Joseph Paul Franklin was a white supremacist who, between 1977 and 1980, traveled the United States shooting people from hiding because of their race or religion. His targets were Black men, Black boys, interracial couples and Jewish worshippers. He paid his way, by the account of prosecutors and the FBI, by robbing banks and selling his blood. Juries and judges in five jurisdictions convicted him of eight murders, and a federal court in Tennessee convicted him of bombing a synagogue. He was acquitted of shooting the civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, a shooting he later admitted, and he was indicted but never tried for shooting Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler. He confessed to other killings that were never tried, and he told interviewers at different times that he had killed as many as 20 people, or about 22.
Only one of his cases ended in a death sentence: the killing of Gerald Gordon, a 42-year-old father of three, who was shot as he left a bar mitzvah at a synagogue in Richmond Heights, Missouri, in October 1977. That killing went unsolved for 17 years, until Franklin, serving life in federal prison, described it to an FBI agent. A St. Louis County jury sentenced him to death in 1997, after a trial in which he represented himself and asked the jurors for that sentence. Missouri executed him on November 20, 2013. He was 63.
Franklin was born James Clayton Vaughn Jr. in Mobile, Alabama, on April 13, 1950, according to a chronology the Deseret News published in 1995. He grew up poor, in all-white public housing projects in Mobile, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch reported in 2013. His parents beat him and his three siblings. An older sister told CNN, as quoted by Hatewatch, that he "always got the worst of it."
The FBI's history of the case says he was drawn to white supremacist ideas as a teenager, dropped out of high school after a serious eye injury, and picked up a record of minor offenses. He married in 1968; the marriage ended in divorce after four months, the Deseret News chronology says. That year he moved to Arlington, Virginia, and joined the American Nazi Party.
On September 18, 1970, he was photographed in a Nazi uniform at a demonstration outside the White House against a visit by the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency described him in 1984 as an early member of the American Nazi Party who wore swastika armbands and joined other American Nazis picketing the White House during that visit. In 1972 he was convicted of carrying a concealed weapon in Fairfax, Virginia. In the mid-1970s he lived in Georgia, joined a group called the Fascist Party and sold its newspaper in Atlanta, according to the Deseret News chronology.
An Associated Press report in 1996 listed the groups he had belonged to: the National Socialist White People's Party, the National States' Rights Party, which he joined in 1973, and the United Klans of America, which he joined in 1976. He had been born James Clayton Vaughn, the AP said, and took the name Joseph Paul Franklin to honor Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin. By the mid-1970s, the FBI says, he had turned away even from the most extreme hate groups, because he wanted to attack rather than sit around complaining.
The FBI dates his first known physical attack to Labor Day weekend in 1976, when he sprayed an interracial couple with mace. The FBI places that attack in Atlanta; the Tenth Circuit's 1983 opinion in his Utah case, which describes the same kind of attack as evidence of motive, places it in Washington, D.C.
On July 29, 1977, Franklin bombed the Beth Shalom synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee. No one was hurt. Chattanooga police later said he had hoped to kill members of the congregation, but the service was canceled because only eight people came. The blast razed the building, which was later rebuilt.
The case stayed unsolved until 1984, when Franklin, by then in federal prison, confessed. A Chattanooga police spokesman, Douglas Fisher, said Franklin told police he had come to the city "to kill Jews." He was indicted in March 1984. The Missouri Supreme Court later recorded that he was convicted in federal court of felonious injury to a building with explosives and felonious possession of explosives, and the Deseret News chronology says he was sentenced on June 13, 1984, to 31 years. Stan Lanzo, who prosecuted the case in 1984, told a Chattanooga station in 2013 that in 27 years as a prosecutor he had seen everything there was to see.
On August 7, 1977, Franklin shot and killed Alphonce Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Madison, Wisconsin. Both were 23. Manning was Black and Schwenn was white. Witnesses scattered and took cover behind cars.
Franklin later said he had gone to Madison to kill a local judge, Archie Simonson, who had presided over a criminal case that had drawn national controversy. He said that as he left the parking lot a car backed into his path, and the couple inside became his targets. He told Madison detectives, "I just decided to go up there and kill the bastard," meaning the judge.
The original investigation failed. According to a 1990 account in the Madison weekly Isthmus, key leads were not followed up and the case was eventually closed. A girl who had run to the scene and stood close to the gunman was never interviewed in 1977. Seven years later a Madison investigator, Ted Mell, found her, and she identified Franklin. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms traced the weapon, a .38-caliber gun reported stolen in 1977 from a sporting goods store in Alabama, and experts said it could have fired the bullets recovered from the victims.
In February 1984, while he was being harassed by Black inmates at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, and wanted a transfer, Franklin confessed to the Madison killings on tape. Dane County District Attorney Hal Harlowe charged him with two counts of first-degree murder about a month later. "There was not a flicker of remorse," Harlowe said of the confession.
Some local officials questioned the cost of a trial for a man already serving life. Harlowe went ahead, noting that Franklin could become eligible for federal parole as early as 1990. Franklin was booked into the Dane County Jail on November 6, 1985. His trial began on February 10, 1986, before Judge William Byrne, who let him represent himself with a standby lawyer. Franklin told the jury his confession was made up and that he had learned the details from newspapers. He called no witnesses. The jury deliberated a little more than an hour and found him guilty of both murders, and he received two more consecutive life sentences.
A cousin of Manning's, a Madison schoolteacher, told Isthmus that her family had accepted that the killer would never be found and that the first investigation had felt "halfhearted." Before the verdict was read, one of Manning's sisters asked the prosecutors and about a dozen relatives to join hands and pray.
Gerald Gordon, 42, lived in Chesterfield, Missouri, worked as a sales representative for a clothing firm, and had a wife and three children, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the St. Louis Jewish Light.
The Missouri Supreme Court's 1998 opinion sets out how the attack was planned, drawing on the trial evidence. Franklin believed Jews were "enemies of the white race." He robbed a bank in Little Rock, Arkansas, drove to Dallas, and bought a rifle with a telescopic sight. Then he went to St. Louis, which he chose for its large Jewish community, the JTA reported in 1994. He drove past several synagogues and picked the Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel Congregation in Richmond Heights; according to the AP, he found it in the Yellow Pages. He bought nails, a guitar case and a bicycle. He drove nails into a telephone pole to make a rest for the rifle, ground off its serial number, wiped his fingerprints from his equipment and hid the rifle and case near the synagogue.
On Saturday, October 8, 1977, shortly before 1 p.m., guests began leaving a bar mitzvah. From about 100 yards away Franklin fired five shots into the parking lot. Gerald Gordon was shot and died. William Ash and Steven Goldman were wounded. Franklin left the rifle and case, rode the bicycle to a nearby parking lot, hid it, and drove out of St. Louis.
Benson Skoff, later the congregation's rabbi emeritus, recalled in 2007 that he had gone home after Sabbath services that day when a congregant came to his door in tears and told him what had happened. It was "a terrible shock," he said; "things like that just didn't happen back then." No one was charged for 17 years.
On March 6, 1978, Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, was shot outside the Gwinnett County courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia, where he was fighting misdemeanor obscenity charges. His lawyer, Gene Reeves, was also hit. Flynt was left paralyzed from the waist down. Reeves spent 26 days in the hospital and recovered. The obscenity charges were later dismissed.
The shooter used a rifle; Reeves called it a .44-caliber "elephant gun." Franklin later claimed he had ambushed the two men with a .44-caliber rifle because Hustler had published pictures of interracial sex. In a 2013 jailhouse interview with CNN, reported by NPR, he said a December 1975 issue showing an interracial couple "just made me sick."
The legal outcome is easy to misstate. A Gwinnett County prosecutor, Bryant Huff, obtained an indictment charging Franklin with two counts of aggravated assault, Atlanta magazine reported, and Isthmus and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency date the indictment to 1984. Franklin was never brought to Georgia to stand trial. After he was sentenced to death in Missouri, a later prosecutor, Tom Lawler, dismissed the charges. District Attorney Danny Porter told Atlanta magazine: "I never could justify the expense or the danger of bringing him to Gwinnett County to try him for an aggravated assault." Franklin confessed to the shooting, and he also recanted at one point. Reeves said Flynt for years did not believe Franklin was the gunman. By 2013 Flynt said he accepted Franklin's confession, as did many of the officers who had investigated.
On July 29, 1978, Franklin was in Chattanooga again. He followed William Bryant Tatum, a Black man, and Tatum's white girlfriend from a movie theater to a restaurant, hid in the grass outside, and fired at them as they came out. Tatum was killed. His girlfriend was wounded and survived. Asked in 1995 why he had come to Chattanooga, Franklin said, "To look for interracial couples."
The original investigator, Tim Carroll, drove to St. Louis in 1995 after Franklin called him, and recorded a confession. Franklin pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life, in 1998 according to the Afro-American. "He's intelligent, but the common denominator is evil under intelligence," Carroll said in an interview after the sentencing. In 2013 Tatum's sister said she had forgiven Franklin but that the pain of losing her brother would never go away.
