Wife of White Supremacist Tom Metzger Is Dead at 49 : Obituary: Husband credits Kathleen Metzger, mother of six children, as being ‘fully supportive’ of his activities. She died of lung cancer.

Kathleen Metzger, whose white supremacist husband, Tom Metzger, was released from jail to be at her deathbed, died Wednesday at Fallbrook Hospital with him and four of her six children at her side. She was 49.

A hospital spokesman said that the family had made a decision to remove the comatose woman from life-support systems after it was determined that nothing more could be done for her.

Lung cancer was diagnosed in December in Mrs. Metzger, a heavy smoker for most of her life, just a few days before Tom Metzger, former Ku Klux Klan leader, was sentenced to jail for his part in a 1983 cross burning in Los Angeles in which he was found guilty of the misdemeanor offense of unlawful assembly. Metzger’s sentence was commuted, and he was released Feb. 21 after serving 46 days of his six-month sentence so that he could be with his critically ill wife.

The Metzgers had been married for 28 years, during which Metzger had risen to become a leader of the Ku Klux Klan and later had founded the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) movement.

In October, 1990, Tom Metzger, the Metzgers’ son, John, and WAR were found liable for the death in Portland, Ore., of an Ethiopian student who was beaten by skinheads linked with the White Aryan Resistance.

The Metzgers’ Fallbrook home, the tools and furnishings of Tom Metzger’s television and small appliance repair business and most of the family’s personal property were seized to pay a portion of the $12.5-million judgment.

“My wife was fully supportive of me in my activities. She was a wonderful wife, a wonderful mother and a great help to me,” Metzger said Thursday. “She always said to me, ‘fight ‘em. fight ‘em,’ and backed me in everything I have done. Her only vice was smoking, and it’s hard to criticize a person with only one vice.”

Metzger said he has appealed the multimillion-dollar judgment to the Oregon Supreme Court. “I’m going to fight it right up to the U.S. Supreme Court, because that is what my wife would have wanted me to do,” he said.

He explained that he had acted as his own attorney in the Portland civil suit, “not to show off, as some people said, but because I couldn’t get a lawyer who would handle the case, at least not one who wanted less than a $100,000 retainer up front. If I hadn’t defended myself and my son, we would have defaulted.

“This time I have a Chicago attorney, Michael Null, who believes this is a landmark case and has agreed to take it on without fee,” Metzger said. Metzger said he also plans to appeal his conviction in the Los Angeles cross burning, “challenging the extraordinarily large bail of $100,000 when the offense was a minor misdemeanor.”

“My wife did the lion’s share of my clerical work. Kathy worked hard for me in my political campaigns and always urged me on,” Metzger said. He ran unsuccessfully for a county supervisorial seat in 1978, for a congressional seat on the Democratic ticket in 1980 and for U.S. Senate in 1982.

Kathleen Metzger also is survived by her six children, Carolyn, 27; Dorraine, 26; John, 23; Lynn, 22; Rebecca, 11, and Laurie, 7, and by her mother and other relatives in the Los Angeles area.

Cremation is planned, followed by a private family memorial service in Fallbrook.