The self-proclaimed head of the Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania died Friday in Spruce Manor Nursing Home, West Reading, with no known survivors.
Roy E. Frankhouser Jr., 69, who had operated the Mountain Church of Jesus Christ in the 100 block of South Fourth Street, which doubled as the local KKK headquarters, had resided in Spruce Manor since November 2006.
The Berks County coroner's office is seeking next of kin to claim Frankhouser's body.
Anyone with information about survivors or who wants more information call the coroner's office at 610-478-3280.
During his life Frankhouser had been convicted of an international fraud scheme, allegedly involved in assassination plots against U.S. government leaders, acquitted of a stabbing a rival Klan leader, lost an eye in a bar fight and waged a battle to get his white supremacist show on public access cable television, according to just a few of the dozens of newspaper clippings in the Reading Eagle archive.
The longtime Klansman and former member of the American Nazi Party was convicted in February 1995, following a four-day federal trial in Boston stemming from allegations he advised a white supremacist's mother to destroy evidence linking her son to the desecration of synagogues in Randolph and Brockton, Mass., as well as alleged assaults on black Brockton residents.
On April 28, 1993, Frankhouser was acquitted in Cumberland County Court of assault charges stemming from a 1992 stabbing incident in a hotel where a large KKK meeting was being held.
Frankhouser, then 53, was acquitted following a two-day trial.
The jury cited self-defense in finding the Klansman not guilty.
Frankhouser testified that stabbing victim Frank Mosley, a KKK security guard, and several skinheads ambushed and attacked him while he was attempting to enter the meeting. James W. Farrands, imperial wizard of a large Klan faction, was at the hotel.
Frankhouser said he defended himself with a Swiss army knife he had in his possession.
Frankhouser claimed a victory for free speech in 1985 when he launched "Race and Reason" on Berks Cable TV, the predecessor to BCTV.
He later hosted "White Forum" on BCTV.
He was on television on either network for more than a decade.
On Feb. 17, 1988, Frankhouser was sentenced to three years in federal prison and fined $50,000 for advising political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. to obstruct a federal grand jury probe into an alleged fundraising fraud scheme.
During the trial, Forrest Lee Fick of Stony Creek Mills testified that he and Frankhouser were asked by a member of LaRouche's organization to kill former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger during a flight to Europe.
According the newspaper records, Frankhouser was first arrested in 1961 at age 22 for kicking an Atlanta police captain in the shins during a protest.
