Chapter 18
On the way back to the motel, we stopped off at a liquor store for a bottle of rum and a twelve-pack of Coke. When we got to my room, we filled up the ice bucket from the hall machine, cracked open the bottle and the cans, and set to work filling out the two interview assessment forms. I never took notes during the interviews because it would distract the subject and take away from the critical intense connection between us. So, as soon as our interviewing work for the day was over, we would try to download from our brains everything we remembered onto paper. I had gotten to the point where when I heard a significant response from an inmate, I could compose in my head what I was going to write down on the assessment form. In this case, we talked out each entry and then Ken filled them out.
First, we tackled Trapnell.
Much more so than Franklin, Trapnell had wanted to play with us, only agreeing to speculate about his crimes in the third person, as if he were discussing someone else. This reminded me of the way Ted Bundy had interacted with investigators. Trapnell bragged to us about how he could feign any condition in the DSM well enough to fool a forensic psychiatrist, and when we said, “Several psychiatrists have testified in court that you were crazy,” he grinned and replied, “Who am I to refute the words of such distinguished professionals?”
We sparred over whether I’d be able to catch him if he were a fugitive. I told him I knew he’d break off any contact with his family because the feds would be looking at them, as they did with Franklin. But I said I knew his dad had been a high-ranking naval officer who he loved and respected and wanted to emulate. Gary’s crime spree began when his father passed away. I told him I would have agents staking out the grave at Arlington National Cemetery at Christmastime, his father’s birthday, and the anniversary of his death.
I could see his facial expression change, and in spite of himself, he broke out into an ironic smile. “You got me!” he conceded.
Then I brought up the “Free Angela Davis” demand. Smiling again, he told us that he was committed to Black liberation and righting the wrongs that had been perpetrated against African Americans since they were first brought over as slaves. But it all seems a little too glib and rehearsed. Finally, as we kept pressing him, he got down to the real motivation, just as David Berkowitz had when he eventually admitted the neighbor’s dog ordering him to kill was a total fabrication.
Trapnell said something to the effect of, “I knew that this airplane hijacking had a lot of risk to it and might not work out. And if it didn’t, and I was arrested, I would be doing a lot of hard time. I knew the makeup of hard-core federal prisons, and I figured if the big Black brothers thought I was a political prisoner, I’d be a lot less likely to get cut up or get my ass raped in the shower!”
So, there it was. Despite the perverse cynicism of the idea, my respect for his criminal sophistication shot up. This man was consciously covering his contingencies.
This turned out to be an important insight in training our hostage negotiators, of whom I used to be one. Any time the subject makes a demand or statement that just seems to come out of the blue, it could be highly significant. It could mean that the negotiation dynamic has shifted and you are now nearer the endgame, that he has already moved on to the next stage in his own mind and the negotiator should react accordingly. It could prevent a lot of violence.
Now, compare this thinking to Franklin, who made elaborate plans to succeed in his crimes, knew in advance the most direct route out of town, disposed of his murder weapons, traded his cars, and changed his physical appearance through wigs, disguises, and differing hair lengths. What he didn’t plan for was what to do if he were caught and imprisoned, other than trying to escape. His passionate hatred of Black people precluded any accommodation with Black inmates and on his third day at Marion, he was practically killed by African American inmates who knew his repellent reputation, while Trapnell was pretty much left alone.
In fact, Trapnell had nothing but contempt for Franklin. When we told him that we had just interviewed Franklin, he was offended. “You came here to talk to me and then went and wasted your time talking to a racist idiot like that?”
As Ken and I sat in the hotel room and next turned our attention to Franklin, we agreed that we had a pretty complete idea of his character and psychological makeup. Pretty much all of the important elements I’d speculated about in the fugitive assessment turned out to be accurate, and his description of his weeks on the run confirmed that upping his stress level forced him into a vulnerable position. His course in life was, indeed, set by a combination of the basic physiological makeup he was born with, his dysfunctional, abusive, and neglectful upbringing, the sociological customs and prejudices of his environment, and his gravitation toward extremist groups that he sensed would help compensate for his own inadequacies, bolstered by a steady diet of hate-filled propaganda literature.
But what we also concluded—Ken from his perspective in protection and trying to anticipate danger, and me from my experience using behavioral clues to solve crimes and identify suspects—was that someone like this is difficult to catch and even more difficult to predict.
As Ken put it, when you’re looking at extremist organizations that either advocate or support violence, how do you determine which of this bunch of yahoos is actually going to become violent? How do you pick out those particular individuals? There doesn’t seem to be any exact pattern of behavior to look for.
Franklin was correct that when he was a member of the Klan and the Nazi party, those organizations were riddled with informants. But as far as I could determine, none of the FBI’s informants ever reported Franklin or suggested he would go out on his own and start killing people. To my knowledge, his name never came up in any informant report.
