Racist Serial K.i.ller Executed: The Final Hours of Joseph Paul Franklin

Do you know how many people you murdered?  Uh, yeah, but I’d rather I’d rather not mention it.  By my count, it’s 22 people. Is that the same number that you have?  That’s approximately it. Uh, no. I don’t really think about them. I mean, I can’t go back and think about the cases, you know, individually.

Uh, I have too much other problems, too much other things I have to focus on and worry about, you know. I regret the fact that I shot them now.  Why did you shoot them?  Well, I was just waiting. I was sitting on that railroad track waiting for the first either interracial couple or black to walk by.  And what was your mission?  Well, to try to get a race war started mixed race couples and blacks.

 I figured if once I started doing it and showed them how other white supremacists would do the same thing, follow suit, you know.  So, you hope people would copy you?  I would hope. Yeah. I hope that other white nationalists would do the same thing.  Do you think you’re a hero to those hate groups?  Well, that’s what they tell me.

 You know, [laughter] it took me many, many years to change. I actually thought as misguided as I was, I was doing the will of God, you know. I thought I was actually doing right. This is what God wanted me to do.  Are you scared?  No. I got my trust in in God.  He called it his mission. Armed with rifles and a warped hatred, Joseph Paul Franklin spent three years crisscrossing America, gunning down strangers in cold blood, all in the delusional hope of igniting a race war.

 More than 20 people fell victim to his racist crusade. An interracial young couple was shot dead in a mall parking lot in Wisconsin. A Hustler magazine publisher was ambushed and left paralyzed on a Georgia sidewalk. Each attack seemed as random as it was ruthless. Yet all were part of Franklin’s grand plan to cleanse the world of those he saw as inferior.

Franklin’s trail of terror finally ended in 1980, landing him on death row. Decades later, on a cold November morning in 2013, he lay strapped to a gurnie in a Missouri execution chamber. He was calm and cooperative, a far cry from the ragefueled sniper he once had been. Franklin met the same fate he had dealt to so many others.

 This is the harrowing story of Joseph Paul Franklin, the racist serial killer who tried to start a war and how justice finally caught up with him. Joseph Paul Franklin was born James Clayton von Jr. on April 13th, 1950 in Mobile, Alabama. His upbringing was anything but stable. He endured severe physical abuse at home and often went hungry as a child, according to his own later recollections.

 They told me stories of brutal beatings. One family friend said of the Vaughn children’s childhood, “Frank Franklin’s father left when he was eight, and his mother, a strict German American, struggled to raise him and his siblings amid poverty and violence. These early traumas seemed to stunt his emotional development.” Franklin himself admitted he was 10 years or more behind others in maturity.

As a teenager in the 1960s, Vaughn, as he was still known then, became fixated on extreme ideologies. He developed an interest in evangelical Christianity, but soon that gave way to Nazism and Ku Klux Clan affiliations. He even joined the National Socialist White People’s Party and the KKK in an act of self-reinvention and homage to his twisted idols.

 He legally changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin, combining the first names of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Gobles and American founding father Benjamin Franklin. It was as if he wanted his very identity to reflect his two guiding forces, Nazi racism and a revolutionary zeal. Franklin found his ultimate inspiration in Adolf Hitler’s main camp.

 Reading Hitler’s manifesto lit a fire in him like nothing before. I’ve never felt that way about any other book. It was something weird about that book, he later reflected. The ideology of violent white supremacy consumed him. By the early 1970s, he was a drifter and self-described white supremacist soldier.

 He fantasized about sparking a nationwide race war, a holy war of whites against blacks and Jews. Franklin would later admit that by this point he was essentially living in a delusion, illogical in his own words, fueled by hate and a desire for chaos. To fund his dark ambitions, Franklin turned to crime. He robbed up to 16 banks across the country to finance his travels and arsenal.

 He even sold his own blood for cash at blood banks, a practice that ironically would contribute to his downfall. With money and guns in hand, Franklin hit the road in the late 1970s, leaving a path of bloodshed and terror in his wake. Between 1977 and 1980, Joseph Paul Franklin launched a one-man war against those he deemed inferior. He drifted state to state, sniping victims from the shadows, and vanishing before anyone knew what had happened.

 His primary targets were black people, Jewish people, and interracial couples. Anyone whose mere existence offended his racist worldview. By his own claim, he murdered as many as 20 people during this period, though he was officially convicted of eight killings across five states. Franklin’s first confirmed murders came on August 7th, 1977 in Madison, Wisconsin.

