Separatist Leader Mclaren ‘Dangerous,’ His Friends Say

A fast-talking, fast-walking Richard McLaren came out of a short stint in jail last summer a changed man.

To friends within the Republic of Texas movement, he was refocused on taking the Republic from a circus sideshow into reality.

His detractors in the movement found him newly argumentative, impatient and intolerant of disagreement or criticism.

Amid McLaren’s increasing conflicts with rivals of his group and his Davis Mountains neighbors, authorities said for months that they were in no rush to serve new arrest warrants on him.

All that changed last week. A siege that began with the kidnapping of two of his neighbors ended after six days Saturday when McLaren and his small band of armed supporters surrendered to authorities.

That standoff with state law officers has further divided the Republic of Texas movement, which already was in three factions, with McLaren the most visible leader of one of them.

“He’s a dangerous person,” said David Johnson of Odessa, the president of an opposing faction of the Republic. “There’s no way the Republic of Texas could stand behind him.”

Archie Lowe of Rice, Texas, president of another faction, said: “What he has done is wrong, and what I would like to see is the U.S. recognize that he is a citizen of the Republic of Texas and let us take care of it.”

Tim Perkins, the Dallas-area common law judge in McLaren’s group, said: “Those who work around him admire him more now than we ever did. We’ll back Rick 100 percent.”

Republic of Texas members maintain that the Lone Star State was annexed illegally by the United States. They demand a statewide referendum on independence.

Even in high school in Wilmington, Ohio, McLaren showed a secessionist tendency.

He was unhappy that students were not permitted to leave the campus for lunch and negotiated a deal with school administrators that would let him go home to eat.

Clinton County Sheriff Ralph Fizer on Friday said that McLaren married the sheriff’s niece, Sandra, in 1973. “It was not with my blessing,” the sheriff said. “He was a squirrelly rascal. He was hyper. Not a violent kind of hyper, but he was just squirrelly. It was like he could never really sit still. He was always real nervous.”

The McLarens moved into a rental home owned by an Ohio tennis pal, Chuck Horack, who had come to the area earlier.

Horack - whose former wife, Evelyn, married McLaren last year after both couples divorced - said McLaren worked at a variety of odd jobs.

By 1979, McLaren was in the Davis Mountains resort near Fort Davis, where he obtained a vineyard.

That also was where he began more than a decade of lawsuits, liens and other legal instruments against his neighbors, Jeff Davis County officials and the Stewart Title Co.

His main complaint was that much of the land in the area had been surveyed improperly and that property lines overlaid each other. The result, he has said, was that land titles were in disarray and some of the land was double-taxed.

Some neighbors whom he sued simply gave up in the face of his obsession, and he took land and thousands in cash settlements. In some cases that he lost, McLaren simply refused to pay the judgments.

One result was the enmity of nearly all his neighbors - especially Joe and Margaret “M.A.” Rowe, the couple that McLaren’s group allegedly took hostage April 27 in retaliation for the arrest of one of his followers. They later were released when the Republic member was permitted to return to the compound.

His lawsuit against the Stewart Title Co. has gone on for years, with McLaren filing many liens against the firm around the state - a tactic that would be emulated by Republic of Texas members and others against dozens of public officials, private individuals and businesses in the state.

It was during his years of land disputes that McLaren has said he discovered that Texas had never been legally brought into the union and remains an independent republic - an assertion that historians reject.

Despite his use of the courts and county clerks where he filed his liens, McLaren now contends that those federal and state courts are illegitimate - they are instruments of a foreign nation and a “de facto” state.

Last year U.S. District Court Judge Lucius Bunton III in Pecos ordered him jailed for contempt after defying a court order to stop filing liens against Stewart Title Co.

McLaren was arrested by U.S. marshals last May while riding his tractor in the vineyard. He was moved from jail to jail out of concerns that his Republic of Texas allies might attempt to break him out.

He was released about a month later, but was named in two other charges by the end of the year - a federal contempt of court charge and a state burglary charge.