Frank Ancona, the professed leader of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), was shot and killed last week in what law enforcement officials called a “tragic and senseless act of violence.”
His wife and stepson were charged in his death on Monday.
His body was found on a Missouri riverbank on Saturday with gunshot wounds to the head, according to the Washington County coroner, Brian DeClue, who called the death a homicide.
In an interview, he said Ancona, 51, was killed with “a shotgun of some sort.”
Jerrod Mahurin, the prosecuting attorney in the case, said Ancona was also shot in the head with a 9mm handgun.
On Monday, Ancona’s wife, Malissa Ancona, 44, and stepson, Paul Jinkerson Jr, 24, were charged with a range of crimes in connection with the killing, including first degree murder and the abandonment of a corpse, the St Francois County Sheriff’s Department said.
The sheriff said Frank Ancona was killed at his home on Thursday and his body was then left at a remote location.
Mahurin said he believed the killing happened because of a marital dispute and was not connected to Ancona’s membership in the KKK.
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that they learned of Ancona’s disappearance on Friday shortly before his vehicle was discovered on land owned by the US Forest Service.
His body was found on the banks of the Big River in Belgrade, Missouri, the next day by a family who had gone to fish.
In an interview with the New York Times this month, Ancona said he had been a member of the Klan for more than 30 years. He formed the Traditionalist American Knights in 2009.
There are at least 29 separate, rival Klan groups active in the US and they compete with each other for members, dues, media attention and the title of being the true heir to the Ku Klux Klan, said Mark Potok, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism in the US. Most recently, Ancona was accused by rival Klansmen of being secretly Jewish.
“It is endless infighting,” Potok said.
Ancona’s group was not considered the largest or the most influential iteration of the Klan, but he was skilled at attracting the spotlight.
During the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown, Ancona’s group passed out leaflets in the city, vowing to use “lethal force” against protesters. The fliers got him invited on MSNBC.
Shortly after that appearance, Ancona explained his beliefs in an interview filmed in a diner with a member of the hacker group Anonymous, which later claimed to have gained access into his group’s files and released the personal information of his and several of his associates.
The group also distributed fliers this year in several towns in Maine, far from its base in Park Hills, Missouri.
Ancona pointed to these operations as a sign of his group’s popularity and reach, but Potok said it had no more than a few dozen members in chapters in three states: Missouri, Idaho and Pennsylvania.
Ancona promoted the Klan as a nonviolent fraternal organization for white Christian men, something akin to a self-help group that also endorsed the separation of the races and opposed what he called “equality propaganda.”
“I don’t focus on the negative history,” Ancona said, adding that he did not understand why people were afraid of the Klan. “What Klansman do you ever see go out and see terrorize anyone?”
However, the group’s Web site and fliers contained a more violent message, including images of hooded Klansmen brandishing nooses, racist cartoons of African-Americans and the letters “KKK” engulfed in flame.
In one picture, which appeared to be manipulated, Ancona stood before a burning cross.
“They want to portray us as all toothless redneck, tobacco chewers,” Ancona said in an interview this month. “Some of us are, but some of us are college educated. I am a business owner,” he said. “We just believe in promoting traditional American values.”
Ancona dismissed the Klan’s violent history as the work of “a few bad apples” in another era.
He said killings attributed to the group during the civil rights era were the work of government agents, much like those who infiltrated civil rights groups at the time.
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