Linkage blindness, as we’ve said, is an ongoing challenge for investigators, but so is confirmation bias—the attitude and approach with which one goes into a case, embracing evidence that supports that bias and depreciating evidence that does not. And when that happens, someone always pays the price—in this case, Jacob Beard and his and the victims’ families and friends.
The Rainbow murders case is a two-decade-long personal tragedy and legal horror story, a searing example of how a misguided investigation and prosecution can ruin lives. But one of the reasons Franklin affected me so deeply is that this was little more than a footnote to his murderous career—just another incidence of picking up hitchhikers and deciding they did not deserve to live. In evaluating crimes, we think about means, motive, and opportunity. Franklin was versatile and adaptable enough that he was able to shift his means and take advantage of diverse opportunities. His motive never changed.
Looking back, the reign of terror that Franklin wrought was clearly far greater than anyone, including myself, could have initially imagined. One of the things we knew about Franklin when we first became aware of him was that he’d been a highly mobile killer. As it turned out, this had proven perhaps his greatest asset. He’d killed over such a large area, during such a broad stretch of time, that many of his crimes and methods had been difficult to link together definitively given his different methods and victimology.
As my retirement from the Bureau loomed, I was ready to finally put Franklin out of my mind.
He had other ideas.
Chapter 21
Once out of the Bureau for several years, consulting independently on cases and working on books about profiling and criminal investigative analysis with Mark, I hadn’t thought much about Franklin for a while, other than reading that he had forsaken his racist and anti-Semitic views. I hoped it was true. Sitting in a prison cell year after year, the one thing you have is time to think.
He had previously written complimenting Mark and me on our analysis of him in our book The Anatomy of Motive. Then, around the beginning of 2001 I received a letter from him, sent to the post office box we kept. It concerned a section in our previous book Obsession, about the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case in Alabama, in which nine young African American male teens were arrested for raping two white teenage girls on a freight train, despite the fact that there was no evidence against them other than the word of the two girls, who showed no signs of physical harm and used the charges as a way to stay out of trouble themselves.
In any event, it was this narrative in our book that Franklin took issue with. The letter was neatly written, and the spelling was perfect. Though we’ve sanitized the N-word, he certainly did not. He wrote:
Dear John,
Greetings. It’s been awhile since I’ve heard anything from you. An inmate here let me check out a copy of “Obsession” he had, and I was pissed off by the position you’re taking regarding the two young white women who were raped by a bunch of n*****s in Scottsboro, AL. One good and easy test for you would be to let your daughter, who I guess is 21 now, get on the empty boxcar of a freight train with about as many n*****s who raped those other girls, and ride with them for about a couple of hundred miles or so, to see if they rape her, and you could let one of your daughter’s friends go with her, to make the rest similar to the first case. You could select black students, workers, or whatever, they wouldn’t necessarily have to be street n*****s like the Scottsboro Boys, and see what happens. Would you be willing to do that? If not, you’re one of the biggest phonies I’ve ever met, and what you’re saying is absolute hogwash!
Sincerely,
Joseph P. Franklin
P.S. I’m curious—why do you think two white women would make up a story about getting raped by n*****s, just to avoid getting arrested for vagrancy, like you stated in your book? It doesn’t make sense—how would they have gotten arrested by the police in the first place?
HE ALWAYS SIGNED HIS NAME WITH A FIVE-POINTED STAR INSTEAD OF A DOT over the “I” in Franklin.
Reading this letter and sharing it with Mark, a harsh reality hit me: I was never going to be free of Joseph Paul Franklin; he had invaded my psyche and intended to reside there. I was instantly reminded of the quote from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that had become a watchword and warning in my Investigative Support Unit: Whoever fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Though he was safely locked away, I felt Franklin had violated me and my family, that he was still challenging my values and my perception of decency, just as he had attempted to do for the entire nation. He had been in my professional life almost from the beginning of my profiling career, up through my retirement from the Bureau and beyond.
But when I tried to shift my mind back to investigator mode, what I found interesting about the letter—after trying to put aside my feelings of being creeped out over the notion of Joseph Paul Franklin even thinking about my daughter—was how he had reacted to the narrative in Obsession.
Anyone who has studied the Scottsboro case would come to the same conclusion Mark and I did—that the defendants had been falsely accused, were all innocent and the victims of the racial bigotry of the times. This is established fact, based on solid evidence. But in reading the details, Franklin imposed his own overlay: in any situation in which a white girl or woman accuses a Black boy or man of sexual assault, it must be true, and the African American must be guilty. That was the mythology he had grown up with, it was the narrative that had shaped his life and given it meaning, and he was not about to abandon it at this point. In some ways, it was the same as a sexual serial killer emotionally sustaining himself in prison by reliving the thrill and power of his crimes over and over again in his mind. Clearly, I represented the authority of law enforcement and the FBI to him, the establishment he had fought his whole life. And if I was going to have my say on such a racially charged subject, so was he. I’ve said repeatedly that you can lock up the body, but you can’t lock up the mind.
