Diksha Sundriyal
A white nationalist group becomes the center of an intense investigation and subsequent manhunt by the FBI in Justin Kurzel’s ‘The Order.’ At the center of the story is veteran FBI agent Terry Husk, who believes he has done enough working with the agency and could take a step back and relax. But then, he lands himself in the middle of an investigation into a white supremacist group led by a man named Bob Mathews, which throws him back into action. One of the people working closely with Mathews is Gary Yarbrough. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Gary Yarbrough was One of the First Order Members to be Brought to Justice
Before Gary Lee Yarbrough got involved with the crime spree of the Order, he had already been to prison for a violent crime. He served three years in Arizona State Prison, where he joined the Aryan Brotherhood. Shortly after his release, he joined Richard Butler’s Aryan Nation and found a job with the group. His task was to focus on security. Initially, he was posted as a guard to be on the lookout for any intruders. He rose the ranks to become security chief before he left the group with Bob Mathews and joined the Silent Brotherhood, aka the Order. By this time, he was already married and had three children.
Once in the Order, Gary Yarbrough became an integral part of their operations, especially their streak of robberies through which they funded the group. The most notable of all was the armored truck robbery that got them $3.6 million in cash. If they hadn’t already been on the FBI’s radar, they became so following the murder of Alan Berg. Four months after the incident, Gary had his first standoff with the cops. On October 18, 1984, the Feds showed up around his house in Sandpoint. They were surveilling the area, and their target wasn’t Gary but his brother, Steven. He shot at three FBI agents and then fled the scene.
When the Feds entered Gary’s place, they found an arsenal, along with a huge portrait of Hitler. A few Aryan Nations uniforms were found alongside a bunch of firearms, several crossbows, explosives, and thousands of rounds of ammunition, among other things. Interestingly, one of the things in this cache of weapons was a MAC-10 sub-machine gun, which turned out to be the very weapon used to shoot down Alan Berg. For more than a month, Gary continued to elude the authorities, but they finally caught him on November 24, 1984. He, along with other members of the Order, were found cooped up in a Portland motel. A shootout ensued, and by the time the bullets stopped raining, Gary was caught.
Gary Yarbrough was convicted of eleven federal charges, which included the attack on FBI agents during the shootouts. For this, he received 25 years in prison. In another trial, he and four other members of the group were accused of racketeering and conspiracy charges. The robbery of the armored truck near Ukiah was also one of the main points of the trial. All five of the accused were found guilty, and this added another 60 years to Gary’s prison sentence. As for Berg’s murder, he maintained his innocence and was found so by the law.
Gary Yarbrough’s Final Years Were Spent in Prison
Gary Lee Yarbrough passed away from liver cancer on April 2, 2018, at a hospice center in Pueblo, Colorado. The 62-year-old was serving his 60-year sentence at the United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado. He was supposed to be released on October 28, 2024. He was married to Susan Hillman Yarbrough, whom he married in 2009. They came to know each other through the letters they exchanged while he was in an Indiana prison. Susan initiated contact after hearing about his story five years ago and had since campaigned to have him released. She created blog sites where she would post everything that Gary wrote while in prison and remained at the forefront of the Free Gary Campaign for years.
Due to his declining health, Gary had applied for parole, but he wasn’t granted so based on his continued ties to the white supremacist groups. While he claimed that he was not in touch with any such group outside the prison, his name was revered in neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups, who even protested and rallied to get him out of prison, along with three other surviving members of the Order. During the trial, Gary claimed that the Order was on a “political trial” and that they were “no more criminals than the men who took part in the Boston Tea Party.” However, by the time of his 2016 parole hearing, his thoughts seemed to have changed a lot. He said that the Order was more of a “Christian separatist” organization rather than a white nationalist group. He said he wasn’t a white supremacist and didn’t believe in “such an odious concept.” He continued the same thread of thoughts in his blog posts till his final days.
