Henderson was the last remaining Cobb ally in Leith until she recently left the town.
The BBC spoke to her shortly before she moved away.
As she stood sobbing outside Cobb’s dilapidated home, where she was living with her three young daughters, she cut a lonely figure.
But then Henderson started praising the White Man’s Bible, a stridently anti-Semitic, racist screed.
She told an anti-parable about a pioneer-era mother who finds a rattlesnake under her child’s bed in their frontier log cabin.
When asked what the serpent might represent, she suggested: “Multiculturalism.”
“I definitely like and support things that are good for the white race,” she said.
Of her African-American neighbour: “I’m honestly thankful that there’s only one. I know that sounds rude.”
In a brief telephone interview from Mercer County jail in North Dakota, Cobb told the BBC he had moved to North Dakota because it was “one of the last Aryan bastions” in the US. The thinly populated state is 90% white, according to census data.
Cobb spent much of the interview discussing his belief that there is a conspiracy to breed the white race out of existence.
But he defended his vision for Leith as his “right to free associate”, while arguing that the state is stopping him practising his “religion of racial awareness”.
Tom Metzger, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who was given a property in Leith by Cobb, says the attempted takeover of the town has failed.
The 75-year-old, of Warsaw, Indiana, told the BBC: “Craig got carried away.
“I warned him not to bring in the Hollywood-style Nazis, or everyone would go crazy. And that’s exactly what’s happened.”
Still, the people of Leith are not complacent.
“Just because Cobb’s in jail, this isn’t over,” says Sherrill Harper.
“I still pray his plans are defeated.”
Video by Anna Bressanin
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