On October 8, 1977, a man lay hidden in the bushes near the Shaare Zedek Synagogue in suburban St. Louis and waited for the congregation to come out. When a group attending services appeared, he opened fire. Gerald Gordon, forty-two, was killed, and Steven Goldman and William Ash were wounded. Twenty years later, in 1997, a Missouri jury sentenced Joseph Paul Franklin to death for Gordon's murder, the one death sentence among the many cases against him. By then he had admitted to or been convicted of shooting twenty-two people in ten states, sixteen of them fatally, most of them Black men, interracial couples and Jews, in what he intended as the start of a race war.
He was born James Clayton Vaughn Jr. in Mobile, Alabama, on April 13, 1950, the elder son of James Clayton Vaughn Sr., a World War II veteran and butcher, and Helen Rau Vaughn. His father left when he was eight, and his mother twice had him jailed for public drunkenness. Franklin later said he was rarely given enough to eat and was badly beaten, and a sister recalled that their father beat the children whenever he visited. In high school he turned to evangelical Christianity and then to Nazism, and after reading Mein Kampf he said he had never felt that way about any other book. He joined the National Socialist White People's Party, earlier the American Nazi Party, and the Ku Klux Klan, and in the early 1970s rode with David Duke and Don Black to a party conference in Virginia. A photograph from September 1970 shows him in a Nazi uniform outside the White House, protesting a visit by the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir. He took his new name from Paul Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin.
For most of his adult life he drifted, apparently living on bank robberies and on money from selling his blood. On July 29, 1977, he firebombed the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and destroyed it; no one was hurt, because some of the worshippers had left early. On August 7 he shot dead Alphonse Manning and Toni Schwenn, an interracial couple, both twenty-three, in the parking lot of East Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin. He was later convicted of both murders and given life. Two months after that came Shaare Zedek.
On March 6, 1978, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, he shot Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, and Flynt's lawyer, Gene Reeves, with a Ruger Model 44 rifle, because the magazine had published a picture of interracial sex. The bullet damaged Flynt's spinal cord and left him paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. No one was ever charged. On July 29, 1978, Franklin waited near a Pizza Hut in Chattanooga and killed William Tatum, twenty, a Black man, with a shotgun, and wounded Tatum's white girlfriend, Nancy Hilton. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life.
In 1979 the killings came through windows. Harold McIver, twenty-nine, a Black manager of a Taco Bell in Doraville, Georgia, was shot from 150 yards away on July 12; Franklin confessed and said he had killed him for being close to white women, but was never tried for it. On August 18 Raymond Turner, the Black manager of a Burger King in Falls Church, Virginia, and often misnamed Raymond Taylor, was shot through the restaurant window, a killing Franklin also later confessed. On October 21 he killed Jesse Taylor, forty-two, a Black man, and his white girlfriend, Marion Bresette, thirty-one, in Oklahoma City.
On May 29, 1980, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he shot the civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, president of the National Urban League, after seeing him with a white woman. Jordan was badly wounded and survived. Franklin denied it, was acquitted, and confessed years later. On June 8, waiting on an overpass in Cincinnati to shoot a racially mixed couple, he shot two cousins instead, Darrell Lane, fourteen, and Dante Brown, thirteen; he was convicted in 1998 and given two life sentences. On June 15, from a wooded hillside above downtown Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he killed Arthur Smothers, twenty-two, who was Black, and Kathleen Mikula, sixteen, who was white, as they crossed the Washington Street Bridge. He was never charged there, but confessed in jail.
On June 25, 1980, in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, he killed two white hitchhikers, Nancy Santomero, nineteen, and Victoria Durian, twenty-six, with a .44 Ruger pistol. He said he had decided to kill them after one said she had a Black boyfriend. A Florida man, Jacob Beard, had been convicted of those murders and imprisoned in 1993. Franklin confessed to them in 1997 to an Ohio assistant prosecutor working another case; Beard was freed in 1999, acquitted at a new trial on May 31, 2000, and later received a $2 million settlement for his wrongful conviction. On August 20, 1980, near Liberty Park in Salt Lake City, Franklin killed two Black men, Theodore Fields, twenty, and David Martin III, eighteen. He was tried on federal civil rights charges as well as state murder charges, convicted of both killings and sentenced to life.
Heading back toward the Midwest, he was stopped in Kentucky and questioned about a gun in his car, and he ran. What investigators found in the vehicle tied him to the sniper killings. His racist tattoos and his habit of selling blood led them to alert blood banks nationwide, and in October 1980 a worker at a Florida blood bank recognized the tattoos and called the FBI. He was arrested in Lakeland, Florida, on October 28, 1980.
The prosecutions ran for the next two decades, in state and federal courts, and ended in seven life sentences and one sentence of death. During the penalty phase of the 1997 Missouri trial for Gordon's murder he tried and failed to escape. The psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who had interviewed him at length, testified for the defense that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, unfit to stand trial, with a childhood history of severe abuse. He spent fifteen years on death row at the Potosi Correctional Center. The white supremacist William Luther Pierce dedicated his 1989 novel Hunter, about a man who murders interracial couples, to Franklin.
In August 2013 the Missouri Supreme Court set his execution for November 20. In October, Larry Flynt asked for clemency, saying that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself. In an interview published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on November 17, Franklin said he had renounced his racism, that his motives had been illogical and partly the product of an abusive upbringing, and that in prison he had seen that Black inmates were people just like him. On November 19 two federal judges granted stays, one over Missouri's new single-drug method and one over his claim that he was mentally incompetent to be executed; an appeals court overturned both and the United States Supreme Court turned down his final appeals.
He was executed at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, on November 20, 2013, the first Missouri execution to use pentobarbital alone, supplied by an unnamed compounding pharmacy after a German manufacturer refused to let its drugs be used. The injection began at 6:07 a.m. and he was pronounced dead at 6:17. He made no final statement and did not speak in the chamber.