Joseph Paul Franklin: Killings, Trials, and Execution

Joseph Paul Franklin was a white supremacist serial killer who murdered at least 15 people across 11 states between 1977 and 1980, targeting Black people, Jewish people, and interracial couples in sniper-style shootings and bombings. Born James Clayton Vaughn Jr., he was convicted of eight murders, claimed responsibility for as many as 22, and was executed by lethal injection in Missouri on November 20, 2013, for the 1977 murder of Gerald Gordon outside a St. Louis-area synagogue.¹

Who He Was

Franklin grew up in what the FBI described as an “abusive, broken home.”¹ He dropped out of high school after a severe eye injury left him blind in one eye, and as a teenager he was drawn to white supremacist ideology. His views hardened through the 1960s and 1970s after he read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “I’ve never felt that way about any other book that I read,” he later said.²

He changed his name from James Clayton Vaughn Jr. to Joseph Paul Franklin, drawing the first name from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the last from Benjamin Franklin.¹ He associated for a time with organized hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, but by the mid-1970s he had rejected them, believing they “didn’t take their hatred far enough.” He set out on what he described as a solo mission to start a race war.³

The Killings, 1977 to 1980

Franklin’s first known attack came over Labor Day weekend in 1976, when he sprayed mace on an interracial couple.¹ The violence escalated fast. On July 25, 1977, he bombed the home of Jewish lobbyist Morris Amitay in Rockland, Maryland. Four days later he bombed the Beth Sholom synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee. No one was hurt in either bombing.⁴

On August 7, 1977, he shot and killed Alphonse Manning Jr., 23, and Toni Schwenn, 23, in a parking lot at the East Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin, because they were an interracial couple.⁵ On October 8, 1977, he opened fire on guests leaving a bar mitzvah at the Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue in Richmond Heights, Missouri, killing Gerald Gordon, 42, and wounding two others.⁶

Over the next three years his attacks stretched across the country:

February 2, 1978: killed Johnny Brookshire and wounded Joy Williams in Atlanta, Georgia.
March 6, 1978: shot and paralyzed Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and wounded attorney Gene Reeves in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
July 29, 1978: killed William Bryant Tatum and wounded Nancy Hilton in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
July 12, 1979: killed Harold McIver in Doraville, Georgia.
October 21, 1979: killed Jesse E. Taylor and Marion Bresette in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
January 1980: killed Lawrence E. Reese and, two days later, Leo Thomas Watkins, both in Indianapolis, Indiana.
May 29, 1980: shot and seriously wounded civil rights leader Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
June 8, 1980: killed Darrell Lane, 13, and Dante Evans, 14, in Cincinnati, Ohio, as the boys walked to a store.
June 15, 1980: killed Arthur Smothers and Kathleen Mikula in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
June 25, 1980: killed Nancy Santomero and Vicki Durian on Droop Mountain in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. The women were hitchhiking to the 1980 Rainbow Gathering.
August 20, 1980: killed Ted Fields, 20, and David Martin, 18, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The two Black men had been jogging with white teenage girls.

Franklin paid for his travels and weapons by robbing banks, which the FBI said he did “with some proficiency,” and by selling plasma at blood banks between robberies.¹ The BBC reported he claimed roughly 16 bank robberies in all.²

The Larry Flynt and Vernon Jordan Shootings

Franklin’s two most widely reported attacks were on Larry Flynt and Vernon Jordan, and neither man died.

On March 6, 1978, Franklin shot Flynt outside a courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Franklin said he targeted Flynt because of a December 1975 Hustler photo spread featuring an interracial couple. He confessed to the shooting but was never formally tried for it.⁷⁸

On May 29, 1980, Franklin shot Vernon Jordan in the back with a hunting rifle in a motel parking lot in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jordan survived. Franklin later admitted he had been stalking what he called “race mixers” and had previously tried to locate Jesse Jackson without success.⁹¹⁰¹¹

How He Was Caught

For years the FBI struggled to link the shootings. The distances between scenes, the shifting weapons, and the lack of physical evidence made a single suspect hard to pin down. The Bureau’s then-experimental behavioral science unit stepped in, and profiler John Douglas built a profile of the unknown shooter, predicting Franklin would return to “comfort zones” like Mobile, Alabama, and warning that the killer’s anger over President Jimmy Carter’s civil rights record made Carter a potential target.¹²

Two habits gave Franklin away: his distinctive racist tattoos and his practice of selling plasma. In September 1980, a Kentucky police officer found a gun in Franklin’s car during a traffic stop and discovered an outstanding warrant. Franklin was detained but escaped custody.¹ The FBI circulated his photograph to blood banks across the southeastern United States. On October 28, 1980, an employee at a donor center in Lakeland, Florida, recognized him after he came in and was paid five dollars for a donation. Agents arrested him that afternoon.¹³ Douglas later called the case a “make-or-break test” for the profiling unit, and it helped establish the concept of a “mission-driven serial killer” motivated by ideology.¹²

Trials and Convictions

After his arrest, Franklin faced prosecution in multiple states and in federal court over roughly two decades.

