The KKK once attacked her family. Now she was writing to a former neo-Nazi.
‘Dear Mr. Gillespie,’ her letter began
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Michael E. Miller.
On the first day of class, on one of the country’s most diverse college campuses, the assignment came as something of a shock.
Write to a former neo-Nazi who had firebombed a synagogue, the instructor told his students at George Mason University.
Near the front of the class, Stacy Nelson stirred in her seat.
The African American senior had been hesitant to take a course on hate crimes when the subject seemed all too real. At the time, the country was nearing the end of a divisive and racially charged presidential election campaign. The alt-right, with its call for a form of American apartheid, was on the rise. So were reports of hate crimes.
The teacher, Kevin Fornshill, a former U.S. Park Police detective, saw the assignment as an experiment.
Could students studying hate crimes learn from someone who had actually committed one?
The former Neo-Nazi
Sean Gillespie had been incarcerated at a high-security prison in Colorado for more than a decade, including eight years in solitary confinement. His face was covered in racist tattoos that he now longed to have removed.
He’d been a member of the Aryan Nations, a white-supremacist group headquartered in rural Idaho. When the compound was closed in 2001, he joined the Army. After his views got him discharged, Gillespie embarked on a hate-fueled cross-country crime tour that included a stop in Oklahoma City.
Before FBI agents could read him his rights, Gillespie told them they could search his pickup truck. Inside, they found a video camera that contained a recording of Gillespie, staring into the camera as he sat in the truck near the synagogue.
“I am going to firebomb it with a molotov cocktail,” he said in the video. “I will film it for your viewing enjoyment, my kindred. White power.”
Moments later, flames erupted on-screen.
During prison
Gillespie confessed. The plan had been to firebomb a Jewish person’s house, he said. He had found a Jewish-sounding name in the phone book but had gotten lost on his way to the address and attacked the synagogue instead.
While awaiting sentencing, Gillespie wrote a letter to the synagogue.
“To the Zionist scum,” it began. “This letter is to thank you for the lies and your testimony against me.”
At the end of the letter, next to a swastika, he wrote “six million more” — a reference to the Jews killed in the Holocaust.
U.S. District Judge Robin J. Cauthron sentenced Gillespie to 39 years in prison.
Before he was led out of the courtroom, Gillespie raised an arm in a Nazi salute.
Nelson’s letter
It began with her family’s story. One night in the 1950s, she wrote, her grandparents were on a date when they were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan.
“My grandpa had to fight the group of guys trying to rape my grandmother,” she wrote. “He got beat up pretty bad but luckily he was able to scare them off. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here today.”
The incident had turned her grandmother against whites, Nelson said.
“I think it’s sad that my grandma has put herself in a little box, separated from the rest of the world,” she wrote.
Gillespie’s letter
Gillespie’s letter arrived a few weeks later. Nelson’s hands shook as she opened it.
“I too have had things in my past that were traumatic enough to cause me to hate others,” he wrote.
Everything changed in 2008, when Gillespie was put in solitary confinement for stabbing another inmate, he told Nelson.
“It was there that I changed my views on race,” he wrote. “I started to question my past and realized that I did not like what I had become.”
After three years of being surrounded by white supremacists, the isolation was liberating. In therapy, he traced the roots of his racism to sex abuse he had suffered at the hands of an Asian babysitter. Stuck in his cell for 23 hours a day, Gillespie pushed himself to change.
“I used to hate seeing inter-racial relationships on T.V.,” he wrote. “I would cuss my television or change the channel. So I forced myself to watch this.”
He also began to read books by black authors. In fact, he told Nelson, he had just finished “Stride Toward Freedom,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott.
“So I can just imagine the traumatic atmosphere that your grandmother experienced,” he wrote.
Also, Gillespie said that writing to students was one of the few reasons he had to live.
“It does give me a sense of happiness that I am no longer full of senseless hate,” he wrote.
Nelson couldn’t read the letter straight through. It took her two days to finish it.
Turning over a new leaf
Gillespie cited the synagogue’s forgiveness when, in 2014, he asked President Barack Obama to commute his sentence to 20 years. The request is still pending, now before President Trump.
He has also asked the Bureau of Prisons for permission to have his face tattoos removed, but the request has so far been denied.
Fornshill plans to have his class write to Gillespie again this fall — as much for the inmate’s sake as for that of his students. The former detective and the former neo-Nazi have struck up a friendship, exchanging movie and book reviews.
During a recent call, Gillespie quoted Nelson Mandela.
“Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished. I did some terrible things, but now I’m trying to let that goodness shine.”