 In a parking lot at Easttown Mall, a young interracial couple, 23-year-old Alfins Manning, a black man, and his white girlfriend Tony Schwen, were sitting in their car when Franklin opened fire. Both were killed simply because they were together. The senseless slaying sent shock waves through the community. Franklin later received two life sentences for these murders.

 But at the time, authorities had no idea the shooter was just getting started. Only two months later, on October 8th, 1977, Franklin struck again. This time in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Hiding in the bushes outside the Brit Shalom Nissath Israel synagogue, he waited for worshippers to exit a bar mitzvah ceremony.

 As families trickled out of the sanctuary, Franklin took aim through his rifle scope. Shots rang out in the autumn air, sending people screaming and ducking for cover. In the chaos, 42-year-old Gerald Gordon fell dead in the parking lot, and two others were wounded by the sniper bullets. The victims had been targeted for no reason other than being Jewish and present at their temple.

 This brazen attack on a house of worship would many years later become the crime that put Franklin on Missouri’s death row. By 1978, Franklin’s mission of hate was in full swing. On March 6th, 1978, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, he set his sights on a nationally known figure. Larry Flint, the flamboyant publisher of Hustla magazine, was walking back to the courthouse with his lawyer during an obscenity trial when a rifle shot slammed into him.

 The bullet ripped through Flint’s body, leaving him partially paralyzed from the waist down. Flint’s lawyer was also injured. Franklin later confessed that he ambushed Flint because Hustler had published photos of interracial couples, an unforgivable sin in Franklin’s eyes. At the time, no one connected the shooting to Franklin, and Flint had no clue who had nearly killed him.

 Years later, Flint would recall how that single sniper’s bullet changed his life forever, condemning him to life in a wheelchair. Only a few months after the Flint shooting, Franklin struck in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On July 29th, 1978, he hid near a Pizza Hut and used a 12- gauge shotgun to kill 20-year-old William Brian Tatum, a black man, as Tatum walked with his white girlfriend after dinner.

 The girlfriend, Nancy Hilton, was hit as well, but survived her injuries. This attack fit Franklin’s hateful pattern to a tea. a black man dating a white woman. Franklin would later plead guilty to Tatum’s murder, earning another life sentence. But in the moment, he simply disappeared into the night, leaving yet another community terrified and grieving.

 Franklin’s relentless rampage continued into 1979. In July of that year, Harold Macccyver, a black manager at a Taco Bell in suburban Atlanta, was shot and killed by a sniper bullet while at work. Franklin would casually confess to this murder later, explaining that he killed Macccyver simply because he saw the man talking to white women.

 A month later, in August 1979, Franklin gunned down Raymond Taylor, a black man in Falls Church, Virginia. And in October 1979, he murdered another interracial couple, 42-year-old Jesse Taylor, no relation to Raymond, and 31-year-old Marian Brassette, in Oklahoma City. Victims kept falling to his sniper rifle, often with no clear link between the crime scenes except the hateful motive behind them.

 By 1980, Franklin had effectively become a roving racist sniper, crossing state lines and evading the FBI. In May 1980, he targeted a high-profile black civil rights figure. Vernon Jordan, president of the National Urban League. Franklin spotted Jordan with a white woman outside a hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and took a shot.

 Jordan was seriously wounded but miraculously survived. Franklin initially denied involvement and even beat the charge in court, being acquitted at trial, only to confess years later that he had indeed been the triggerman. When he was finally brought to trial for these murders in 1998, Franklin showed no remorse. He was convicted and given two more life sentences.

 Franklin’s killing spree didn’t stop there. A week after the Ohio incident on June 15th, 1980, he murdered yet another interracial couple, Arthur Dale Smothers, a 22-year-old black man, and Kathleen Mula, a 16-year-old white girl, as they crossed a bridge in John’stown, Pennsylvania. Franklin had perched on a wooded hillside like a hunter waiting for prey and shot the young couple from a distance.

 He managed to slip away unseen and those murders remained unsolved until he confessed years later from prison. Then on June 25th, 1980, he picked up two white female hitchhikers in West Virginia, Nancy Santa, 19, and Vicky Durian, 26, and coldly executed them in a remote area when one mentioned she had a black boyfriend.

 This crime was initially blamed on an innocent man who spent years in prison before Franklin’s 1997 confession exonerated him. The hitchhiker’s murders showed the terrifying unpredictability of Franklin’s violence. Even a casual conversation could turn deadly if it offended his racist sensibilities. Franklin’s final known murders occurred on August 20th, 1980 in Salt Lake City, Utah, nearly 3 years to the day after his first killings in 1977.

That evening, he spotted two young black men, 20-year-old Ted Fields and 18-year-old David Martin, jogging in a park with two white teenage girls. Enraged by the sight of what he considered race mixing, Franklin hid in tall weeds and opened fire with a high-powered rifle. Fields and Martin collapsed as the girl screamed.