Franklin confessed to killings in Georgia in 1979 and was linked to two more in Oklahoma that year. The Afro-American's 2013 account of his victims lists Mercedes Lynn Masters, 15, killed in DeKalb County, Georgia, in 1979, and Harold McIver, 27, also killed in DeKalb County. It says Franklin confessed to both while on death row. Neither case was tried.
In Oklahoma City in 1979, Jesse E. Taylor, 42, who was Black, and Marion Bresette, 31, who was white, were killed. Franklin was charged, according to the Afro-American, but the charges were later dropped.
In 1980 two young Black men, Lawrence Reese, 22, and Leo Watkins, 19, were shot to death outside a store in Indianapolis. Franklin was charged, but the case never went to trial, according to the Deseret News chronology, which dates the killings to June 1980. An Associated Press report in 1996 placed the Indianapolis shootings in January 1980.
On the night of May 29, 1980, Vernon Jordan, president of the National Urban League, was shot and seriously wounded in a motel parking lot in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was 44 and survived. Jordan had worked as an NAACP field secretary in Mississippi with Medgar Evers and later advised President Bill Clinton.
Franklin was charged in federal court with violating Jordan's civil rights. Prosecutors said he had been angered by seeing Jordan in a car with a white woman. The trial was held in South Bend before U.S. District Judge Allen Sharp, who remarked that trying the shooting as a civil rights case in federal court, rather than as attempted murder in a state court, pushed federal jurisdiction "close to its constitutional limits." Inmates testified that Franklin had bragged about the shooting. A Fort Wayne motel employee said she had spoken with him in the city at the time, and FBI experts said the signatures on motel registration cards from that week were his. Franklin testified that he had not shot Jordan and had not been in Fort Wayne in 1980, and said he had refused to talk to one inmate witness because "I knew he was a plant." On cross-examination he said he hated Black people "as a whole."
The all-white jury of eight men and four women deliberated more than eight hours and acquitted him; the verdict was reported on August 19, 1982. "Your decision, while a controversial one within a controversial case, is well within the law and well within the evidence," Judge Sharp told the jurors.
In February 1996, Franklin told The Indianapolis Star and The Indianapolis News that the jury had been wrong. He said he had come to Fort Wayne from Chicago after failing to kill Jesse Jackson, heard that Jordan was speaking at a local hotel, and waited in the grass with a hunting rifle and his car's hood raised, as though he had engine trouble. He fired at a Black man who got out of a car in the lighted parking lot without knowing for sure that it was Jordan. "I was the executioner, the judge and the jury," he said, and he described himself as having been "on a holy war against evil-doers." An assistant U.S. attorney in Indianapolis, Christina McKee, said the double jeopardy rule meant he could not be tried again. The shooting of Vernon Jordan therefore remains, in law, a crime of which Franklin was acquitted.
On the night of Sunday, June 8, 1980, two Black cousins, Darrell Lane, 14, and Dante Evans Brown, 13, were walking to a corner store in the Bond Hill neighborhood of Cincinnati to buy candy when they were shot from a distance. Dante died at the scene. Darrell died three days later. Darrell's sister heard the shots and ran down the street in time to see him put into an ambulance; she later testified at the trial. Dante's younger brother, who was 7 and shared bunk beds with him, recalled years later that he knew something was wrong when the top bunk was empty.
Police and prosecutors put Franklin at the top of their suspect list within months, but there were no witnesses, and the rifle, which was apparently sold, was never found. The case stayed open for 17 years.
In 1997 a cellmate reported that Franklin had confessed to killing two Black boys in Cincinnati. Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters sent an assistant prosecutor, Melissa Powers, to see him at the Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri, where he was on death row. Powers wrote to him first, flattered him, and agreed to his conditions: no cameras, only a tape recorder, and no meeting on Hitler's birthday. They met on April 13, 1997. "You know I did it," he told her, and then, "I killed those dudes," adding that it happened "in Cincinnati." On tape he described other killings, including the double homicides in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Pocahontas County, West Virginia, in June 1980. He said he had decided to "turn up the heat a little bit" and kill more people to force publicity. He also explained his three-year campaign as matching the length of Jesus' ministry.
The trial was held in 1998 in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court before Judge Ralph Winkler, who admitted the taped confession over defense objections. Franklin acted as his own co-counsel. Powers testified and played the tape. After one day of testimony the jury took about 45 minutes to convict him of two counts of aggravated murder. In closing, Deters told the jurors, "These are our children and 18 years means nothing." Ohio could not impose a death sentence in the case. WCPO and FOX19 reported two life sentences; the Hamilton County Prosecutor's Office summary gives the sentence as 99 years.
