Joseph Paul Franklin

[DADOCTOR]

Joseph Paul Franklin

Joseph Paul Franklin is a serial extremist killer whose crimes were motivated by a pathological hatred of African Americans and Jews. His killing rampage lasted between 1977 and 1980, ending after his arrest in September 1980.

Childhood Years
Franklin (named James Clayton Vaughan Jr. at birth) was born in Mobile, Alabama on April 13, 1950 and was the second of four children in a volatile impoverished home.



As a child Franklin, who felt different from other children, turned to reading books, mostly fairy tales, as an escape from the domestic violence in the home. His sister has described the home as abusive, saying Franklin was the target of much of the abuse.




Teen Years
During his teen years he was introduced to the American Nazi Party through pamphlets and he adopted the belief that the world needed to be "cleansed" of what he considered inferior races - mainly African Americans and Jews.



He was in full agreement with the Nazi teachings and he became a member of the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the National States Rights Party.



Name Change
In 1976, he wanted to join the Rhodesian Army, but because of his criminal background he needed to change his name to be accepted. He changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin - Joseph Paul after Adolph Hitler's minister of propaganda, Joseph Paul Goebbels, and Franklin after Benjamin Franklin.


Franklin never did join the army, but instead launched his own war of the races.



Obsessed With Hate
Obsessed with hatred for interracial marriages, many of his killings were against black and white couples he encountered.


He has also admitted to blowing up synagogues and takes responsibility for the 1978 shooting of Hustler Magazine publisher, Larry Flynt and the 1980 shooting on civil rights activist and Urban League president Vernon Jordan, Jr.
Over the years Franklin has been linked to or confessed to numerous bank robberies, bombings and murders.



However not all of his confessions are viewed as truthful and many of the crimes were never brought to trial.



Convictions

• Alphonse Manning and Toni Schwenn
  Madison Wisconsin
  
  In 1985 Franklin was found guilty of killing interracial couple Alphonse Manning (black) and Toni Schwenn (white), both 23 years old.
  
  The couple was pulling out of a shopping mall when Franklin rammed their car from behind, then got out and shot Manning twice and Schwenn four times, killing both.
  
  He was sentenced to two life terms.
• Bryant Tatum and Nancy Hilton
  Chattanooga, Tennessee
  
  In 1977 he pleaded guilty to the July 29, 1978 sniper murder of Bryant Tatum (black) and for attempting to murder his white girlfriend Nancy Hilton.The couple were at a Pizza Hut restaurant in Chattanooga when Franklin, hiding in tall grass near the restaurant, gunned them down. He was given a life sentence.
• Donte Brown and Darrel Lane
  Cincinnati, Ohio
  
  Cousins Dante Brown, 13, and Darrel Lane, 14, were headed to a local convenience store on June 6, 1980, when Franklin, standing on an overpass, shot two bullets into each child. Lane died at the scene and Brown died a few hours later at the hospital.
  
  Franklin was found guilty and sentenced to two life terms.
• Ted Fields and David Martin
  Salt Lake City, Utah
  
  Ted Fields, 20, and David Martin, 18, were friends who shared the reputation for being hard working, responsible and with bright futures. On August, 20, they went jogging with two women at Liberty Park.
  
  Franklin hit the group with a barrage of bullets, striking Fields three times and Martin five, killing both. One of the women was injured.
  
  He was found guilty and received two life sentences.
• Gerald Gordon
  Potosi, Missouri
  
  On October 8, 1977, Gerald Gordon, Steven Goldman and William Ash, had no idea a Remington 700 hunting rifle was aimed at them while they walked through the synagogue parking lot.
  
  Franklin, who had carefully planned his assault the day before, fired five shots at the men, killing Gordon and injuring Goldman and Ash.
  
  In February, 1997, a jury found him guilty and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

Any Regrets?

Eight life sentences and a death sentence has done little to change Franklin's radical racist views. He has told authorities that his only regret is that killing Jews isn't legal.During a 1995 article published by Deseret News, Franklin seemed to boast about his killing sprees and the only regret that he seems to have is that there were victims that managed to survive his murderous rage.

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

More...

[DADOCTOR]

Joseph Paul Franklin (April 13, 1950-) is an American serial killer who may have killed 20 people between 1977 and 1980.



