Their first item of business was to read him his Miranda rights while recording the conversation. “Are you willing to make a statement to us at this time without a lawyer present?” Love asked.
“Yes, I am.”
“This initial interview will concern bombing of the Beth Shalom Synagogue.”
“Right.”
The motive for the confession appeared to be the same as in the Flynt shooting—a combination of wanting credit, relieving boredom, and perhaps even some kind of personal inventory, now that he had nothing to do but think about his past life. Meticulously, the investigators went through Franklin’s planning—where he had purchased the dynamite and how much he had acquired; how he had surveilled the site at night and found a crawl space under the building to place the pack of fifty pounds of water gel explosives and five sticks of dynamite; how he had looked around for a place to plug into an electrical outlet to detonate the dynamite; how he had run the electrical cord from the nearby motel; and finally, how he had called the synagogue to ask when they would next “meet,” “making out like I was interested in going to one of their meetings.” He confirmed everything the investigators had determined.
“I went back there on the day that they said they were supposed to be there and, uh, hooked another extension cord from the end of the cord that I had there to the motel.”
“Did you stay around and watch the results after you detonated it?”
“Naw, I just figured I’d split as soon as possible.”
Love showed Franklin photos taken of the synagogue after the explosion, including one taken from the air, and asked him to identify surrounding buildings. Franklin seemed quite interested in studying the shot. “Man, was that it right after?” he asked.
“That’s correct,” Love replied.
“Man! Blew that tree down, too, huh? That sucker really got pulverized.” Clearly, he was highly impressed with his own work.
This dimension of Franklin’s criminal personality was very interesting to me in terms of our analysis of both modus operandi and signature. Normally, the means of killing is either an inherent part of the signature, as strangling and mental torture were to Dennis Rader and physical torture and terror were to such perverted sadists as Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, and Leonard Lake and Charles Ng; or it is an M.O., as it was with Ted Kaczynski with bomb-making. That is to say, killers kill through the means they find most comfortable. As a rule, a shooter remains a shooter, a bomber remains a bomber, and a strangler remains a strangler. There may be evolution in the seriousness of the crimes, like a Peeping Tom evolving into a rapist or a fire-starter like David Berkowitz evolving into a killer. But they generally tend to remain with their preferred form of violence.
Franklin was different. He didn’t seem to get off on the act itself, but on the results, suiting the means to the situation. In his case, it was the signature that was all-important: killing African Americans, Jews, and those who associated with them. But the M.O. was fluid and adaptable. Whatever it took to rob a bank successfully, he would do, and learn from each experience to be better at it the next time, just as a baseball player might adjust his stance or swing to improve his batting average. He had begun his mission by bombing a private home in Maryland and a synagogue in Chattanooga, but much to his disappointment, neither act resulted in any human fatalities. At that point, I believe, he decided his efforts had to be more direct. He was at his best as a sniper, because that is the skill he had perfected after the eye accident of his youth, so that was the course he followed. Ironically, it is as if this extremist right-wing high school dropout had unconsciously adopted the slogan popularized by such left-wing intellectuals as Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Malcolm X: By any means necessary.
“How long were you in Chattanooga before you blew up the synagogue?” Love asked.
“Uh, let’s see. Well, actually, I was there, I bought the explosives and then I left, you know, for a while. And then came back there.” And here, surprisingly, Franklin segued into yet another bombing confession. “You know, at first I wanted to, after I bought the explosives from the store in Chattanooga, then I went up to Maryland and decided to bomb the Jew’s home up in Maryland, you know, while I was up there.”
“Now, whose home was it in Maryland that you bombed?” the investigators asked.
“A Jew by the name of Morris Amitay: Morris A-M-I-T-A-Y.”
“And how did you select him?”
“Uh, I just happened to be reading the Washington Post one day, and it said something about an Israeli lobbyist was doing something there, you know. . . . So, uh, being familiar with Rockville and Silver Spring, Maryland, I had lived there for so long, I knew exactly where the area was. So, I went over there and looked up his name . . . and just went over there, cruised, you know, passed by his house. He lived right on the corner, and uh, checked it out a couple of times. Then I went back there later, one night, and blew it up.”
Four days before the Beth Shalom bomb, the home of attorney and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) executive director Morris J. Amitay in the Flower Valley neighborhood of Rockville, Maryland, a D.C. suburb, had been rocked by an explosion. The split-level house was severely damaged in the 3:20 A.M. blast, and though Amitay, his wife, Sybil, their two sons, and a daughter managed to escape unhurt, they lost their six-month-old beagle Ringo, who was in the ground-floor family room. Windows were broken and siding torn loose in houses as far as five blocks away. “I don’t know how anyone got out of there alive,” one fireman commented.
The forty-one-year-old Amitay was a former foreign service officer and foreign policy and legislative aide to Abraham Ribicoff, the former health, education, and welfare secretary under President Kennedy and later Connecticut senator. Amitay said the family had not been threatened and he had no idea who could have committed the crime, though police speculated the attack had to do with Amitay’s being regarded as one of the leading lobbyists for Israel in Washington. Investigators said they were unsure whether the explosion was meant to kill the family or merely frighten them.
