Joseph Paul Franklin
Joseph Paul Franklin and I went way back together, to the fall of 1980 when FBI Civil Rights Section chief Dave Kohl, one of my close friends in the Bureau, asked me to do a fugitive assessment on the serial killer of African Americans, interracial couples and Jews. He had been arrested and interrogated, but managed to slip out a police station window. I thought he’d be difficult to catch because he was extremely sophisticated about police procedures and techniques, but I felt he would come back to somewhere along the Gulf Coast where he felt comfortable and our best shot at getting him would be when he needed money. He was spotted and identified from his tattoos by nurses at a Lakeland, Florida blood bank, where he’d gone to sell his plasma. FBI agents arrested him at a nearby store where he’d gone to cash the check.
Franklin died early yesterday morning by lethal injection at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center in Bonne Terre for the 1977 sniper style killing of Gerald Gordon outside a suburban St. Louis synagogue. That he was executed for this particular crime was almost arbitrary, though. In total, Franklin killed at least 22 and is most famous for two he only managed to wound: civil rights leader Vernon Jordan and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, whom he left permanently paralyzed.
Despite the fact that I conducted a long interview with Franklin about 20 years ago, corresponded with him, taught his case and wrote about him, I’m in no way sorry to see him go.
