As soon as he was hit, he said, he was in immediate pain and all he could see was red. He was rushed to Charity Hospital, where he spent a week recovering on the ward. When he was released, he told us, one of the doctors said to his mother to be sure to bring him back after a certain amount of time for an operation that would restore his sight. She never did, and by the time he was old enough to deal with the matter on his own, he was told the eye was too scarred over with cataracts.
He told us that sometimes in prison he dreamed of having killed his mother. When we asked if he thought his murders might have been displacement for his anger toward his mother, as Edmund Kemper’s had been, he said he thought that was a real possibility.
This was one of the clues I had been looking for. There is almost always a triggering event or a series of triggering events that combine to form the catalyst that leads to criminality and violence. We had identified the Beth Shalom bombing in Chattanooga and the Amitay house bombing in Maryland as Franklin’s first intentions to kill, even though each failed. Then there was the encounter in the parking lot as the event that moved Franklin from anger and hatred to the willing application of deadly force to victims right in front of him. But with the eye injury recollection, it was clear that the eye accident and its aftermath not only led to Franklin’s compensatory behavior as a marksman but solidified the resentment and hatred he felt for his mother, which then needed an outlet. Had it not been for her, he seemed to be telling us, his eye could have been fixed, he would have been able to join the military or have a career in law enforcement, and he would not have had to seek his power where he did.
Of course, this is too simplistic an answer on its own and doesn’t account for his rabid hatred of African American and Jewish people. But it does go a long way in addressing the nature-versus-nurture conundrum—the one we are always dealing with in our study and analysis of the criminal personality—as it applied to Joseph Paul Franklin. Given his hard wiring and the effects of his upbringing and environment, and especially his view of his mother’s abuse and neglect, it was as if nature had loaded the gun and nurture pulled the trigger.
There are a number of ways people manifest bad backgrounds and upbringings. When I first started doing this kind of research back in the 1970s, we were perplexed by the fact that nearly all serial killers were men. Yes, men are loaded with testosterone, which is thought to fuel aggression, and men tend to be stronger and have better physical equipment for sexual assault than women. But when we thought about the fact that girls probably suffer from bad family situations just as frequently as boys do, we wondered if it could be that women are able to suppress their anger, rage, and resentment better than men, or are they simply not as harmed by the same kind of treatment? That didn’t seem possible.
As described earlier, we found the answer is that girls are just as adversely affected, if not more so. But unlike the boys, as they grow into women, they tend to internalize their abuse and take it out more on themselves than on others. This can manifest itself in self-abusive or harmful behavior, prostitution, drug addiction, or hooking up with men who continue to treat them badly because they have been brought up to feel that they don’t deserve any better.
Franklin followed the male behavioral pattern. He externalized rather than internalized his anger, first by seeking out people and groups with beliefs like his, then by going out on his own and defining himself as a man of action. It is significant to note that while all four of the Vaughn children suffered at the hands of their parents, the two boys were in continuous trouble as adults and the two girls grew up to lead relatively normal lives, largely free of the hatred and prejudice that consumed their brother.
We are always looking to connect the developmental dots, and Franklin confirmed some of these conclusions with his next recollection. As with many of the predators we’ve studied, Franklin had a conflicted view of law enforcement. His heroes growing up, he said, were cowboys and outlaws like Jesse James, men who were strong and brave and acted on their own. Even into his adult years, he said, he frequently wore a western hat. But he liked the power and the heroism that a badge, uniform, and gun represented, and as a teen, he wanted to become a police officer when he grew up, as his uncle was. When he was seventeen, he said, his mom was talking to a local policeman and said that her son wanted to be a cop. The officer told her that unfortunately, that wouldn’t be possible, because someone who was legally blind in one eye couldn’t qualify. Franklin said that was the end of his aspiration. Coincidentally or not, it was shortly after this that he dropped out of high school, married sixteen-year-old Bobbie Louise Dorman, and joined the American Nazi Party. He had read Mein Kampf two years earlier.
This was a young man who was filled with anger, rage, and hate, and he had to find an outlet for it. Much of what determines what type of criminal someone like this will end up as is the life circumstances during the formative years. In Franklin’s case, the combination of his inadequate and abusive parents, the family’s abject poverty, the racism and discrimination endemic in the Jim Crow South in which he grew up, and his exposure to Hitler and the Nazi philosophy, all came together to shape the type of adult James Clayton Vaughn Jr. evolved into.
He made it clear that he had joined the Nazis in high school because he embraced their philosophy and only joined the Ku Klux Klan when he was out on his own. But he repeated to us that he didn’t stay in the Klan very long because he was convinced it was infiltrated with FBI informers. Many of the rank and file he perceived as simply a bunch of drunks like his father.
I explained to Franklin that sexual predators often use violent pornography to fuel their desires and motivate their crimes. Did he have anything similar that drove him? Yes, it was the white supremacist newspapers that detailed the violent crimes Blacks committed against whites. He got angry every time he read one and determined to do something about it.
