16:01.040 --> 0:16:05.240 opposite life than mine. He is today a happily married man, 0:16:05.600 --> 0:16:08.960 a peaceful, non political citizen, and the owner of a 0:16:09.000 --> 0:16:14.680 small business he built up himself, And maybe in nineteen 0:16:14.720 --> 0:16:20.480 sixty seven, John Patler believed that that was true. It 0:16:20.520 --> 0:16:23.200 was around this time that his brother George moved down 0:16:23.240 --> 0:16:26.960 to Virginia from New York. I couldn't tell you what 0:16:27.040 --> 0:16:31.680 prompted the move for exactly when it was. Articles about 0:16:31.680 --> 0:16:34.520 George that were written much later say that he moved 0:16:34.520 --> 0:16:38.400 to Virginia in the early seventies, but birth records for 0:16:38.480 --> 0:16:41.440 his children show one born in New York in nineteen 0:16:41.480 --> 0:16:45.160 sixty three, followed by one born in Virginia in nineteen 0:16:45.200 --> 0:16:48.920 sixty seven. So he was living in Virginia at least 0:16:48.960 --> 0:16:53.880 as early as nineteen sixty seven, and the happy marriage 0:16:54.240 --> 0:16:57.680 Tatler wrote about seems to have been anything. But he 0:16:57.720 --> 0:17:00.360 married his first wife in nineteen sixty three, at eight 0:17:00.400 --> 0:17:04.200 months before their first daughter was born. When his wife 0:17:04.240 --> 0:17:09.359 filed for divorce, she cited both cruelty and wilful abandonment. 0:17:11.200 --> 0:17:15.240 By the time the divorce was finalized in nineteen seventy four. George, 0:17:15.280 --> 0:17:17.760 who was in his mid thirties and a father of four, 0:17:18.720 --> 0:17:21.320 was already living with a girl he met a year earlier, 0:17:22.400 --> 0:17:40.280 when he was married and she was in high school. 0:17:40.440 --> 0:17:44.919 Her name was Ava DeHart. By nineteen eighty two, she 0:17:45.000 --> 0:17:50.000 wasn't a teenager anymore. They'd been together for almost a decade. 0:17:50.600 --> 0:17:53.520 She worked at the motorcycle shop he ran in Fredericksburg, Virginia, 0:17:54.119 --> 0:17:56.200 and they lived together in a trailer in a small 0:17:56.240 --> 0:18:01.560 town about halfway between Fredericksburg and Charlottesville. In the summer 0:18:01.600 --> 0:18:04.840 of nineteen eighty two, Ava confided in her sister that 0:18:04.920 --> 0:18:08.080 she was afraid of George, that he'd been hurting her, 0:18:08.920 --> 0:18:10.920 and she was afraid that if she tried to leave, 0:18:11.480 --> 0:18:16.040 he would find her and kill her, or worse, that 0:18:16.080 --> 0:18:21.400 he'd kill her family. She told her sister that he'd 0:18:21.480 --> 0:18:28.359 killed before, but she wouldn't say anymore, and then she disappeared. 0:18:30.520 --> 0:18:34.160 George Patsalos had already moved on to another woman before 0:18:34.280 --> 0:18:38.359 Ava disappeared in nineteen eighty two, and in nineteen eighty 0:18:38.400 --> 0:18:42.240 five he married Barbara Campfield, the woman he'd started seeing 0:18:42.280 --> 0:18:47.600 a year before. Ava de Heart vanished. That marriage was 0:18:47.760 --> 0:18:51.639 over before it even really began. They married in March, 0:18:52.160 --> 0:18:55.119 had a baby in May, and they were separated by July, 0:18:56.440 --> 0:19:00.919 though they didn't officially divorce until nineteen eighty seven. On 0:19:00.960 --> 0:19:03.919 the divorce decree, the legal grounds for the divorce is 0:19:03.960 --> 0:19:09.800 listed simply as cruelty. You can't really know what goes 0:19:09.840 --> 0:19:13.840 on behind closed doors. But shortly before Barbara filed for 