WASHINGTON — James W. von Brunn was growing despondent.
John de Nugent, a white separatist and acquaintance, noticed the change when they last spoke two weeks ago.
“He said his Social Security had been cut and that he was barely making it,” de Nugent said. “He felt it was the direct result of someone in Washington looking at his website.”
In one of his e-mail blasts expressing his white-supremacist views, the man accused of shooting and killing a security guard Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum told readers that they shouldn’t expect to hear from him again.
He was about to give away his computer, his primary connection to the fringe world of radical racists. He was living hand to mouth.
The e-mails were getting violent in tone: “It’s time to kill all the Jews.”
Von Brunn, who lived in Annapolis, Md., was known for decades to fellow white supremacists who read his elaborate conspiracy theories on his website and met him through a network of radical racist groups. He was smart enough to join Mensa, but even admirers considered him a loner, a hothead and a man consumed with hatred.
Civil-rights groups and federal investigators tracked von Brunn as an avowed white supremacist and anti-Semite.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, has kept an eye on him since 1981. Lately, it has focused on von Brunn’s website, .
Von Brunn, 88, worked at Noontide Press, a California-based distributor of books on the “Jewish Question.” His book, “Kill the Best Gentiles,” is a screed against the Talmud and it is dedicated to Revilo Oliver, a well-known denier of the Holocaust. His writings condemning “Negroes” and Jews were prolific.
Von Brunn apparently supported himself through much of the 1980s and 1990s by distributing copies of The Spotlight, the racist newspaper of Liberty Lobby, a radical-right group.
Von Brunn’s ex-wife said she divorced him about 30 years ago when she could no longer take his racist beliefs.
“When he talked about it (race), he would get verbally abusive because I didn’t really want to talk about it,” said the 69-year-old woman, who lives in Florida and did not wish to be named. “It was always against the Jews and the blacks.”
