Richard Girnt Butler (February 23, 1918 – September 8, 2004) was an American aerospace engineer for Lockheed, who later became the leader of the Christian Identity white supremacist group Aryan Nations.
Butler was born in Denver, Colorado, to Winfred Girnt and Clarence Butler. His father was of English ancestry, while his mother was of German ancestry.[1] He was raised in Los Angeles, California, and after graduating from high school in 1938, he became an aeronautical engineering major at Los Angeles City College. He was a co-inventor of the rapid repair of tubeless tires, for which he held both U.S. and Canadian patents.[2]
While he was a member of a Presbyterian church, Butler was drafted into the United States Army Air Forces where he served as a pilot during World War II.[3] He married Betty Litch in 1941, with whom he fathered two daughters.[3] Litch died on December 1, 1995 after 54 years of marriage.
In 1946, Butler organized and operated a machine plant for the production and precision machining of automotive parts and engine assemblies for commercial and military aircraft in the United States, Africa, and India.[3] Butler was a marketing analyst for new inventions from 1964 through 1973. Butler later became a senior manufacturing engineer for Lockheed Martin in Palmdale, California.[3]
In the early 1970s, he moved with his family from Palmdale, California, to North Idaho, where he founded the Aryan Nations, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian, whose ideology is a mixture of Christian Identity and Nazism. The organization operated from a 20-acre (81,000 m2) compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, a suburb of tourist town Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which became the center of a U.S. neo-Nazi network with worldwide links. Butler was implicated in plots to overthrow the United States government beginning in the 1980s, and had ties to the neo-Nazi group known as The Order. His group often blanketed the community with fliers and mass mailings, and held an annual parade in downtown Coeur d'Alene, however the parade was a pariah since the Aryan Nations was condemned by the town of Coeur d'Alene. Locals responded almost immediately by forming the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, with legal battles often overshadowing the parades.
Butler organized yearly gatherings of white supremacists at his compound in Idaho which he termed the "Aryan Nations World Congress." At their height in 1984-86, several hundred people would attend including most of the well known leaders of the American far right, such as Klansman Louis Beam, White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger, Gordon "Jack" Mohr, Robert E. Miles, Posse Comitatus leader James Wickstrom, Thomas Robb, Grand Wizard Don Black, and John Trochmann leader of the Militia of Montana.
In 1987, Butler was "indicted for seditious conspiracy," by the State of Arkansas, however "prosecutors failed to convince an Arkansas jury that Butler and several other prominent racists had conspired to start a race war."[4]
In 2000, Victoria and Jason Keenan, two Native Americans who were harassed at gunpoint by Aryan Nations' members, successfully sued Butler.[5] Represented by local attorney Norm Gissel and Morris Dees's Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, they won a combined civil judgment of $6.3 million from Butler and the Aryan Nations' members who attacked them.[6] Butler then sold the compound. In September 2000, fellow Sandpoint, Idaho millionaire Vincent Bertollini provided Butler with a new house in Hayden, Idaho. The house was troublesome for neighbors; police were forced to respond to at least one domestic disturbance call, in which two Aryan Nation members were engaged in an altercation on his lawn.
From late 2003 until his death, his reputation within the Aryan Nations suffered; when Butler and his traveling companion attempted to board a plane at a Spokane, Washington airport, his companion, who turned out to be porn star Bianca Trump (famous for her explicit, interracial sex scenes), was arrested on an outstanding forgery warrant.[7]
Butler died in his home on September 8, 2004. A spokesman for the Aryan Nation stated that he passed away in his sleep from congestive heart failure. At the time of his death, the Aryan Nations had 200 members, Butler's World Congress in 2002 drew less than 100 people, and when he ran for mayor, he lost by about 2,100 votes to 50.[3]