Joseph Paul Franklin

Joseph Paul Franklin
Born	James Clayton Vaughn, Jr. (1950-04-13) April 13, 1950 Mobile, Alabama
Other names	Joseph Paul Franklin The Racist Killer
Motive	Anti-Christ, anti-Masonry, anti-Zionism, anti-government, anti-media
Criminal penalty	Death
Details
Victims	7-20+
Span of crimes	August 7, 1977 – August 20, 1980
Country	United States
State(s)	Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Utah
Date apprehended	1980

Joseph Paul Franklin (born April 13, 1950) is an American serial killer. He has been convicted of several murders, and given six life sentences, as well as a death sentence. He confessed to the attempted murders of two prominent men: the magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1978 and Vernon Jordan, Jr., the civil rights activist, in 1980. Franklin has not been convicted in either of those cases.

Because Franklin has repeatedly changed his accounts of some cases, officials cannot determine the full extent of his crimes. His claims of racial motivation have been offset by a defense expert witness who testified in 1997 that Franklin was a paranoid schizophrenic who was not fit to stand trial.

The Missouri Supreme Court has set November 20, 2013 as the execution date. Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said in a statement that by setting execution dates, the state high court "has taken an important step to see that justice is finally done for the victims and their families."

Early life

He was born James Clayton Vaughn in Mobile, Alabama, to a poor family. He suffered severe physical abuse as a child. As early as high school, he had become interested first in evangelical Christianity, and Nazism, and later held memberships in both the National Socialist White People's Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1976 at the age of 26, he changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin. He selected Joseph Paul in honor of Paul Joseph Goebbels and Franklin after Benjamin Franklin.

Marriage and family

He married in 1979 and had a daughter. He and his wife divorced.

Crimes

For much of his life, Franklin was a drifter, roaming up and down the East Coast looking for chances to "cleanse the world" of people he considered inferior, especially blacks and Jews. He supported himself by robbing banks and often sold or traded the guns he used to kill others . Despite being partially blind in his left eye and completely blind in his right eye, Franklin was a proficient marksman, and killed most of his victims from more than 100 feet (30 m) away . He attacked the majority of victims from a distance. He was a highly organized killer who would plan in advance several escape routes and techniques in which to leave no evidence .

Franklin's level of violence escalated; before he committed his first known murder, he fire-bombed a synagogue and sprayed mace at a racially mixed couple. Starting in 1977, he went on a murder spree, while continuing to rob banks. He has admitted his racist ideology; God, he said, wanted him to start a race war.

His targets were mixed-race couples, which he called "MRCs." In interviews, he explained that he planned the murders and his exit in advance, often changing his hair style and color, as well as changing clothes and vehicles often. He would listen to a police scanner during his escapes.

On one occasion, he threatened to kill President Jimmy Carter for his pro-civil rights views. He had also intended to shoot Jesse Jackson, but felt that Jackson's security detail made an assassination attempt impossible. He shot Vernon Jordan in 1980 instead, nearly killing him.

Due to his careful planning, he eluded law enforcement for years. He was eventually caught when a nurse in Florida taking the blood he was selling recognized a bald eagle tattoo on his arm as one publicized for the suspect in several murders. She contacted the police. Arrested in 1980, Franklin provided detailed confessions. He has been tried and convicted in several states. Convicted in a murder case in Missouri in 1997, he was sentenced to death.

Franklin has been linked by either indictment or confession to 20 murders, six aggravated assaults, 16 bank robberies and two bombings. He has confessed to eight murders, and has received six life sentences and a death sentence. He made several confessions in 1997 on the condition that he confess to "an attractive white female investigator."

List of crimes

1976

• September 6, 1976: Franklin followed an interracial couple down an alley and sprayed mace at them.

1977

• July 29, 1977: Beth Sholom synagogue in Chattanooga is firebombed. Franklin has confessed to the crime.
• August 7, 1977: dressed in cowboy regalia, Franklin fatally shot a black man and a white woman, Alphonse Manning and Toni Schwenn, while driving away from a bank robbery in Madison, Wisconsin. He was frustrated with the slow speed of Manning's driving. Manning stopped his car and got out; Franklin picked up a stolen handgun and shot him, then walked over to his car and shot his friend. On February 14, 1986, he received two life sentences for these murders.
• October 8, 1977: Franklin hid in long grass behind a telegraph pole at Brith Shalom, a synagogue in Richmond Heights, Missouri and used a hunting rifle to kill Gerald Gordon and injure two others. He confessed to this in 1995 and was tried in 1997. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection in the Potosi Correctional Center in Potosi, Missouri. He is still in prison there.

