The boyfriend of an Ohio woman who allegedly worshipped mass murderers like Dylann Roof and plotted a massacre was charged Wednesday with lying to the FBI, authorities said.
A criminal complaint says Vincent Armstrong, 23, initially told investigators that he and girlfriend Elizabeth Lecron, 23, were “role-playing” when they talked about killing people—but later admitted it had “crossed over” from fantasy to reality and had started prepping for an attack.
Armstrong was taken into custody two days after the feds arrested Lecron. She told an informant working for the FBI that the two of them had hatched a plan to commit “upscale mass murder” at a Toledo bar, according court papers filed this week.
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She and Armstrong also wrote about their urge to carry out violent attacks in disturbing journal entries seized by the feds and on their Tumblr accounts.
“Around 5 a.m., I called [Subject-1],” Lecron wrote in May, referring to Armstrong. “He told me he felt homicidal. He had followed a car, wanting to murder. Didn’t happen but it worried me. I just told him ‘soon.’”
A few weeks later, Armstrong wrote that he was haunted by “a vision to kill.”
“To hunt the unwilling. These peasants to society. The hatred toward the human race is bewildering,” he wrote. “It makes me feel good to know I will end it all. Very soon. I am buying a knife this weekend to slay my pray [sic].”
In another entry, he said he had bought caps for pipe bombs. “Soon we will bring destruction on society,” he threatened.
The journal entries were detailed in a 19-page criminal complaint that laid bare Lecron’s alleged blood lust—including her correspondence with Roof, who is behind bars for carrying out the 2015 Charleston church massacre; a visit to Columbine High School, the site of a 1999 mass shooting; and a Tumblr account full of mass-murderer worship so foul it was taken down by the company only to be replaced by a similar one.
According to the complaint, Lecron expressed admiration for a host of mass killers, boasting that she had written to 1979 school shooter Brenda Spencer and posted photos of Crimean school shooter Vladislav Roslyakov and human remains inside the house of a Prussian cannibal.
But she appeared particularly obsessed with the Columbine killers and Roof.
In August, she and Armstrong flew to Colorado, and she was caught taking photos on the campus, according to the complaint. She wrote about the visit on her Tumblr.
“Lecron posted her next trip would be to Charleston to visit ‘the church,’” the complaint says, adding that it’s believed she was referring to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston where white supremacist Roof murdered nine black people.
In July, Lecron wrote to Roof in prison and asked him for reading suggestions, signing her note with a drawing of a flower and a ribbon and the words, “Best wishes,” according to the complaint.
Authorities said Roof has only every responded to four people who have written to him, but Lecron was one of them. He asked her to send him books about civil uprising and the Nazis, and she obliged, sending him a book about a Belgian who fought for the Nazis.
“Stay strong, Storm,” she wrote to him. “You have a lot of people who care for you beyond those walls.”
Lecron told the FBI informant that Roof had written to her four times. “Super cool,” she said.
The informant introduced Lecron to undercover agents posing as like-minded extremists who began discussing with her possibility of an attack. Soon after, she agreed to buy components of a bomb to blow up a pipeline, authorities said.
