April Gaede

She is the mother and promoter of the tonally challenged twins Lynx and Lamb, whose band Prussian Blue was for a time hot on the white nationalist circuit. In 2007, Gaede was accorded the “honor” of disposing of the remains of terrorist David Lane, a member of The Order who died while serving a 190-year federal sentence in connection with the murder of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg in 1984.

In her own words

“White people are and have been overwhelmingly the victims of interracial violence for years, not the perpetrators — though the Jewish media tell us the opposite. We must reclaim the moral high ground that is rightfully ours, and use every opportunity to show the madness and injustice of White guilt, multiracialism, and universalist attempts to convert other races.”
— 2003 essay on the National Vanguard website

“I find other races annoying. … I don’t like their chattering in other languages, I don’t like the way they look. I mean, 99% of them, they’re just not pretty. I don’t want to be around them. I don’t like the fact they seem to make everything just dirty and messy wherever they are. I don’t like to be around them. I want to be around all white people.”
— 2004 interview with the BBC’s Louis Theroux

 “Did you know anti-Semitism is a disease? Yeah, you catch it from Jews.”
— Quoted in GQ magazine, 2006

Background

Best known for her twin daughters, Lynx and Lamb, who as adolescents performed folk music at white supremacist festivals and elsewhere under the name Prussian Blue, April Gaede was suckled on neo-Nazi ideology. She grew up on a ranch near Fresno, Calif., where her father branded the family’s horse and cattle with swastikas.

In 1986, when she was 20, Gaede says she selected her first husband, Kris Lingelser, for his “Aryan” looks. The couple settled in Bakersfield, Calif., and, eight years later, Gaede gave birth to her blonde, blue-eyed twins. She was not overtly active in the neo-Nazi movement during this period of her life.

In 1994, Gaede was arrested for indecent exposure when she rode a horse down a public street wearing only a cowboy hat, boots and bumper stickers pasted in strategic locations as a publicity stunt for a local radio station.

Citing her husband’s alleged drug abuse and incidents of domestic violence, Gaede filed for divorce in 1997. A second marriage came and went before Gaede threw herself headlong into racial activism in 2001, the same year she joined the neo-Nazi National Alliance. After joining the Alliance, Gaede spent hundreds of hours posting racist and anti-Semitic diatribes, along with gardening and parenting tips, on white nationalist online message boards. She was also a prolific writer of hateful letters to California newspapers.

Gaede kept her twins out of public school, preferring to steep them in white nationalist ideology at home. “I’ve done it [home schooling] without an ‘approved’ curriculum. I made up my own curriculum,” she said in 2005 interview published on the National Alliance website. “And what I’ve done is use a lot of books from the 1950s — from the years before ‘civil rights’ and feminism became so evident.”

When Lynx and Lamb turned 9 in 2003, Gaede began heavily promoting them as fresh — and attractive — faces on the neo-Nazi music scene with an eye toward luring mainstream audiences into the white nationalist fold. “What young, red-blooded American boy isn’t going to find two blonde twins, 16 years old, singing about white pride and pride in your race … very appealing?” she asked later.

Prussian Blue, named for the distinctive color of Zyklon B residue in the Nazi gas chambers, gained widespread mainstream media attention and performed covers of hate rock anthems as well as original songs like “Victory Day” and “I Will Bleed for You” at Holocaust denial conferences and racist skinhead festivals across the country. They frequently have been described as a neo-Nazi version of the Olsen twins.

Gaede married a third time in 2003. Her union with public school teacher Mark Herrington produced a third daughter. Gaede has since publicly rued the loss of six prime childbearing years between marriages, when, as she put it, “I could have produced four to six more children with that ideal eugenic quality that [Lynx and Lamb] possess.”

In 2005, during a leadership struggle within the National Alliance, Gaede and others were expelled and founded a new white nationalist group, National Vanguard. Gaede published articles in National Vanguard’s magazine warning white women about their vulnerability to rape by African-American men and comparing California’s rapid demographic shifts to “watching a good friend die a slow death.” Gaede quit National Vanguard in 2006, after its founder and leader, Kevin Alfred Strom, was indicted for possession of child pornography.

Gaede and Herrington relocated to Kalispell, Mont., that same year. Lynx and Lamb continued to record and perform while Gaede remained active on various white nationalist websites in addition to posting regular updates on Prussian Blue’s blog.

In 2007, Gaede was given the high privilege of disposing of the ashes of The Order member David Lane — a man who drove the getaway car during the machine-gun assassination of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg in 1984 — after Lane died in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Lane frequently corresponded with Gaede, who encouraged his infatuation with her teenage twin daughters, who were 54 years his junior. Lane referred to them as his “fantasy sweethearts.” Gaede announced with great fanfare that she and “the gals from WAU [Women For Aryan Unity]” had established a David Lane Memorial Fund to cover the expenses of interring Lane’s remains.

According to Gaede, Lane told her that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes placed in the capstone of a pyramid monument. However, as Gaede wrote on the racist online forum Stormfront, “Since we are not in a situation to build a monument in a White homeland,” she planned instead to distribute Lane’s ashes among 14 smaller, portable pyramids, which would then be placed in the homes of 14 white nationalist women. (The number of pyramids is a direct reference to the “14 Words,” the famous white nationalist catchphrase authored by Lane). Lane’s body was reportedly cremated in early June 2007 after a private ceremony near Gaede’s Montana home. In January 2010, Gaede announced plans to launch a white-power online dating service on Stormfront, the leading white supremacist web forum. She was eager, she said, “to act as a go-between, researcher, matchmaker, older sister and guide for any WNs [white nationalists] who are looking for a WN spouse. But, to the vocal disappointment of several Stormfront posters, nothing seems to have come of this venture. Similarly ill-fated was Gaede’s attempt, announced later that year on Stormfront, to launch a magazine for white nationalist housewives (that niche was already filled by Homefront, a publication of the neo-Nazi Women for Aryan Unity).

Most embarrassing of all for Gaede was her daughters’ announcement in 2011 that they had renounced the extremist views of their girlhood in favor of marijuana-fueled “love and positivity.” In an interview with The Daily, an online publication, Lamb characterized her younger self as “just spouting a lot of knowledge that I had no idea what I was saying.”

Gaede dismissed her daughters’ professed change of heart as the stuff of an ill-advised youth. “They’re 19,” she said. “When they have children of their own, they’ll come to the same conclusions I have.” However, the day after The Daily’s piece came out, Gaede had a different story for her friends on Facebook, portraying the twins’ conversion as less than sincere: “The girls are using the Jews [media] to make bank as usual. If they had done anything else they would not have gotten any attention.”