To establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.
Practically speaking, this means that if the accused comprehends the distinction between right and wrong and is able to conform his behavior to the rules of society, then he is morally and legally culpable for the crime. So, who would be covered by insanity rules? Someone who was truly delusional and psychically detached from reality. M’Naghten was found to be suffering from severe delusions of persecution, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was transferred from Newgate Prison to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Bethlehem Hospital, commonly known by its nickname, Bedlam. I can think of only a handful of killers I would consider legally insane, and Joseph Paul Franklin was not among them.
The judge agreed.
By the time the trial in federal court began, in February 1981, a nineteen-year-old inmate named Robert Lee Herrera, who was being held in the Salt Lake jail on a burglary conviction, got word to the local FBI field office that Franklin had confessed the Fields-Martin and Lane-Brown murders to him after Herrera told him that he had been moved to Franklin’s cell block after he got into a fight with a Black man. Herrera said Franklin told him he would kill anyone of any age as long as they were Black, particularly if they were mixing with white. Black men with white women in public, he believed, should die. He reportedly admitted the Vernon Jordan shooting for the first time, but perhaps most interestingly, he confessed to an unsolved crime that no one, up until that point, had been able to pin on him.
In March 1978, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt was on trial in Lawrenceville, Georgia, for obscenity charges. Near the Gwinnett County Courthouse, where the trial was taking place, Flynt was shot and permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Flynt’s attorney, Gene Reeves, was also seriously wounded, requiring twenty days in the intensive care unit of Button Gwinnett Hospital, but he eventually made a full recovery.
For the nearly three years since, the crime had remained unsolved, and though it was a sniper-style shooting, it hadn’t been considered in connection with Franklin’s alleged spree. When he was captured in Florida and the extent of his alleged crimes became known, local Georgia authorities said Franklin was “wanted for questioning,” but that was as far as any connection had gone. But speaking to Herrera, Franklin confessed to Flynt’s shooting, explaining that he’d done it because he was disgusted by the porn publication’s occasional pictorials of mixed-race couples.
The FBI agents who met with Herrera conveyed the information to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Several assistant attorneys then interviewed Herrera themselves and had him sit for a polygraph exam, which he passed. Still, any jailhouse snitch is questionable because they all have something to gain from cooperating with the authorities. Though Herrera offered a fair degree of detail about the aftermath of some of the crimes, the attorneys weren’t sure any of it wasn’t available from previously published sources. And even if he was telling the truth, maybe Franklin wasn’t.
As the trial date neared, the prosecutors learned that Franklin had also shot his mouth off to another jail inmate, Richard Hawley, confessing to the Salt Lake City murders and that of a mixed-race couple in Oklahoma City in 1979. Hawley was being held on federal charges of conspiracy to transport explosives across state lines and wanted to talk to the feds about favorable treatment before he had to plead, but the information he provided built on a pattern of Franklin’s confessions.
The Salt Lake City trial began on Monday, February 23, 1981, with Judge Bruce S. Jenkins presiding and Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven W. Snarr heading up the prosecution. Demonstrating that Franklin was an avowed racist was not difficult; he had freely admitted it to the press and numerous individuals. In fact, the defense implied that his racism was the reason the government was prosecuting him, rather than that he had actually murdered anyone. The prosecution spent a week on its case, including circumstantial evidence regarding Franklin’s vehicle and the witnessed getaway car, tire tread matchups, and sixty-five witnesses. None, however, had seen Franklin fire the rifle, nor was the rifle located.
But they did have testimony from Herrera and Hawley, as well as Anita Cooper, all of whom repeated their accounts of how Franklin had admitted the murders to them. Hawley mentioned the “joy” Franklin had described in killing the two men. Hawley acknowledged that he had pled guilty about a week and a half before but that there was no agreement with prosecutors about how his testimony would affect his upcoming sentencing.
As Hawley was completing his testimony, Franklin shouted out from the defense table, “How long did it take you to make that up, Hawley, you liar!” Even after a warning from Judge Jenkins, Franklin kept spouting about liars and snitches when prosecutors would mention Herrera, Hawley, and Cooper to the jury.
Among the witnesses called to testify were the two teenage girls who jogged with the victims. They described their terror as Martin and Fields were hit.
Also, the Salt Lake City Tribune reported:
Three witnesses, Leon Beauchaine, his daughter, Carrie, and Gary Spicer, testified about how they looked into the vacant, weed-covered field and saw “muzzle flashes” and a man crouched with a rifle, wearing a baseball cap and a dark leather jacket.
Mr. Spicer told how the sniper tossed the rifle in the trunk of his car and drove away from the field while the gunshots still echoed in the neighborhood.
Robert L. Van Sciver, one of the most highly respected defense lawyers in the state, led Franklin’s defense team. The Franklin defense claimed that his visual disability would have prevented him from the kind of long-range kills he was accused of. They supported this assertion with testimony from an ophthalmologist and a military sniper. Van Sciver said that witnesses like Spicer said the man they saw was not wearing glasses. When I read this, I wondered whether it mattered, given the enlarging power of a telescopic gunsight.
