Two Covington Lies Demolished

"Murders That Never Happened" is a short excerpt from my much longer treatment of Harold Covington's defamation of Ben Klassen. I have found this convenient as a brief and indisputable demonstration of Harold Covington's brazen lying. Recently I posted it on The Occidental Observer, and asked Covington directly if he would like to back away from these accusations:

Covington, what do you mean you rest your case?

You have a paper trail of disgrace behind you that is not going away, especially since you yourself keep those issues alive by continuing the libels.

Let me ask you this Covington, since Chechar didn’t do it: do you still stand by the Barry Edwards and Dennis Witherspoon murder accusations that you’ve been making for decades, or do you now back away from those accusations since I contacted the relevant police agencies and they say that no such crimes occurred? [31 March 2011]

Covington's silence was conspicuous and telling, but more shocking was the lack of any expression of concern from onlookers, many of whom may have come to the discussion from a link that Covington posted on his own blog.

Nonetheless it had to be an embarrassment for any Covingtonista with at least half a brain when the examples were as clear as these:

Murders that Never Happened

Harold Covington would have us believe that Ben Klassen, founder of the Church of the Creator and author of Nature's Eternal Religion, was responsible for many unpunished crimes, including a number of murders, and that although he, Covington, knew this, somehow Klassen was never charged. 

Part 1. "Barry Edwards"

There is the case of "Barry Edwards," which appears in Covington's vicious obituary of Klassen in 1993, and which is visible online and was reproduced in several of Jeffrey Kaplan's books about White Nationalism. The story is perpetuated in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement (2007) as follows:

1978 - Klassen business manager Barry Edwards is murdered in what police call a “gangland style execution.” Edwards’s body is found on June 12th, 1978 in the trunk of a car parked at a public beach in West Palm Beach.

This seems to be total fiction. In a Google News Archive search through the whole decade of the 1970s you will not find reference to a murdered Barry Edwards in West Palm Beach. An inquiry was sent to the West Palm Beach Police Department as to whether any Barry Edwards was murdered in that city in 1978. On 31 August 2010 Sergeant Jim Cink of the homicide unit gave this response:

Regarding your inquiry into the death/murder of a Mr. Barry Edwards, our records show a Barry Edwards alive as of April 1984. Without any other details such as his date of birth, social security number, etc., we may not be talking about the same person. I can tell you we don't have, according to our records, a Barry Edwards murdered in the City of West Palm Beach after 1967.

Part 2. "Dennis Witherspoon"

Covington's A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement and his gloating obituary of Klassen also contain the tale of "Dennis Witherspoon," retold in the Brief History as follows:

1990 - On October 12th, 20 year-old former Skinhead Dennis Witherspoon is found dead in a rural area of Dade County, Florida. He has been bound with duct tape and shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber revolver. Witherspoon was known to have been a former COTC “Reverend” who claimed that in the summer of 1989, a year previously, he arrived in the Otto, N.C. compound and was invited to Klassen’s basement rec room for a private showing of Leni Riefenstahl’ s Triumph of the Will. He was given drugged liquor and passed out. Witherspoon then claims he suddenly awoke on the floor, doubled up nude with sofa pillows under him, while Klassen was in the act of sodomizing him, with the movie still playing. Witherspoon jumped up and assaulted Klassen, beating him very badly and extorting a promise of money. Witherspoon claims he was given $10,000 in cash next day and a used car, with which he drove to Florida. The only comment Klassen ever makes about this incident is that Witherspoon was attempting to blackmail him. Florida police write off Witherspoon’s death as a drug-related killing, which may be correct.

The details given here imply that Klassen was a suspect in this "murder" and was questioned about it, but you will find nothing about it in a Google News Archive search. "The Old Order Passeth," an article written by Harold Covington under the pen name Luther Williams, which Covington sent out to readers of his Resistance newsletter in the 1990s, has 1987, not 1989, as the date of the alleged anal rape: obviously, dates can be flexible in a story that was never based on fact anyway. According to Will Williams there was never a Dennis Witherspoon in the COTC.

For absolute verification, an inquiry was sent to the Miami-Dade Police Department:

Is there any record of a Dennis Witherspoon being found dead in rural Dade County? The claim is that he had been shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber revolver. This is alleged to have happened on 12 October 1990.

On 2 September 2010 Major Rey Valdes of the homicide bureau gave this response:

Thank you for your recent email requesting information related to the death of Dennis Witherspoon, which occurred in Miami-Dade County, on October 12, 1990.

We have researched our records and were unable to locate a homicide case involving Mr. Witherspoon, or matching the description you provided. In abundance of caution, we also contacted the Medical Examiner Department, with similar results.

This means that they could find neither any record of a homicide involving a Dennis Witherspoon, nor any killing of a similar description on or about the specified date.

Major Valdes says that further information, if anybody has any, or further inquiries about the alleged Witherspoon homicide (which evidently never occurred) should be directed to Sergeant Miguel Tabernero of the Homicide Bureau, Miami-Dade Police Department.

The examples given above are typical of the stories that Harold Covington invented about Ben Klassen and the Church of the Creator in 1989-1993 and has been propagating ever since.