Kansas jury weighs death penalty for Jewish center killer
By Kevin Murphy
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (Reuters) - A Kansas jury was deliberating Tuesday over whether a Missouri white supremacist should be sentenced to death in the killings of three people outside two Jewish centers in April 2014.
Frazier Glenn Cross, 74, a former senior member of the Ku Klux Klan who is representing himself in court, gave a Nazi salute to the jury, and declared "Death to the Jews" at the end of his closing statement.
Cross was found guilty last month of killing Reat Underwood, 14, and his grandfather, William Corporon, 69, outside the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, and Terri LaManno, 53, outside a Jewish retirement home, both in Overland Park, Kansas. The jury also convicted Cross of three counts of attempted murder for shooting at three other people.
Cross said he assumed everyone he shot at was Jewish. None of the dead were Jewish.
At his two-week-long trial, Cross testified in his own defense, admitting he committed the killings. He said he had wanted to kill as many Jews as he could.
Cross said Jews control the media, financial institutions and the movie industry and he blamed Jewish women for backing a movement that led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1973 to legalize abortion.
Prosecutor Steve Howe told jurors on Tuesday that the point-blank shootings met the definition of "heinous, cruel and atrocious" murders under Kansas law governing the death penalty.
He showed the jury a shotgun Cross used to shoot LaManno and recalled testimony that she screamed “no, no, no” before he fired.
“She was terrified,” Howe said. “And his response was to brutally kill her.”
At the end of his closing statement, Cross glared at jurors over his reading glasses as he sat in a wheelchair and said he dared them to give him the death penalty.
“I voluntarily sacrificed my freedom for my people,” Cross said. “Do you see fear in me? You see a proud white man.”
Cross, also known as Glenn Miller, suffers from emphysema and was wheeled into and out of the courtroom. He rose from the chair on Tuesday to hobble to a screen where he posted a picture of his family from many years ago.
He also wrote on a board, “It’s the Jews, stupid.”
Kansas restored the death penalty in 1994, but no one has been executed in the state since 1965. Nine people are now on death row, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections.
(Reporting and writing by Kevin Murphy and Carey Gillam; Editing by Dan Grebler and Grant McCool)
