Jury recommends death in Jewish site slayings
OLATHE, Kan. — Jurors recommended a death sentence Tuesday for the white supremacist who fatally shot three people at Jewish sites in Kansas last year.
The jury convicted Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., 74, last week of capital murder for the April 2014 shootings. The judge overseeing the trial will now decide whether to follow the jury’s sentencing recommendation.
Miller, who raised his arm in a Nazi salute after he was convicted, represented himself at the six-day trial. When presenting his defense, the Missouri man said prosecutors had “a slam dunk.” He then told the jurors, “You guys are going to put me on death row. We all know that.”
Miller admitted killing William Corporon, 69, and Corporon’s 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, at the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park. He also said he shot Terri LaManno, 53, shortly afterward at the nearby Village Shalom retirement center. None of the victims was Jewish.
In a rambling, hourlong closing argument earlier Tuesday, Miller touched on the media, white supremacy and his health. He concluded by telling the jury he didn’t care what sentence they handed down.
“Frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn,” he said and again raised his right arm in the Nazi salute.
Miller has said he suffers from chronic emphysema and wanted to kill Jewish people before he died. A doctor testified during trial that Miller probably had five to six years left to live.
Among Miller’s witnesses was his son, Frazier Glenn Miller III, 39, who testified that he doesn’t know where his father learned about “hating Jews and about hating other races.”
Miller, a Vietnam veteran, founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in his native North Carolina and later the White Patriot Party. He ran for the U.S. House in 2006 and the U.S. Senate in 2010 in Missouri, each time espousing a whitepower platform.
Kansas has not executed a death row inmate since reinstating the death penalty in 1994.