Sanford police on Thursday arrested a North Carolina man who has apparently been linked to various extremist groups on charges of soliciting a minor for sex.
Boyd Dale Cathey, 76, of Wendell faces felony charges of attempted statutory sex offense on a child of 15 or younger and solicitation of a child by computer.
Detectives arrested Cathey around 10:20 a.m. Thursday following an “ongoing investigation” by the Sanford Police Department. According to the arrest report, Cathey was taken into custody in the Carthage Colonies subdivision.
The first result of a Google search of Cathey’s name is a profile on the website for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which among other initiatives tracks individuals involved with extremist groups. The profile lists Wendell as Cathey’s location, although it puts his birth year at 1950 instead of 1948, the year given by SPD.
“For three decades, radical right-wing activist and author Boyd Cathey has worked to bridge mainstream conservative politics and the far-right fringe worlds of Holocaust denial, extremist Catholicism, and racially tinged neo-Confederate causes,” reads the profile, which also notes that he served as “North Carolina co-chair for the presidential campaign of anti-gay televangelist … Pat Robertson,” and was “state campaign manager for Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign” in 1992.
The profile also notes that Cathey had been linked to the Institute for Historical Review, which it described as “arguably the world’s leading Holocaust denial organization.”
More recently, Cathey appears to have maintained a blog covering a number of current political topics from what appears to be a far right perspective.
A Lee County magistrate ordered no bond for Cathey, and the Lee County Jail’s website showed him as an active inmate as of Thursday afternoon.
