Joseph Paul Franklin

What the record shows

Joseph Paul Franklin was a white supremacist drifter who was convicted of eight murders committed in five states between 1977 and 1980, most of them sniper shootings of Black men, Jewish worshippers and interracial couples. He received life sentences in Utah, Wisconsin, Ohio and Tennessee and a death sentence in Missouri for the 1977 killing of Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in Richmond Heights, a St. Louis suburb. Missouri executed him by lethal injection at Bonne Terre on November 20, 2013, when he was 63.

Franklin was born James Clayton Vaughn Jr. in Mobile, Alabama, on April 13, 1950, and later changed his name. A 1995 Deseret News chronology says he joined the American Nazi Party in Virginia in the late 1960s and later sold a fascist party newspaper in Atlanta. According to Associated Press reporting carried by the Christian Science Monitor, he began drifting across the country in the mid-1970s and robbed as many as 16 banks to pay his way. In July 1977 he bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee; no one was hurt, and he was later sentenced to federal prison for it.

The killings began weeks later. On August 7, 1977, he shot dead Alphonce Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn, an interracial couple, in Madison, Wisconsin. On October 8, 1977, he fired five shots from about 100 yards at guests leaving a bar mitzvah at Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel Congregation in Richmond Heights, according to the Missouri Supreme Court. Gerald Gordon, 42, was killed and two other men were wounded. AP reporting says he was convicted of a further killing in Chattanooga, and that his victims also included two children in Cincinnati. On June 8, 1980, cousins Dante Evans Brown, 13, and Darrell Lane, 14, were shot from a railway trestle on Reading Road in Cincinnati; Dante died at the scene and Darrell three days later, WCPO reported.

On August 20, 1980, Ted Fields, 20, and David Martin, 18, two Black men, were shot dead while jogging with two white women in Liberty Park, Salt Lake City. Retired detective Don Bell told the Deseret News that motel registrations placed Franklin in the city for 10 days, and a motel owner's note of his real licence plate led to a warrant that caused his arrest in Kentucky. He escaped from an interrogation room there and was captured about a month later in Lakeland, Florida. Utah was the first jurisdiction to convict him: a federal civil rights verdict in March 1981 brought two consecutive life terms, and a state jury convicted him of both murders in August 1981 but could not agree on death, according to the Deseret News.

Other convictions followed over the next two decades. Wisconsin convicted him of the Madison killings in February 1986. In 1994 he told FBI agents he was responsible for the Richmond Heights shooting, and in 1997 a St. Louis County jury convicted him of capital murder and two counts of felonious assault and he was sentenced to death. The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence on June 16, 1998, after Franklin said he did not wish to appeal. In 1997 a Hamilton County assistant prosecutor, Melissa Powers, obtained a taped confession to the Cincinnati killings, and in 1998 a jury convicted him of two counts of aggravated murder; FOX19 reported he received two life sentences.

Franklin also claimed responsibility for shooting Hustler publisher Larry Flynt in Georgia in 1978 and Urban League president Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1980. He was acquitted of the Jordan shooting, and the Wikipedia article says no one was ever charged over the Flynt attack. Counts of his killings vary by source: AP reporting said he claimed up to 20, the Deseret News said he told CNN in 2013 that he had killed about 22 people, and the Wikipedia article lists further admitted killings in Georgia, Virginia, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and West Virginia for which he was not convicted.

His execution was delayed by two federal stays granted on November 19, 2013, including one over Missouri's new single-drug protocol, but an appeals court lifted them and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene. He was pronounced dead at 6:17 a.m. after five grams of pentobarbital, the first Missouri execution with that drug, according to the AP and the BBC. Flynt had publicly opposed the execution. In final interviews Franklin said he regretted his crimes and had renounced racism; defence lawyers had long argued that he was a paranoid schizophrenic.