Joseph Paul Franklin

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Paul Franklin chose his own name, and it was not the one he was born with. By his own admission or by court verdict, he shot 22 people across ten American states. Sixteen of them died. He was a white supremacist, and he picked victims because of their race or their religion. He drifted from state to state, probably paying his way with money from bank robberies. Most of the people he attacked were interracial couples, usually a black man with a white woman, or Jewish worshippers. How did a drifter with a rifle stay ahead of investigators in so many places? What small habit finally gave him away? Why did one of his confessions free a man from prison? And what did he say about his own beliefs in the last days of his life?

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• 2. Early Life

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  In Mobile, Alabama, on the 13th of April 1950, a boy was born named James Clayton Vaughn Jr. His parents were James Clayton Vaughn Sr. and Helen Rau Vaughn. He was the elder of two sons, and he also had two sisters. His father had served in World War II and worked as a butcher. He left the family when the boy was 8 years old. Helen twice had her husband jailed for public drunkenness. Franklin later described a childhood with too little food and severe beatings, and he said his mother "didn't care about him and his siblings". He believed this stunted his emotional growth. In his words, he had "always been at least ten years or more behind other people in their maturity." His sister Carolyn remembered the father's visits bluntly: "Whenever Vaughn Sr. came to visit, he'd beat us." A family friend called Helen "a real strict, perfectionist lady". Her children said she beat them too. Franklin would later point to this abuse when he explained where his racism came from.

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• 3. A Borrowed Name

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  By high school, the teenager was drawn first to evangelical Christianity and then to Nazism. He went on to join two white supremacist groups. One was the Ku Klux Klan. The other was the National Socialist White People's Party, which had earlier been called the American Nazi Party. Eventually he renamed himself Joseph Paul Franklin. The name honored two white men: Benjamin Franklin, and the Nazi official Paul Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler's 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf, pushed him toward the idea of starting a race war. Franklin said of it: "I've never felt that way about any other book that I read … it was something weird about that book." In the early 1970s he rode with the white supremacists David Duke and Don Black to a party conference in Virginia. A photograph from September 1970 shows him in a Nazi uniform outside the White House in Washington, D.C. He was there to protest a visit by Israel's prime minister, Golda Meir. Picket lines would not satisfy him for long.

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• 4. First Attacks

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  Across the East Coast, Franklin lived as a vagrant. He spoke of wanting to "cleanse the world" of people he judged inferior, especially black and Jewish people. On the 29th of July 1977, he firebombed Beth Shalom Synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and destroyed the building. Nobody was hurt, because some worshippers had left early that evening. On the 7th of August, he shot and killed Alphonse Manning and Toni Schwenn, an interracial couple, both aged 23. They were in the parking lot of East Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin. He was later convicted of both murders and sentenced to life in prison. On the 8th of October, he crouched in bushes near Shaare Zedek Synagogue in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. He fired on a group attending services, killing Gerald Gordon, who was 42, and wounding Steven Goldman and William Ash. On the 6th of March 1978, he turned a Ruger Model 44 semi-automatic rifle on the publisher of Hustler magazine, Larry Flynt, and Flynt's lawyer, Gene Reeves. The attack happened in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Franklin said it was revenge for a picture of interracial sex in the magazine. Flynt's spinal cord was damaged, and he was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. No one was ever charged with that shooting. On the 29th of July 1978, Franklin lay in wait near a Pizza Hut in Chattanooga. With a 12-gauge shotgun he killed William Tatum, a 20-year-old black man. He also wounded Tatum's white girlfriend, Nancy Hilton, who survived. Franklin later confessed and pleaded guilty. He received a life sentence, plus a separate sentence for an armed robbery in 1977.

