"They really believe 'The Turner Diaries' is the road map to their success," says J.D. Cash, an Oklahoma reporter with long associations among right-wing activists who broke stories about Timothy McVeigh's links to white-supremacist groups like Christian Identity.

"The Turner Diaries," an apocalyptic novel embraced by McVeigh and other Christian extremists, portrays a "patriot" who foments a right-wing backlash against the government's effort to crack down on guns by setting off bombs.

Police found Christian Identity literature in the van of Furrow, a 37-year-old Washington state man who turned himself into Las Vegas police after allegedly wounding three children, a teenager and an adult with bursts of automatic weapons fire at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, Tuesday. Furrow is also suspected of the murder of a postal worker an hour after the community center shooting.

The discovery of Christian Identity material led some commentators to link Furrow to notorious abortion bombing suspect Eric Rudolph, who disappeared into North Carolina's Smokey Mountains after police connected him to the bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., in January 1998. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which tracks hate groups and has a file on Furrow, believes he followed the beliefs of the so-called Phineas Priesthood, a branch of Christian Identity. That loose-knit group also has been linked to 1996 bombings and bank robberies in the Spokane, Wash., area.

But the Christian Identity links to Furrow are less apparent than the movement's links to Rudolph, right wing experts told Salon News. Furrow is close to the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation in Washington state, while Rudolph had no known neo-Nazi associations.

"We're talking about two different regions here, two different sets of friends, two different sets of beliefs," said Mike Vanderbaugh, a leader of the Alabama militia movement, in a telephone interview. Vanderbaugh has made a hobby out of ridiculing Christian Identity followers and excludes them from his organization. "Rudolph is more Identity, this guy is more Nazi, is my read on it," he said.

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