On April 13, 2014, I remember reading an article on Google News about a mass shooting that had taken place in a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas.
It was yet another senseless act of gun violence - one that I had become all too familiar with growing up in the United States - but, today, something was different. This was the first - and only - time that I knew about the mass shooter himself before he committed his crimes.
The gunman was 73-year-old Frazier Glenn Miller - a man who I was quite familiar with. At first glance, Miller appeared to be a harmless old man. But beneath that harmless-looking veneer lurked a vile and highly dangerous personality - one that had been brooding a festering hatred of Jews, Blacks, homosexuals, and the US government for decades. It was a life punctuated by violence, racism, hatred, sedition, and, ultimately, mass murder.
Frazier Glenn Miller had started out as a man of honor. Born in North Carolina in 1940, Miller enlisted in the US Army after leaving high school. He rose to the rank of master sergeant and served two tours in Vietnam, where he earned commendations for his bravery in combat.
But Miller - along with so many other rural white Americans - soon fell into the allure of a growing far-right movement in the United States. While in the army, Miller came across The Thunderbolt - a racist, antisemitic, and conspiratorial tabloid produced by the pro-segregation National States' Rights Party, and soon afterwards, Miller joined the American Nazi Party - the most prominent white supremacist group in the US at the time aside from the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1979, Miller was among a group of neo-Nazis who got into a deadly shootout with anti-racist activists in Greensboro, North Carolina, in which five people died. Though he was acquitted of criminal charges in that incident, Miller was later discharged from the army that same year for distributing racist propaganda. Out of a job and radicalized with hate, Miller now devoted his entire life to the cause of violent "white revolution" and the vitriolic promotion of racial hatred.
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| Frazier Glenn Miller in CKKKK uniform |
In 1980, Miller founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (later known as the White Patriot Party), which became infamous for marching in public while wearing military fatigues, carrying weapons, and flying swastika flags while Miller screamed hateful slogans from a bullhorn. He became infamous for his incendiary rhetoric and devotion to the extreme right, and Miller made a name for himself among the American neo-Nazi movement as an influential leader.
In 1984, Miller became an associate of The Order - a violent neo-Nazi terrorist group that would later commit a series of bombings, robberies, and murders in the Pacific Northwest in furtherance of a "white revolution". He would later claim to have received $200,000 from Robert Jay Mathews - the leader of The Order - and helped train their members in paramilitary camps in the North Carolina wilderness.
Though The Order collapsed by 1985 after an FBI crackdown, Miller sought to continue Mathews' revolution of hate. In 1987, he was involved in a plot to assassinate Morris Dees - an Alabama attorney and founder of the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center - and even wrote a threatening "Declaration of War" against the so-called "Zionist Occupation Government".
"In the name of our Aryan God, through His beloved son Glenn Miller, I do hereby declare total war. I ask for no quarter and I shall give none. I declare war against Niggers, Kikes, Faggots, Queers, assorted Mongrels, White Race traitors, and despicable informants", read the vile screed. "Let the blood of our enemies flood the streets, rivers, and fields of the nation in Holy vengeance and justice. The Jews are our main and most formidable enemies, brothers and sisters. They are truly the Children of Satan."
Miller's downfall would come later that year when he was arrested by the FBI for running illegal paramilitary camps and plotting sedition against the US government. After choosing to become an informant, Miller served three years in federal prison and was released into the witness protection program, where he changed his name to Frazier Glenn Cross.
But hatred and bigotry are not abandoned so easily. And in Frazier Glenn Miller's case, his hatred would poison his entire family.
One of Miller's sons, Gunjer Miller, would later be convicted of throwing a firebomb into a townhome occupied by an interracial family - a crime for which he served a year in prison. Only months after being released, Gunjer died in a fiery car crash in 1998 at the age of 19, while trying to run a black driver off the road.
Ten years later, another one of Miller's sons would meet a violent and tragic end. On March 28, 2008, 30-year-old Jesse Miller got into a car accident near Marionville, Missouri, while traveling with his mother. When a passing driver, Joseph M. Rich, stopped to help, Miller, without any provocation, opened fire with a shotgun, killing Rich. Jesse Miller later shot and wounded a police officer who was responding to the scene, but the officer was able to return fire, killing Jesse and putting an end to his violent, inexplicable rampage.
Through all of this, Frazier Glenn Miller continued spewing his message of hate to all who would listen. He railed against immigrants, Jews, blacks, homosexuals, and anti-racists. He praised Adolf Hitler, Robert Mathews, and his own two sons as martyrs for the white supremacist cause. And, before long, in the twilight years of his twisted life, Miller would take matters into his own hands.