Attempting to change the thinking of an adult like Franklin, we concluded, was essentially an impossible task. First of all, you would have to come up with something to replace it with, and that would take a total immersion effort, like the tactics the military employs in basic training to break a recruit down and then build him or her up again with the desired attitude and outlook. That would not be possible with a Franklin. Not only would he be unwilling, but there were no facilities or mechanisms with which to accomplish it. Franklin’s hatreds were what kept him going, what gave him his direction in life. Absent the idea of intensive early intervention we mentioned earlier, there was no way we were going to transform him as an adult into a useful, productive member of society with a positive outlook and sense of himself.
The fact that this was difficult to do, which we determined from our assassin study in general and our interview with Franklin in particular, is not a capitulation to the problem nor a failure of behavioral science. It is merely an acceptance of the research conclusions. From a Secret Service protection perspective, if you can’t always anticipate where the threat is going to come from, then you have to harden the target. For example, in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, it was common for presidents and other dignitaries to ride through crowds lining streets and buildings in open cars. After the horrific tragedy of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963, it was instantly determined that it was not possible to protect a president that way, and the practice halted. It is a shame when a political figure has to be separated from the public, but that is the reality we must face.
This doesn’t mean the Secret Service should stop keeping track of threats. It just means that additional layers of security are essential.
My needs and agenda as an FBI agent were somewhat different. While I would love to be able to root out potential killers before they strike, that is not our main function. The FBI is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not the Federal Bureau of Prevention. We always say that if you are relying on us in law enforcement to solve your societal problems, you are already too late. Our behavioral science efforts are aimed at learning more about how to catch them once they have acted and, hopefully, before they act again. And from that point
of view, the interview with Franklin was useful and illuminating.
Joseph Paul Franklin defined a different type of serial killer and assassin-type personality for us. He came from a similar—if not considerably worse—type of background than other offenders we’d studied, but his crimes were not primarily sexually motivated. Though he was certainly compensating for his own inadequacies, he was not primarily seeking his own glory and place in history so much as trying to alter society to match his own vision, through his own efforts and his example to others. He took calculated risks, but he did not want to be caught or have a martyr complex. And though his ideas were abhorrent, he sincerely believed what he was doing was religiously motivated. He genuinely believed that the combination of his planning and luck was the work of a God who wanted him to succeed in his mission. He moved freely around the country using a variety of aliases, fake IDs, disguises, different cars, different weapons, and different addresses. He was not limited to a single means of killing. He committed most of his crimes from a distance, so there was little physical or behavioral evidence at the point of the murders and therefore the crime scene had to be considerably expanded. For all of these reasons, someone like this is very difficult to catch until he makes a mistake. And just as difficult to determine is who is going to emerge from the crowd as the next Joseph Paul Franklin.
Fortunately, there haven’t been many killers as single-minded, versatile, mobile, and resourceful as Franklin. But perhaps the most important takeaway from the interview was to expand our investigative horizons in terms of linkage and pattern recognition; we needed to coordinate more fully with law enforcement agencies in the areas of the crimes and share and compare evidence and reports; and when an UNSUB of this type was operating, we needed to come up with proactive strategies to get him to make a move that might identify him, and place him under as much pressure and stress as possible to force his hand.
We weren’t the only ones who continued to be interested in Franklin.
WHILE FRANKLIN HAD LARGELY STOPPED CONFESSING TO CRIMES IN THE MID-1980s, there were still unsolved murders that had been circulating around him for years—crimes for which he was the only suspect. And one in particular would prove crucial to his fate.
Almost as soon as Franklin arrived at Marion in 1982, Lee Lankford, a captain with the Richmond Heights Police Department in St. Louis, started writing to him, asking to talk to him about the Brith Sholom synagogue shooting back in 1977. When Franklin was initially arraigned in Salt Lake City, Lankford had followed the case, and the details led him to contact the Justice Department in Washington to see if they would share their files with him. As he reviewed those files, everything pointed to Franklin as the synagogue shooter, but the hard evidence still wasn’t there. What Lankford really needed was a confession.
So, he started reaching out to Franklin directly, at first sending him small amounts of money for the prison commissary and magazines to relieve his boredom, trying to build some kind of rapport. At one point, he drove the 125 miles to Marion and showed up at the penitentiary, asking to see the inmate, but Franklin refused.
But Lankford never gave up, working the case for years. He spoke to Gerald Gordon’s mother every week. When he was appointed chief of the department in 1988, he moved a large box filled with files on the case into his new office, continually trying to give prosecutors what they said they needed to bring a charge in the Gordon murder. He never stopped trying to get to see Franklin. “I want to sit down eye-to-eye with the guy,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
In October 1994, Franklin contacted the FBI to say he was the shooter in the murder at Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel Synagogue almost exactly seventeen years before. The Bureau passed along the information to Richmond Heights PD. Lankford had retired as police chief two years before, but no one was more gratified than he that they might finally have closure and he could fulfill the promise he’d made to Gerald Gordon’s mother so many years before. He had even made a trip to Irving, Texas, to visit the gun shop where Franklin said he had bought the rifle. Franklin had robbed a bank in Oklahoma in which the stash he escaped with had exploded with a blue dye pack. Franklin put two of the hundred-dollar bills inside his socks, figuring his foot perspiration would fade the dye. The gun shop owner told Lankford that Franklin had paid for the rifle with two creased and soggy hundred-dollar bills that he took out of his shoes.
