Eric Lichtblau

But then that story begins to fall apart for various reasons.

And the police weren't originally focusing on Sam, but within a few days, they do begin to see him as a suspect.

He's been changing details.

He concocts a girlfriend whose name he can't really remember.

He has cuts and bruises on his hands.

Yes.

So then they have the forensics examination that confirms tragically that it is him.

But what they're still lacking then is really a motive.

And most of what cracked open the motive

A lot of that was done from outside journalists digging into it, especially from ProPublica, which did a lot of great reporting on white supremacy in general, including this case, to their credit, by showing that

There were all sorts of internal chat logs where they were basically celebrating the murder of a dead gay Jew, as they put it.

And this was literally something to be celebrated, as horrible as that sounds, at Atomwaffen.

Not at all.

Yes, that was journalism making a difference.

Now the police after that were able to get into his phone and that revealed a lot of further evidence of just how –

deeply embedded he was with the neo-Nazi movement.

Now that, and

There was tons more evidence that then was produced at trial of reams and reams of stuff that he had on his phone.

There was so much they had to limit how much was introduced at trial.

So that was just a tranche of racist, vile, anti-Semitic stuff on his phone.