METALINE FALLS, Wash. -- The wife of neo-Nazi gangleader Robert Mathews says her husband was 'murdered' by the FBI because he was 'brave enough to stand up and fight for God, truth and their race.'
Mathews, who had been wanted for an armored car robbery and for wounding an FBI agent, was presumed killed after his secluded hideout near Seattle exploded in flames during a shootout Saturday with SWAT teams.
Debbie Mathews, who lived in a trailer home with her husband and three-year-old son, complained in a statement published Wednesday that the FBI refused to let her speak to her husband during the 36-hour standoff on remote Whidbey Island.
She also said she believed in her husband's innocence.
'I will not have my husband's name besmirched after his death. It is easy and convenient to accuse a dead man of crimes because he cannot stand up and defend himself,' she said. 'I know in my heart he would never have committed those robberies the paid informant said he did.
In a letter Mathews apparently wrote to a white supremacist cult in Idaho, he promised to sever the head of the informant his wife referred to and described his plans to save the 'Aryan race.'
Vowing to punish FBI agents and 'cowardly, sheepish degenerates' he said were working to destroy the white race, Mathews said he feared 'my entire race was headed for oblivion unless the white man rose and turned the tide.'
Federal prosecutors have charged Mathews and five members of his 'Silent Brotherhood' gang with the 1983 robbery of an armored car near Seattle. They said the group got $25,000 in that heist and another $3.6 million when they ambushed a Brinks truck earlier this year near Ukiah, Calif.
Mrs. Mathews, who refused to answer questions after reading her statement, said, 'My husband and Gordon Kahl were guilty only of self-defense. They were both murdered because they were brave enough to stand up and fight for God, truth and their race. Their deaths will not be forgotten.'
Kahl, a member of a tax-resister group called Posse Comitatus, was slain by federal agents in Arkansas last year after allegedly killing two agents and wounding two others who were trying to arrest him for parole violation.
FBI spokesman Joseph A. Smith refused to comment on her statements.
Mathews, 31, of Metaline Falls, was tracked last week to Whidbey Island, Wash., where he apparently died of smoke inhalation when illumination flares dropped from a police helicopter sparked a fire that destroyed his hideout.
A charred body believed to be the fugitive's was pulled from the rubble. But although dental comparison provided tentative identification, the medical examiner said positive identification could not be confirmed.
Four people were arrested during that dragnet, including one of the gang charged with the armored car robbery. Another gangmember was captured earlier and three more are still being sought.
The letter Mathews sent to the Aryan Nations church in Idaho predicted his death.
'It is only logical to assume that my days on this planet are rapidly drawing to a close,' he said. 'I will leave knowing I have made the ultimate sacrifice to secure the future of my children.'
Mathews said he was worried his son 'would be a stranger in his own land, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan in a country populated mainly by Mexicans, mulattoes, blacks and Asians.'
Mathews was the founder of a neo-Nazi group variously called the 'Silent Brotherhood' and the 'White American Bastion,' which officials say planned to use stolen money to finance murder and terrorist attacks.