Nailah Franklin and Andre Wright: Conviction, Sentence, and Appeal

The Nailah Franklin murder case ended with her ex-boyfriend, Reginald Potts Jr., convicted of first-degree murder in November 2015 and sentenced in March 2016 to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Franklin, a 28-year-old pharmaceutical sales representative from Chicago, disappeared on September 18, 2007, after breaking off a brief relationship with Potts and reporting his threats to police. Her body was found nine days later in a shallow grave behind vacant businesses in Calumet City, Illinois. She had been asphyxiated.¹

Who Nailah Franklin Was

Nailah Oliani Franklin was born on April 12, 1979, in Highland Park, Illinois. She earned an advertising degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001, worked at Leo Burnett, and joined Eli Lilly & Co. in 2006 as a pharmaceutical sales rep.² At the time of her death she was 28, lived in a condominium in Chicago’s University Village neighborhood, worked part-time at an art gallery, and had started an interior decorating side business.³

The Threats From Reginald Potts

Franklin dated Potts briefly in 2007 and ended the relationship in early September after learning about his extensive criminal history. On September 6, 2007, she emailed friends and acquaintances an article detailing that history. Prosecutors later described what followed as a “barrage of heated communications” from Potts.¹

In one voicemail, Potts told Franklin, “I could erase you, and I should have somebody come over there and get you now.” In another he said, “if you do anything else, if I hear anything else, I will erase your a***. You will disappear.”⁴

Franklin took the threats seriously. She gave her best friend, Dana McClellan, her email and voicemail passwords in case anything happened. In a July 2007 email titled “Adios” she called Potts “crazy” and “truly pathological.”⁴ On September 16 she emailed Potts to say she had filed a police report and would seek an order of protection: “If you come anywhere near me you will be back in jail, I promise.”¹ She told her friend Devin Carter that if anything ever happened to her, “he did it.”⁵

The Disappearance and the Nine-Day Search

On September 16 and 17, 2007, neighbors and security guards at Franklin’s University Village condo building reported seeing Potts in the parking garage and hallways. Guards found him in a stairwell after the garage door locking mechanism had been tampered with. He gave a false name, “Johnson,” and fled.¹

On September 18, 2007, surveillance cameras recorded Potts and Franklin entering the building’s parking garage shortly before noon. It was the last confirmed sighting of Franklin alive.⁶ That evening, brief texts went out from her phone to her boyfriend Andre Wright, his boss, and her sister. One read, “At a dinner. Call you back.”⁷ When Franklin missed a work meeting the next morning, her family reported her missing. Police traced her cell phone activity to Calumet City and Hammond, Indiana, and recovered her black Chevrolet Impala in a residential neighborhood in Hammond.¹

On September 27, 2007, investigators found Franklin’s unclothed, badly decomposed body in a shallow grave behind several vacant businesses in Calumet City, including a shuttered video store owned by Potts’s brother-in-law.⁸ Dental records confirmed her identity. A pathologist ruled the cause of death asphyxiation and classified it as a homicide.¹

How Prosecutors Built the Case

No direct physical evidence tied Potts to the scene. Franklin’s car appeared to have been wiped clean of fingerprints and DNA.⁴ The case ran on circumstantial and digital evidence.

Historical cell-site records from the phones of Potts, Franklin, and Potts’s acquaintance Hugh Echols showed all three devices moving from downtown Chicago toward Calumet City and Hammond on September 18, 2007, tracking the area where Franklin’s car and body were later found.¹ Police also recovered an iPod from Potts’s apartment that had been labeled “Nailah’s iPod” and was renamed to “Reginald” shortly after midnight on September 19, 2007, with its database deleted and a new iTunes file created.⁹

Prosecutors argued Potts used Franklin’s phone after her death to send texts and make a bogus dinner reservation in her name to create the illusion she was still alive.⁷ Boxes of Eli Lilly pharmaceutical samples belonging to Franklin were found near a property owned by Potts’s brother-in-law. Remy Martin advertisement cards connected to another woman Potts was dating turned up both in Franklin’s car trunk and near the burial site.¹

Potts tried to use a baby registry purchase at Target as an alibi for the evening of September 18, but store surveillance showed Hugh Echols and his wife, Castra, shopping alone. Echols initially lied to police to cover for Potts, then recanted after his wife urged him to tell the truth and testified that he had actually picked Potts up from a gas station in Hammond around 9:15 p.m.¹⁰