He has been convicted of several slayings. He has confessed to the attempted assassinations of two prominent people: the 1978 shooting of magazine publisher Larry Flynt and Flynt's attorney and the 1980 shooting of Vernon Jordan. Franklin has not been convicted in either of those cases.



He was born James Clayton Vaughn, in Mobile, Alabama to a poor family. In 1976 he changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin. He selected Joseph Paul in honor of Paul Joseph Goebbels and Franklin after US founding father, Benjamin Franklin.



Franklin is believed to have suffered an abusive childhood at the hands of both his violent parents. As early as high school he had become very interested in Nazism and later held memberships in both the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. He also has one daughter from a 1968 marriage.


Franklin was a drifter, roaming up and down the East Coast, always looking for chances to "cleanse the world" of people he considered inferior, especially blacks and Jews. He sustained himself by robbing banks and often sold or traded the guns he used to kill.



Despite being partially blind in his left eye and completely blind in his right eye, Franklin was a proficient sniper, and killed most of his victims from over 100 feet away. He did not touch or try to contact the majority of victims, instead assassinating them from a distance; thereby falling into the category of a mission orientated serial killer.



He was a highly organised killer, who would plan several escape routes and anti-forensic techniques in advance. Despite his rare and inflammatory motives, Franklin's complete lack of murder ritual has excluded him from pop culture reference, unlike less prolific serial killers such as Charles Manson.



A recalcitrant and unrepentant prisoner, Franklin claimed after trial (for the murder of Gerald Gordon) that his only regret was that killing Jews was not legal. He also threatened to rape a Jewish psychologist who came to interview him, as well as making an escape attempt during a jury adjournment.



He made a reference to his escape attempts during the trial, thanking the jury for a fair trial and commending them on their verdict, claiming that if he had not been given the death penalty, he would probably escape again.


Criminal career

Franklin's level of violence continuously escalated; before he committed his first known murder, he fire-bombed a synagogue and threw mace at a racially-mixed couple. Starting in 1977, he went a continual murder spree, supporting himself by robbing banks. He admitted his racist ideology; God, he said, wanted him to start a race war.



Franklin killed at random, and may have begun in Madison, Wisconsin. His target of choice 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 colour, 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'd also intended to shoot Jesse Jackson, but Jackson's security detail made this impossible; he changed his target to Vernon Jordan in lieu of Jackson. An escape artist, he managed to elude law enforcement for years. He was eventually caught, however, when a nurse in Florida taking the blood he was selling recognised a bald eagle tattoo on his arm.



Arrested in 1980, Franklin provided detailed confessions. He has been tried in several states and, in Missouri in 1997, he was sentenced to death.
Franklin has been linked by either indictment or confession to 20 murders, 6 aggravated assaults, 16 bank robberies and 2 bombings.



He has confessed to 8 murders, and has received several life sentences or capital punishment for others. He made several confessions in the late 1990's on the condition that he confessed to "an attractive white female investigator."
1976

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

1977

• July 29, 1977; Beth Shalom synagogue in Chattanooga is firebombed.

• August 7, 1977; Dressed in cowboy regalia, Franklin shot and killed a black man and a white woman, Alphonse Manning and Toni Schwenn, driving away from a bank robbery Madison, Wisconsin. He had been wanting to drive faster, but was frustrated with the speed of Manning's driving. Manning stopped his car and got out, Franklin picked up a stolen handgun and shot him, then walking over to his car and shot his friend. In 1985, he received two life sentences for these murders.

• October 8, 1977; He hid in long grass behind a telegraph pole at a synagogue parking lot in Richmond Heights, Missouri, using a Remington 700 sniper rifle to kill one man, Gerald Gordon, and injure two others. He had earlier in the day bought some ten inch nails, a bicycle and a guitar case. He scratched the serial number from his gun, cleaned off his fingerprints and placed it in the guitar case. He hammered the nails into the telegraph pole to serve as a gun rest and used the bike for a quick escape. he then took the rifle out of the case and fired five shots. After killing Gordon and wounding Steven Goldman and William Ash, he cycled to his car. He was convicted of murder, and was sentenced to death by lethal injection in the Potosi Correctional Center in Potosi, Missouri.

1978

• Franklin claims that, on March 6, 1978, he used a .44 calibre rifle to ambush pornographer Larry Flynt and his lawyer Gene Reeves in Lawrenceville, Georgia. In his confession, Franklin said this was in retaliation for an edition of Hustler celebrating interracial sex. Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down. Flynt believes Franklin's confessions, although there have been no charges in the case.

