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This article was published 26/6/2016 (1547 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Violence caught up to Bill Harcus more than two decades after he became notorious as the head of the Ku Klux Klan in Manitoba.

Harcus, 45, who had legally changed his name to James Edsel Tucker, died early Thursday after being stabbed in an apartment on Furby Street.

Winnipeg police Const. Jason Michalyshen confirmed Sunday Tucker’s previous identity as Harcus, and said the fatal stabbing had nothing to do with his earlier life in the KKK.

In 1992, Harcus, then 21, and two other members of the KKK were charged with hate crimes. Harcus had pleaded not guilty to distributing flyers promoting hatred of black people, of helping distribute pamphlets entitled The Death of the White Race, and was also charged with mischief for allegedly erasing and replacing a recording on a Coalition Against Homophobic Violence answering machine.

Harcus was represented at the trial by lawyer Doug Christie, who also gained notoriety for defending other people charged with hate crimes, including Alberta school teacher Jim Keegstra and Toronto publisher Ernst Zundel.

But the charges against Harcus and the other two were stayed after a Winnipeg police officer admitted she perjured herself by not admitting at first she used surveillance tapes instead of just her memory to help her in writing her notes.

Helmut-Harry Loewen, a former University of Winnipeg sociology professor who has been active in the anti-hate movement for decades, said Harcus legally changed his name within a couple of years of the trial.

Loewen said he had received information at the time Harcus had possibly changed his name not because of his notoriety, but because other hate groups were upset with him for discrediting their movement and might come after him.

Loewen said as far as he knows, Harcus never re-entered the hate movement.

"In recent years people say he told them Bill Harcus is trying to amend his ways," Loewen said.

"He tried to cast himself as a person who is trying to change his ways and get on with his life, but he never disavowed himself of white supremacy."

Loewen said while Harcus’s trial ended up resulting in the charges being stayed against him and two others, it did bring to an end the KKK in Manitoba.

"He established the Klan as a presence here and that elicited a strong response from the human rights and anti-racism communities," he said.

"Who knows now whether he will be viewed as a martyr to the cause — I don’t know."

Two men have been charged.

Joshua Evans, 24, is charged with second-degree murder, two counts of robbery with a firearm, and charges of kidnapping with a firearm, sexual assault, assault with a weapon, and other weapons-related charges.

Martin Archie Flett, 22, faces the same charges.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca