With the proliferation and reach of these online spaces today, I am reminded of how Franklin told me he used white supremacist newspapers the way many sexual predators use violent pornography, to fuel both his fantasy of racial violence and his belief that he had a heroic role to play within a larger movement. The internet today is rife with spaces that do precisely the same thing, incubating and disseminating hate-fueled lies and conspiracies.
And there clearly is a point when dangerous speech turns into actual danger; when a switch flips and suddenly talk is no longer enough. Just as Franklin tired of the talk of the hate groups he was a part of, so do similar white supremacists of today.
On the evening of June 15, 2015, a slightly built, shaggy-haired twenty-one-year-old unemployed high school dropout named Dylann Storm Roof walked into the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church at 110 Calhoun Street in Charleston, South Carolina, long associated with the civil rights movement. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans and asked one of the parishioners for the pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney. When told Reverend Pinckney was attending a Bible study meeting, Roof went in and sat down next to him. He participated for a while and later said the other participants were very nice to him.
At approximately 9:05 P.M., Roof stood up, took a Glock 41 semiautomatic .45-caliber handgun from his fanny pack and opened fire around the room. He killed nine people, six women and three men, all African Americans aged twenty-six to eighty-seven, including forty-one-year-old Pinckney, a Democratic member of the state senate. His wife and two daughters were in the church building at the time.
Roof ran from the scene and was captured the next morning at a traffic stop in his hometown of Shelby, North Carolina, 245 miles away. He waived extradition and was returned to South Carolina. At a bond hearing he attended from jail by videoconference, survivors and relatives of five of the victims told him they forgave him and were praying for his soul. In September, he agreed to plead guilty to multiple state murder charges in exchange for a life without parole sentence instead of the death penalty urged by Governor Nikki Haley.
On December 15, 2016, at the end of a federal trial in which one of his attorneys would not allow a guilty plea because of a possible death penalty, Roof was found guilty of all thirty-three murder and hate crimes charges against him. He was sentenced to death on January 10, 2017. By that point, like Franklin, he had dismissed his attorneys and chose to represent himself.
In January 2020, a new defense team filed a 321-page motion with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, seeking to overturn the federal conviction and death sentence on the grounds that Roof should not have been allowed to represent himself because he was “disconnected from reality” and suffering from “schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, autism, anxiety and depression.”
This was in opposition to a statement he made at the hearing, contradicting his attorneys, as Franklin often did, and asking the court to disregard them: “There’s nothing wrong with me psychologically.”
In a jailhouse journal he wrote, after the attack, “I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed.”
What some people find so difficult to conceive is that someone may make a statement like this not because he is crazy but because this is what he believes. Is Roof mentally ill? I would say so, just as I believed about Franklin. But did he know right from wrong and was he able to control his actions? Just like Franklin, absolutely.
And here is the gist of it: His lawyers said that Roof was unconcerned with both the life without parole and death sentences because he had killed with the idea of starting a race war. And after victory in that war, he would be freed by the victorious white supremacists. In his time, Franklin believed the same.
“I did what I thought would make the biggest wave,” Roof wrote from prison, “and now the fate of our race is in the hands of my brothers who continue to live freely.”
As stated in an in-depth December 2019 article on hate crimes in The Washington Post, “Roof has become a cult figure among white supremacists, especially those who espouse racial violence.” Just as Franklin was before him.
Both Franklin and Roof were delusional in the sense of expecting a race war, after which they would be embraced as heroes. But both these useless losers were sane and rational, within their own belief systems, when they took lives of people they considered inferior.
On March 20, 2017, a jobless twenty-eight-year-old army veteran named James Harris Jackson, known by his middle name, fatally stabbed sixty-six-year-old Timothy Caughman shortly after 11:00 p.m. on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Caught on surveillance footage, Jackson told NYPD detectives the next day that he had been inspired by Dylann Roof’s act and that the stabbing was “practice” for a larger racial slaughter in Times Square. The night before the attack he had typed a manifesto he entitled “Declaration of Total War on Negros.”
Unlike other right-wing extremists, Jackson came from a liberal and progressive Baltimore family that supported Barack Obama for president, and he attended a Quaker Friends school. His grandfather had been instrumental in desegregating the Shreveport, Louisiana, school system. Perhaps Jackson’s evolving racial hatred was a means of rebellion.
I see Dylann Roof as Franklin’s spiritual son—a young man whose hate and resentment at his own fate was so strong that he not only had to blame others, he had to translate his hate into action. And I see Harris Jackson as Roof’s. As I said regarding Franklin, perhaps intense intervention along the way could have turned either of them around. But it’s too late for that now.
Joseph Paul Franklin has spawned many spiritual children.
On August 11 and 12, 2017, white supremacists marched through the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, in a demonstration they called the Unite the Right rally. Carrying lit torches, they chanted “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and Soil,” a slogan that originated in Nazi Germany. Some of the marchers waved Nazi flags while others wore red Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” caps. The ostensible purpose of the rally was to protest the dismantling of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a city park.
On the second day, James Alex Fields Jr., a twenty-year-old self-identified white supremacist, intentionally rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, a paralegal, and injuring nineteen others.
David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, called the rally a “turning point.” Vox.com quoted him as saying, “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”
For his part, President Trump, who had frequently been accused of fomenting divisiveness and encouraging hate speech, commented on the protesters, “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had some people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
At about 9:50 on Saturday morning, October 27, 2018, forty-six-year-old Robert Gregory Bowers walked into the Tree of Life Congregation in the peaceful Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh during a sabbath service attended by about seventy-five Jewish worshippers. The bearded, heavyset white male opened fire with a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and three Glock .357 semiautomatic pistols. During a twenty-minute barrage he killed eleven people, aged fifty-four to ninety-seven, and wounded six others, including four Pittsburgh police officers.
