Westboro hate group aim to picket Liz Taylor funeral

Members of the Kansas City-based Westboro Baptist Church have threatened to picket the funeral of the legendary actress Elizabeth Taylor, whose death in Los Angeles was announced yesterday.

Margie Phelps, daughter of the hate group's leader Fred Phelps, made it clear in a series of ugly tweets yesterday that they aim to spoil Taylor's funeral because of her support for gay rights and her charitable work on behalf of Aids victims.

Within hours of Taylor's death, Phelps was tweeting attacks on the actress who helped raise more than $100m through the American Foundation for AIDS Research since 1985.

One of the tweets read: "RIP Elizabeth Taylor is in hell as sure as you're reading this & getting mad as a wet hen. She should've obeyed God. Too late!"

Another went: "No RIP Elizabeth Taylor who spent her life in adultery and enabling proud f*gs".

The Westboro Baptist Church normally pickets US military funerals, believing the soldiers' deaths are God's retribution for America's acceptance of gays and Judaism. Earlier this month, the church won a Supreme Court ruling allowing members to continue with the funeral picketing under their rights to free speech.

Taylor is to be buried at the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, next to her mother and father.

She once said that she hoped to be buried alongside Richard Burton, the only man she married twice. But that was not possible.

He was buried near his home in Celigny, Switzerland. His fourth and last wife, Sally, put paid to Taylor's ambition by having a gravestone specially designed that straddled Burton's grave and a plot she chose for herself when the time comes.

Sally Burton, who was 36 when she married the then 57-year-old actor just a year before his death, now lives in Australia but has not given up her right to be buried at his side.

At Westwood Village, Taylor will be 6,000 miles from Burton, of whom she once said: "Maybe we loved each other too much". But she will in the company of Marilyn Monroe, Roy Orbison, Dean Martin and Truman Capote. ·