0:19:13.880 --> 0:19:18.080 the divorce, her brother shot George in the neck during 0:19:18.080 --> 0:19:22.439 an argument that took place at her mother's house. For 0:19:22.600 --> 0:19:27.800 fourteen years, Ava Dehart's sister, Debbie, investigated the disappearance on 0:19:27.840 --> 0:19:32.960 her own. She hired a private investigator, but she kept 0:19:33.000 --> 0:19:38.359 pursuing the best lead on her own. Barbara Campfield hadn't 0:19:38.359 --> 0:19:42.959 to know something. She was George Patsalos's girlfriend when Ava disappeared, 0:19:44.720 --> 0:19:49.040 and it's a small town people talk, so she took 0:19:49.040 --> 0:19:53.680 advantage of that, and she talked too. Debbie would stop 0:19:53.680 --> 0:19:56.480 by the grocery store where Barbara was working, just a chat. 0:19:57.040 --> 0:20:01.919 Every now and then. She'd ask Barbara her sister. She 0:20:01.960 --> 0:20:05.479 asked her about George. She asked what happened in nineteen 0:20:05.560 --> 0:20:11.639 eighty two, and slowly Barbara opened up to her. Barbara 0:20:11.720 --> 0:20:14.320 hired a lawyer shortly after She led on to Debbie 0:20:14.359 --> 0:20:17.320 that she'd helped George clean up a lot of blood 0:20:17.600 --> 0:20:21.159 one night in July of nineteen eighty two, and her 0:20:21.240 --> 0:20:26.360 lawyer negotiated a deal for immunity, and then she took 0:20:26.400 --> 0:20:31.840 the police to the well. Barbara said for all those 0:20:31.920 --> 0:20:35.160 years she'd been too afraid to talk. She was afraid 0:20:35.240 --> 0:20:38.240 that George would do the same thing to her. But 0:20:38.320 --> 0:20:41.760 in nineteen ninety six, she finally confessed to helping George 0:20:41.760 --> 0:20:47.119 Potsollos throw a body down a well. She claimed that 0:20:47.200 --> 0:20:51.199 she never knew whose body it was. A forensic examination 0:20:51.359 --> 0:20:53.719 confirmed that the skeletal remains at the bottom of an 0:20:53.720 --> 0:20:59.800 abandoned well were those of Ava DeHart. A forensic anthropologist 0:20:59.840 --> 0:21:04.000 had testified that of the thirty five fractures detected on examination, 0:21:05.080 --> 0:21:08.240 twenty seven of them happened while she was still alive. 0:21:10.280 --> 0:21:17.800 George Potzalos beat her to death. George Pozzalos was convicted 0:21:17.800 --> 0:21:19.840 of the first degree murder of Ava de Hart in 0:21:19.920 --> 0:21:23.520 nineteen ninety seven. He was sentenced to life in prison, 0:21:23.560 --> 0:21:27.720 where he died in two thousand and six. So in 0:21:27.760 --> 0:21:32.399 nineteen forty three, Cristos Pazzalos shot his wife Athena in 0:21:32.440 --> 0:21:38.000 the throat, leaving John and George without a mother. John 0:21:38.040 --> 0:21:42.119 Patler was right almost when he wrote in nineteen seventy 0:21:42.119 --> 0:21:45.560 six that it isn't fair to attribute his political leanings 0:21:45.720 --> 0:21:50.040 entirely to his violent childhood. It is possible to grow 0:21:50.119 --> 0:21:52.760 up in a violent home and not become a Nazi. 0:21:53.760 --> 0:21:56.120 It is possible to be the son of a domestic 0:21:56.160 --> 0:21:59.800 abuser and not grow up to beat women to death. 0:22:01.560 --> 0:22:04.199 But it is still true to say that that's what 0:22:04.280 --> 0:22:08.760 happened here, that the sons of a murdered mother grew 0:22:08.800 --> 0:22:13.639 into men who murdered too. One killed a man he 0:22:13.680 --> 0:22:16.960 loved like a father, and the other killed a woman 0:22:17.040 --> 0:22:22.879 who'd once carried his child. I don't know what that means, 0:22:23.480 --> 0:22:27.160 if it means anything, All I know is that's what happened. 