According to USA Today, he shouted “All Jews must die!” as he fired at random.
He surrendered to police after being wounded by the SWAT team, two of whose members he first wounded in a shootout as they entered the building.
A white supremacist and neo-Nazi, Bowers believed Jews to be “the children of Satan.” He was particularly upset at HIAS, the 130-plus-year-old Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, for helping “to bring invaders in that kill our people.”
On Friday, November 1, 2019, the FBI arrested a man in Colorado, and charged him with plo
tting to blow up Temple Emanuel synagogue in Pueblo. In a private Facebook message intercepted by undercover agents, he wrote “I wish the Holocaust really did happen. The Jews need to die.” Some of the congregation’s members were children of Holocaust survivors.
Sadly, the list seems to grow with each passing month, and by the time you are reading these pages, there probably will have been even more. What all of these individuals share with Joseph Paul Franklin is that they are “lone wolves,” men who embrace the collective philosophy of the hate group but take it one shattering step further and act on it. Men for whom words are no longer enough. Those who carried the torches and spouted the racist slogans in Charlottesville may talk the talk and even walk the walk, but one of them, James Fields, took it upon himself to drive his car into a peaceful gathering.
Thoughts and words matter. They have power—for both good and evil. They inspire some to violence, and those, in turn, inspire others. The good news is that today, the same online visibility that enables hate messages to flourish also makes it more possible for us to spot those who may be teetering on the edge and intervene before they move to action. And it is encouraging that in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, people of all races, faiths, and ethnicities were willing to come together to demonstrate in large numbers, all across the country, supporting the civil and human rights that those like Franklin seek to deny.
The journey to reckon with our nation’s searing history of racial hatred, intolerance, and discrimination is ongoing, and there are no neutrals in that struggle. The shadow cast by Joseph Paul Franklin and his like is long and dark, so the sunlight to eradicate it must be even brighter and stronger.
Acknowledgments
Once again, our special and heartfelt thanks go out to:
Our wonderful and discerning editor, Matt Harper, whose talent, insight, and perspective guided us every step of the way; and the entire HarperCollins/William Morrow/Dey Street family, including Anna Montague, Andrea Molitor, Danielle Bartlett, Bianca Flores, Kell Wilson, and Beth Silfin.
Our amazing researcher Ann Hennigan, who has worked with us since the beginning and is an integral part of the team. She was critical in helping us keep this complicated story straight and her perceptions added mightily.
Our ever supportive and resourceful agent, Frank Weimann and his team at Folio Literary Management.
John’s colleagues at Quantico, with special remembrance of the late Special Agent Roy Hazelwood and late Secret Service Special Agent Ken Baker, two of the very best.
Mark’s wife, Carolyn, among many other attributes, our Mindhunters chief of staff and in-house counselor.
We are also indebted to our British friend Mel Ayton, whose book Dark Soul of the South: The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin proved an invaluable resource. So, too, was the voluminous journalistic record over a forty-year period, with special appreciation for the Associated Press, United Press International, and Mark’s old newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Finally, though this book is dedicated to all of Franklin’s known murder victims, we also want to pay respectful tribute to their noble and courageous survivors, family, and friends. A murderer’s bullet, knife edge, or bomb always strikes a multitude of targets and the ripples of that disruption move out in concentric circles for generations. They will always have a firm place deep in our hearts.
About the Authors
JOHN DOUGLAS is a former FBI special agent, the bureau’s criminal profiling pioneer, founding chief of the Investigative Support Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and one of the creators of the Crime Classification Manual. He has hunted some of the most notorious and sadistic criminals of our time, including the Trailside Killer in San Francisco, the Atlanta Child Murderer, the Tylenol Poisoner, the Unabomber, the man who hunted prostitutes for sport in the woods of Alaska, and Seattle’s Green River killer, the case that nearly ended his own life. He holds a doctor of education degree, based on comparing methods of classifying violent crimes for law enforcement personnel. Today, he is a widely sought-after speaker and expert on criminal investigative analysis, having consulted on the JonBenet Ramsey murder, the civil case against O. J. Simpson, and the exoneration efforts for the West Memphis Three and Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. Douglas is the author, with Mark Olshaker, of seven previous books, including Mindhunter, the Number 1 New York Times bestseller that is the basis for the hit Netflix series.
MARK OLSHAKER is a novelist, nonfiction author, and Emmy Award–winning filmmaker who has worked with John Douglas for many years, beginning with the PBS Nova Emmy-nominated documentary Mind of a Serial Killer. He has written and produced documentaries across a wide range of subjects, including for the Peabody Award-winning PBS series Building Big and Avoiding Armageddon. Olshaker is the author of highly praised suspense novels such as Einstein’s Brain, Unnatural Causes, and The Edge. In the other realm of life-threatening mysteries, he is coauthor with Dr. C.J. Peters of Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World, and with Dr. Michael Osterholm of Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Time, Fortune, and Foreign Affairs.
Both authors and their wives live in the Washington, D.C., area.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
Mindhunter
Journey into Darkness
Unabomber
Obsession
The Anatomy of Motive
The Cases That Haunt Us
Broken Wings
Law & Disorder
The Killer Across the Table
Copyright
THE KILLER’S SHADOW. Copyright © 2020 by Mindhunters, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover photographs © Sam Bloomberg-Rissman/Getty Images; © Ensuper/Shutterstock (texture)
Abstract background image on title page © aerial333//stock.adobe.com
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-297977-3
Version 10062020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-297976-6 (trade paperback edition)
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-307444-6 (library hardcover edition)
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