Malissa Ancona once told police that her son pulled the trigger. Two years later, standing before a circuit judge, she said something very different: that she alone fired both shots that killed her husband, Frank Ancona, the Imperial Wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, inside their Leadwood, Missouri home in February 2017.
The reversal came during Ancona's April 2019 plea hearing, when she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, tampering with evidence and abandonment of a corpse, according to AP News. She received a life prison sentence. It was a stunning about-face from the account she originally gave investigators, in which she claimed her stepson, Paul Jinkerson Jr., was the one who shot Frank Ancona while he slept in the master bedroom, according to a probable cause statement detailed by the St. Louis Riverfront Times.
Jinkerson did not escape accountability despite his stepmother's later claim that she acted alone. A Missouri judge sentenced him to 59 years in prison in July 2019 after a jury convicted him of second-degree murder, abandonment of a corpse and other related charges tied to Frank Ancona's death, per the same AP account. The court's handling of the case left both defendants held responsible even as their stories about who actually fired the fatal shots continued to shift.
A House Full of Cats and a Marriage Falling Apart
Frank Ancona, 51, worked as an overnight courier for a St. Louis-based shipping company and had moved to Leadwood, a small town of 1,282 people about 70 miles south of St. Louis with a median household income of roughly $31,000, five or six years before his death, according to the Riverfront Times report. At home, he and Malissa Ancona, then 44, were living amid what the outlet described as chaos: dozens of cats and two dogs crammed into a 1,000-square-foot house. Frank Ancona reportedly told his stepdaughter the home was unfit for an animal to live in, and he sometimes had to sleep on the couch because the bedroom was trashed.
Neighbor estimates cited by the Riverfront Times put the cat population as high as 70 at its peak, and animal rescuers who later intervened pulled 42 cats from the property over the course of a single week. Lucretia Skaggs, quoted in that report, said Malissa Ancona scammed animal nonprofits out of free veterinary care while running what the outlet called an off-the-books animal rescue; animal rescue workers eventually reported her to the Missouri Department of Agriculture. Eleven of the cats were taken in by Open Door Animal Sanctuary in House Springs, which treated them for fleas, worms and feline calicivirus, while the rest of the cats and both dogs were relocated to shelters, veterinarians and rescues.
Frank Ancona also suspected his wife was drugging him, telling others he believed she had dissolved Klonopin in his food and, separately, suspected she had used clonidine on him, according to the Riverfront Times. The couple's household strain culminated on February 8, 2017, when Malissa Ancona posted a Facebook roommate ad, later telling investigators she did so because Frank planned to leave the state and file for divorce. She told police she last saw him alive at about 6 a.m. that day.
Disappearance, a Burned Pile of Clothes, and a Body in the River
Frank Ancona went missing on February 9, 2017, and his employer reported that he had failed to show up for work for the first time in nearly a decade. A U.S. Forest Service worker found his Ford Fusion near an access road in Washington County, and a family fishing the Big River later found his body nearby. He had been shot in the head and was found wearing only underwear and socks. An autopsy determined he died from close-range gunshot wounds inflicted by both a 9mm pistol and a shotgun, according to Washington County Coroner Brian DeClue, as reported by HeraldNet.
Investigators reported that Malissa Ancona and Jinkerson had been seen driving Frank Ancona's Ford Fusion and Jinkerson's Chevy Impala near the Big River on a Thursday morning, and a pile of burned clothes turned up near the abandoned vehicle. Washington County Sheriff's detectives said they found blood inside Jinkerson's car as well as bloody clothes at his home, while the St. Francois County Sheriff's Department reported finding blood spatter on the bedroom ceiling and blood soaked into the mattress at the Ancona residence, per the Riverfront Times account. Leadwood police also found a safe that appeared to have been pried open.
Jinkerson was taken into custody on a probation violation before both he and Malissa Ancona were charged on February 13, 2017, with first-degree murder, armed criminal action, tampering with evidence and abandonment of a corpse. Both pleaded not guilty at their initial court appearance. Malissa Ancona told investigators that she and Jinkerson killed Frank Ancona together during the early morning hours of February 9, 2017, and she later admitted she failed to report the crime and attempted to destroy blood evidence, according to the Riverfront Times reporting.
Recovering the Weapons and a Stepson's Account
Acting on information Malissa Ancona disclosed to investigators, police recovered a 9mm handgun from the Big River in Washington County and a shotgun from a pond in St. Francois County, according to HeraldNet. At a February 2017 bail hearing, a public defender sought reduced bond for Malissa Ancona, telling the court she was indigent, suffered from mental health problems and survived solely on federal disability payments, per the same HeraldNet report.
Paul Jinkerson Sr. told the Riverfront Times that Malissa had wanted to kill Frank and had wanted Paul Jr. to help clean it up afterward — an account that stood in tension with the version Malissa Ancona would later give under oath. In November 2018, while incarcerated, she sent a letter to the circuit judge claiming she had been under the influence at the time of the shooting and had acted alone, according to CBS News. That letter foreshadowed the reversal she would deliver in open court five months later, when she told the circuit judge directly that she alone fired both shots.
A Klan Leader With a Public Record of Extremism
Frank Ancona founded the Traditionalist American Knights in 2009, and the group grew to about 40 members at its peak. He drew national media attention in 2014 after his faction distributed fliers in Ferguson, Missouri threatening “lethal force” against racial justice protesters following the police shooting of Michael Brown, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. At the time, Ancona described his group as operating in a low-key manner.
Years earlier, in 2010 and 2012, Ancona had represented his Klan group in federal civil rights lawsuits assisted by the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, securing court orders against Missouri municipalities that had restricted handbill distribution and public park rentals. That legal history sat alongside a broader national decline in Klan membership: SPLC research found that by around 2014, national Ku Klux Klan membership had fallen to between 4,000 and 6,000 active members spread across roughly 163 klaverns, down sharply from an estimated 40,000 members in the 1960s. Ancona's small Missouri faction was, by that measure, a fringe outfit within an already shrinking movement — one whose leader's death would ultimately be traced not to political enemies, but to the collapse of his own household.
