Reginald Potts on Dateline: Investigation, Trial, and Appeal

NBC’s Dateline covered the Reginald Potts case in a 2016 episode titled “Smoke and Mirrors,” which traced the 2007 murder of 28-year-old Chicago pharmaceutical sales representative Nailah Franklin and the eight-year wait her family endured before Potts stood trial. Potts, Franklin’s ex-boyfriend, was convicted of first-degree murder in November 2015 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in March 2016.¹²

Who Nailah Franklin Was

Nailah Oliani Franklin, born April 12, 1979, in Highland Park, Illinois, graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and joined Eli Lilly & Co. in 2006 as a pharmaceutical sales representative after starting her career at Leo Burnett. She also worked part-time at an art gallery. Relatives called her a “vivacious West Side woman” who “lit up any room she entered.”³⁴

Franklin met Potts by chance on the street in 2006. He presented himself as a wealthy real estate investor, drove a white Bentley, and claimed to live in a South Loop penthouse.⁵ The image was a fiction. Potts had a lengthy criminal history that included drug and weapons arrests and an escape from custody at the Dirksen Federal Building, and he had a documented history of violence against women. His ex-wife Nathaly Figueroa reported being hit, choked, and nearly suffocated with a pillow. Ina Dorsey, the mother of one of his children, testified that Potts choked her with both hands while she held their infant daughter and pushed her down stairs.⁶

The Breakup and the Threats

Franklin ended the relationship in July 2007 after discovering that Potts had lied about his past, had other girlfriends, and refused to acknowledge his three daughters. She described the relationship in an email to friends as “games” and “sexual exploits,” and she told Potts she had filed a police report and intended to obtain an order of protection against him.⁶

Potts responded with hostile messages. In one voicemail, he told her: “If I hear anything else, I will erase your a**. You will disappear.”⁶

September 18, 2007

Franklin took a personal day from work that Tuesday. Surveillance footage from her University Village condo building showed her entering the parking garage with Potts shortly before noon and returning to the garage around 1:00 p.m. Building security had also spotted Potts lurking in her parking garage and stairwell in the days before her disappearance.⁶⁷

Between 4:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., cryptic and uncharacteristic text messages were sent from Franklin’s phone to friends and coworkers. Prosecutors later argued Potts sent them to make it look like Franklin was still alive. At 10:15 p.m., 911 calls were placed from her phone near Potts’s condo building. By 10:16 p.m., the phone went silent for good.⁶

Friends checked Franklin’s condo the next day and found it in disarray and her car missing. Her family distributed thousands of fliers and the search drew national attention.⁸⁹⁶

How Investigators Built the Case

Detectives focused on Potts almost immediately. He was the last person seen with Franklin, and his threats against her were already known. Because no physical evidence directly tied him to the killing, the case was built on circumstantial evidence.

Cell-site records became the backbone. FBI Special Agent Michael Easter mapped the movements of Franklin’s phone, Potts’s phone, and a third phone belonging to an associate named Hugh Echols on the evening of September 18. After 7:00 p.m., Franklin’s and Potts’s phones moved together south along Interstate 94 toward Calumet City and Hammond. Between 7:44 and 7:47 p.m., both phones were near the River Oaks Golf Course parking lot, where boxes of Eli Lilly pharmaceutical samples addressed to Franklin were later found. Between 8:56 and 9:13 p.m., both phones were in the vicinity of the burial site and the area where Franklin’s car was eventually recovered. Echols’s phone tracked through the same areas during that window.⁶

Franklin’s car was located in a residential neighborhood in Hammond, Indiana, about a half mile from the burial site. A box of Cymbalta samples also turned up in an alley near Potts’s condo on September 19.⁶

A second thread was digital. An iPod seized from Potts’s apartment had originally been named “Nailah’s iPod.” Shortly after midnight on September 19, the device was renamed “Reginald” and its database was wiped.¹⁰

The third thread was Echols himself. He initially gave police an alibi for Potts, but detectives confronted him with Target surveillance footage that contradicted his account. Echols then admitted he had lied and told investigators he had picked up Potts in Hammond on the night of the murder. Potts was arrested the same day and charged with Franklin’s murder roughly two months after her death, held without bail.⁶⁴

Why the Trial Took Eight Years

Potts was arrested in late 2007 and charged in early 2008, but he did not go to trial until 2015. The delay was driven primarily by Potts’s repeated switching between representing himself and accepting court-appointed public defenders. Each change disrupted the proceedings, a maneuver he had used in prior criminal cases.¹¹ Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez later said Potts “knew how to corrupt the system” through these maneuvers.²

