A 40-year-old white supremacist has been arrested after abducting a 12-year-old girl and trying to fly her across the country in disguise, authorities say. Nathan Larson, the alleged kidnapper, is a convicted felon with a track record of openly promoting pedophilia on his website, according to the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office. He has also run unsuccessfully for public office in Virginia.
Larson began corresponding over the internet this fall with the unnamed 12-year-old girl from Fresno. He then groomed the girl and flew to Fresno to meet her, convincing her to sneak out of her home in the middle of the night early Monday to see him, police said in a statement released Saturday.
At that point, police say, Larson ordered a ride share car to pick the two of them up and take them to the Fresno Airport.
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Larson had allegedly convinced the child to run away with him, making her wear a wig to hide her identity and pretend to be unable to speak and have a disability so she couldn’t communicate with others in the airport. When the girl was reported missing by her family to the Fresno Police Department and Fresno County Sheriff’s Office early Monday morning, authorities began searching for her.
An acquaintance of the girl’s told authorities that she had been talking with an adult man on the internet. The case was then referred to the Central California Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force. That tip, together with help from various other law enforcement teams, helped lead members of the investigation to the Denver International Airport on Monday where they found Larson and the child on a layover supposedly on their way to his home outside of Washington, D.C.
Larson was arrested. The girl was deemed to be physically unharmed and was quickly reunited with her family back in Fresno on Monday night. “There was some activity including at the airport that was inappropriate between her and the suspect,” police said, without providing further details.
So far Larson has been charged in Denver with harboring a minor. He’s also facing charges of kidnapping, child abduction, soliciting child pornography from a minor and meeting a child for the intention of sex in Fresno. Larson is set to have a hearing on Dec. 24th in Denver, after which it’s likely he’ll be extradited to Fresno.
Larson served 14 months in prison for threatening to kill the president in December 2008. It’s unclear whether he was referring to President George W. Bush who was in his final weeks in office or President-elect Barack Obama, who would enter office the following month.
He had an unsuccessful run for office in 2017 for a spot in the Virginia House of Delegates. In that race, he listed allowing fathers to marry their daughters, diminishing women’s rights, and legalizing child pornography among his goals if elected. Larson ran for local public office twice more, always either losing or dropping out of the race.
In 2018 he told Vice News that “we’re wasting resources by allowing women to work.” He described his political beliefs as “mostly a libertarian platform with a neoreactionary flavor,” and said “there's some truth” to Adolf Hitler’s racist ideology.
When confronted about his pro-pedophilia stance in 2018, he admitted to HuffPost that he ran two now-defunct websites where pedophiles discussed their fantasies in chat rooms. Among numerous posts written under a pseudonym on one of the sites, Larson is said to have once suggested “every pedo” should impregnate a “pedo wife” to create “fucktoys.”
Fresno authorities noted Larson’s “deeply disturbing” track record of promoting pedophilia after announcing his arrest on Saturday. “This is a man who runs a website, which encourages the raping of children and sharing of naked photos and video of children being raped,” the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office said. They believe Larson convinced the young girl to send him inappropriate photos of herself before her abduction.
Larson has also reportedly admitted to raping his ex-spouse, who was transgender and later committed suicide. The two had a child that Larson lost custody of in court.
“Due to the sophisticated nature of how Larson groomed this Fresno girl, detectives believe he has victimized other children in the past, but those cases have never been reported to law enforcement,” the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department wrote in a press release.