Detective sergeants Richard Zwiefel and John Wren went to Marion to interview Franklin the following month. “He said he wanted to clear his conscience. It was a calm, almost casual conversation,” Zwiefel said. “He wasn’t cocky. And he is still a racist.”
While on the one hand it was surprising that Franklin would be confessing now, he seemed to have a reason. Back in 1983 and 1984, when Franklin contacted authorities in Georgia, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, he had never mentioned this crime, even though investigators had considered him a strong suspect. One possible reason was that Missouri was a death penalty state and, as he put it, he “wasn’t anxious to be sentenced to the gas chamber.”
So, what changed in those ten years?
Well, for one thing, he said he had a dream in which he was told to confess, and Franklin, professing a great faith in the Bible, was a strong believer in signs and portents. On a more practical level, though he was still housed in the protective K Unit at Marion, Franklin remained convinced that both the Black inmates and the guards wanted to kill him. Even if he was convicted and sentenced to execution, he figured he would live a lot longer on death row in a state prison as the wheels of justice ground slowly than he would if he remained a target at Marion.
And there was a third factor, which may have played a role: 1994 was the year that Franklin’s father, James Clayton Vaughn Sr., died in a mental ward in Biloxi, Mississippi.
After the indictment, Franklin was transferred from Marion to the St. Louis County Jail. At the time of his confession, the Richmond Heights case was only his third known murder chronologically, after the killings of Alphonce Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn in the East Towne Mall parking lot two months earlier, but in many ways it was his most archetypal crime—a well-planned sniper attack from far away with no particular target in mind; just a general vicious hatred of an entire group of people. It is as if it was also the most important act of fatal violence to Franklin himself, representative of his outlook on life and sense of his own purpose. Sometimes, despite law enforcement’s best efforts, it’s not enough just to know who the killer is to bring him to justice for a particular crime.
But in the end, I suspect, the Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel murder was so central to Franklin’s psyche that even though Missouri was a death penalty state, he couldn’t keep from claiming it as his own; the compulsion was that strong. All the other reasons he gave from time to time for the confession, including wanting to get out of Marion, I think, were side issues.
IT WOULD BE MORE THAN TWO MORE YEARS BEFORE HE CAME TO TRIAL IN ST. LOUIS. In the meantime, on April 20, 1995, Chattanooga police detective Tim Carroll took a phone call from a caseworker at the St. Louis County Jail who said an inmate there wanted to confess to an old murder.
The night of July 29, 1978, twenty-year-old William Bryant Tatum was shot and killed in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut. His eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Nancy Diane Hilton, was wounded. Tatum, a junior at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga who went by his middle name, was Black. Hilton, who worked at the Pizza Hut, was white. They planned to get married in November. Carroll remembered the case well. It was Chattanooga’s only unsolved murder that year.
Franklin said he was responsible and asked Carroll to come meet with him. Carroll asked him why he decided to confess now. Franklin said he wanted to have the most death penalty cases pending against him of anyone. The response dovetailed with what I’d learned from my interview: that he was still hungry for recognition and still compared his image to that of other well-known serial killers.
Carroll agreed to come to the jail and five days lat
er arrived with Detective Mike Mathis. When Franklin was brought into the conference room, his head shaved, he saw Mathis and demanded that he leave the room. Franklin said he had never spoken with Mathis before and therefore didn’t trust him. In the interest of getting a confession, Mathis agreed to leave.
“I was on a search and destroy mission for race mixers,” Franklin told Carroll as he described spotting and following the couple. He parked his car and found a stand of tall grass nearby. It was close to Hilton’s 1974 Ford Mustang. Ten minutes later the couple emerged from the restaurant. Franklin aimed and fired his twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. He hit Tatum in the chest and the blast tore through his heart and one lung. Hilton was struck on her right side.
“Had he not called, the case would have probably gone unsolved,” the AP quoted Carroll. “His call was to let us know he did it, not to say, ‘Look, I’m sorry I did it.’ There was no remorse.”
A grand jury indicted Franklin for murder on March 1, 1996. When a Hamilton County, Tennessee, Criminal Court judge set a trial date the next year, Franklin commented, “That’s cool.”
Prosecutors said they would seek another death penalty as insurance.
Chapter 19
While waiting to stand trial in Missouri, Franklin began talking again.
He had admitted to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter in November 1995 that he shot Vernon Jordan but wouldn’t give details or say any more about it. The following April, he elaborated in an interview with Indianapolis Star reporter R. Joseph Gelarden, published on Sunday, April 7, 1996, saying that he had first considered killing civil rights leader Jesse Jackson in Chicago, but focused on Jordan when he found out he would be speaking in Fort Wayne.
Killer's Shadow Page 20