Was Suspect in Kansas Murders Tied to Attack on Gay Bookstore?

The man accused of killing three people at Jewish community sites in Overland Park, Kan., last weekend may be linked to a 1987 attack on a gay adult bookstore in North Carolina that left three men dead, says an investigative report from news website Raw Story.

Frazier Glenn Miller, arrested Sunday in connection with the shooting deaths in the Kansas City suburb, has a long history of advocacy for white supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs. In a "Declaration of War" he mailed to media outlets and racist groups in 1987, he said he also planned to wage war on "queers."

On January 17 of that year, the Shelby III Adult Bookstore on the outskirts of Shelby, N.C., which had a large gay customer base, was attacked by three masked men. "The men ordered the store's four customers and a clerk to the floor, and then shot them, execution style, in the back of their heads," Raw Story reports. "The masked intruders took cash from the register and rigged up plastic gallon jugs filled with gasoline and detonation fuses, planning to burn the bookstore to the ground." Three of the men who were shot died of their wounds, while the two others escaped the burning building and survived.

Robert Eugene "Jack" Jackson and Douglas Lawrence Sheets, two of Miller's comrades in the White Patriot Party, were charged with the bookstore murders. Miller agreed to testify against them as part of a plea deal in a separate matter, in which he was arrested in Missouri for illegal possession of a large cache of weapons in April 1987, according to Raw Story. Even with Miller's testimony, though, there was no evidence placing either Sheets or Jackson at the bookstore, so Sheets, whose trial took place in April and May 1989, was acquitted, and Jackson's trial, scheduled to take place afterward, was canceled.

Attorneys involved in the case now tell Raw Story they believe Miller, who was in Raleigh, N.C., the day after the bookstore attack, should have been a prime suspect. "I still believe Miller was involved with those murders. I do," Kirk D. Lyons, who helped defend Sheets, told the site. "And, I've got a lot more proof than I've ever had because he's done it again -- killed more people." Sheets testified that Miller had boasted of making "a big boom in Shelby," and in pretrial statements, Miller showed knowledge of the bookstore's interior, Raw Story notes.

Lyons added that there were rumors Miller was working as an informant for the federal government, a claim Miller makes in his autobiography, A White Man Speaks Out. According to the Raw Story account, there is speculation he became an informant even before the weapons incident. A couple of years earlier, he was arrested in the company of a prostitute described as a "black transvestite." Miller said he had picked up the prostitute in order to "whip his ass." "Lyons believes it was that arrest that convinced Miller to become a federal informant, and that he was already working for the feds when he went on his 1987 'Declaration of War' rampage, hoping to get his fellow White Patriot Party extremists arrested and convicted," Raw Story reports.

The murders at the bookstore remain unsolved. Read the full Raw Story account here.