Gordon Kahl

Who was Gordon Kahl?

Gordon Wendell Kahl was an American involved in two fatal shootouts with law enforcement officers in the United States in 1983.

Raised on a North Dakota farm, Kahl was a highly decorated turret gunner during World War II. After the war, "he had a 400-acre farm near Heaton, Wells County, North Dakota, [but] bounced around the Texas oilfields in later life as a mechanic and general worker."

In 1967, Kahl wrote a letter to the Internal Revenue Service stating that he would no longer pay taxes to the, in his words, "Synagogue of Satan under the 2nd plank of the Communist Manifesto." During the 1970s, Kahl organized the first Texas chapter of the Posse Comitatus, although he later left the group and was not a member at the time of the 1983 shootouts. In 1976 he appeared on a Texas television program stating that the income tax was illegal and encouraging others not to pay their income taxes. A 1991 movie based on these events was called In the Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas, starring actor Rod Steiger. The events also inspired the making of the documentary film Death & Taxes, which was released in 1993.