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Kansas Shooting Suspect Is Former KKK Leader

Frazier Glenn Miller, a ‘raging anti-Semite,’ in custody for deadly JCC attack

by
Stephanie Butnick
April 14, 2014
A police car is seen at the entrance of the Jewish Community Center after three were killed when a gunman opened fire on April 13, 2014 in Overland Park, Kansas. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
A police car is seen at the entrance of the Jewish Community Center after three were killed when a gunman opened fire on April 13, 2014 in Overland Park, Kansas. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

The suspect in yesterday’s shooting at two Jewish institutions in Overland Park, Kansas, in which three people were killed, has been identified as Frazier Glenn Miller, who also goes by the name Frazier Glenn Cross, a 73-year-old “known white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader who was once the subject of a nationwide manhunt.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Miller founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s, and was the former “grand dragon” of the group before forming another Klan group called the White Patriot Party.

Miller is a raging anti-Semite who has posted more than 12,000 times on Vanguard News Network (VNN), whose slogan is “No Jews, Just Right.” VNN founder Alex Linder has openly advocated “exterminating” Jews since December 2009. Miller, a close partner to Linder, has called Jews “swarthy, hairy, bow-legged, beady-eyed, parasitic midgets.” Miller is also one of VNN’s largest donors and he printed and distributed thousands of copies of VNN’s newsletter, The Aryan Alternative.

The Anti-Defamation League released its own backgrounder on Miller, whom they call “one of the more noto­ri­ous white suprema­cists in the United States” during the 1980s.

Yesterday’s attack appears to have been motivated by anti-Semitism—according to police Miller shot two of the victims in the parking lot of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City before driving to Village Shalom, a Jewish retirement home, and shooting the third victim. There’s chilling video of Miller yelling “Heil Hitler” from the back of a police car after his arrest.

The Kansas City Star identified the first two victims as William Lewis Corporon and his 14-year-old grandson Reat Griffin Underwood, a high school freshman who was reportedly at the JCC to audition for a local singing competition. Services are being held at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, the family’s church.

The third victim was identified this morning as Terri LaManno, 53, a Kansas City resident and mother of two who worked as an occupational therapist at the Children’s Center for the Visually Impaired. She was visiting her mother, a resident at Village Shalom, when the shooting occurred. A statement was released by St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Kansas City, where LaManno and her husband were longtime parishioners, calling her “a loving mother and wife, and a gentle and giving woman.”

Miller is currently being held on multiple charges, including premeditated first-degree murder, KCTV5 reports. He also faces hate crime charges in federal court.

Stephanie Butnick is chief strategy officer of Tablet Magazine, co-founder of Tablet Studios, and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.