• July 29, 1978; Frankin hid in the long grass around a Pizza Hut in Chattanooga, jumping out to kill Bryant Tatum with a 12 gauge shotgun. Tatum, a black man, was shot once, as was his white girlfriend Nancy Hilton (who survived.) Franklin confessed and pled 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 shot through a window from 150 yards in Doraville, Georgia, killing him. Franklin confessed but was not tried or sentenced for this crime. Franklin asserted that McIver was in close contact with white women, and the murder prevented him from having sex with any of them.

• August 18, 1979; He killed a black man seated in a Burger King with a sniper rifle in Falls Church. Later, this would be the scene of another sniper attack by the Beltway Sniper, a black man who killed a woman whose surname was Franklin. Franklin confessed to the murder on videotape.

• October 21, 1979; Franklin used a sniper rifle to kill a mixed race couple in Oklahoma City. He has not yet been tried for this murder. He fired five shots from 100 yards away, hitting Jesse Taylor, who was black, three times and Marian Bresette, who was white, once.

• December 5, 1979; Franklin killed 15-year-old prostitute Mercedes Lynn Masters, with whom he had previously lived in Dekalb County, Georgia, with a shotgun. Her fatal mistake was telling Franklin him that she had black customers. DeKalb County was also the scene of four of the Atlanta child murders, which were initially thought to be racially motivated.

1980

• January 8 or January 11, 1980]; Franklin murdered a 19-year-old black man in a long-distance sniper attack in Indianapolis. The young man was standing with his father outside a fried chicken restaurant. Franklin awaits trial for aggravated murder.

• January 16 or January 17, 1980; He sniped a black man with the same sniper rifle from 150 yards in Indianapolis. He awaits trial for aggravated murder.

• May 2, 1980; He shot hitchhiker Rebecca Bergstrom with a handgun in Monroe County, Wisconsin. He confessed to this murder in 1984.

• May 29, 1980; He shot Bill Clinton associate Vernon Jordan after seeing him with a white woman in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was initially acquitted, but later confessed.

• June 8, 1980; Franklin has confessed to killing cousins Darrel Lane (14) and Donte Evans Brown (13) in Bond Hill, Cincinnati. He was waiting on an overpass for hours to shoot a racially mixed couple, but grew impatient and shot the boys instead. He received two life sentences for these murders. During the trial, he taunted the Judge and claimed that the sheriff and his deputies were homosexuals.

• June 15, 1980; He shot and killed an interracial couple, Arthur Smothers (22) and Kathleen Mikula (16), from a woodland area in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Franklin has confessed, although Pennsylvania has not extradited him.

• June 25, 1980; He 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 after it was revealed that another man, Jacob Beard of Florida, was imprisoned in 1993 on these charges. He picked up the white girls, but decided to kill them after one of them admitted having a black boyfriend. He later said, "They told me they were into race-mixing, I just decided to waste 'em."

• August 20, 1980; He killed two black men from 40 yards with a Marlin Firearms lever action rifle as they jogged with white women in Salt Lake City. Franklin received two life sentences for this crime. The victims, Ted Fields and David Martin, died at the scene.

• September, 1980; He escaped from police custody, but was recaptured in Florida.

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[DADOCTOR]

America would be hard-pressed to find a truer face of hate than the man Missouri plans to execute.


For that reason alone, the state shouldn’t end his sorry life. Joseph Paul Franklin has been convicted in eight murders and is suspected in up to 20.
Guilt is not a question.



Franklin is an admitted white supremacist serial killer, an anti-Semite, and he exemplifies the lone-wolf theory that many Americans just learned of through the Holocaust museum shooting and the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller.


Franklin has said he’s the man who paralyzed Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and attempted to kill civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. He wasn’t tried in the Flynt case and by legal loophole was acquitted in Jordan’s.


Sister Helen Prejean I am not. No arguments here for benevolence. Rather, Franklin ought to be studied, mentally dissected and put on display — not for glorification, but for insight.



Something akin to a U.S. mini-course on how hate ferments, then attacks. Besides, he sometimes desires death to escape suffering in prison. Sorry, but no.