I didn’t hear from Franklin again until April 2004, when he wrote asking me to help find his first wife, Bobbie Louise Dorman. Whether he had reached out to anyone else, I didn’t know, but he said he had gotten ahold of an FBI report from 1980 or 1981 that listed her remarried name. I checked the case file and he was correct—that information was on a timeline that had been supplied to me when I worked up the fugitive assessment in 1980. I have no idea how Franklin got a copy.
It wasn’t infrequent that incarcerated killers reached out to me by mail. Part of it was probably their knowledge of all the prison interviews I’d conducted, which showed that I was willing to listen to them when few law enforcement officials were. Part of it was the books Mark and I had published, which had reached a wide audience, apparently even in prison.
Franklin said he wanted to get back in touch with Bobbie, though he added, “John, please make it clear to her that I’m not trying to get a serious relationship going again. I just want to kind of, like, keep in touch, OK?”
What was pathetic about this was that as his life presumably neared its end, Franklin must have realized there was nothing left for him, no human connection. If I was the best person he could think of to help reach his ex-wife, he must truly be desperate. Even with the most hardened criminals, I’ve found there is generally some sentimental core. With Franklin, it was the daughter to whom he’d never been a father and the wife to whom he’d only briefly been a husband. But they took a back seat to the pursuit of his murderous hatred.
It’s hard to imagine an emptier life.
AS IS SO OFTEN TRUE IN DEATH PENALTY CASES, THE APPEALS PROCESS WAS lengthy. While his case wound its way through various levels of state and federal appeals, Franklin began to express remorse for the first time. He said he had been mentally ill at the time of the Gordon shooting and told anyone who would listen that he had forsaken his anti-Black and anti-Jewish views and
come to believe in the equality of all of God’s children. I hoped he was sincere, though my encounters with him over the years made me retain a healthy dose of skepticism.
Finally, on August 14, 2013, the court set the date for the now sixty-three-year-old Franklin to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday, November 20. He had been thirty when he was finally captured in 1980; he had spent more than half his life in prison.
The determination of Franklin’s execution date coincided with a decision by the Missouri Department of Corrections to switch to a one-drug execution protocol employing pentobarbital, a short-acting barbiturate sedative that used to be marketed as a sleeping pill under the trade name Nembutal. Up until then the state had employed a standard three-drug series of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride, all of which were becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Missouri then decided to switch to high doses of propofol, commonly used in hospitals for anesthesia. But the European Union, which opposed the death penalty, threatened to withhold supplies to the United States if it was used in execution protocols. In high doses, pentobarbital shuts down the heart and respiratory system, leading to death.
As the execution date neared, Larry Flynt came out against it, saying that he didn’t believe in the death penalty and felt a lifelong prison sentence would be greater and more effective punishment, “far harsher than the quick release of a lethal injection.”
Franklin reached out by phone to a number of the reporters he had spoken to over the years, calling himself a changed man who no longer hated African Americans or Jews and had repented to God. He had gotten to know Blacks as individuals in prison, and he was no longer anti-Semitic, but pro-Semitic. “It just goes to show you how you can be totally convinced that something you believe is true when nothing can be further from the truth.”
Back in February 1997, while he awaited formal sentencing in the St. Louis County Jail for the Gerald Gordon murder, the one that would finally bring him the death sentence he said he wanted, Franklin shared with Kim Bell of the Post-Dispatch his contempt for convicted killers who try to avoid execution: “It disgusts me that these guys try to save their miserable lives.”
Now, his attorney Jennifer Herndon said, “He believes he should be kept alive so he could help other people overcome their racist views.”
There is some karmic justice in his own last-minute efforts to stave off the lethal injection. In truth, though, Franklin never actually claimed he wanted to die. He simply preferred to die later in a state prison than sooner, as he thought he would, at the hands of Marion’s guards or Black inmates. What he actually preferred was to be freed from jail, either by escape or when the race war was finally won and he was greeted as a hero of the revolution.
He was moved from Potosi the short distance to the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, where executions took place. His attorneys and the American Civil Liberties Union attacked the protocol, claiming not enough was known of the effects of pentobarbital to ensure against “an excruciatingly painful execution,” as Franklin’s attorneys put it, potentially violating the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments.
“There are simply too many unanswered questions to justify ending someone’s life,” ACLU of Missouri’s executive director, Jeffrey A. Mittman, wrote in an email on Friday, November 15.
Officials pointed out that pentobarbital was commonly used to euthanize ailing pets. Franklin took issue with that, too, and not for the reasons his lawyers or the ACLU did. He told Post-Dispatch reporter Jeremy Kohler, “It’s humiliating to put a person to death with a drug like that. It’s humiliating to put someone like me in the same category as an animal. It isn’t moral to kill somebody using that type of drug. I don’t think it is right.” I think the irony speaks for itself.