After the verdict Dante's brother kissed their mother on the cheek. She said Franklin "didn't get what he deserved," but that it was over.
Among the killings Franklin described to Melissa Powers in 1997 were the shootings of Arthur Smothers and Kathleen Mikula in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in June 1980, according to the Hamilton County Prosecutor's Office. He was never charged in Pennsylvania. Those deaths are attributed to him only by his own account.
On June 25, 1980, Nancy Santomero, 19, and Vicki Durian, 26, were shot and killed at Briery Knob, a remote spot on Droop Mountain in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. They had been hitchhiking to the Rainbow Family gathering in the Monongahela National Forest, an annual event that drew about 6,000 people in Webster County that year despite the killings. In the weeks before, West Virginia's secretary of state and a group of local residents had sued, unsuccessfully, to keep the gathering out of the forest.
Franklin's statements about these killings are recorded in a 1995 opinion of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia. On March 1, 1984, he told a Wisconsin Department of Justice special agent that he had killed two white women in West Virginia and drew a map of the place. He repeated this to federal agents. When a West Virginia state trooper interviewed him, he first denied it, then accepted responsibility, and then refused to say more. To Powers in 1997 he said of one of the women, "I decided to waste her."
West Virginia charged a local man, J.B., and six others in 1992. Those charges were dismissed, and in 1993 five men were indicted; only J.B. was tried. On June 4, 1993, a Greenbrier County jury, hearing the case after it was moved because of publicity, convicted him of both murders, and he was sentenced to life without mercy. The trial judge had excluded Franklin's confession and map as unreliable hearsay, because, in the judge's words, Franklin made "one statement today and then won't talk to you after that about it." The state Supreme Court found no error in that ruling in 1995 but sent the case back on a separate immunity issue. In January 1999 a habeas corpus petition supported by a sworn deposition from Franklin, saying he had killed the women, was granted, and a new trial was ordered. A Braxton County jury acquitted J.B. on May 31, 2000, after less than three hours of deliberation, and he later settled a wrongful conviction claim for $2 million. The National Registry of Exonerations lists the case as an exoneration. Franklin was never charged with these killings.
On the night of August 20, 1980, between 10 and 10:15 p.m., Theodore (Ted) Fields, 20, and David Martin, 18, both Black, were shot and killed as they left Liberty Park in Salt Lake City, where they had been jogging with two white women. Witnesses heard five to seven shots, and ballistics showed that every bullet came from one rifle. The gunman fired from a vacant lot outside the park; the Deseret News gave the distance as about 40 yards. He had first seen a Black man walking with a white woman, prosecutors said later, and waited for another mixed group to pass. Fields and Martin were the next to come by.
Investigators found that in the days before, Franklin had stayed in at least six motels under false names, asking whether Black people had used or cleaned the rooms, and once demanded a refund after learning a Black person had slept in his bed. He checked the race of cooks and servers before he would sit down in a restaurant. Witnesses placed a car like his, a brown 1975 Camaro, near the park that night, and one saw a man get out of it and later saw a man holding what looked like a gun. Police found six cartridge cases at the spot the witness described, which fit a rifle that holds seven rounds but ejects six. Tire prints in the lot resembled those his tires would make.
A woman he had been with in Salt Lake City told a friend he had called himself a "hit man for the KKK," and she helped police find a motel where he had stayed. Motel records showed he had been in the valley for 10 days, including the night of the shooting, using false names and license plates. One motel owner had written down his real plate number. Detectives got a warrant for failing to pay an innkeeper and entered it in the national database. "It was this mission of his, this spree," the Salt Lake prosecutor Bob Stott said years later. "He had a trunk full of powerful rifles, weapons and ammunition."
In September 1980 a police officer in Kentucky noticed a gun in the back of Franklin's car. A records check turned up the outstanding warrant, and he was taken in for questioning. He escaped from the interrogation room. The Cincinnati station WCPO identified the department as the Florence, Kentucky, police and said he had been held over a handgun stolen from an Indiana officer. Evidence from the car he had been driving, the FBI says, suggested links to the sniper attacks.
The FBI publicized two details: his racist tattoos and his habit of selling blood for cash between robberies. Agents in the Tampa office handed out flyers at plasma centers, and the search grew urgent because President Jimmy Carter was due in Tampa on October 31. An employee at one center reported a visitor with tattoos like Franklin's. FBI agents tracked the man to Lakeland, Florida, and arrested him on October 28, 1980. He gave a false name and denied being Franklin, but the FBI's Identification Division matched his fingerprints. He had cut and dyed his hair. In Florida he said he was a racist and felt no remorse. From a Tampa police station, he telephoned his former wife and, referring to the joggers, told her, "I did that," the Tenth Circuit recorded.