 Seeing one man wounded and his friends trying to drag him to safety, Franklin later said, “I couldn’t understand that.” He was astonished that the white girls and the other black victim didn’t immediately flee and abandon their friend. Instead, they tried to help, which seemed to baffle the killer. Franklin then chambered another round, looked through a scope, and dropped the second black guy.

 By his own chilling account, to make sure his mission was complete, he walked up and emptied the gun into both guys while they were lying there. “I figured I should complete the job,” he recounted dispassionately. Both young men died on that cold ground. Murdered for no reason other than the color of their skin.

 This Utah double murder would be the last in Franklin’s cross-country rampage. Unbeknownst to him, law enforcement was finally closing in. By the late summer of 1980, the FBI had a serial sniper on their hands, and the pattern of racially motivated shootings was becoming clear. Multiple states authorities began comparing notes on these seemingly random hate crimes.

After the Salt Lake City killings, a description of a suspicious drifter with racist tattoos began circulating. In October 1980, a major break came from an unexpected place, a blood bank in Florida. Franklin had a habit of selling his blood for cash as he traveled, and the FBI had astutely alerted blood banks nationwide to watch out for anyone with conspicuous Nazi or KKK tattoos.

 Sure enough, on October 28th, 1980, a worker at a blood bank in Lakeland, Florida, noticed a man with numerous racist tattoos who matched the fugitive’s description. She tipped off the authorities and the FBI swooped in. After three years on the run, Joseph Paul Franklin was finally arrested. Investigators soon realized they had caught one of the nation’s most elusive and prolific killers.

 Franklin’s arrest opened the floodgates to a morbid series of confessions. safely behind bars. He boasted about many of his crimes, freely admitting to shootings that had long stumped police. In fact, the murder of Gerald Gordon outside the St. Louis synagogue back in 1977 had gone unsolved for nearly two decades until Franklin confessed to it in 1994 while serving time for other crimes.

 He chillingly explained that he decided to come clean about that particular killing because he had a dream in prison that instructed him to tell the truth. “I was always having dreams telling me to do things,” Franklin said, describing how he used to interpret his nightmares as messages from God during his years on the streets.

 This bizarre, almost supernatural justification was part of the warped mental state he claimed to have been in. Once in custody, Franklin faced a gauntlet of legal proceedings across multiple states. Over the next two decades, he was tried for a host of murders, attempted murders, and hate crimes. One by one, juries and judges held him accountable for his bloody spree.

 He ultimately received a total of seven life sentences for various murders in different jurisdictions. These included life terms for the interracial couple in Wisconsin, the two joggers in Utah, and others. Federal civil rights charges were also brought in some cases, like the Utah murders, ensuring he’d never taste freedom again.

 But one case in particular stood out. Missouri charged Franklin with capital murder for the synagogue sniper attack that killed Gerald Gordon. It was this trial nearly 20 years after the crime that posed the ultimate question of whether Franklin would live or die for his actions. In 1997, Joseph Paul Franklin was brought to St.

 Louis, Missouri to stand trial for the killing of Gerald Gordon outside the Brit Shalom Synagogue. By this time, Franklin was notorious nationwide as a racist serial killer. Rather than showing remorse or fear as he faced a possible death sentence, Franklin shockingly embraced the prospect. He opted to represent himself in court. Using the trial as a platform for his hateful beliefs, at one point, Franklin told the court that his only regret was that killing Jews wasn’t legal.

 A stunning statement that left onlookers gasping. He made no apologies for the synagogue shooting. In fact, he openly bragged. I had just totally been obsessed with main camp and Hitler and wanted to kill some Jews, he told the jury, doubling down on his actions. Franklin’s behavior in the courtroom swung between brazen and bizarre.

 He actually asked the jury to sentence him to death, essentially daring them to grant him martyrdom. When the jury obliged and returned to verdict of death, Franklin flashed them a thumbs up and smiled. It was as if this was the outcome he wanted all along. Observers could hardly believe it. The defendant was congratulating the jurors for condemning him to die.

 In Franklin’s warped mind, a death sentence might have signified validation of his mission or perhaps a twisted sense of victory. During the penalty phase of that trial, there was also drama of a different sort. Franklin attempted an escape during the proceedings, trying to flee the courtroom or courthouse in a desperate bid for freedom.

 The escape attempt failed. Guards quickly subdued him, but it added yet another wild chapter to the trial. This was a man both eager to die on his own terms and yet instinctually afraid of being caged. The contradictions in Franklin’s conduct were on full display. His defense did present evidence about his mental state, calling psychiatrist Dr.