Andre Wright, Franklin’s boyfriend at the time and a Milwaukee attorney, testified for the prosecution. He told the jury Franklin contacted him the morning of September 18 asking why he hadn’t reached out. When he called back later that day, he got no answer. The text that came in response from Franklin’s phone said, “At a dinner. Call you back.” The next morning, from his Milwaukee office, Wright sent Franklin an email with the subject line “Are you alive?”⁷ Police confirmed early in the investigation that Wright was cooperating fully and was not considered a suspect.¹¹

Potts’s History of Violence

Prosecutors described Potts as a nine-time convicted felon who had spent all but four years behind bars since 1997.¹² His prior offenses included drug dealing, theft of luxury cars, swindling real estate colleagues, assaulting police officers, and threatening a Highland Park officer investigating him for car theft.¹

The trial court admitted testimony about Potts’s domestic violence as evidence of his propensity to murder. His ex-wife, Nathaly Figueroa, testified about repeated assaults, including an attempt to suffocate her with a pillow and multiple choking attacks. One beating left her hospitalized with a bleeding ear. A former girlfriend, Ina Dorsey, testified that on September 8, 2007, ten days before Franklin’s murder, Potts placed their three-month-old infant face down on a bed and then choked Dorsey with both hands until her mother intervened. Both women had obtained orders of protection against him.¹³

While awaiting trial in Cook County Jail, Potts was classified as one of the 75 highest-risk inmates. His disciplinary record ran 54 pages and included citations for intimidation, extortion, battery of jail personnel, weapons possession, and possession of a tool used to exit his cell.¹⁴

Conviction and Sentence

Potts was charged with first-degree murder in Cook County, Illinois, under Case No. 08-CR-06600. Trial did not begin until more than eight years after Franklin’s death, with Judge Thomas Gainer Jr. presiding.¹⁵ In November 2015, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder and found that the crime had been committed in a “cold, calculated, and premeditated manner.”⁶

On March 8, 2016, Judge Gainer sentenced Potts to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The judge called Potts “a cold, calculating, conniving coward of a con man” and noted that he had been in “continuous custody” for criminal behavior dating back to 1996.¹⁶ Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez called Potts a “monster” who “stole Nailah Franklin’s vibrant life.”⁵

The Appeal

Potts appealed to the Illinois Appellate Court, First District. He argued that the historical cell-site location data used to track his movements should have been suppressed because police obtained it in 2007 without a warrant, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States. He also alleged defective jury instructions, ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, and the trial court’s refusal to allow a post-trial witness to testify anonymously on his behalf.¹⁷

On April 28, 2021, the appellate court rejected all of his arguments and affirmed the conviction and life sentence. The court acknowledged the Carpenter decision but upheld the admission of the cell-site evidence, concluding that the totality of the evidence supported the jury’s finding.¹

Potts remains incarcerated. Franklin’s family established the Nailah O. Franklin Memorial Fund at the Chicago Community Trust to support violence prevention and youth development.²

1
Illinois Courts. People v. Potts, 2021 IL App (1st) 161219
2
GovInfo. Congressional Record Tribute to Nailah Franklin
3
Chicago Tribune. Remembering Nailah Franklin
4
Chicago Tribune. Woman Called Reginald Potts ‘Pathological’ in Email Before Killing
5
CBS News Chicago. Reginald Potts Sentenced to Life in Prison for Murder of Nailah Franklin
6
Chicago Sun-Times. Reginald Potts Found Guilty of Killing Nailah Franklin
7
CBS News Chicago. Nailah Franklin’s Boyfriend Says He Sent Her an Email Asking ‘Are You Alive?’
8
NBC News. Body Found in Search for Missing Chicago Woman
9
Chicago Sun-Times. Prosecutors Rest in Reginald Potts Murder Trial
10
Fox 32 Chicago. Pathologist Testifies Nailah Franklin Was Asphyxiated
11
Chicago Tribune. Cops: Missing Woman Had Complained of Calls
12
Fox 32 Chicago. Convicted Killer Reginald Potts: ‘I Did Not Murder Nailah’
13
Chicago Sun-Times. Reginald Potts Ex-Wife, Former Girlfriend Recount Abuse
14
CBS News Chicago. Prosecutors Depict Convicted Killer as Serial Woman Abuser
15
CBS News Chicago. More Than Eight Years Later, Trial Begins in Woman’s Murder
16
Chicago Tribune. Ripped as ‘Conniving Coward,’ Reginald Potts Jr. Given Life in Prison
17
FindLaw. People v. Potts, 2021 IL App (1st) 161219