Frank Ancona, head of a Ku Klux Klan group in Missouri, has been found dead in southeast Missouri.
The body of the Leadwood, Mo., resident was found Saturday near the Big River by a family fishing in the area, Washington County Sheriff Zach Jacobsen said.
Jacobsen said authorities learned Friday that Ancona had disappeared and that his car had been found by a U.S. Forest Service employee on Forest Service property near Potosi.
"During the investigation, one subject was arrested on an unrelated warrant and two search warrants were executed in Washington County," Jacobsen said. "Subsequently, a body was discovered on the bank of the Big River near Belgrade, Mo., in southern Washington County ... The body was identified as Mr. Ancona, and his family has been notified."
Ancona had not been seen since Wednesday morning, authorities said. Leadwood Police Chief William Dickey told the Park Hills Daily Journal that police learned Ancona was missing when they were contacted by his employer. Ancona's wife, Malissa, told police that her husband had received a call from work saying he needed to deliver a vehicle part across the state. But the employer told police that Ancona was not sent on a delivery run.
Dickey told the Daily Journal that a search of Ancona's home found a safe that looked as though someone "had taken a crowbar to it." Everything was missing from the safe, Dickey said, and Ancona's guns were missing from the house.
The police chief also said that he questioned Malissa Ancona about a Facebook post she'd made the day he disappeared. In the post, she said she was seeking a new roommate. Dickey said Malissa Ancona told him that when her husband left, he said he was filing for divorce when he got home, so she figured she would need a new roommate to help pay the bills.
Ancona, the imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had posted recruiting videos and cross-burnings on YouTube and was profiled in a domestic terrorism series published by The Kansas City Star in 2015.
In a series of interviews with The Star in 2014 and 2015, Ancona described his Klan as a Christian organization and a fraternal order.
"The only things secret about the Klan are that our rituals and ceremonies are only for members to see," he said. "That's part of the mystique of being a member."
He said his Klan was not a hate group: "How can you be a Christian organization and hate other people?
"I've actually taken a lot of heat from other white nationalists because of that," he said. "I'm called an N-lover and a Jew, blah, blah, blah. I'm doing everything I can to hold it to the principles it's supposed to be by."
But the group's website is filled with race-based language, including this statement: "This Order will strive forever to maintain the God-given supremacy of the White Race."
Ancona said his organization had members from every state except Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah. Missouri contributed many members, he said.
"Missouri's always been a strong Klan state," he said. "Kansas, not so much."
Ancona was not popular with other KKK groups and was vocal in his criticism of them. He told The Star that there were few Klan organizations in the country that he considered legitimate and had been in squabbles with some of them.
Although Ancona claimed his Klan had thousands of members, figures are impossible to come by for such groups, which don't share their membership lists. Watchdog groups say the numbers are grossly overstated.