Franklin is obsessed with black men having sex with white women. The hatred of those relationships, while outdated to sane minds, was the basis for laws opposing interracial marriage, played into slavery and was the starting point of many a stereotype.



No one will ever know how many black men were lynched because they so much as looked at a white woman.


Franklin is just a modern-day extrapolation of that mindset. He targeted Flynt for interracial porn. He admitted paralyzing a 23-year-old white Atlanta woman by shooting her.



Franklin said he shot the woman’s husband dead solely because the man was black. He’s suspected in similar murders of other interracial couples. He yearned to start a race war.


Missouri ended up with him because the only murder he was convicted of that brought the death penalty occurred near St. Louis. That time, anti-Semitism spurred him to shoot a man leaving a bar mitzvah.



Franklin was adept at living below the radar. He traipsed the country killing randomly, robbing banks for money.



“Hunter,” a textbook for racists, is dedicated to Franklin to honor and disseminate his lone-wolf tactics for evading prosecution, according to Leonard Zeskind, a Kansas City-area-based expert on white supremacy.


Franklin is also mentally ill, like other accused killers in recent headlines. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. But most mentally ill people are not violent. So what fetid mix of pathology came together to form Franklin?
Franklin is truly a national scourge.



And yet, could he be used as an example to deter hate? Could he somehow help law enforcement stop lone wolves who haven’t struck?
We’ll never know if he’s dead.


By MARY SANCHEZ

The Kansas City Star

[DADOCTOR]

Convicted killer, avowed racist tells of life of rage, hatred

06/17/2009


Joseph Paul Franklin


Joseph Paul Franklin was 23 when he first looked at a Hustler magazine. He never bought one. He just flipped through them at a newsstand or in the aisles of a convenience store.

An avowed racist, Franklin still remembers what went through his mind wh en he saw one of Hustler's sexually explicit photographs of an interracial couple titled "Butch and His Georgia Peach." "I just saw blood," Franklin says.

Seeing that photo triggered a rage that left smut king Larry Flynt, the magazine's publisher, paralyzed in a 1978 shooting in Georgia. Franklin admitted he shot Flynt and has been indicted but not yet tried.

"Have you seen the movie yet?" Franklin, with a child's curiosity, asks a reporter.

Franklin, 46, is referring to the current blockbuster, "The People vs. Larry Flynt." He wonders how he is portrayed by the rail-thin actor with darting eyes who plays "the assassin."

"Check it out," he counsels, "and tell me what you think."

Franklin seems preoccupied by the movie Thursday afternoon as he sits behind a glass partition in the visiting room of the St. Louis County Jail. He knows he's not likely to see the flick anytime soon, until it comes to cable television in a state prison.

Just two hours earlier, a St. Louis County jury convicted him of the 1977 sniper killing of Gerald Gordon at a Richmond Heights synagogue. He's not fazed by the conviction. He wanted it - and the death sentence jurors handed down Friday. Being executed is better, he says, than being slain in prison by inmates who despise him.

"Being murdered by some punks is just a dishonorable way to die," he says. "I got my name listed in encyclopedias on serial killers. They might just kill me for the notoriety. I'd rather be executed by the state."

`I Shot Larry Flynt'

A native of Alabama, Franklin already is serving six consecutive life sentences for four murders. His string of crimes has stretched from Wisconsin to Oklahoma, including the killings of a biracial couple in 1977 and the bombing of a Chattanooga, Tenn., synagogue the same year.

In the Flynt shooting, he has teased police along the way with details of the crime that only the gunman would know, said Danny Porter, district attorney for Gwinnett County, Ga. Flynt was walking to the courthouse on a lunch break from his obscenity trial on March 6, 1978, when someone pumped three .44-caliber rifle bullets into his body.

Several years after the shooting, Porter's office got a letter from Franklin, who was in an isolation cell at the federal prison in Marion, Ill. Porter said the shocking letter said simply: "My name is Joseph Paul Franklin. I shot Larry Flynt. If you bring me to Gwinnett County, I'll tell you about it."

When police first went to Marion to talk to Franklin, he said his letter was only a hoax. Later, he cooperated and, after two interviews with Franklin, Georgia police were convinced he was telling the truth.

Porter said Franklin could describe the interior of a two-story, abandoned storefront building, where the shots came from. "He described his escape route, the vehicle he used, where he drove, and we were able to corroborate at least points of it," Porter said.