 Dorothy Lewis to testify. Dr. Lewis, a renowned expert on violent minds, had examined Franklin at length. She diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, prone to delusions, and likely unfit to stand trial in her view. She noted his lifelong history of severe abuse and mental illness, painting a picture of a deeply disturbed individual.

 However, the court ultimately found Franklin competent, and the trial moved forward to its conclusion. In the end, Missouri’s justice system had the final word. Joseph Paul Franklin was convicted of Gerald Gordon’s murder and formally sentenced to death on February 27th, 1997. For the first time in his life, the self-proclaimed soldier of a race war faced an enemy he could not outrun or shoot at, the executioner’s needle.

He was sent to Missouri’s Poty Correctional Center to await his fate on death row. On death row, a curious transformation began to take shape in Joseph Paul Franklin. He had spent years glorifying violence and spewing hate. But isolated in a cell with nothing but time and his thoughts, he gradually started to reflect on his life and beliefs.

 In interviews and communications from prison, Franklin surprisingly renounced his racist views in his later years. In a 2013 interview just before his execution, he admitted that his past motivations had been illogical and that he’d been living in a delusional state fueled by an abusive upbringing. Interacting with black inmates in prison apparently altered his perspective.

 “I saw they were people just like us,” he said, as if finally grasping the basic humanity of those he once demonized. It was a stark about face for someone who had tried to incite a race war and it came far too late long after irreparable harm had been done. Franklin also began to describe himself as mentally ill during these years.

 I was mentally ill when I was out there. Man, I was just completely out of control to be quite honest, he told one journalist, reflecting on his killing spree. He insisted that was not me out there in the streets doing that crap. I would not even think of doing that stuff again. In his own repetitive way, he kept coming back to the phrase, “I was mentally ill,” as an explanation for his crimes.

 He even claimed to have cured himself through what he called bibliootherapy, reading books and meditating alone in his cell for years. To observers, it was hard to tell how genuine this transformation was. Was he truly remorseful and changed, or was this simply a survival strategy as execution loomed? Perhaps it was a bit of both.

 Those who knew the old Franklin were skeptical. He had been a hero and role model in neo-Nazi circles during his rampage. White supremacist leader William Pierce even dedicated a 1989 race war novel to Franklin, calling him a man who saw his duty as a white man and did what a responsible son of his race must do. Such was the infamy Franklin had achieved among the radical right.

 Yet here was Franklin in the 2000s disavowing the very ideologies that propelled them. Meanwhile, some of Franklin’s victims and survivors grappled with how to feel about the killer awaiting execution. In October 2013, just a month before Franklin’s scheduled death, an unexpected voice called for mercy on his behalf. Larry Flint, the very man Franklin had shot and paralyzed in 1978, spoke out against executing him.

 Flint, an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, filed a legal motion to stop the execution. “A government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself,” Flint argued. In Flint’s view, executing Franklin would only be state sanctioned revenge, something he could not support even after all he had suffered.

 It’s a poignant twist. One of Franklin’s most famous victims became one of the only people trying to save his life. Missouri officials, however, showed no inclination to grant clemency based on Flint’s objections. Other survivors, felt differently. Terry Jackson Mitchell, one of the white teenagers who had been jogging with the two black victims in the 1980 Utah attack, carried physical and emotional scars for decades.

 A bullet fragment from Franklin’s rifle had grazed her that night as her friend were killed. She struggled for years with trauma and anger. Yet, as Franklin’s execution neared, Jackson Mitchell made an incredible gesture. She sent him books on spiritual healing and even agreed to speak with him by phone. In their conversations, Franklin told her he was glad he didn’t kill me, and he apologized for the incident, his chillingly mundane term for the night he murdered her friends.

 Mitchell later said Franklin sounded scared and scattered, clearly afraid of dying, and expressed as much remorse as he was capable of. She forgave him in her heart, but notably, she still supported the execution. In her eyes, putting Franklin to death might finally put an end to his lifetime of suffering and perhaps ease the suffering of those he hurt.

 As the execution date drew closer, Missouri’s governor and courts weighed Franklin’s fate. His lawyers filed last ditch appeals, arguing, among other things, that his diagnosed schizophrenia and mental incompetence should bar his execution. They also challenged the state’s lethal injection method since Missouri had switched to a new drug, Pentobarbatl, sourced from a compounding pharmacy.

 on November 19th, 2013, hours before the scheduled execution. Two federal judges granted temporary stays, one over the drug issue and another over Franklin’s mental competency. For a brief moment, it looked like Franklin’s date with death might be postponed. But the reprieve was fleeting. The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals swiftly overturned both stays that very night.