“Nobody’s called to take credit for it,” said police spokesman Philip Caswell at the time. It is not unusual in terrorist crimes for the responsible group or others with similar aims to publicly claim responsibility.
I. L. Kenen, AIPAC’s honorary chairman, said he thought those responsible were “anti-Israel, either anti-Semite or pro-Arab.”
It is interesting to me that in those days, it was assumed a crime of this magnitude must have been carried out by a group rather than a single individual. Burton M. Joseph, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, expressed shock and called upon the FBI and police to pursue the investigation with “vigorous dispatch so that the terrorist culprits are apprehended as quickly as possible.”
Police and ATF agents determined the explosion was caused by dynamite and detonated with a four-hundred-foot electrical cord. Within a week, federal officials had begun coordinating investigations into the Chattanooga and Rockville bombs through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ Explosives Enforcement Branch. An ATF spokesman said that after a blast, “A computer scans all our bomb cases and flags similarities. Then we immediately begin working on the two together.”
Franklin drew a diagram of the Amitay house and described to Bradley and Love how he had determined where to place the explosive device:
I suspected that possibly since this corner was furtherest away from the street, you know, from the street noise, that he would, the bedroom of the house would be right there, you know? So, therefore, I decided to go ahead and bomb this corner right here, you know, so it would kill more of the, you know, when it hit. . . . So, I found out later I was mistaken. . . . It didn’t kill none, you know. It blew their dog up.
When they finished asking him about specific crimes, Bradley clarified, “As far as talking to us and telling us what you’ve done here, what you know, we haven’t promised you anything as to what
we could do in Tennessee relating to this crime.”
Franklin replied that he just wanted to get a transfer out of the federal penitentiary, but that he really didn’t expect anything in return. Bradley reminded him, “You know you’re confessing to a serious crime.”
“I don’t really think it’s serious,” Franklin replied. “I don’t even consider it a crime. I think it was good.”
When Love asked why he picked the Chattanooga synagogue for bombing rather than New York, Franklin said, “I was basically familiar with Chattanooga and I was able to buy the dynamite there.” I found this an interesting statement because it showed that even a mission-oriented criminal like Franklin still committed his crimes within a basic comfort zone.
After denying involvement with the Larry Flynt shooting, he admitted onetime membership in all the extreme right-wing organizations we had documented, but then explained why he dropped out. “They’re all controlled by Jews and queers, you know, and FBI informants. And actually, the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] runs those.” While this is a somewhat different explanation than he had given previously for why he had left these hate groups, the response is consistent in its contempt for his former comrades. More important, I think it demonstrates Franklin’s growing paranoia.
His next response confirmed that paranoia. Love asked, “Did anyone aid you in any way? Did you let anybody in on what you were going to do? Or did anyone encourage you to do it?”
“Anyone in on it? No, uh-uh. I never told nobody about anything. The only ones that knew about that were me and God. That’s the way I’ve always been ever since. I’ve never told nobody anything about what I’ve done. Not one single soul would I trust, you know. So, that’s one reason I was able to operate so long without anybody, you, being able to catch me before. I never told nobody nothing.”
“In case after case,” the AP reported, “investigators say Franklin has been able to provide scraps of key information that could not be known by anyone who was not at the crime scene.”
Chapter 15
In a matter of weeks Franklin had confessed to a startling array of crimes, and of these new confessions, Tennessee reacted the fastest.
On July 12, after a two-day trial, it only took a Chattanooga Criminal Court jury about forty-five minutes to find Franklin guilty of the 1977 synagogue bombing. There was a clear forensic trail of purchasing explosives from a Chattanooga supply store under his own name and fingerprints on the transaction records that matched his exemplars. The two prominent local attorneys who represented him were out to convince the jury that the taped confession was just another of Franklin’s many lies, intended to get him out of Marion. It was an odd courtroom dynamic, with the prosecution trying to convince the jury the defendant was telling the truth, while the defense tried to show he was lying.
Though he refused to take the stand, the attorneys’ strategy kind of fell through the floor after prosecutor Stanley Lanzo suggested Franklin was a coward in spite of his macho self-image. Telling the jury that Franklin was in a protective unit at Marion because of what the Black inmates thought of him, Lanzo said, “He ought to be in the general population where they can test him to see if he’s a real man.”
That was too much for Franklin. He asked Judge Douglas Meyer if he could make a statement in rebuttal. The judge granted the request, telling the jury that the defendant had decided to make his own closing statement. His attorneys were not exactly pleased, and I have to say his oration was compelling, at least in terms of deciding the trial’s outcome.
“Jews control the American government,” Franklin asserted to the eight-man, four-woman jury, which included two African Americans. “They control the news media, they control the Communist governments, they control the Western democracies. I’ll admit to you I bombed the synagogue—I did it. It was a synagogue of Satan.
“This country was founded by white men who were believers in Jesus Christ. They’ve been taken over by atheists. I’d just like to tell you this—the only way for the white man to survive is to get on their knees and pray to the Lord and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.”