Could intervention in his mid-teens have turned him around and changed the outcome? It’s possible, if he could have been shown a positive alternative to Nazism and racial hatred, as well as a discernible way out of his poverty and personal desperation. Unfortunately, that’s a tall order. It would have meant, at the very least, being able to get him out of his home environment, and if not out of the racist-leaning South, at least under the influence of an older authority figure or mentor who could have shown him an alternative and exposed him to African Americans on a meaningful personal level. Certainly, the majority of men and women who grew up in this era and region were able to get past the racism they had seen all around them, but Franklin was so damaged on so many levels that this was not something he could accomplish on his own through the normal course of maturing into adulthood. His racism was something he had to hang on to because he had little else to give him a sense of identity and purpose, as well as to have something to blame for his lack of success. The point is, most men who grow up in abusive, impoverished, and hostile environments don’t become criminals. But we seldom see a serial killer or repeat violent offender who comes from what we would call a normal, healthy background.
Like many serial killers, Franklin looked up to other criminals who had come before him. He confirmed that he had gotten the idea of fomenting a race war from Charles Manson. When I mentioned that I had interviewed Manson in San Quentin, his interest perked up. He wanted to know what Manson was like in person. I said that I was surprised by how short he was, but he had obviously developed the ability to capture attention with his expressions, verbal skills, and body language, just as Franklin had compensated for his crippling eye injury with relentless shooting practice.
Franklin was fascinated as I related how Manson climbed up and sat on the back of a chair so that he could physically dominate Bob Ressler and me, and even convinced Bob to give him his sunglasses, so he could tell the other inmates he had successfully conned an FBI agent. You would think Franklin didn’t have much in common with a counterculture denizen like Manson. But Franklin admitted that he idolized Manson, par
ticularly his ability to get followers to do what he wanted them to, something Franklin knew he was incapable of. Getting others to go out and kill at your suggestion was the ultimate power to him, but Franklin knew the only hope he had of influencing followers was by his example in violent action. The difference, he said, as if he had studied the subject carefully, was that Manson’s strategy was to kill a bunch of rich white people and blame it on the Blacks, while Franklin was more direct—he would just kill as many Black people as he could. After we interviewed Manson, I became convinced that if he had fulfilled his ambition to be a rock star, the Tate and LaBianca murders never would have taken place. I was never even convinced he was interested in the race war he preached to his “family.” It was merely a convenient cause to get them focused on. And there was no way Manson would ever embark on a career as a lone killer; it just wasn’t part of his makeup. For Manson, it was all about recognition, living through other people’s efforts and his power over others.
Franklin, though, was serious about a race war. He was hoping other white supremacists would see what he was doing, even though they didn’t know who it was, and copy his actions. In fact, the thing that most seemed to annoy him was that he wasn’t as famous or notorious as other serial killers and assassins, whom he didn’t consider nearly as accomplished as him. Despite all of the media reporting, he felt the press didn’t really appreciate the significance of his mission. Many sexually motivated serial killers compare themselves to others by way of both fame and number of kills. As BTK, Dennis Rader didn’t think he was getting his due from the media and envied the attention directed at the Son of Sam. Franklin was neither boastful nor even particularly reflective on this point. It was as though it should be obvious to us that this was what he was all about. And though his thinking about anything involving himself, as opposed to his mission, tended to be erratic, this was clearly one of the motivations for his round of confessions now that he felt he had nothing to lose.
He also was disappointed that, as in his early days in the Klan, most of the racists turned out to be all talk and no action. When he mentioned this, it was one of the psychological factors we were most focused on. For both the Bureau and the Secret Service, the question of when do you get concerned about hateful thoughts having the potential to transform into violence is a paramount consideration. Unlike most serial killers, who are generally fantasizing about their sexually based crimes for years before they actually commit one, it was a terrifying realization that with someone like Franklin, he could always be just one conversation or hate pamphlet away from activation. Everything he complained about or implied confirmed my original and ongoing suppositions about that transition in Franklin.
The violent tendencies came from a combination of his hardwired personality traits and whatever was going on in his brain that controlled executive function. The hostility, frustration, anger, and resentment at his own failings were what pushed him over the edge into violence. As far as I was concerned from my research and study of his case, the targets—African Americans and Jews—were the justification for his violent impulses and need to act out. Terrorists may be very sincere in their sense of mission, but I have yet to see or study one that didn’t have deep psychological inadequacies and a need to prove their worth that actually drove them to action. It is what terrorist leaders and strategists have learned to recognize and profile in recruiting suicide bombers, gunmen, and hijackers. That is to say, had everything else been the same in Franklin’s background except for his exposure to Nazi and racist sentiments, I think he still would have developed into a killer, just with a different set of targets. Violence for someone like Franklin becomes the ultimate fulfillment, the ultimate self-actualization.