On April 13, 2014, Miller drove across the Missouri border into Overland Park, Kansas, armed with a 12-gauge shotgun and a pistol, and entered the parking lot of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City. There, he screamed "Heil Hitler!" and began firing indiscriminately at people gathered outside, killing 14-year-old aspiring singer Reat Underwood and his grandfather, 69-year-old William Corporon, as they pulled into the parking lot.
Miller then drove to a nearby Jewish retirement home, Village Shalom, where he shot and killed 53-year-old Terri LaManno, who was visiting her mother at the facility.
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| The victims of Miller's rampage (from left to right): William Corporon, Reat Underwood, and Terri LaManno. |
Responding police finally apprehended the 73-year-old Miller outside an elementary school, where he dropped his weapons and surrendered. As he was seated in the back of a patrol car, Miller continued to spew his vitriol.
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| Miller is arrested following his deadly rampage in Overland Park, Kansas. He continued to spew hate as he was taken into custody. |
"I am an anti-Semite!", the murderer spat as he sat handcuffed in the backseat. "I hate goddamn Jews!"
I remember following the subsequent trial of Frazier Glenn Miller closely over the following year. Confined to a wheelchair and suffering from advanced emphysema, Miller fired his attorneys and chose to represent himself during his trial for capital murder. He made little attempt to defend himself against the charges, and every attempt to continue spreading his message of hate.
"This whole trial is predicated on my hatred of Jews. You [the jury] are all whores of the Jews.", Miller commented in court. "I thrive on hate. If I didn't thrive on hate, I would go crazy."
Miller's lack of remorse was evident even in the letters he wrote from jail while awaiting trial. "I'm totally at peace with myself. I struck violent blows against the goddamn Jew menace - effective blows, too!", he wrote in one such letter. "I'm not afraid of the death penalty. I'll die with a clear conscience, knowing I did my best to secure the existence of our people and a future for White children."
In the end, Miller's few defenses in court did him no good. On August 31, 2015, a jury found Miller guilty of capital murder and attempted murder. Eight days later, it took less than 90 minutes for that same jury to unanimously recommend that Miller - a man whose long life was punctuated by murder, hatred, and violence - lose his right to live at all.
On November 12, 2015, I watched live coverage of the courtroom as Johnson County District Judge Kelly Ryan handed down the ultimate sentence to Miller. "Your attempt to bring hate to this community, to bring terror to this community, has failed", the judge told Miller before reading out the sentence. "I find from the review of the entirety of the evidence presented in this trial that the jury's verdict should be and is affirmed. And, for your conviction for capital murder, you will be transported to the Kansas Department of Corrections to carry out the sentence of death by lethal injection as provided by Kansas law."
But even to the end, Miller was undeterred. As the judge sentenced him to death, Miller continued to do what he did best: spew hatred.
"Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!", Miller screamed as he gave a Nazi salute from his wheelchair as bailiffs tried to wheel him out. "One day my spirit will rise from the grave and you will know that I was right! Heil Hitler!"
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| Frazier Glenn Miller screams racist slogans and gives a Nazi salute as he is sentenced to death by lethal injection. |
That was the last time the outside world would ever see the infamous purveyor of hate again. Frazier Glenn Miller was sent to El Dorado Correctional Facility to join 11 other inmates on Kansas' death row. Despite having the death penalty, Kansas did not - and still does not - have an execution protocol, lethal injection drugs, or any inmates eligible to be executed. Miller would spend the rest of his life awaiting an execution date that, in his case, was unlikely to come.
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| The lethal injection chamber at Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing, Kansas. Frazier Glenn Miller ultimately never lived to be executed in this room, which has still never been used. |
And come it did not. Yesterday, on May 3, 2021, after spending nearly 6 years languishing on death row, Frazier Glenn Miller's twisted, depraved, and hateful life finally came to its bitter and long-overdue end. The murderer died the same way he lived; pitiful, forgotten, and with no company save for the festering hatred and malice that had consumed his mind for decades.
There will never be closure for those whose lives Miller so senselessly destroyed - not just the lives he took on April 13, 2014, but the countless other lives he poisoned, corrupted, or ruined through his decades of hateful living, preaching violent action against those he saw as enemies, or poisoning the minds of countless people with the ideologies of hatred, fear, racism, and violence.
Frazier Glenn Miller may have sought to leave a legacy of martyrdom for his cause, but the only legacy he has left is a legacy of destruction, misery, hatred, pain, and senseless waste. It is a legacy that has produced nothing but anguish and ruin, and it is a legacy that purely defines every vile thing he stood for.
Frazier Glenn Miller is dead. The long, dreadful saga of his life has finally come to a close. May everything he stood for - the hatred, the malice, the violence, and the racial bigotry - one day join him in death.
And, despite my skepticism of an afterlife, I wish both Miller and his legacy a swift journey to Hell.
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