There are several reasons a suspect might project his actions onto another persona. The most obvious one is to establish an insanity defense based on multiple personality disorder. This tactic seldom works, but most defendants don’t know that. Another reason is for psychological face-saving. In 1985, after thirty-six-year-old Larry Gene Bell was arrested for the abduction and murder of seventeen-year-old Shari Faye Smith in Lexington County, South Carolina, I was asked to interrogate him to see if I could get a confession. After setting up for him the proposition that some people end up doing things as if in a nightmare and finessing him into a reaction to the crime, I asked, “Larry, as you’re sitting here now, did you do this thing? Could you have done it?”
He then looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, “All I know is that the Larry Gene Bell sitting here couldn’t have done this. But the bad Larry Gene Bell could have.”
In Franklin’s case, this conversational tactic occurred not long after his arrest, when the idea of long-term incarceration was probably starting to set in. He would have started thinking about the racial animosity he would face from Black inmates if they knew the details of his crimes, and this could have been a feeble self-preserving attempt to separate himself from his own racist image. It quickly became clear he couldn’t sustain this, though. An equally plausible, though opposite, explanation is that he didn’t consider the crime in question up to his “standards” as a killer.
Though nearly everything out of Franklin’s mouth was suggestive on one level or another, the ego-stroking technique was not producing any direct confessions. Dwyer decided to take the Son of Sam strategy one step further. He said he knew that all of the traveling Franklin had done in the past several years, all the banks he had robbed, and all the sniper shootings he had performed were part of his “historic mission,” which Dwyer said he understood to be to kill Blacks and Jews. He suggested that the mission would not achieve the significance Franklin felt it deserved unless it was all written down somewhere, and that the best way to do this was for Franklin to write it all out in his own handwriting on the official FBI stationery Dwyer was carrying. That way, it would become a historical document, the agent stated, akin to what was held and exhibited in the National Archives building in Washington.
Franklin thought long and hard about this offer and Dwyer reported that he was severely tempted to take him up on it, and it was only with the most disciplined restraint that Franklin decided not to.
They had been in the air about seven hours at this point, and Dwyer was feeling emotionally drained from being in the close presence of a man like Franklin and trying so hard to come up with confession strategies. But he also sensed they were nearing a now-or-never moment, and he had to try everything he could think of.
Since Franklin was subject to both state and federal charges, Dwyer said that if Franklin would plead to a federal crime, he could probably work out a deal to be placed in a prison located close to his wife and little girl. If he was found guilty in any of the possible state courts in which he would be tried, the feds would have no influence over where he ended up. Once again, Franklin seemed intrigued by the idea, but pulled back without implicating himself.
With no prompting from Dwyer, Franklin commented that he admired Fred Cowan and what he had accomplished. Dwyer asked who Cowan was and what he had done. Franklin related that Cowan was a member of the National States’ Rights Party and had swastikas tattooed on his arm. Several years earlier, according to Franklin, Cowan went to the warehouse where he worked in New Rochelle, New York, heavily armed, and killed four Black people who worked there. He tried to kill the Jewish business owner as well, but he’d hidden under a desk. When the “pigs” arrived at the scene, Cowan killed one of them and then committed suicide.
The actual story wasn’t all that far from the one Franklin told, but with a somewhat different emphasis. At 7:45 A.M. on St. Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1977, thirty-three-year-old Frederick William Cowan, a twice court-marshaled ex-GI, bodybuilder, and Hitler admirer who lived with his parents and collected Nazi paraphernalia, arrived at the Neptune Worldwide Moving Company, looking for Norman Bing, a supervisor who was Jewish and who had suspended him for being rude to customers. Unlike what Franklin had said, Bing was not the owner of the company. As Cowan passed through the lobby and cafeteria and toward the office area, he shot and killed three Black employees and a dark-skinned electrician from India. Bing saw Cowan entering the building, left his office, and hid under a table in another room.
Within ten minutes, police had arrived and charged into the building. Cowan shot and killed the first one in and wounded three others. Before long, the building was surrounded by three hundred officers and agents from state, local, and nearby police departments and the FBI, and helicopters circled overhead. They waited out the siege for several hours because of the fear of harm to the hostages and the explosives Cowan threatened to detonate. When they finally went in, they found Cowan dead in a second-floor room of a single gunshot wound to the head. He had not been holding any of the fourteen remaining and hidden employees as hostages.
Technically, Cowan was a mass murderer, while Franklin was a serial killer. But this was just the kind of person we could imagine Franklin admiring and drawing strength from. Although Cowan’s crime was basically an attempted revenge killing, Franklin would see a couple of tropes to which he could relate. First, the perceived “owner” of the business was Jewish, and going after him was a justified way of getting back at the Jews. Second, Cowan had tried to kill as many Black people as he could, and if one of them was Indian, well, close enough. The interpretation for Franklin would be that Cowan acted on his beliefs rather than just talking about them, and that he fulfilled his mission, even at the cost of his own life. Franklin, on the other hand, for all his blustering, had no intention of dying for his beliefs.