On Monday, November 18, Governor Jay Nixon denied clemency. He asked Missourians to keep Gerald Gordon, his family, and all of Franklin’s other victims and their survivors in their thoughts and prayers.
Lee Lankford, retired chief of the Richmond Heights PD, who had seen the case through from beginning to end, commented, “How many lives did he take on his rampage across the United States? Just to be put to sleep, that’s the easiest way out of here.” Having looked at so many crime scene photos and read so many medical examiners’ reports, I’ve often felt the same way myself.
Franklin refused a final meal, asking that it be given to a hungry child or homeless person instead. On the morning of November 20, Franklin was brought from his holding cell into the execution chamber and strapped to a table. He offered no resistance and said nothing.
At 6:05 A.M., Governor Nixon gave the okay for the execution to commence.
Franklin made no final statement. At 6:07 he was injected with five grams of pentobarbital in a 5 percent solution. Once the lethal chemical began running through his veins, he was observed to swallow hard, breathe heavily for several moments, then lie still. Three witnesses from the media reported that he did not appear to be in pain. The entire process took about ten minutes.
Perhaps it was Hal Harlowe, the former Dane County district attorney who prosecuted the Manning-Schwenn murders in Madison, Wisconsin, who gave Franklin his most truthful epitaph. Upon learning in 1997 that the Missouri jurors had handed down a death sentence, Harlowe noted: “He was ordinary and not very bright. He was not nearly as special as the many people he killed.”
Epilogue
“Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare—Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.”
—Rod Serling, closing monologue from “He’s Alive,” The Twilight Zone
When I learned that Joseph Paul Franklin had been executed, I felt that justice had finally been rendered in his case, though I can’t say I rested much easier. He was dead, but the legacy of hatred, intolerance, and resentment he hoped to encourage was still alive, as it is to this day.
And it is why the Franklin case continued to haunt me, and why understanding a killer like Franklin is important—and urgent. Hate always has an antecedent and a target—it comes from somewhere and it goes somewhere. With all of the serial killers I have studied we confront the ongoing question: Are they born or made? Is it nature or nurture? The answer, as we have seen, is both; in fact, a dynamic interaction between the two. Despite his grisly success as a repeat killer, Franklin is not unique and the shadow he cast is long.
In 1978, in the midst of Franklin’s murderous reign of terror, a rabidly racist and anti-Semitic screed of a novel titled The Turner Diaries was published. Set in the near future, the book centers around one Earl Turner, a white revolutionary who joins “the Organization,” an Aryan supremacy group, to wage guerilla war against the repressive American government, referred to as “the System.” As part of its campaign, the Organization stages the “Day of the Rope” in Los Angeles, during which “race traitors” are publicly hanged. Turner dies a hero when he flies a small plane equipped with a nuclear warhead into the Pentagon. An epilogue tells how, over the next century, the Organization has triumphed and eliminated all of the nonwhite races, as well as the Jews.
The novel went on to sell more than half a million copies and, among other acts of domestic terror, is known to have inspired a shady white supremacist group known as the Order in the 1984 murder of liberal Denver talk-show host Alan Berg and the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing by Timothy McVeigh, which mirrored the novel’s bombing of FBI headquarters. Pages from the novel were found in McVeigh’s getaway car.
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The Turner Diaries author is listed as Andrew Macdonald, actually a pseudonym for William Luther Pierce III, a physicist by profession who had taught at Oregon State University. Pierce’s life’s work, however, was as a professional purveyor of hate. A onetime member of the John Birch Society and National Socialist White People’s Party, he founded the white supremacist National Alliance in 1974. As John Sutherland wrote in the London Review of Books, “The Turner Diaries is not the work of a Holocaust-denier (although Pierce gives us plenty of that) so much as a would-be Holocaust-repeater.”
Pierce’s next novel, Hunter, also written under the Andrew Macdonald pseudonym, came out in 1989. It follows Oscar Yeager, who sets out on a campaign to assassinate interracial couples and civil rights advocates and settle “the Jewish question.” There is little doubt on whom Hunter is based, and Pierce dedicated it to Franklin, “the Lone Hunter, who saw his duty as a White man and did what a responsible son of his race must do, to the best of his ability and without regard for the personal consequences.” Like The Turner Diaries, Hunter is considered an urtext of the movement.
Due to the remarkable advances in communications technologies, we find ourselves living at a time when it is far easier to radicalize and inspire hate than ever before. The internet and social media have made it much easier to spread philosophies like Franklin’s than it was in his time, and he would undoubtedly be delighted to see his face appearing frequently on sites like YouTube. With today’s technology, conversations that used to be limited to basements and meeting halls, the kinds of words and places that first helped radicalize Franklin, now have tens of thousands of participants online. Corrosive ideas, hate speech, conspiracies, and even potential crimes have a home online unlike any they have ever known. As early as 2000, the Southern Poverty Law Center had identified as many as five hundred racial hate websites, a number that has exploded in the decades since, metastasizing across social media platforms as well.
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