He was not a passive detainee in the meantime. Jail officials classified him as one of their “highest risk” inmates, and he was cited for intimidation, extortion, battering jail personnel, possessing weapons, and possessing a tool capable of opening his cell.¹²

The 2015 Trial

The trial opened in the fall of 2015 before Cook County Judge Thomas Gainer Jr. Prosecutors called the killing a “deadly ambush” and told jurors they had a “mountain of circumstantial evidence.”⁷ Assistant State’s Attorney Fabio Valentini told the jury during opening statements: “Women don’t stand up to Mr. Potts. Women who confront Reginald Potts take a beating.”⁵

The state’s case combined the cell-site mapping, surveillance footage placing Potts in Franklin’s building the day she vanished, the “erase” voicemail and other threats, forensic testimony about the renamed iPod, propensity testimony from Figueroa and Dorsey about Potts’s history of choking and strangling women, and the collapse of Echols’s original alibi.⁶

The defense, led by public defender Richard Labrador, argued that investigators had “rushed to judgment” and pointed to the absence of direct physical evidence.¹⁰ Potts did not testify. Three defense witnesses offered innocent explanations for his movements that day, contending he had visited Franklin’s building for real estate reasons and that his travel toward Hammond was an unrelated errand.⁶

On November 10, 2015, the jury found Potts guilty of first-degree murder and found the crime had been committed in a “cold, calculated, and premeditated manner.”¹³

Life Without Parole

Sentencing spanned five days and concluded on March 8, 2016. Witnesses filled in more of Potts’s history: a former police officer testified that Potts had admitted involvement in drug trafficking, and a former prosecutor testified that Potts had forged Cook County State’s Attorney letterhead.⁷ A statement from Franklin’s mother, Maria Maner, read by Franklin’s sister Lehia Franklin Acox, called Potts “a wart that has been removed finally from the face of humanity.”²

Potts maintained his innocence, telling the court, “I’m not a monster,” and, “I can’t seek forgiveness for something I did not do.” He blamed the news media for his conviction.¹⁴

Judge Gainer spoke for about an hour, describing Potts as “a cold, calculating, conniving coward of a con man” who had been in “continuous custody” for criminal behavior since 1996. Referring back to the “erase” voicemail, the judge said: “You didn’t erase her, Mr. Potts. She lives on in the hearts and minds of all those people who cherished her while she was alive.” He sentenced Potts to life in prison without the possibility of parole.²

The Appeal

Potts appealed to the Appellate Court of Illinois, arguing among other things that the trial court should have suppressed the cell-site location data obtained without a warrant, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Carpenter v. United States. He also raised claims of defective jury instructions, ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, and a challenge to the trial court’s refusal to allow a post-trial witness to testify anonymously.⁶

On April 28, 2021, the appellate court affirmed the conviction on all counts. It acknowledged Carpenter but did not find that it required suppressing evidence collected in 2007, more than a decade before that ruling.⁹ The Supreme Court of Illinois denied Potts’s petition for leave to appeal on September 29, 2021.¹⁵ Potts remains incarcerated and is serving his life sentence.

1
NBC News. The Eight Year Wait for Justice
2
Chicago Tribune. Ripped as Conniving Coward, Reginald Potts Jr. Given Life in Prison
3
GovInfo. Congressional Record Tribute to Nailah Oliani Franklin
4
Chicago Defender. One Year Passed Since Nailah Franklin Death
5
Chicago Tribune. Woman Called Reginald Potts Pathological in Email Before Killing
6
Illinois Courts. People v. Potts, 2021 IL App (1st) 161219
7
ABC 7 Chicago. Sentencing Hearing for Reginald Potts Begins
8
Chicago Tribune. Sentencing Begins for Man in 2007 Murder of Nailah Franklin
9
Findlaw. People v. Potts, 2021 IL App (1st) 161219
10
Chicago Sun-Times. Prosecutors Rest in Reginald Potts Murder Trial
11
CBS News Chicago. More Than Eight Years Later, Trial Begins in Woman’s Murder
12
CBS News Chicago. Prosecutors Depict Convicted Killer as Serial Woman Abuser
13
Chicago Tribune. Jury Convicts Reginald Potts Jr. in 2007 Murder of Nailah Franklin
14
CBS News Chicago. Reginald Potts Sentenced to Life in Prison for Murder of Nailah Franklin
15
Leagle. People v. Potts, No. 127322