Gotta say, this seems like another sad case where the ‘Flower of White Christian Manhood’ cosplay comes off as a particularly toxic attempt at self-deception. Disheartening for those of us who support animal rescue, too — reminder that the twist leading to animal hoarding too often coexists with other mental-health problems. Doyle Murphy, in the St. Louis Riverfront Times, with one of the great ledes of all time:
Frank Ancona, the imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, smelled like cat piss.
The stench clung to the 51-year-old’s graying hair and mustache. It seeped into the fabric of his clothes and hung on him like a blanket. He was unhappy about it, but he did not seem to know what to do. He lived in a small, beat-looking house in the rural southeast Missouri town of Leadwood. The windows of the front porch had been pulled out and the wood frames wrapped in chicken wire — a project his wife had undertaken one evening after he headed off to his job as an overnight courier for a St. Louis-based shipping company.
Malissa Ancona, 44, seemed intent on turning their home into a giant kennel. It was well-known that the bleach blonde ran an off-the-books — some would say infamous — animal rescue. Dozens of cats and two dogs shared 1,000 square feet with the Klansman and his wife. They nested in piles of dirty clothes, pawed through open garbage and kicked litter across the floors. A neighbor estimates as many as 70 cats lived there during peak times…
There’s not much money in Leadwood. Set in the hills about 70 miles south of St. Louis, the median household income is about $31,000, nearly $20,000 less than the statewide figure. The population of 1,282 is 99 percent white. For diversity, residents identifying as American Indian outnumbered African-Americans two to one. That’s not a ratio: Census workers counted a total of two Native Americans and one black person in the 2010 tally.
Leadwood is the kind of place where people might not agree with the KKK, but they also don’t get too worked up about a Klan leader living next door. The Anconas moved in five or six years ago. Frank’s dad lived one house over to the south, and the local fire station was across the street. The younger Ancona seemed intent on settling in after years spent bouncing around Missouri and Illinois. The Leadwood house was a lease, but Frank had worked out a rent-to-own arrangement with the homeowners, relatives say. Shortly after moving in, he hung a red flag with the KKK’s “blood drop” cross to the left of the front door and a replica of the Klan’s historical flying dragon pennant to the right.
His only real problem was Malissa…
When word spread that Frank had gone missing February 9, no one seemed too surprised. His son, Frank Jr., knew something was wrong when his father’s employer called to say he had not shown up for work for the first time in nearly a decade. The son called police and headed over to the house.
He and the officers were just about to go inside when Malissa returned home with her son from a previous relationship and barred their way. Frank Jr. remembered a feeling of dread sweep over him.
“I had a gut feeling right then and there she’d done something bad.”…
BGinCHI
“I had a gut feeling right then and there she’d done something bad.”…
Let’s not be too hasty with that negative judgment.
ThresherK
“Earl was a missing person that nobody missed at all.”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
I read this piece earlier in the week. Classic profile of the Ozark region white, underclass.
The quote is misleading. He had two real problems: her and the fact he was a fucking racist shithole who publicized it in one of the most notorious manners possible: letting his KKK freak flag fly.
No sympathy for either of them, just the cats and maybe the son who got snookered into helping the crazy cat lady.
M31
the son:
“who had previously been convicted for possessing meth and was awaiting trial on charges he had helped break into car wash coin machines”
I was going to make some crack about ‘guess how I know he’s white’ but it’s really just sad
Ohio Mom
The epitome of multi-generational dysfunction.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for the lot of them. They are the people our society has thrown away. None of them sound smart enough to find a way out, and there was no net to catch them.
Mnemosyne
@Ohio Mom:
This is why they desperately cling to the one thing that gives them a sense of superiority. If they don’t have their whiteness, they don’t have anything else.
bystander
MSNBC is reporting that somebody with a backpack broke into the WH last night and was caught.
Am I the only whose mind wanders after hearing that?
Villago Delenda Est
I can’t blame poor whites in rural areas for feeling like they’ve been abandoned, but some of it is very much of their own making. Attempts to reach out to them are often rebuffed, because they “just want to be left alone”. Fine. They are often offered help and simply refuse to accept it out of ignorance, or pride, or just stubbornness.
ruemara
I’m trying to have a problem with it and failing. Especially with the cats pissing on him.