Utah

Franklin was tried for the August 20, 1980, murders of Ted Fields and David Martin in Salt Lake City and convicted on both counts. On September 28, 1981, Judge Jay Banks sentenced him to consecutive life terms. During the trial’s final proceedings, Franklin briefly escaped from a holding area at the Hall of Justice by tampering with an elevator and door pins, and was recaptured about 15 minutes later.¹⁴ He was separately convicted in federal court of civil rights violations for the same killings, and the Tenth Circuit affirmed that conviction in 1983.¹⁵

Chattanooga Synagogue Bombing

Franklin was convicted in 1984 of the 1977 bombing of the Beth Sholom synagogue in Chattanooga and sentenced to 31 years in prison.¹⁶

Wisconsin

In 1984, after Franklin gave a taped confession at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, Dane County District Attorney Hal Harlowe charged him with two counts of first-degree murder for the killings of Alphonse Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn. Franklin represented himself at trial in February 1986 and recanted the confession, claiming he had fabricated it to secure a transfer out of Marion. Prosecutors countered with eyewitness testimony, forensic evidence, and details from a separate bank robbery confession that lined up with the Madison confession. The jury deliberated for just over an hour before convicting on both counts, and Judge William D. Byrne imposed two consecutive life terms.¹⁷⁵

Ohio

The 1980 murders of Darrell Lane and Dante Evans in Cincinnati stayed unsolved for years. In 1997, investigator Melissa Powers interviewed Franklin at Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri and obtained a recorded confession. A Hamilton County jury convicted him in 1998 after one day of testimony, and Judge Ralph Winkler sentenced him to 99 years.¹⁸

West Virginia

Franklin confessed in 1997 to the 1980 murders of Nancy Santomero and Vicki Durian on Droop Mountain, though law enforcement officials questioned the confession’s validity. Another man, Jacob Beard, had been convicted of the killings in 1993; his conviction was overturned in 1999 and he was acquitted at retrial in 2000.¹⁹

The Missouri Death Sentence and Execution

Of the jurisdictions that prosecuted Franklin, only Missouri sentenced him to death. He received that sentence in 1997 for the October 8, 1977, murder of Gerald Gordon outside the Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue.²⁰

His execution, set for November 20, 2013, ran into a fight over Missouri’s lethal injection protocol. The state had switched to a single-drug protocol using pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy whose identity was shielded by state privacy rules, and Franklin was the first inmate to be executed under it.²¹ On the evening of November 19, two federal judges granted separate stays. U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey called the state’s protocol a “frustratingly moving target,” noting three different protocols in the three months before the execution date, and found Franklin’s lawyers had shown a “significant possibility of success” on their Eighth Amendment claim. U.S. District Judge Carol Jackson issued a second stay based on questions about Franklin’s mental competency.²²

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster appealed overnight. The Eighth Circuit vacated both stays, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, and Governor Jay Nixon had already denied clemency on November 18.⁶ Franklin was administered the lethal injection at 6:07 a.m. Central Time on November 20, 2013, at the state prison in Bonne Terre and pronounced dead at 6:17 a.m. He refused a final meal and gave no final statement.²³

Larry Flynt, whom Franklin had paralyzed 35 years earlier, publicly opposed the execution. Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, Flynt argued that a life spent in a “3-by-6-foot cell” was “far harsher than the quick release of a lethal injection.” The ACLU of Missouri filed a motion on his behalf seeking to unseal documents about the execution process.⁸

What He Said at the End

In interviews shortly before his execution, Franklin said he had renounced his racist views, called his past motivations “illogical,” and traced them in part to his abusive upbringing. He said interactions with Black inmates in prison had changed him: “I saw they were people just like us.”² He put his own total at roughly 22 killings during the three-year campaign.³

1
FBI. Serial Killers, Part 4
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BBC News. White Supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin Executed
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CNN. Death Row Interview With Joseph Paul Franklin
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The Salt Lake Tribune. Franklin Timeline
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The New York Times. Man Is Convicted of Killing Interracial Couple in Wisconsin in ’77
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CNN. Missouri Executes Joseph Paul Franklin
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NPR. White Supremacist Murderer Who Shot Larry Flynt Is Executed
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Vermont Public. Larry Flynt Seeks to Block Execution of Man Who Shot Him
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Washington Informer. Racist Who Shot Vernon Jordan, Larry Flynt and Killer of Many Others Executed in Missouri
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UPI. The Jury That Acquitted Avowed Racist Joseph Paul Franklin
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Time. Law: Racist’s Victory
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Oxygen. How John Douglas Helped Catch Killer Joseph Paul Franklin
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UPI. A White Supremacist Sought in a Series of Black Shootings Arrested
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Yahoo News. Deseret News Archives: Joseph Paul Franklin
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vLex. U.S. v. Franklin, 704 F.2d 1183
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The Salt Lake Tribune. Joseph Paul Franklin Timeline
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Isthmus. In Cold Blood
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Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office. Case Vault
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West Virginia Encyclopedia. Rainbow Murders
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The Guardian. White Supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin Stay of Execution Lifted
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CBC News. U.S. White Supremacist Who Targeted Jews, Blacks Executed
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St. Louis Public Radio. Mo. Carries Out Execution After Court Vacates Stays
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ABC7 Chicago. White Supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin Executed