Unlike in the first FBI interview with Franklin, in which the interrogating agents alternated questions, I had suggested to Dwyer that whenever there was a lull in the conversation, he shouldn’t try to fill it. As part of his insecurity and need to feel in control, Franklin would be compelled to talk. It was a common phenomenon we had seen both during hostage negotiations and in our prison interviews. We called it a “voice vacuum,” and the other party often would feel a need to fill it. And this is what Dwyer said kept happening.
As the plane approached Salt Lake City, part of our strategy was to circle over the Utah State Prison at Draper. From the air, it is a gray and white compound of institutional-looking buildings that might even appear to be a factory complex. Seizing the opportunity, Dwyer pointed out the facility and commented that it was where two-time killer Gary Gilmore had been executed by firing squad about three and a half years earlier. He described how Gilmore was strapped to a chair with a wall of sandbags stacked behind him and a paper target pinned to the left center of his chest. Five local police officers stood behind a curtain with small holes through which they aimed their rifles. The medical examiner’s autopsy, Dwyer went on, showed that the bullets had completely pulverized Gilmore’s heart. That was how Franklin would die if Utah had its way with him, the agent noted. Actually, Gilmore was given the choice between firing squad and hanging, but the drama of the description had the desired effect on Franklin. His attention was riveted on the scene below the plane’s window. I thought Dwyer’s ad lib was brilliant.
Though Franklin hadn’t yet admitted to any murders, I thought Dwyer’s first-rate performance during the flight would still yield positive results down the line.
Near the end of his detailed report, Dwyer wrote:
In conclusion, it is felt that the many suggestions made by BSU preparatory to conducting this interview were extremely valuable and virtually each technique suggested succeeded to one extent or another. Few interviews are conducted under ideal conditions and investigations seldom have the opportunity to make the preparations that led up to this interview. However, the foregoing narration clearly indicates that the s
ervices of BSU are a valuable weapon in the Bureau’s investigative arsenal.
Most of us are attracted to the image of the G-man, and it’s a prime reason many of us wanted to go into this line of work in the first place. But let’s be honest enough to acknowledge that on one level, the FBI is a government bureaucracy like any other, with competing interests, agendas, and power centers. So, that vote of confidence at this still-early and tentative stage of our evolution meant a lot to us in establishing our legitimacy and supporting the development of criminal profiling, investigative analysis, and proactive behavioral strategies that would become the essential core of my work and that of the colleagues who would join me. The proof of concept of our research and methods was coming into focus.
And, in upping Franklin’s ass-pucker factor, we had considerably reduced our own.
Chapter 10
Because of Franklin’s notoriety, the marshals were anxious that he be transferred to the Salt Lake City Jail with as little publicity and fanfare as possible. The chartered plane landed at Salt Lake City International Airport and taxied to the far side of the airfield, where the Utah National Guard had a hangar. But as soon as the plane came to a stop, the marshals looked out the window and saw a television crew waiting on the runway and a Channel 2 helicopter swooping down for a better view. Apparently, someone in local government wanted a media show. The marshals ordered the plane into the cavernous hangar and a tractor pulled the outer door shut. The interior was lined with air police officers carrying M16 rifles.
A deputy U.S. marshal fitted Franklin with a bulletproof vest and put him in one of three windowless vans in a convoy that was led by a V-formation of five Salt Lake City motorcycle cops, an air force truck with a mounted machine gun, and city police cruisers with their sirens blaring. Dwyer commented that the hoopla rivaled a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. The plan was for Franklin to be deposited in the basement garage of the jail. Dwyer asked the police official accompanying him what to expect when they arrived. He was told that just about every media person in Salt Lake City would be there. Dwyer immediately worried about a scene similar to when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot before a gaggle of cameras and reporters in the basement garage of Dallas police headquarters.
Franklin had been calm and fairly talkative during the ride into town, but as soon as they reached the garage and he was escorted out of the van, Franklin and his minders were blinded by a sea of camera flashes. The prisoner, wearing dark glasses, lost it at that moment and began screaming that he was being persecuted for his racist beliefs and that “the Communist federal government is trying to frame me!”
Based on our strategy of trying to place Franklin under maximum stress, especially the mention near the end of the flight as to how he could face the same fate as Gary Gilmore at the Draper penitentiary, Dwyer told jail officials he expected Franklin to talk about his crimes in some form of confession to other prisoners as a stress-relieving action. We’d already seen Franklin do this after his first interview with Dwyer and Fred Rivero in Tampa. Dwyer suggested they debrief any inmates who had any kind of contact with Franklin over the next twenty-four hours and see if he said anything to them. Within the time frame, as Dwyer predicted, Franklin did confess a number of his crimes to several inmates.
With a character like Franklin, you can never be sure whether confessions such as these are legitimate or merely braggadocio to other criminals to enhance his image. In and of themselves, these confessions wouldn’t be much good in court. But they did give both federal and state prosecutors added confidence that they could proceed to trial.
Though the Salt Lake County attorney’s office and Salt Lake City PD detectives felt they had now amassed sufficient evidence to go forward with state charges, they agreed that the best strategy was to go first with the federal civil rights case. The county attorney filed two counts of first-degree murder, to be pursued after the federal prosecution.