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• 5. The Sniper Years

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  On the 12th of July 1979, Harold McIver, a 29-year-old black manager of a Taco Bell, was shot through a window in Doraville, Georgia. The shot came from 150 yards away. Franklin confessed but was never tried or sentenced for it. He said he killed McIver for being close to white women. On the 18th of August, Raymond Turner was shot through the window of the Burger King he managed in Falls Church, Virginia. His name is often wrongly given as Raymond Taylor. Turner's father, Jack, had been a civil rights activist and one of the first black men elected to office in Loudoun County, Virginia. Franklin is not understood to have known that. On the 21st of October, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Franklin killed Jesse Taylor, who was 42 and black, and his white girlfriend, Marion Bresette, who was 31. On the 29th of May 1980, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Franklin saw the civil rights activist Vernon Jordan with a white woman. Jordan was president of the Urban League. Franklin shot him, and Jordan was seriously wounded but survived. Franklin first denied the shooting and was acquitted, but he later confessed. On the 8th of June, Franklin waited on an overpass in Cincinnati, Ohio, hoping to shoot a racially mixed couple. He killed the cousins Darrell Lane, 14, and Dante Brown, 13, instead. He was convicted in 1998 and received two life sentences. On the 15th of June, he hid on a wooded hillside above Johnstown, Pennsylvania. With a high-powered rifle he shot Arthur Smothers, 22, and Kathleen Mikula, 16, as they crossed the Washington Street Bridge. He was never arrested for those murders but confessed to them in jail. On the 20th of August, near Liberty Park in Salt Lake City, Utah, he killed two black men, Theodore Fields, 20, and David Martin III, 18. He faced federal civil rights charges and state first-degree murder charges, was convicted of both murders, and was sentenced to life in prison.

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• 6. Capture and Courtrooms

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  After Utah, Franklin headed back to the Midwest. In Kentucky, police detained him and asked about a firearm in his car. He ran from the interrogators. Investigators then recovered enough evidence from the vehicle to tie him to the sniper killings. They also knew two things about him: his racist tattoos were hard to miss, and he sold blood at blood banks. Police sent a nationwide alert to blood banks. In October 1980, a worker at a Florida blood bank noticed the tattoos and called the FBI. Franklin was arrested in Lakeland, Florida, on the 28th of October. For the next two decades he faced prosecutions across the country, in state and federal courts. He was sentenced to life in prison several times and received a death sentence in Missouri for the murder of Gerald Gordon. During the judgment phase of his 1997 Missouri trial, he tried to escape, but he was convicted anyway. The psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis had interviewed him at length. She testified for the defense that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and unfit for trial. She cited delusional thinking and a childhood of severe abuse. A different case from the same year had a stranger consequence. On the 25th of June 1980, in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two hitchhikers had been killed with a .44 Ruger pistol. They were Nancy Santomero, 19, and Victoria Durian, 26, both white women. In 1997, Franklin confessed to an assistant prosecutor from Ohio who was working on another case. He said he decided to kill them after one mentioned a black boyfriend. A Florida man named Jacob Beard had already been convicted of those murders in 1993. Beard was freed in 1999, and a new trial was ordered because of Franklin's confession. On the 31st of May 2000, a jury found Beard not guilty. He sued for wrongful conviction and received a $2 million settlement. Franklin himself spent 15 years on Missouri's death row.

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• 7. Execution

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  Franklin waited on death row at the Potosi Correctional Center near Mineral Point, Missouri. In August 2013, the Missouri Supreme Court announced that he would be executed on the 20th of November. Attorney General Chris Koster said the court had "taken an important step to see that justice is finally done for the victims and their families." In October, Larry Flynt, the man Franklin had paralyzed, called for clemency. Flynt argued "that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself." The method itself was in doubt. A European Union export ban had forced the German drug maker Fresenius Kabi to refuse the use of its drugs in lethal injections. Missouri said it would instead use a single drug, supplied by an unnamed compounding pharmacy. On the 17th of November, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an interview with Franklin. He said he had renounced his racist views and called his earlier motivation "illogical". He blamed it partly on his abusive upbringing. He said he had met black people in prison, adding: "I saw they were people just like us." On the 19th of November, Judge Nanette Laughrey in Jefferson City granted a stay over concerns about the new method. That evening Judge Carol E. Jackson in St. Louis granted a second stay, saying Franklin was too mentally incompetent to be executed. An appeals court quickly overturned both, and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his last appeals. He was executed on the 20th of November at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri. The procedure began at 6:07 a.m. CST, and he was pronounced dead at 6:17. It was the first Missouri lethal injection to use pentobarbital alone instead of three drugs. A dose of 5 g was given. Franklin made no final written statement and spoke no words in the chamber. Three witnesses said he seemed to feel no pain. They saw him blink a few times, breathe and swallow hard, then stop moving.

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• 8. Echoes in Print and Film

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  In 1989, William Luther Pierce, founder of the white supremacist group National Alliance, published a novel called Hunter. It follows a serial killer who murders interracial couples, and Pierce dedicated it to Franklin. Pierce publicly praised Franklin as a man who had done what he saw as his duty. The book shows how Franklin's crimes were treated as inspiration by others in the movement. In 1996 the film The People vs. Larry Flynt portrayed Franklin, played by the actor Jan Tříska. The film's story centered on the publisher whom Franklin had shot. It arrived a year before Franklin's Missouri trial for the murder of Gerald Gordon.

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