Villago Delenda Est
@bystander: I wonder why a backpack is mentioned? Did it contain something dangerous, like a copy of the Federalist Papers?
germy
@bystander: I wonder what was in the backpack? And will drumpf milk this for all it’s worth? “the liberals are crawling through the windows! They must be stopped!”
And from what I understand, Sean Shannity is setting policy now?
Should we call the mass firings the Fox Purge?
Tom
On the one hand, I’m grateful for the fact that it wasn’t another one of the “White guy shoots multiple non-white guys (or women, or children) while screaming ‘Go back where you came from!'” On the other hand, I’m sadden that he and his wife couldn’t find their way out of their psychopathologies, and whatever safety nets were available didn’t catch them.
germy
I’m hoping the cats find good, loving homes. That’s about all the concern I can feel.
sukabi
@bystander: I can understand why the Secret Service wouldn’t give a shit…but where was drumpfs private security?
Where’s all that winning we were promised?
Eta… Forgot it’s Saturday. Went to Maralago and left the gate open.
Mnemosyne
@bystander:
Trump was already down at Mar-a-Lago for the weekend, so no harm, no foul.
Big Ole Hound
Buncha fucked up people living in a fucked up state. Just normal stuff in the rural south. Betcha the family was on some form of assistance and voted for Trump to fight the gubmint.
germy
I’m not sure I’d call that a rescue. More like warehousing and abuse. I’m sure Mr. KKK kicked more than a few of those animals .
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I’m finding no cause for chuckling over the “dumb-ass crackers” either. Once again, the intersection of untreated mental illness and ignorance produces a violent end. This happens in families of all colors, all religions, etc.
I’m aware that the world may not have been measurably diminished with his passing and subsequent incarceration of those left behind. But cause for mirth? Nah…
I’m not trying to be a scold. Just stating my personal response.
germy
I’m enjoying American Masters on PBS, but it reminds me of how lousy my history education was, because I’ve never heard of this woman:
germy
@West of the Rockies (been a while): I have empathy, but I sort of draw the line at active Klan members; people who would nod in approval if they saw my son hanging from a tree.
It’s sort of like asking a Jewish person to feel sad about a retired SS guard being killed by his wife. Sure, there were some mental health issues, but the fact remains the compassion would not be reciprocated under different circumstances.
mai naem mobile
I was listening to NPR the other day and they said theres a small outbreak of Yellow Fever in Brazil and that chances are that will make its way to the Gulf Coast. I am sure Fox Nooz will say Obama got into his way back machine and got it going before he left town so that Asshole 45 would have to deal with it. I wonder if we will be treated to the 24/7 ‘we are going to die’ coverage from the media like we got with ebola.
Lillian Barron
@Ohio Mom: Traditionally, any net would earn their disdain, because THEY are not welfare recipients, THEY are proud Patriots. I’ve seen that dynamic in NY and PA and FL.
Adam L Silverman
@bystander: It was Obama. He was trying to place new wiretaps and retrieve the SDM cards from the trap cameras he and Joe Biden and Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett hid all over the White House.//
Ruckus
@ruemara:
Cats often do seem to understand when a situation requires a poignant comment.
Adam L Silverman
@mai naem mobile: Yep, the outbreak has been ongoing for several months.
Ruckus
@germy:
compassion would not be reciprocated under
differentany circumstances.I think this was what you were going for but are a bit too nice to say.
The Thin Black Duke
Problem is, I have to remind myself that a lifetime of my sympathy wouldn’t buy me a moment of mercy from these people. They hate me more than they hate themselves, and until they figure that out, I’ll never be safe.
Mnemosyne
@mai naem mobile:
Not until it starts to look like the Democrats could win the House back in the midterms.
rodnchance
If she offed this alien creature of a husband she really missed an opportunity to turn him into cat food, heck that should be her alibi as to why she could not have killed him.
germy
@Mnemosyne: Funny how ebola vanished from the airwaves the minute the elections were over. Like magic.
jeffreyw
@germy:
Babe Didrikson was another woman athlete that you don’t hear much about these days.
“Achieved a great deal of success” is something of an understatement.
Ruckus
@The Thin Black Duke:
And they seem to dislike themselves a rather inordinate amount. They take pride in it, they revel in it, they celebrate it.
p.a.
Since the Civil Rights era of the 1960’s no numeric group has been a bigger supporter of the system-as-is than these people. No sympathy.
Mnemosyne
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
It’s not funny, because there’s way too many wasted lives and far too much abuse (including animal abuse) in the story.