The main difference I noted between Franklin and other terrorists and assassin types was that he was not suicidal or harboring a martyr complex. All of his risk-taking was calculated. A key component of his scrupulous planning was his exit, or escape, plan for each crime, something most assassins do not think much about. Their historic act is often the endgame, and while it may end their lives or their freedom, they believe it will secure their place in history. Franklin had no such intentions. So when I brought up his initial arrest and escape in Florence, Kentucky, and whether he had any contingency plans or money, clothing, and other resources stashed somewhere, he said no; he hadn’t been planning to commit a crime that night so he hadn’t been prepared to have to get away.
This is a perfect example of the confusion and mixed organized and disorganized presentations we often see from repeat offenders. They think they are rational and planning their crimes, but when they are not in that mindset, they become vulnerable to their own emotions and impulses, just as the rest of us do. When Franklin saw that his car was blocked in at the motel, he became both angry and worried that he would not be able to get out when he had to. At the moment when he decided to complain about it, he said he didn’t even think about the fact that there were guns in the car, because it didn’t occur to him that anyone was going to look there.
The escape from the Florence police station was fairly skillful and certainly opportunistic, just as his brief escape in the Metropolitan Hall of Justice in Utah had been. But neither was planned, and Franklin’s improvising skills only went so far.
This led to our asking about his time on the run. Clearly, he needed money, and I wanted to test my theory about why he didn’t attempt a bank robbery, a skill in which he could feel confidence. Here he confirmed all of my assumptions. He knew he was a highly wanted man and that police departments all over the country would be on the lookout for him. Banks had surveillance cameras, and even in disguise, if he robbed a bank, it would be too easy to get to him before he could get away. He had also had a bad experience with an exploding dye pack of currency in one bank robbery and didn’t want to take the chance on that.
Did he think about any other kind of robbery or theft? Vaguely, he said, but it was clear to us that his inherent paranoia had reached an acute level by then, and he admitted that he really wasn’t thinking clearly. He wanted to get home to Alabama or somewhere in the South and he said he was getting kind of desperate. He had sold his blood before and knew he could get some quick cash that way.
Didn’t he think he would be vulnerable at a blood bank, even if he gave a false name? He looked at us as if we really didn’t understand. Sure, it made sense sitting here in prison and thinking about it all. But when you’re on the run and every stare from a stranger could be the one that tips off the cops, you’re not thinking clearly. He was close to the end of his rope. And though he didn’t use the term with us, he indicated that he was quickly decompensating. He needed a little money to regroup, find a better place to stay than a shelter, and figure out his next move. He was extremely mobile, but he needed some money to travel.
As he had in his previous interviews with law enforcement, he described the details of hateful beliefs, and it was clear that we weren’t going to change his thinking any more than he was going to change ours. This paranoid, delusional system he subscribed to, in which Jews nefariously controlled all the mechanisms of government and commerce, and Blacks were their ignorant pawns and somewhat less than fully human, appeared logical to him within his own value structure and he was not about to break out of it. With someone like this, the more you try to convince them of the actual illogic of their thinking, the more attenuated and disjointed their argument may become, but they will hold fast to their ideas, because to change their thinking would mean having to acknowledge their own inadequacy. In fact, Franklin likened his three-year run of murders before his arrest to Christ’s three-year ministry before his arrest and crucifixion, a comparison he would make to others. He firmly believed he was doing the will of God and justified his goal by saying that if the Lord had wanted all peoples to mix, he would have created only one race.
The only time we really broke through Franklin’s protective shell was when we brought up his daughter, Lori. She was born during his killing-
spree years and would by then be around ten. We knew he hadn’t seen her since he’d been behind bars, and he said his ex-wife had kept her from communicating with him. He actually grew despondent when he talked about her, something that hadn’t happened when he described all the people he had killed, including the two young teens.
In this respect I found him typical of serial killers. The victims he killed were impersonal props as far as he was concerned, subject to complete objectification. His own family members were actual people, subject to real emotion on his part. Though he had left Lori’s mother when the baby’s birth was imminent, Franklin had now gotten older and perhaps more emotionally vulnerable. The child was no longer an abstract baby but an actual live ten-year-old girl, and his sadness about having no part in her life was palpable. He seemed to hold on to the fantasy that had he been there for her, he would have been a good and supportive father, unlike how his own parents had treated him.
Significantly, in his case, this natural human feeling was just another manifestation of his narcissism and lack of empathy. It wasn’t really about Lori missing out on having a dad. It was about Franklin not being given the opportunity to be a father, as was his right. It was all about him, rather than this girl growing up with the stigma of having a racist serial killer for a father.
We had a camera with us, as we often did for the prison interviews, and he asked us to take some photos of him and send them to her. He then positioned himself in the center of the room and put himself through a series of martial arts and bodybuilder poses. At first, I thought he was hamming it up, but he seemed completely serious. This was the way he wanted his preteen daughter to perceive him. For the first and only time, I almost felt sorry for him.
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