0:22:30.200 --> 0:22:35.520 In twenty thirteen, John Patler's youngest son, Nicholas Patler, contributed 0:22:35.560 --> 0:22:38.720 the afterward to William Schmaltz's biography of George Lincoln Rockwell. 0:22:40.560 --> 0:22:43.080 Nicholas was not quite a year old when his father 0:22:43.119 --> 0:22:46.160 shot Rockwell, and he wrote that he had no contact 0:22:46.160 --> 0:22:48.960 with his father from the time he was six until 0:22:49.000 --> 0:22:53.200 he was thirty four. He's the only one of Patler's 0:22:53.200 --> 0:22:55.760 four children who seems to have made any public statement 0:22:55.800 --> 0:22:58.679 about their father, So he's the only one I'll talk about. 0:23:00.359 --> 0:23:04.040 He has a master's degree in history. His first book 0:23:04.280 --> 0:23:07.040 was a history of the massive protest movement that emerged 0:23:07.040 --> 0:23:10.120 in opposition to the forced segregation of the federal workforce 0:23:10.240 --> 0:23:14.040 during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. For several years he 0:23:14.080 --> 0:23:18.480 was an adjunct professor teaching African American history. His second 0:23:18.480 --> 0:23:21.119 book actually just came out a few weeks ago, a 0:23:21.160 --> 0:23:25.520 biography of Pinkney Bent and Stewart Pinchback. Pinchback was the 0:23:25.560 --> 0:23:29.359 son of an enslaved woman and was briefly the governor 0:23:29.359 --> 0:23:35.040 of Louisiana in eighteen seventy two. Nicholas Butler has clearly 0:23:35.080 --> 0:23:38.480 worked hard to put something into the world that his 0:23:38.520 --> 0:23:42.119 father was trying to take away from it. Look at 0:23:42.119 --> 0:23:45.720 his life, his work, interviews he's given over the years. 0:23:46.560 --> 0:23:49.240 He is the opposite of the man his father was 0:23:49.240 --> 0:23:54.600 in the nineteen sixties. In that afterward, he writes compassionately 0:23:54.760 --> 0:23:57.000 about the father he got to know as an adult. 0:23:58.040 --> 0:24:02.119 He describes his father's traumatic childhood, and he understands how 0:24:02.160 --> 0:24:05.320 a damaged young man came to be drawn in by 0:24:05.359 --> 0:24:10.600 the fatherly attention he got from Rockwell. He's trying to understand, 0:24:12.040 --> 0:24:14.280 and he's careful to emphasize that his goal is not 0:24:14.320 --> 0:24:19.280 to excuse. When he wrote this in twenty thirteen, he'd 0:24:19.320 --> 0:24:22.080 spent a little over a decade getting to know his father, 0:24:23.520 --> 0:24:26.000 and at the time he had also recently enrolled in 0:24:26.000 --> 0:24:30.200 a master's program at Bethany Theological Seminary. And I think 0:24:30.280 --> 0:24:33.520 that does help me understand the tenor of the essay 0:24:33.560 --> 0:24:38.479 in a way. He's writing earnestly about finding peace and 0:24:38.520 --> 0:24:43.240 being opened to the possibility of transformation. He wrote that 0:24:43.280 --> 0:24:47.600 his father really was a changed man. His father had 0:24:47.600 --> 0:24:50.159 told him once that he regretted his time in the 0:24:50.240 --> 0:24:54.720 Nazi movement, and even expressed that he now realized he'd 0:24:54.760 --> 0:24:58.240 been marching with the wrong side during the Civil Rights movement. 0:25:00.560 --> 0:25:06.359 Nicholas Butler ends that afterward on a hopeful note, writing quote, 0:25:07.000 --> 0:25:09.280 I want to encourage the reader not to give up 0:25:09.480 --> 0:25:13.040 on those trapped in cycles and situations of violence and distortion, 0:25:13.760 --> 0:25:16.080 whether in her own back yard or across the globe. 