NEW ORLEANS (Associated Press) - Elizabeth "Beth" Rickey, who helped refute former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke's claims that he had renounced neo-Nazi ties, died Saturday. She was 53.

Rickey died at a hotel in Santa Fe, N.M., said friends and associates. Her longtime friend Quin Hillyer, now a reporter for The Washington Times, said Rickey had been in ill health for years, with ailments including Crohn's disease. She was running out of money and unable to find steady work because of her health, Hillyer said.

Duke had been an unabashed neo-Nazi and former Klan leader on the fringe of Louisiana politics when he made a successful move into the mainstream, narrowly winning election to an open seat in the Louisiana House as a Republican from suburban New Orleans in February 1989.

He claimed to have renounced extremism, recalled Lance Hill, who worked with Rickey and others to found the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism when Duke's political star was rising.

But Rickey, a Republican researcher, exposed the fact that his office was selling books advocating Nazism and questioning whether the Holocaust occurred. Rickey's purchase of the books including "Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last," that helped expose those ties.

Rickey also traveled to Chicago in 1989, where she taped Duke's speech to the right-wing Populist Party of America. Duke later apologized to the House for any embarrassment caused after he was photographed at the convention shaking hands at the convention with Art Jones, then the vice chairman of the American Nazi Party.