Franklin was indicted for the Lawrenceville, Ga., crime in 1984. But Porter knows the assault charges take second-billing to the string of murder charges Franklin faces elsewhere.

"We're sort of at the end of the line because he's facing murder in every jurisdiction but ours," Porter said. "We could give him 20 years max, and I'm not sure that would be a good use of the taxpayer's money. And I'm not in a hurry to bring Larry Flynt, and the rolling circus he brings with him, back for a trial."

As for Flynt himself, he declined to be interviewed Friday. His office in Beverly Hills, Calif., issued a statement about the same time the jury in St. Louis County was handing down its death-penalty verdict.

"I am against the death penalty. Good luck," Flynt said.

A Firing Squad

At the jail in Clayton, Franklin was hesitant to say too much about the Flynt case. He said the Hustler photo of the interracial couple angered him and that sex between a white woman and black man leads to physical deformities, such as flabby skin. But Franklin didn't want to say much more than that.

"I'd rather not discuss Larry Flynt at this moment. Put Mr. Flynt," he tells the reporter. "Show him a little respect."

Franklin peers over his wire-rimmed glasses as he sits with his wrists shackled and chained to his waist. He twists the beads on a rosary that he wears around his neck. He is not a Catholic; a jail volunteer gave him the rosary.

Franklin matter-of-factly discussed how he would prefer to be executed.

"I would by far want a firing squad, and I barely missed out on that in Utah," he says. "They put a target over your heart, and you die instantly, for one thing."

In 1981, Franklin got two life sentences for the 1980 murders of two black men he saw jogging with two white women in Utah.

In Missouri, lethal injection is the only method. While men on Missouri's death row try every legal maneuver imaginable to wiggle out of their punishment, Franklin said he won't fight it. In fact, he says he thinks appeals should last no longer than three years, while the average in Missouri is about 10.

"It disgusts me that these guys try to save their miserable lives," he says.

Franklin was his own defense attorney during his trial in St. Louis. To ensure he would get the death penalty, Franklin said he automatically ruled out women from the jury panel because they are more compassionate than men.

"In Utah, the jury was half women, and they voted for life" in prison, he said. "So here, I deliberately struck all women. I used all nine strikes to strike women."

Franklin, by the way, said he knows how to solve the world's ills. To rid the planet of evil, use ultrasound to detect all of the male fetuses. "Abort all the male babies, and keep this up until the population is about 80 percent female," he says. "Most evil comes from males."

Franklin's hair has a strange blondish-red tint to it. He has let it grow since coming to the St. Louis County Jail.

"Up until recently, I was shaving my head," he says. "I had a dream not to do that. I used to cut my hair and dye it a lot after I'd commit a bank robbery or murder. I'd go from brown to black to change my appearance."

Heroes? "(Capt.) Quantrill, the guerrilla fighter. He was my biggest influence. And I was a big fan of Jesse James."

Franklin even picked some of his crimes based on Army Capt. William C. Quantrill's Civil War exploits. "I knew Quantrill and his band killed men in Lawrence, Kan., so I robbed a bank there in the '70s. It was a University of Kansas branch. I wore brown hunting clothes."

At a bank robbery once in Oklahoma, he did something impolite, he says, that he never repeated.

"I pulled out my sawed-off shotgun and the teller, a woman . . . it scared the living daylights out of her," he said. "I never again pointed a gun at a woman. I'd just pull it out of my pants or coat and show it to them, but not point it."

How many people have you killed?

"I have only confessed right to, let's see . . . 11, 12 . . . 13 murders," he says as calmly as one might recount a dinner menu. "Put down 11," he tells the reporter. "That's how many I've been indicted or convicted of. And it happens to be a lucky number for me right now."

Franklin loves numbers. At the start of the 90-minute interview, he told a reporter he liked her name because it had three letters. "Three's a good number," he explains. "It's all throughout the Bible, best book in the world. Jesus was 30 when he started his ministry. He was killed when he was 33, and stayed in the tomb three days" before Christians believe he rose from the dead.

Franklin was the only son of an unemployed, alcoholic father and a domineering mother. His childhood was marked by poverty and frequent beatings. He said he used to collect stray cats and dogs as a boy.

"My mom once poured hot, scalding water on a stray dog," he says. "That's cruel. Sadistic, isn't it?"