On Monday, November 10, Franklin, handcuffed, in leg irons, and accompanied by his court-appointed attorney Stephen McCaughey, was arraigned before U.S. magistrate Daniel Alsup, who had issued the original warrant for Franklin’s arrest in connection with the Liberty Park murders. Four armed guards stood outside the magistrate’s chambers. When Alsup asked for his plea to the first federal civil rights charge against him, Franklin replied, “Definitely not guilty.” In response to the second charge he said, “Same thing.” Alsup continued his bail at one million dollars. County Attorney Theodore L. “Ted” Cannon confirmed that the state would defer its own prosecution until the federal case was completed, and U.S. Attorney Ronald Rencher said he did not believe the federal and state cases constituted double jeopardy because the charges were different.
“The federal charges are a separate and distinct matter from the local murder charges,” Cannon stated. “The federal complaint supports the theory that the individual so charged did violate the civil rights of both Martin and Fields because of their race and color.”
Franklin’s arraignment made national news, and one of the people who caught the report was Lee Lankford, a captain in the Richmond Heights Police Department who, as a detective sergeant, had investigated the 1977 Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue shooting. When he happened to see the television coverage of Franklin’s court appearance, he became convinced that Franklin was good for the Brith Sholom shooting. The Salt Lake City crime was close enough to the Richmond Heights M.O., and Franklin looked enough like the composite drawing of the man leaving the synagogue scene. Learning that he hated African Americans and Jews cinched it. Lankford delved back into it, but the case was not yet strong enough to bring to the district attorney. Still, the detective pledged to Gerald Gordon’s mother that they would find her son’s killer.
In addition to the state murder charges in Utah, first-degree murder charges were filed in Oklahoma County District Court alleging that Franklin had killed Jesse Taylor and Marion Bresette as the mixed-race couple left the supermarket on October 21, 1979. “Franklin told friends and some of his cellmates that he, in fact, committed the homicides here in Oklahoma City and he told them specific details about the homicides,” Oklahoma City homicide detective Bill Lewis said to an AP reporter.
John D. Tinder, chief trial deputy for the Marion County, Indiana, prosecutor’s office, said following a conference with FBI officials that Franklin was a “strong suspect” in the murders of Lawrence Reese and Leo Thomas Watkins, both shot sniper-style through plate-glass windows, two days apart in January 1980.
The Department of Justice announced it was still investigating Franklin in connection with the wounding of Vernon Jordan.
Officials in Cincinnati and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, also considered Franklin a prime suspect for the June murders in their cities the previous year. It seemed just about every case we’d looked at in connection with him, other than the .22-Caliber Killer, he could be good for.
On Tuesday, November 25, while awaiting trial, Franklin gave a telephone interview to the Cincinnati Enquirer, which was interested because of the pending charges against him for the June 8 sniper murders of the two boys, Darrell Lane and Dante Evans Brown.
In describing his escape from the police station in Florence, Kentucky, Franklin offered, “The Lord didn’t think my time had come to get caught,” explaining, “I was handcuffed to a chair. I prayed to the Lord. An hour later, this blond guy took the handcuffs and left the room. I already knew where the window was because earlier that night a guy had rapped at the window and wanted to know how to get into the Florence police headquarters and I told him.” He said that once he had jumped out the window, he ran to the street and was picked up in a car driven by a “high school kid.” The driver dropped him off in northern Kentucky; he hitched another ride to Cincinnati, then took a bus to Columbus. The odyssey took him to Charleston, West Virginia; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and Atlanta, before he made his way down to Florida.
He said he thought he was being held and charged because of the letter he had wri
tten to candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976, but again asserted that he had no interest in President Carter as a target.
Franklin claimed he was innocent of all the sniper slayings and would only kill in self-defense. He added cryptically, “I did some stuff. I did a few things. I’m not totally a good guy, you know. But the end justifies the means.”
He also granted an interview to KALL radio reporters Mike Watkiss and Dave Gonzales in which he said that “race mixing is a sin against God and nature,” and that while he was innocent, whoever had killed the joggers had committed “justifiable homicide.”
In December, as the trial date was approaching, federal prosecutors sought a psychiatric examination of Franklin. Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven W. Snarr filed a motion for the examination to see if Franklin “may have been insane” or suffering from mental illness.
This idea comes up all the time in my work and I always have to explain it. The average person cannot see how someone could kill in cold blood, with preplanning, without being insane. I will grant that just about all of the violent killers I have encountered over the years have been mentally ill to one degree or another. They tend to be narcissistic, paranoid, and either completely devoid of empathy or extremely selective about whom they extend their empathy to. We call that type of mental illness a character defect, a term that speaks for itself. But insanity is a legal term, going back centuries in British common law. Though the definition of insanity has evolved over the years since 1843, when Daniel M’Naghten was tried in London for attempting to assassinate Prime Minister Robert Peel and successfully murdering his private secretary Edward Drummond, the basic concept has remained the same as spelled out in what came to be known as the M’Naghten (sometimes rendered McNaughton) Rule:
Killer's Shadow Page 10