JOSEPH SET TO BE EXECUTED FOR RACIAL KILLING
KILLER FUELED BY RACIAL HATE SET TO BE EXECUTED
Joseph Paul Franklin targeted
interracial couples during a rampage that left at least 21 dead.
MOTIVE:
One of the nation's most notorious
serial killers, Joseph Paul Franklin, got his idea to kill Hustler publisher
Larry Flynt after looking at the magazine in Jackson in 1977.By the time Franklin got his chance a year later, he had
already begun his rampage, bombing synagogues, shooting interracial couples and
killing "enemies of the white race," and, by the time it ended,
leaving at least 21 dead, including Jackson State University student Johnnie
Noyes Jr., according to authorities.
"I had a hatred toward blacks bordering on
insanity," the 63-year-old Franklin, who is scheduled to be executed Nov.
20, said in a telephone interview from death row in Missouri. "I was
flat-out mentally ill."
Before those killings began, he rented a place in an
upscale neighborhood in Jackson near a Krystal, where he gobbled many burgers
in 1977. "It was all I could afford," he said.Inside that home, he spotted a Hustler on a coffee table
and picked it up. "I see some broad having sex with a black man," he
said. "I got so outraged."He flipped through the magazine and discovered Flynt was
the publisher. "I thought, 'I'm going to kill that guy,'" Franklin
said. "I started stalking him."
LIFE OF JOSEPH:
Franklin was born in 1950 to a Mobile, Ala., family that
swirled with violence, neglect and mental illness.His drunken father beat his mother before abandoning the
family. He recalled his mother walking up behind him while he was eating and
smacking him in the face.
After he and his siblings came home from school, she
would keep them locked in the house, he said. "It was like being in a
prison most of your childhood. It really messed up our minds." He said he became a loner, and his brother, Gordon,
"wound up in prison. He went completely crazy."So did his father, James Clayton Vaughn Sr., who died in
a mental ward in Biloxi in 1994.
To escape, Franklin buried himself in books, including
Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf." "To me at the time, Hitler was a
god-man," he said. "'Mein Kampf' was my Bible. I read it hundreds of
times."By age 18, his lone attempt at marriage had ended amid
allegations he abused his wife.
Struggling for identity, he moved in 1969 to Washington,
D.C., where he became active in the American Nazi Party and later the National
Socialist White People's Party. Franklin faithfully listened to the daily "White
Power" messages left by neo-Nazi leader William Pierce. Pierce denounced the Jews and called for repatriation of
African Americans.
KILLER ON THE RUN:
Upset at "race mixing," Franklin confronted
interracial couples, hurled insults at them and later sprayed them with mace. Worried a 1973 conviction for carrying a concealed weapon
would haunt him, he legally changed his name from James Clayton Vaughn Jr. to
Joseph Paul Franklin, borrowing the names of Nazi leader Paul Joseph Goebbels
and American patriot Benjamin Franklin.
He wandered the country, working dead-end jobs before he
decided to go on the "warpath," killing Jews, he said.
On July 25, 1977, he blew up a Jewish lobbyist's home,
but failed to kill the man. Days later he planted a bomb inside a synagogue in
Chattanooga, Tenn. He had timed the device to explode during Sabbath services,
but when the eight members left early because of light attendance, the blast
hurt no one.
After his attack failed, he read about Judge Archie
Simonson in Madison, Wis., whom he felt had been too lenient in sentencing two
African-American men for raping a white woman."I got so mad, I drove all the way to Madison to
kill that (expletive)," he said.En route to the judge's office, he gave two teenage girls
a ride to a mall and then grew frustrated when a car slowed down in front of
him.
Inside the car was Mississippi native Alphonse Manning,
an African American who worked as a high school janitor. With him was his white
girlfriend, Toni Schwenn, who worked at a juvenile detention center.Franklin beeped his horn. When Manning failed to speed up, Franklin laid on the
horn. Upset, Manning bolted out of his car.
Franklin said he reached under the front seat for his
.357-caliber pistol. "I grabbed it and whipped it out and 'pow, pow,' I
shot him twice." Franklin got out of the car, walked past the body and
shot Schwenn through the car window. As he drove away, he shot Schwenn a second time.