0:25:17.480 --> 0:25:20.320 The one thing that I have seen personally and witnessed 0:25:20.359 --> 0:25:24.600 over and over in many contexts that can transform hatred 0:25:24.680 --> 0:25:31.840 and the hater is love, courageous, visionary, and uncompromising love. 0:25:34.560 --> 0:25:38.800 In twenty thirteen, when he wrote that his father was 0:25:38.880 --> 0:25:44.640 proof of this message, that he'd been transformed. Four years later, 0:25:45.280 --> 0:25:49.800 in twenty seventeen, after the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville, Virginia, 0:25:50.359 --> 0:25:53.879 every news outlet in the country was running front page 0:25:53.920 --> 0:26:00.000 stories with pictures of Nazis. Hundreds and hundreds of neo Nazis, 0:26:01.440 --> 0:26:05.720 men flying Swastika flags, men with Swastika tattoos, men in 0:26:05.840 --> 0:26:11.600 Nazi uniforms, men with torches, men with weapons, Videos of 0:26:11.640 --> 0:26:15.719 men chanting you will not replace us blood and soil, 0:26:17.400 --> 0:26:22.480 videos of men shouting Rockwell's most famous slogan, white power. 0:26:24.600 --> 0:26:29.320 A changed man, a man who regretted inciting violent racist 0:26:29.359 --> 0:26:33.920 mobs all those years ago, What would he say when 0:26:33.960 --> 0:26:50.960 he saw it happening again. Two days after that rally, 0:26:51.560 --> 0:26:54.359 after a young neo Nazi murdered a peaceful demonstrator in 0:26:54.359 --> 0:26:59.600 the streets, John Patler posted on Facebook that there's nothing 0:26:59.640 --> 0:27:05.400 wrong with white pride. He wrote, it was a peaceful parade, 0:27:05.880 --> 0:27:08.760 a couple of hundred white men, neatly attired, expressing their 0:27:08.800 --> 0:27:11.520 right to free speech and objection to the removal of 0:27:11.520 --> 0:27:16.440 the statue of General Lee. A reporter from The Washington 0:27:16.480 --> 0:27:19.560 Post made several attempts to contact him, even visiting his 0:27:19.600 --> 0:27:25.680 apartment in Manhattan, but he refused to be interviewed. His son, 0:27:26.480 --> 0:27:29.240 the same son who wrote so proudly, so lovingly in 0:27:29.280 --> 0:27:34.040 twenty thirteen about his father's transformation, told The Washington Post 0:27:34.040 --> 0:27:37.399 in twenty seventeen that his father had started to change 0:27:37.400 --> 0:27:42.840 again around twenty fifteen. Quote, I don't know what the 0:27:42.880 --> 0:27:47.399 climate is doing to him now. It seems like little 0:27:47.400 --> 0:27:53.840 by little he's becoming poisoned again. You can't know what's 0:27:53.840 --> 0:27:57.560 in a man's heart. You can judge his actions, you 0:27:57.600 --> 0:28:01.360 can interpret his words, but there isn't any one who 0:28:01.359 --> 0:28:05.040 can tell you for sure whether John Patler's heart changed 0:28:05.119 --> 0:28:10.399 twice or not at all? Was he a changed man 0:28:10.440 --> 0:28:14.840 from nineteen seventy until twenty fifteen and then he changed back? 0:28:16.160 --> 0:28:19.280 Did the love and understanding of a once estranged sun 0:28:19.520 --> 0:28:21.439 help him come to terms with the hurt in his 0:28:21.560 --> 0:28:24.760 own soul and the ways that pushed him to inflict 0:28:24.760 --> 0:28:29.160 pain on the world, only then to hear the siren 0:28:29.280 --> 0:28:32.320 song of a new fure during the twenty sixteen election. 0:28:34.240 --> 0:28:38.000 Was that hate, just lying dormant, waiting for the right 0:28:38.080 --> 0:28:43.360