But it is ironic that someone who spent his life howling about how horrible and violent and immoral Black people are was murdered for money by members of his own family.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@germy:
I wouldn’t expect you to feel sorrow for such people, germy. I wish it were possible to point and laugh such people to death. It isn’t. And waiting for them and conservative “olds” to die off isn’t the best strategy either. We had lots of ignorant-ass folks in 100 B.C., 500 A.D., and 1950. My suspicion us that we’ll have them in the year 2525, too.
We can’t ignore these people because they vote, they drive on our roads with their damned rolling coal trucks. Their kids spill their bigotry on our kids in school and on the playground.
What IS the way forward? I wish I knew. Stupid evidently has a shelf-life that puts Twinkies to shame. I think we maybe convert them one at a time through art and literature, through one-on-one human connection at work and such. It’s a slow process, and for every two we convert, a new one shows up.
I DO point and laugh at these people sometimes, abso-fucking-lutely. I guess I’m just not feeling it today. Today it just makes me sad for humanity. And cats.
Kathleen
@germy: The person with the backpack was, of course, Obama, waging his stealth “Deep State” subversion. Wouldn’t be surprised to see tweet.
ETA: Perhaps we should start referring to Sean as “Sean Shammity”.
ETA: Adam beat me to the punch. So much for my mad skrolling/skanning skillzzz!
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Mnemosyne:
Just so.
I guess I have this ludicrous hope that a few of these people such as in the story may see Hidden Figures and see the immense bravery and fortitude and goodness of the principle figures. That perhaps they’ll have a family member come out as gay or who brings home a black or Asian or Jewish or atheist boyfriend or girlfriend, and actually discover some common humanity with them. A boy can hope.
SiubhanDuinne
@germy:
I saw her play live in 1956 or 57. She was my first tennis “star.”
Kathleen
@The Thin Black Duke: This. This is a root cause problem here. Self hatred that is denied and projected. I would call it a “spiritual disease” which could prove to be our undoing.
Mnemosyne
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
From the stories I’ve seen, it usually happens with them meeting and becoming friends with people from the hated group(s) in real life, which is one of the reasons white supremacists work so hard to keep people separated. There was one really poignant story I read of a guy who had been raised by his white supremacist parents to basically be the Great White Hope of the movement, but he met and fell in love with a Black woman, and that made him question his entire life. The relationship didn’t work out for obvious reasons, but he was never able to go back to his former beliefs and even became an activist for equality.
Kathleen
@germy: Sort of like Hillary’s crimes.
Aimai
@Ohio Mom: society did not throw them away–except Malissa who got a shitty deal as a child in a family of abusive alcholics with no mother. This artucle is just the natural follow in to the arlie hochschild piece in mother jones–shiftlessness is considered a higher sin than racism. The son is proud of his father holding down a job and “never missing a day of work” but the racism etc…dont bother him.
lgerard
@germy:
just like how the color coded “terror warnings” disappeared immediately following the 2004 election
Gelfling 545
I am always amazed that these people (Klan and their like) are able to convince themselves they are a superior race despite overwhelming evidence that they are nothing of the sort.
Eric U.
there is quite a bit of propaganda fed to them that shows minorities as horrible, stupid, criminal people. So keeping the races separate is how it’s propagated.
Mike J
@Big Ole Hound:
It’s not just the rural south. 50-75 miles away from any city in the US is a lot like Deliverance.
H.E.Wolf
Thanks @germy (and PBS) for the shout-out to Althea Gibson!
Another great African-American woman in tennis was Wilma Rudolph: a childhood polio survivor who went on to become a Bronze-medal Olympian.
And thanks also @jeffreyw… Babe Didrikson Zaharias has a cherce little cameo (as herself) with K. Hepburn in “Pat and Mike”, in the golf contest portion of the film.
[ETA, fixed misspellings. Apologies, BDZ.]
bystander
@Mnemosyne: They are reporting Trump was still there. Wouldn’t it be great if it turned out Trump reeked of catpee and was having an affair with one of his fans?
trollhattan
@Tom:
Guy like this would be all, “Git outta here with that damn net before I shoot!”
MomSense
@germy:
Like I predicted they would, the media Ebola’d the emails before the ’16 election.
Now Pence and Chaffetz both have email problems and we’ve barely heard a peep about it.