Both of Franklin’s sisters came to Salt Lake City for the trial and Marilyn Garzan stayed through to the end. She told a UPI reporter her brother had developed a deep hatred of Blacks because of harassment and assaults family members suffered growing up in their predominantly Black neighborhood. This didn’t square with what we had found while researching his background. “The sister,” the article stated, “said she had learned to consider Blacks as individuals, not as a collective group.” Apparently Franklin had learned no such thing.
Despite Van Sciver’s desire to put his client on the witness stand, Franklin decided not to testify in his own defense, which was his absolute right.
When it came time for the summations, though, Franklin did offer a few off-the-cuff comments. When Snarr mentioned Herrera’s, Hawley’s, and Cooper’s testimony during his summation, Franklin shouted out, “They’re liars, all liars! Why don’t you make them take a polygraph test? They’re manipulated by the FBI!” and declared, “I don’t feel like going to a firing squad because of some liars!”
Judge Jenkins ordered him removed to a small holding cell, where a speaker was rigged up for him to hear the rest of the trial. As security guards led him out past the judge’s bench he screamed, “I won’t be quiet when there’s a bunch of liars saying those things!”
Van Sciver, pacing before the jury with his hands plunged deep into his suit jacket pockets, attempted to rebut each of Snarr’s points, noting that the medical testimony indicated eight or nine bullet wounds, while the police found only six empty shells. Did that mean there was more than one gunman at a different location? He said that several witnesses thought they heard shots coming from different directions. Taken together with the apparent angle of the shots, he declared, “As a citizen of this country, I am offended that the government in this case has failed to explain away the physical evidence. The government’s eviden
ce simply did not fit together.”
He suggested the investigators were totally swayed by witness interviews and accused them and the prosecutors of “tunnel vision”: “From the totality of the ugliness of the offense of August 20, 1980, we’ve got to convict, we’ve got to punish somebody . . . and they rely on the people who share Joseph Paul Franklin’s secrets.”
Following closing arguments and Jenkins’s instructions, the all-white jury of ten women and two men began deliberations at 4:15 on Tuesday, March 3. They deliberated for thirteen and a half hours before returning the next afternoon with a verdict of guilty on both counts of having violated the civil rights of the two victims. In contrast to his earlier outbursts, Franklin appeared impassive as the court clerk read the verdicts. Jenkins set sentencing for March 23.
Ted Fields’s father, Reverend Theodore Fields, told reporters and supporters, “I feel justice has been done, and I feel happy about it.”
Richard Roberts, an African American attorney with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division who had assisted Snarr with the prosecution, called the case a signal that his department would “vigorously prosecute any civil rights cases in the country.”
In tears, Marilyn Garzan left the courtroom saying, “It’s not over. There’s no way it’s over.”
And as he left the courtroom in handcuffs, Franklin proclaimed to reporters, “I didn’t do it. It’s a government frame-up. That’s what I’ve said all along.”
The Associated Press reported, “Franklin, who has maintained he didn’t kill anyone, has told reporters earlier he felt the Black youths deserved to die for ‘race mixing.’ ”
Van Sciver said he would appeal the verdict. “I was disappointed,” he admitted. “We tried very hard and I think there were problems with the state’s evidence.” At about the same time, Deputy County Attorney Robert Stott said his office would now proceed with state murder charges against Franklin.
At sentencing, UPI reported that as Snarr commented about all the lives that had been shattered by the crime, Franklin, standing in the center of the courtroom with Van Sciver, dressed in a blue pin-striped suit and striped tie, his hair neatly trimmed and parted in the middle, yelled, “Got any more lies about me, you little faggot—you and that trained ape you’ve got lying for you,” referring to Roberts. As he said this, he leapt at the prosecution table and dove at Roberts, knocking a glass and pitcher of water over, splashing the two prosecutors and dumping ice into the lap of FBI agent Curt Jensen. Ten U.S. marshals and Salt Lake County sheriff’s deputies wrestled Franklin to the carpet in front of the judge’s bench. It took several minutes to subdue him.
“Put him in irons,” Jenkins directed.
Marshals cuffed and shackled Franklin and hauled him upright before the bench. He complained that the handcuffs were too tight and were cutting off the circulation in his hands. The marshals loosened them, but every time Jenkins started to speak, Franklin complained again.
“You’ll just have to live with it, Mr. Franklin,” Jenkins said. “I want your full attention. This whole thing has been a tragedy from beginning to end.”
Judge Jenkins noted Franklin’s unhappy youth, saying, “I suppose that’s an explanation, but not an excuse for what happened here.” He said it was still not too late to change his life in prison.
“Not if I’m sentenced for something I didn’t do,” Franklin yelled back. “This whole thing is a farce!”
The judge then handed down two life terms, the maximum for each federal charge, which in practical terms meant anywhere between ten and sixty years in federal prison.
Franklin responded, “You are nothing but an agent of the Communist government, you bastard!” as marshals hauled him upright before the judge’s bench.
After a three-year reign of terror, Joseph Paul Franklin was behind bars for what would turn out to be the rest of his life. But his story was far from over. And his horrific legacy was just beginning.