Then at around 5:00 a.m. on November 20th, the US Supreme Court rejected Franklin’s final appeals. Missouri’s Governor Jay Nixon had already denied clemency, citing Franklin’s merciless acts of violence fueled by hate and the need to see justice done. The path was clear for the execution to proceed at last.

 Reporters described the legal battle that night as a roller coaster of lastminute maneuvers. Franklin himself, who had once thumbmed his nose at death, was now by all accounts anxious as the clock ticked down. He had been moved to a holding cell near the execution chamber and even requested a sedative to calm his nerves.

 After 33 years behind bars and 15 years on death row, the end was at hand. In the pre-dawn darkness of November 20th, 2013, Joseph Paul Franklin was escorted into the execution chamber at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center in Bontra, Missouri. It was about 5:30 a.m. local time. The man once dubbed the poster boy for modern-day American terrorists shuffled the final 20 ft flanked by guards, hands and feet shackled.

 He was helped onto a steel gurnie where straps secured his arms, legs, and torso. A sheet was drawn up to his neck, leaving only his head exposed. An introvenous line was inserted into his arm, hooked up to syringes filled with the lethal solution. Prison officials asked Franklin if he had any last words or a final statement to make.

He did not. The 63-year-old killer kept silent, offering no apology, no statement of defiance, nothing. He also had refused any last meal. Unlike many condemned inmates who order a feast, Franklin declined special food the night before and ate nothing before his execution. Perhaps it was an attempt to show resolve.

 Or perhaps, as some speculate, it was because he had lost his appetite due to anxiety. Either way, he met his fate on an empty stomach and with closed lips. Witnesses observed that Franklin seemed composed, even peaceful. “He was calm, he was peaceful, he was cooperative,” said Mike Oonnell, a Department of Public Safety spokesman who was present.

 “At approximately 6:07 a.m. Central time, the warden gave the signal and the execution began. A single large dose of pentobarbatital, a powerful barbbiterate sedative, started flowing into Franklin’s veins. Missouri had adopted this single drug method for the first time due to shortages of the standard three drug cocktail and controversy over execution drugs.

 5 g of pentobarbatl were administered, a dose massive enough to shut down Franklin’s heart and lungs within minutes. For a moment, Franklin’s eyelids fluttered. He took a few deep breaths and was seen swallowing hard a couple of times as the drug hit his system. His chest heaved a few times, then gradually slowed.

 Three media witnesses and an associated press reporter looked unintently. They later reported that Franklin did not cry out or show obvious signs of pain. He simply closed his eyes and started to fade. By 6:17 a.m., a prison doctor pronounced him dead. 10 minutes was all it took from the start of the injection to the final heartbeat.

 And just like that, Joseph Paul Franklin’s life ended in the most undramatic of ways. A quiet exit observed by a handful of witnesses in a sterile room. Outside the prison, the world carried on its morning. Many unaware that another chapter in a dark history had just closed. Franklin became the 69th person executed by Missouri since the death penalties return in the 1970s.

 A body count one reporter dryly noted that any serial killer would envy. It was a grim statistic highlighting that the state had ultimately done to Franklin what he had done to so many others. The execution of Joseph Paul Franklin marked the end of a horrific saga of hatefueled violence. In the aftermath, there was little public mourning for the gunman who had terrorized so many lives.

 Justice had been served. Many felt long overdue. Missouri’s attorney general at the time summed it up by saying the execution was an important step to see that justice is finally done for the victims and their families. Yet, the story of Joseph Paul Franklin continues to resonate as a cautionary tale.

 He was a loner driven by delusions of starting a race war. And while he failed to ignite the larger conflict he wanted, he succeeded in inflicting unspeakable pain on innocent people across the country. The hate that motivated him remains a frightening force in society, and his case is often studied to understand how extremist ideologies can turn an individual into a monster.

 Franklin himself, in his final days, recognized the utter madness of his crusade. Who would want to go around shooting somebody worshiping at a synagogue? I just cannot imagine myself committing a crime like that anymore, he admitted to an interviewer, sounding like a man who no longer knew the person he once was. In popular culture, Franklin’s crimes and trial have been noted in books and film.

 The neo-Nazi novel Hunter was dedicated to him, as mentioned, glorifying his lone wolf approach. He was even portrayed briefly in the 1996 film The People Versus Larry Flint, reminding the world of the bizarre intersection between the racist killer and the porn publisher he tried to kill. In the end, Joseph Paul Franklin died not as a martyr to any cause, but as a condemned murderer.

 The race war he dreamed of never came. Instead, he left behind a trail of broken families and untold grief.