MattF
@bystander: Hmm. Prob’ly not makin’ whoooopie with Melania, these days… so, could be…
MomSense
@Mike J:
Hell a mile west of I 95 anywhere in Maine is Deliverance
Pete Mack
“I may be henpecked and cat-pissed, but at least I’m better than the blacks.”
tkrr
@Kathleen: I want this to be real just so I can see how they’d react if Obama succeeded and then… handed off the presidency to someone else, because he’s not eligible anymore.
ChrisGrrr
@Gelfling 545: Their so-called flaws are obviously caused by the jealous Others.
EBT
The only victims here are the kitties. Maybe at one point the wife too.
Mnemosyne
@MattF:
At his age, weight, and health condition, he’s probably not makin’ whoopee with anyone, which is why he’s hiring Russian hookers to pee on beds.
The Pale Scot
@The Thin Black Duke:
I’m gonna hold on to that for future use if ya don’t mind.
The Pale Scot
@Kathleen: I’d go with Sean Scammity
J R in WV
We had a nice visit in Maine for nearly 3 weeks, quite a while ago now. Interesting thing about the country roads.
Down the center of the road the pavement is dead level flat and in good repair. The outside quarter on each side is wavy up and down, and occasional pot holes. Hard to drive with the inside tires on level pavement and the outside tires going up and down a LOT.
I finally figured out what was going on – the center of these roads was paved with stone over and over for 200 years, as the stone sank into the earth, more was stacked on top and rolled out, so the farmers could get their food to town to sell. Then, about 80 or 90 years ago, cars came to rural Maine.
Then some time later on there was enough traffic to need two lane roads – so they widened the roads, doubling the standard width, one quarter on each side. Those parts of the road are brand new, compared to the center of the road, which was built in the late 1700s and early 1800s. They will need to put rock/pavement on those strips for another 100 years before it stops heaving up in the winters.
But the folks in rural Maine seemed to be much like the folks in the middle of the eastern mountains around here. A little neater around the house, the useful junk is better organized into categories, and there are more Maine Coon Catteries per highway mile. Not much of that here.
But the food was pretty bland up there. We visited western Mass once to see the Boston orchestra at their summer camp. One night we went to a fancy brick oven pizza place with lots of good selections of pizze – when I asked for a shaker of crushed red peppers, the guy looked at me like I had just asked for the arsenic shaker – “We don’t have any thing like that here!”
I mean, even Papa Godfather has little foil packets of red peppers, come one! Now, maybe he was a new guy, and had never been to a real pizzaria… but it seemed pretty universal north of NYC. We stopped at a family-style restaurant and ordered the turkey dinner, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans.
They had invented a device to remove flavor from the food they served. No amount of salt and pepper would put flavor back into it. Butter on the potatoes, like butter on cotton. No help there either. No idea how they could serve green beans with less flavor than they come out of the can with! Place was crowded with local folks, too.
I can’t talk about the “government” now, not even to make fun of the circus. Too sad and unpredictable what they’re doing. Or about to do, or did under the table.
Pretty funny about the federal prosecutor declining to resign in NYC – fuck you guys, fire me if you can!! Hope he’s about to indict all of them, the FBI republican stooges, the Russian lobby guys, all of them…
There now, I talked about them after all -and it’s you guys’ fault!!
Teddys Person
@jeffreyw: I recently watched Olympic Pride, Olympic Prejudice (doc about all the African-American athletes at the 1936 Olympics). There were two female track and field athletes that talked about their experiences in Berlin and in the U.S. track and field world. One of the women told a story about being on a train with all the Olympic hopefuls – including Babe Didrikson – where Didrikson entered her compartment on the train and poured milk or ice water on her. Lowered my opinion of Didrikson a bit.
There were also two African-American boxers and one weightlifter highlighted at the ’36 Olympics. At the end of the doc, they showed pictures of the athletes, what they did later in life, and their birth and death dates. For two of these three men, their ultimate fate was unknown, which made me quite sad.
trollhattan
@J R in WV:
You remind me of my occasional trips back to Iowa from the west coast–food, for the most part is impossibly bland outside Des Moines anyway. The only hopeful progress is the few Mexican joints serving workers at the meat packing plants.
Sherparick
@Ohio Mom: As David Simon wrote about in the wire, these are people that American capitalism has thrown away. Just a white rural ghetto as opposed to the Black urban ghetto of Baltimore.
brendancalling
@BGinCHI: I fail to see what’s so “bad” about a dead Klansman, especially a Grand Wizard.
