Apparently, anti-immigration “activist” Shawna Forde (charged in Arizona with the murder of an Arizona man and his 9-year old daughter) had a closer relationship with the Minuteman Project and its president Jim Gilchrist than we were first led to believe.

In an E-mail titled “Jim Gilchrist Exposed!!!!” on the Minuteman Project’s website, Nightingale, the Save Our State official, wrote that “patriots” were incensed at Gilchrist’s group because it supported Forde. “As a mother I am sick to death that a little child was murdered!” she wrote. “Murdered at the hands of people that were endorsed on the Jim Gilchrist MMP site. Wasn’t it bad enough that your forum is a sewer full of lies and bashing of patriots? Or are each of you being paid by say the SPLC, La Raza to destroy the movement with your filth and personal connections?”

In his response, Gilchrist asserted that Save Our State’s allies included the Mountain Minutemen, whose leader in 2007 produced a faked video that appeared to show an undocumented immigrant being shot at the border. “Your unwarranted wrath is all about sour grapes, Ms. Nightingale,” Gilchrist wrote. “If you are going to be a crackpot, Ms. Nightingale, please be thorough about it.”

Gilchrist defended Forde this winter after other nativist leaders expressed doubt about her claims that she’d been raped, beaten and shot in a bizarre series of incidents in and near her Everett, Wash., home. The Everett Herald reported that police have dropped the investigation of the reported rape, citing a lack of evidence.