Frank G. Spisak Jr

"My aim was pretty good."

Frank Spisak's neighbours knew him as 'Frankie Ann Spisak.' He was a frizzy-haired transvestite who was looking forward to having a sex-change operation. They didn't know about Spisak's other side, a side that eventually took over his personality. Spisak eventually decided he no longer wanted to be a woman, but instead he wanted to be Hitler. He stopped wearing frocks and make-up, and changed to silly suits, slicked back hair and a toothbrush moustache. I'm not sure which gathered the most amount of laughs, but either way Spisak was serious about this new style.

In February 1982, Spisak launched his first "seek and destroy mission" in which he was attempting to "clean up the city". He walked onto the Cleveland State University and shot a black minister, Rev. Horace Rickerson, in a men's room. The Reverend died.

Four months later he shot another black, John Hardaway, 55, only wounding this one.

During August Spisak struck three times. The first was Timothy Sheehan, 50, also at Cleveland State University. Sheehan was Caucasian but Spisak suspected that he may have been Jewish. He then gunned down 17-year-old Brian Warford, another black, at a bus stop near the campus. His next attack failed, narrowly missing another CSU employee.

Spisak was arrested in September for firing his gun out of his apartment window, but was released on bail. Police then received an anonymous phone call telling them to check the gun, a .22-caliber pistol. The gun was linked to the Warford murder and Spisak admitted to the others.

At the trial Spisak pled insanity, saying that the one-man war was launched under direct orders from God, his "immediate superior." He also blamed his transvestite period on the Jews saying that they "seized control of my mind when I wasn't looking". No one fell for this crap and Spisak was sentenced to death on August 10, 1983.

"Even though this court may pronounce me guilty a thousand times, the higher court of our great Aryan warrior God pronounces me innocent. Heil Hitler!"
- Or so Spisak thought after the trial.

After Spisak was sentenced to death the Social Nationalist Aryan Peoples Party stepped forward to claim him as a dues-paying lieutenant. The party's leader, ex-con Keith Gilbert, announced that Spisak was "acting under direct orders of the party" when he murdered the three victims in Cleveland. The orders, according to Gilbert: "Kill niggers until the last one is dead."