May 13, 2005
White supremacist Martin Lindstedt, of Granby, Missouri, was arrested by Newton County authorities on May 10, and charged with first degree statutory sodomy, a charge that indicates the victim was under 12 years of age.
For years, Lindstedt, a former truck driver, has been a vocal white supremacist and an adherent of Christian Identity, a racist and anti-Semitic religious sect. Most recently, he had been the Missouri contact for the Church of the Sons of Yahweh, a Louisiana-based Christian Identity group whose leader, Morris Gulett, was arrested in May 2005 for allegedly planning a bank robbery.
Newton County authorities said that Lindstedt's arrest followed an investigation stemming from a report of child abuse. According to documents posted by Lindstedt to his Web site, his four grandchildren were removed from his custody following the report and he was suspected by authorities of having abused them.
Lindstedt said on his Web site that local authorities "and probably the jews and feds," wanted to create false child molestation charges against him, and claimed that he "notified the Resistance to commit some discreet atrocities if necessary for revenge." He told a local prosecuting attorney that he prayed every day that God or Muslims would use biological warfare on the U.S. and that he himself looked forward "to destroying your families in retaliation for destroying not only my family, but the families of so many others."
In the 1990s, Lindstedt was an early proponent of the anti-government militia movement, operating his "one-man militia group," the 7th Missouri Militia, and publishing an occasional newsletter, "The Modern Militiaman's Gazette," throughout the late 1990s. Over time, Lindstedt became more interested in promoting white supremacy, changing the title of his newsletter to the "Resistance Political Frontline."
Lindstedt achieved most of his notoriety as a perennial candidate for public office. Since 1994, he has run for federal, state, and local offices, on a variety of political party tickets, but has invariably lost, typically with a miniscule percentage of the vote.