Part 2
Into the Mind of a Monster
Chapter 11
Driven by the results from the Franklin case and our work in other areas, the profiling program started taking off around the same time that Franklin was heading off to prison.
Headquarters took notice of the accuracy of my fugitive assessment and the advice I gave on how to interact with Franklin on the flight to Utah, certainly boosted by Robert Dwyer’s complimentary report. And it was gratifying that Dave Kohl’s faith in the Behavioral Science Unit was validated. Jim McKenzie, the FBI’s assistant director for the Training Division, which made him the head honcho at Quantico, had always been a supporter, and he took great pride in our accomplishments. Larry Monroe, who had been one of the outstanding instructors at the academy, was now the BSU chief, and he had come to realize that profiling and investigative consultation could be a significant and useful addition to our services.
But the case that really put us on the map was in many ways almost a “photo negative” of Franklin’s.
By the time my unit was called into the Atlanta child murders case, the Georgia capital was a city under siege. Public Safety Commissioner Lee Brown had set up a Missing and Murdered Task Force with more than fifty members, but the murder and disappearance of African American children continued. In September 1980, Mayor Maynard Jackson asked the White House for help, and on November 6, Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti ordered the FBI to investigate whether any of the missing children had been kidnapped and moved across state lines, thereby triggering federal law and jurisdiction.
But there was another aspect to the case that made FBI involvement less of a stretch. With sixteen apparently linked killings in one of the most progressive cities in the South, this looked to be a Classification 44: violation of civil rights. It was designated FBI Major Case 30, codenamed ATKID. Was this a conspiracy to commit genocide on the Black population, as Franklin had hoped to inspire? Was it the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, or some other hate group moving from the blustering talk Franklin scorned to the action he longed for? If so, then Atlanta and maybe other southern cities could be tinderboxes ready to burst into conflagration.
Roy Hazelwood and I flew down to Atlanta in January 1981. Roy was the logical choice to join me, a brilliant special agent and academy instructor who was the Bureau’s foremost expert on interpersonal violence. Of all the academy instructors, he was doing the most profiling, taking on many of the rape cases that came to the unit. When we got to Atlanta PD headquarters, we spent considerable time going through the extensive case files—crime scene photos, victimology, descriptions of what each child was wearing when found, statements from witnesses in the area, autopsy protocols, etc. We talked to family members of the missing and murdered children and had the police drive us around each of the neighborhoods where the children had disappeared, and to each of the body dump sites.
The first thing we determined was that these were not Klan-type crimes. If you study what we call group cause hate crimes, going all the way back to post–Civil War days, they tend to be highly visible, highly symbolic acts, designed to instill terror. If a hate group had been responsible, it wouldn’t have taken investigators months to start linking cases.
The second thing we noted was that the body dump sites and the areas where the victims were last seen were in predominantly or exclusively Black areas of the city. A white individual, much less a white group, could not have prowled these neighborhoods without being noticed. The police had canvassed and interviewed extensively and had no reports about white people in unusual places. Many of these areas had street activity around the clock, especially in the warm-weather months, so even under cover of night a white man could not have gone unnoticed on several occasions. Unlike Franklin’s crimes, these were not committed from a distance. The victims had been abducted and their bodies had been moved after death. We concluded that the killer was a single African American male, and based on the age of the victims, we thought he’d be in his early to mid-twenties. He’d have some
kind of hustle to lure these kids from poor neighborhoods, maybe claiming to be an athletic or music scout, or even a cop. He’d be a police buff to compensate for his own inadequacy, and probably drive a police-type vehicle and have a police-type dog. Based on the victimology, he would probably be homosexual and might also resent being Black himself.
The differences between Franklin’s crimes and the Atlanta killer’s gave us important insight. Being largely mission driven, Franklin wanted no personal contact with his victims; he certainly didn’t want to meet or personalize them. To him, they were merely ciphers for their race or religion. Once he committed each crime, he wanted to escape and get out of town as quickly as possible. The Atlanta UNSUB was emotionally invested in his relationship with his victims, how they perceived him, and his power over them.
None of our observations about the killer made us very popular with the public, the media, or the Atlanta PD, most of whom still thought this had to be a series of hate crimes. It also didn’t make us popular when we declared that while many of the murders were linked, we didn’t think they all were. The two female victims didn’t seem to be related to this killer, or to each other. There was even evidence in a couple of the cases that they might have been family murders.
It took months before there was any resolution. During that time, several incidents made us realize that the UNSUB was following and reacting to the media coverage, which allowed us to manipulate him. We had the medical examiner announce that they were finding fibers and other evidence on the bodies, which was true. As we anticipated, this prompted the killer to start dumping bodies in the local rivers to eliminate that evidence. On May 22, 1981, the last day of a surveillance experiment on all the local rivers, Wayne Bertram Williams, a twenty-two-year-old African American, self-styled music producer, was observed dumping a body off the Jackson Parkway Bridge over the Chattahoochee River. He fit the profile in every key respect, including owning a German shepherd and a police-type car with a police scanner, and a previous arrest for impersonating a law officer. By June 21, the evidence was compelling enough to arrest him.
Killer's Shadow Page 11