1978

• Franklin claims that, on March 6, 1978, he used a .44 caliber rifle to ambush Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and his lawyer Gene Reeves in Lawrenceville, Georgia. In his confession, Franklin said this was in retaliation for an edition of Hustler displaying interracial sex. The confession came years after the shooting. Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down. Flynt believes Franklin's confession, but there have been no charges in the case. Many (but not all) of the law enforcement agents investigating the shooting have stated that they now believe the strong possibility that Franklin was the shooter of Flynt.
• July 29, 1978: Franklin hid near a Pizza Hut in Chattanooga, and shot and killed Bryant Tatum with a 12-gauge shotgun; he shot his girlfriend, Nancy Hilton; she survived. Franklin confessed and pleaded guilty, being given a life sentence, as well as a sentence for an unrelated armed robbery in 1977.

1979

• July 12, 1979: Taco Bell manager Harold McIver (27), a black man, was fatally shot through a window from 150 yards (140 m) in Doraville, Georgia. Franklin confessed but was not tried or sentenced for this crime. Franklin said that McIver was in close contact with white women, so he murdered him.
• August 18, 1979: Franklin shot and killed a black man seated in a Burger King in Falls Church, Virginia. Franklin confessed to the murder on videotape.
• October 21, 1979: Franklin used a rifle to kill an interracial couple, Jesse Taylor, who was black, and Marian Bresette, in Oklahoma City. He has not yet been tried for this murder.
• December 5, 1979: Franklin shot and killed the 15-year-old prostitute Mercedes Lynn Masters, with whom he had previously lived in Dekalb County, Georgia. She had told Franklin that she had black customers.

1980

• January 8 or January 11, 1980: Franklin murdered a 19-year-old black man in a long-distance rifle attack in Indianapolis. Franklin awaits trial for aggravated murder.
• January 16 or January 17, 1980: Franklin shot a black man with the same rifle from 150 yards (140 m) in Indianapolis. He awaits trial for aggravated murder.
• May 2, 1980: Franklin shot hitchhiker Rebecca Bergstrom with a handgun in Monroe County, Wisconsin. He confessed to this murder in 1984.
• May 29, 1980: Franklin says he shot and seriously wounded civil rights activist and Urban League president Vernon Jordan, Jr. after seeing him with a white woman in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Franklin initially denied any part in the crime and was acquitted, but later confessed.
• June 8, 1980: Franklin has confessed to killing cousins Darrell Lane (14) and Dante Evans Brown (13) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Waiting on an overpass to shoot a racially mixed couple, he shot the boys instead. He was convicted in 1998 and received two life sentences for these murders.
• June 15, 1980: Franklin shot and killed an interracial couple, Arthur Smothers (22) and Kathleen Mikula (16), in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Franklin has confessed, although Pennsylvania has not extradited and tried him.
• June 25, 1980: Franklin used a .44 Ruger pistol to kill two hitchhikers, Nancy Santomero (19) and Vicki Durian (26), in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. He confessed to the crime in 1997 to an Ohio assistant prosecutor in the course of investigation in another case; he said he picked up the white girls and decided to kill them after one said she had a black boyfriend. Jacob Beard of Florida, was convicted and imprisoned in 1993 on these charges. He was freed in 1999 and a new trial was ordered based on Franklin's confession.
• August 20, 1980: Franklin killed two black men, Ted Fields and David Martin, near Liberty Park located in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was tried on federal civil rights charges as well as state first-degree murder charges. Franklin was convicted and received two life sentences for the murders.

• September 1980: Franklin escaped from police custody, but was recaptured in Florida.

Conviction and imprisonment

Franklin tried to escape during the judgment of the 1997 Missouri trial on charges of murdering Gerald Gordon. He was convicted of the murder charge. The psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who had interviewed him at length, testified for the defense that she believed that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and unfit to stand trial. She noted his delusional thinking and a childhood history of severe abuse.

Franklin is held on death row at the Potosi Correctional Center near Mineral Point, Missouri.

Representation in other media

William L. Pierce wrote a novel, Hunter (1989), published under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. Pierce, founder of the National Alliance dedicated the book to Joseph Paul Franklin.

See also

• Beltway sniper attacks
• Benjamin Nathaniel Smith
• John Ausonius
• Buford O. Furrow, Jr.
• Zebra murders
• Alan Berg

Further reading

• Mel Ayton, Dark Soul of the South: The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin, Potomac Press, Inc., 2011

External links

• Joseph Paul Franklin , Court TV: police photography
• Joseph Paul Franklin, second trial, Court TV
• Malcolm Gladwell, "Damaged", New Yorker, 24 February 1997
• "Joseph Paul Franklin", Criminal Mindscape, at TV.com
• Joseph Paul Franklin at IMDb