Now, these statements pretty much speak for themselves, and we can easily see how they “helped” the jury reach its collective verdict. But for a profiler and criminal analyst like me, they provided some interesting insight into Franklin’s personality. First of all, he is not making this speech to piss off the jurors or turn them against him. Rather, he is stating something he believes and wants to convince them of. He doesn’t expect the jury to let him off, necessarily, particularly the two Black members; he’s already in prison for a long, long time regardless of how it rules. But he does want them to understand why he did what he did and why he’s proud of it. He wants his statement to get out—if the Jewish-controlled media will let it out—to inspire others to join his cause. So, there is a delicate psychic balancing here between outlandish paranoid fantasy and logical thinking about how to get his message across.
Second, it is clear that within his paranoid logic system, he truly believes he is a devout Christian and believer. Would Jesus want his followers to go out and hunt down Jews and Black people? No rational person would think so, and yet he has convinced himself that he is on a holy mission ordained by God and that Jesus is telling him what to do. In effect, he has psychologically inoculated himself against the charge that what he has done is wrong or evil, so he need not have any remorse or regret about any of it. It is the same mechanism by which sexually motivated serial killers depersonalize their victims. It stems from a complete absence of empathy and the narcissistic idea that they are the only ones who matter.
Are they insane? No, not by any legal definition. They are just really bad people.
Judge Meyer sentenced Franklin to fifteen to twenty-one years for the bombing and an additional six to ten years for possession of explosives. The terms were to be served consecutively, though everyone in the courtroom knew the sentence was essentially symbolic, since it couldn’t be served until Franklin had served his life sentences for the Salt Lake City murders.
But the symbolism was important to the judge. “Jews have been persecuted for two thousand years,” he said. “But regardless of what’s going on in the Middle East and in Ireland, the word must go out that we will not tolerate crimes against humanity.”
BY THE TIME FRANKLIN’S TRIAL FOR THE MADISON MURDERS BEGAN IN DANE County Circuit Court on Monday, February 10, 1986, he had recanted his prison confession to the two police officers. The previous month, Judge William D. Byrne had rejected Franklin’s request that the confession be suppressed. He did, however, allow Franklin to act as his own attorney, with a lawyer and former state public defender, William Olson, there to aid him.
In bringing the Manning-Schwenn murder case to trial in Dane County Circuit Court, District Attorney Hal Harlowe explained that under Franklin’s current sentences, he could possibly be eligible for parole as early as 1990, and he was pursuing further murder convictions to assure that he would never be released. “To my amazement, there really weren’t any guarantees he would never be released.”
I seldom like to make comparisons of real killers to fictional characters, but in one way—not intelligence—Franklin was similar to novelist Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, who was also supposedly in prison for life, but everyone was still scared of him and what would likely happen if he ever got out. Franklin had repeatedly proven himself to be a hate-filled, efficient killing machine.
Acting as his own counsel, Franklin insisted to another all-white jury that he had faked his confession to get out of Marion and that he had gotten the details of the crime from the newspapers. “I just wanted to win temporary release from the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, because of the brutal conditions there.”
Then, referring to himself in the third person he said, “The evidence in this case will show that the defendant was not the perpetrator of this crime. They have no case here other than a confession, and the defendant is now sayi
ng this confession is false.” He further claimed that he was tortured into making the confession, which was patently absurd to anyone who heard the tape.
There was high security in the courtroom and Franklin’s legs were shackled, though the jury couldn’t see this as he sat behind the curtained defense table. Harlowe played the confession tape, in which Franklin described coming to town under the alias John Wesley Hardin, after the famous Old West gunslinger and gambler, with the intention of assassinating Judge Simonson but then ended up shooting the young couple in the mall parking lot.
Johanna Karen Thompson, a teller at the Ohio State Bank in Columbus, identified Franklin as the man who had pointed a .357 Magnum revolver in her face on August 2, 1977, as he robbed her bank of twenty-five hundred dollars. She wept softly as she pointed him out and said, “It was him.” He had described the robbery in his confession and characterized it as “confiscating the money from the Jewish bankers.” Richard Thompson, a ballistics expert formerly with the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory (and not related to bank teller Thompson), affirmed that the .38-caliber bullets removed from Manning and Schwenn’s bodies could have been fired by such a weapon.
The strong case built from there. Madison police captain Richard Wallden testified about his February 7, 1984, telephone conversation with Franklin. And then there was the confession tape itself—the disturbing and clear catalyst for the long-sought justice. As it played on the fourth day of the trial, the twelve jurors and two alternates heard Franklin’s confession and his hate-filled words.
In his summation the morning of Friday, February 15, Harlowe called the murders “a cold-blooded execution” and said, “He is guilty of a horrible, senseless, pointless, unnecessary crime” that was the “closest thing to killing for sport” Harlowe had ever seen. He said, “He was proud of what he did. He wanted to talk about it. It was bottled up too long,” and referred to the taped confession as “the pride of recollection from a job well done.” My thoughts exactly. “Justice has waited nine years,” he said. “I’m asking that it not wait any longer.”
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