Deceased convicted murderer/gang leader Gary Yarbrough handwritten letter envelope set, signed Gary

A radical racist who once served as the personal bodyguard of Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler has died.

Gary Lee Yarbrough was also a member of the neo-Nazi splinter group known as The Order, which sought to divide the nation along racial lines and establish, through a violent uprising, an all-white territory in the Pacific Northwest. He died of liver cancer early Monday in a hospice center in Pueblo, Colorado, according to his wife, Susan Hillman Yarbrough. He was 62.

Pueblo is a short drive from the Supermax federal prison where Yarbrough was serving a 60-year sentence. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons did not respond to a request for information, but an online prison roster confirmed that Yarbrough died on Monday. He had been in custody, in one facility or another, since November 1984.

The Order funded its activities by counterfeiting cash and by committing a string of armed robberies, culminating with the July 1984 theft of $3.6 million from an armored truck on a highway in Ukiah, California. Some of that money was distributed to other white nationalist groups.

Members and sympathizers of The Order planted real and fake bombs to divert attention while they conducted robberies in Spokane, Coeur d’Alene and Seattle in the mid-1980s. Those crimes were believed to have inspired bombings and robberies that took place in 1996 in Spokane Valley.

Among the many crimes that investigators linked to Yarbough was the murder of Alan Berg, a provocative Jewish radio personality who was gunned down in the driveway of his Denver home on June 18, 1984. Yarbrough never was charged for that crime, though two of his conspirators, Bruce Pierce and David Lane, were identified as the gunman and getaway driver, respectively. They, too, have died in prison.