Another Scott
@Mnemosyne: Bingo.
They expect people will forget their freak-outs over Ebola that magically ended the Wednesday after the 2014 election.
:-/
We can’t forget, and we can’t let them set the narrative again either.
Cheers,
Scott.
EBT
@J R in WV: don’t get Pizza in small towns. Also the no flavor thing is what older people from the Midwest do. My ex’s mother had a bachelor’s in French cooking and holy fuck everything she made tasted like cardboard before me and the ex fixed it.
Shell
Why not? Trump probably already believes that Obama sneaks into his room at night and rearranges all the stuff on his dresser.
Ohio Mom
@Sherparick: Yes, that is a good way to put it, it is just another type of ghetto. I don’t really see much difference between Frank’s involvement in the Klan and someone in an urban area joining a gang. Both give you a sense of belonging and both terrorize. Truth be told, Frank sounded very ineffective as a Klansman (thank goodness!).
One of the things that struck me was that the cats had rescuers but the people didn’t. I know the people probably wouldn’t be particularly open to being rescued (that after all is part of their pathology) but still.
Take the son who tried going to college. It is extremely difficult to be the first person in your family to go to college.
My kid is taking a class at our local community college and I am continually impressed with the extra supports that are provded to their most vulnerable students — everything from their own tutoring center to a food pantry.
Did the son have that level of support at his college? The ways capitalism throws people away is systemic and subtle.
WereBear
I think Cracker Barrel has the patent.
polyorchnid octopunch
@The Pale Scot: I prefer “shitstain”. Works for all of ’em, no matter their moniker.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
Very tardy coming to this thread (had opera this afternoon) so someone else may well have commented, but I heard a report on MSNBC late this afternoon that Trump was indeed in the WH at the time of the intrusion. Think he flew to M-a-L very late last night or possibly early this morning, but I admit I don’t try to stay on top of his every coming and going.
ETA: O/T, but is it tomorrow that you fly to Orlando for your DW holiday with the nieces? Wishing you safe travels, minimal hassles from TSA, and a grand time. This adventure should earn you some comfortable years in the nursing home several decades down the road.
SiubhanDuinne
@Ruckus:
I think you mean “pungent.”
SiubhanDuinne
@jeffreyw:
I remember reading a kids’ biography of her back in the day (I was maybe around 10). There was a series of potted biographical sketches — I don’t recall the publisher, possibly Grossett & Dunlap? — about famous Americans. I read them voraciously. Paul Revere, Ben Franklin, Clara Barton, Thomas Edison, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Juliette Gordon Low, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, tons and tons of others. It didn’t impress me then, but it does now, that a significant number of the books were about American women. (I think George Washington Carver was in the series, but very few if any other people of color, so maybe not quite as enlightened as we might hope.)
Wish I had kept those books. They’d probably see me through a comfortable retirement by now.
Smedley the uncertain
@SiubhanDuinne: Traviata, Met Live HD? Me too, in our local small town 1891 Opera House. Nice to see two lovers that are young enough to be believable.
randy khan
Every death diminishes all of us, but in some cases it’s very hard to tell. This is one of those cases.
I do feel like there’s some chance that the cats were the winners in this; certainly none of the people were.
Eric U.
I have to admit I am quite fond of the idea of any grand dragon that ends up dead. However, there was an interview with this guy, and he seemed genuinely confused about what a grand dragon is supposed to be the least confused about. I wondered at the time if he had been killed by someone that thought he was too much of a squish. Kinda disappointed it was just his wife.
AnotherBruce
Not entirely sure why media is covering these scum suckers
JGabriel
I’m coming very late to the thread, but I gotta ask:
If the Traditionalist American Knights of the KKK made the guy who smells like cat piss their Imperial Wizard, then what the hell do the rest of them smell like?
Ian
@bystander:
I always thought the standard policy was to shoot people who climbed the gates. Wait, was this dude a follower of Islam or a minority?NO? That is why he is still alive…
As to the murdered KKK leader and his meth fueled child, FUCK THEM, No sympathy for these idiots. At least the crazy cat lady had empathy.
smart & fancy
You shouldn’t apologize
smart & fancy
YOU GOT THAT RIGHT BROTHER..FROM…YOUR BLACK SISTER”!!The hatred of the whites….stay away from it..
smart & fancy
@The Thin Black Duke: You got that right….the hatred that leaks…come from mostly white people…the HATRED never made sense..