Sixth Man in Anti-SPLC Plot Faces Trial
Wallace Scott Weicherding becomes the sixth man in a plot to blow up the Center and assassinate co-founder Morris Dees to face trial.
After five men pleaded guilty to charges in an alleged plot to blow up the Southern Poverty Law Center and kill Center co-founder Morris Dees, only one man still faced trial.
Wallace Scott Weicherding was scheduled to go to court Aug. 24 on charges that he scouted a bank to rob and drew up a hit list of assassination and bombing targets.
Weicherding, a 64-year-old former prison guard fired for giving fellow employees Klan literature, also allegedly helped the leader of a group called The New Order — after a right-wing terrorist group that robbed and murdered in a 1980s crime spree — acquire a machine gun.
According to the indictment against him, Weicherding and the others planned to illegally convert other weapons to automatic and sell them to raise money.
Earlier, New Order leader and former Klansman Dennis Michael McGiffen, 35; Ralph P. Bock, 27; Glenn LeVelle Lowtharp, 50; Daniel Rick, 20; and Karl Schave, 31, pleaded guilty to various weapons charges. The men were from Illinois and Ohio.
Prosecutors say the group planned to bomb state capitol buildings, attack post offices and communication systems, and destroy the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the offices of the Anti-Defamation League in an unnamed city.
Weicherding allegedly came with a gun to a speech given by Dees in southern Illinois with plans to murder him. But, officials say, he turned back when he spotted metal detectors at the door.