A witness at the crime scene saw his Alabama license
plate but was unable to get the number. Almost a decade would pass before
Franklin was tried and convicted of murder in the slayings. By then he was
already serving a life sentence for murdering two black joggers in Utah in
1980.
From Wisconsin, Franklin took a Greyhound to Atlanta and
used a new alias he had taken from a 7-year-old boy whose name he had found in
microfilm while looking through newspaper obituaries.
Arrested in New Orleans on yet another concealed-weapon
charge, Franklin spent a week and a half in jail.After he was freed, he left New Orleans, vowing to start
a "race war," believing other whites would join him. Adopting aliases of Old West gunslingers he admired, he
began looking for victims and robbed banks to support his crimes. He then spent time on the Gulf Coast until he sensed
someone was following him. He grabbed his suitcase and hit the road again.
STARTED ONCE MORE:
Franklin resumed his rampage. On Oct. 8, 1977, he opened
fire on members emerging from a synagogue in a St. Louis suburb, killing one
and injuring another. It was the crime that eventually would land him on death
row. He headed south on I-55 and stayed in Memphis.
Then in February 1978 it was on to Atlanta, where he
spotted a young interracial couple. He opened fire, killing Johnny Brookshire
and paralyzing Joy Williams.He readied to leave Atlanta when he read the Hustler
publisher he had been longing to kill was on trial for obscenity in nearby
Lawrenceville.
He said he drove there and began to search for "a
good place to ambush him."
His answer came in the newspaper when he read that Flynt
liked to eat at the V&J Cafeteria.That night, Franklin walked the path from the courthouse
to the cafeteria and spotted an empty building across the street — the perfect
spot for a sniper's nest.He saw the building lacked windows and returned with
burlap sacks, which he tacked up to conceal his presence.
The morning of March 6, 1978, he slipped into his
sniper's nest.Unlike previous attacks, he felt terrified, he said.
"I was thinking to myself, 'What in the world am I doing here?'"Two men walked down the street, and Franklin decided to
sight one as practice. "As soon as I got the scope on him, I realized it
was Larry Flynt," he said.
He fired several shots, hitting both Flynt and his
lawyer, Gene Reeves. Flynt was left paralyzed from the waist down. Reeves, who
was in a coma for 20 days, survived.
As he was leaving the scene, Franklin said, a Camaro
peeled out, prompting an all-points bulletin for a black and silver Camaro.
"Since I was in a green Torino, nobody was looking for my car."
FINAL MASSACRE:
In spring 1979, Franklin arrived in Jackson with killing on his mind.On March 25, he drove past a car wash on U.S. 80. From across the street, he leveled his .44 Magnum and fired. Johnnie Noyes Jr., a 25-year-old Jackson State University student who dreamed of being a doctor, dropped dead.
Months later, authorities caught him after he sold his
plasma for $5 to a Florida blood bank.As Franklin's rampage became news, white supremacists
praised him.William Pierce wrote his 1989 book, "Hunter,"
about a racist assassin eerily similar to Franklin and dedicated the book to
him, saying he "saw his duty as a white man and did what a responsible son
of his race must do."
HIS VERDICT:
Franklin now regrets his actions, saying he was suffering
from manic depression. "I felt like a cloud descended over me," he
said. "I was obviously mentally ill."After going to jail in St. Louis in 1996, Franklin
interacted with African Americans and realized the error of his racism, he
said.
He no longer believes "race mixing" is an
abomination, saying God could have easily had the human race all one color, he
said. "For some reason, he made us different colors." As for his many crimes, "I feel like the Lord has
forgiven me because I've repented," he said.
He now regrets shooting Jordan. Although a federal jury
acquitted him of shooting Jordan, Franklin admits he, indeed, shot the civil
rights leader. "I've got a lot of respect for him now," he said.Franklin also expressed regret for shooting the Hustler
publisher.
Flynt has become an unexpected voice in favor of halting
the serial killer's execution."I have every reason to be overjoyed with this
decision, but I am not," he penned in a guest column in The Hollywood
Reporter. "I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among
its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself."
But the 54-year-old brother of Johnnie Noyes Jr. sees it
differently.Franklin is "getting what he deserves," said
Felix Noyes. "It's just that simple."