Franklin was taken to Salt Lake City for the first of his many trials. He went through several defense lawyers before the judge appointed Dave Yocom, who said Franklin was belligerent at first and later personable, and who brought a deputy with him on jail visits.
The federal trial began on February 23, 1981. Franklin was charged with two counts of violating a federal civil rights law by shooting and killing two Black men because they were using a public facility, the park. The trial lasted seven days and the government called about 80 witnesses. Besides the motel, car and cartridge evidence, the jury heard from two fellow inmates at the Salt Lake County Jail who said he told them he shot the joggers because Black and white people were mixing in the park, and from a woman who said he had talked with her about killing Black men. He was convicted on both counts on March 4, 1981, and sentenced to two consecutive life terms; the Deseret News chronology says he tried to attack the judge. The Tenth Circuit affirmed on April 12, 1983, rejecting his arguments about the mace evidence, his phone call to his former wife and the timing of an inmate's testimony, and holding that the evidence showed the men were denied the use of a public facility because of their race.
The state murder trial followed. Stott, a Salt Lake County deputy district attorney, called the case circumstantial: no one saw Franklin fire, and the rifle was never found. During that trial Franklin would not allow his defense to call a Black man who had been seen in the park with a high-powered rifle the day before, a witness Stott said might have raised doubt about whether police had the right man. On August 27, 1981, the jury convicted him of both murders. It could not agree unanimously on death, so he received two more life sentences. Stott said three or four jurors had voted against death. "His whole life was controlled by his hate," Stott said. He also said the Utah conviction, the first time Franklin was caught, charged and successfully prosecuted, helped other states connect their unsolved cases to him.
Franklin never served his Utah sentences in Utah. He was sent to the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. In 1982 he was stabbed there by a group of Black inmates, Hatewatch reported. The Salt Lake detective who led the investigation, Don Bell, called the killings a wake-up call for the city, and said in 2013 that he regarded Franklin's later claims of reform as a con.
On November 8, 1994, Franklin, still serving federal life sentences, told FBI agents that he was responsible for the Richmond Heights shooting, the Deseret News chronology records. The Eighth Circuit later described the confession as detailed, and said he repeated it on videotape to a Richmond Heights police officer. Detective Rich Zweifel said Franklin "wanted to clear his conscience," that the conversation was calm and almost casual, and that Franklin "is still a racist." He told police he wished he "had killed five Jews with the five bullets." Hatewatch reported that he said a dream had told him to confess.
Missouri charged him with capital murder, two counts of assault with intent to do great bodily harm, and three counts of armed criminal action; the armed criminal action counts were later dropped. The president of the congregation in 1977, Irl Baris, said the members were "very pleased that the crime has been solved."
Franklin's mental state was the first question. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist retained by the defense, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia in 1996 and found him not competent to stand trial. A state psychiatrist, Sam Parwatikar, found idiosyncratic thinking and a personality disorder, but no mental disease, and found him competent. The trial court agreed with the state's expert.
Franklin then asked to represent himself, citing disagreements with his lawyers. After a second hearing the court found that his waiver of counsel was knowing and voluntary, let him proceed on his own, and ordered his lawyers to stay on as advisory counsel. He took part in jury selection, cross-examined witnesses and called one witness. The St. Louis County jury convicted him of capital murder and both assaults, in January 1997 according to the St. Louis Jewish Light.
At the penalty phase the state put in his convictions for the two Utah murders, the Wisconsin murders of the interracial couple and the Chattanooga synagogue bombing. Franklin asked the jury for death. He told the jurors that if they did not vote for the death penalty, he should kill someone to make sure the next jury did, and that it "would just be a total farce" if they spared him. The jury returned a death sentence for the murder and life terms for the assaults, and the court imposed them, the life terms to run concurrently. Jay Nixon, who as governor would later deny Franklin clemency, was Missouri's attorney general at the time.
Franklin said again and again that he did not want to appeal, and he asked for an execution date. His advisory counsel filed a notice of appeal anyway, which he refused to authorize. On May 1, 1998, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered him to say in writing whether he wished to appeal. On May 27 he wrote: "This is to advise the court that I do NOT wish to appeal case No. 79735." The court dismissed the appeal on June 16, 1998, in State v. Franklin. Under Missouri law it still reviewed the death sentence and found no sign of passion or prejudice. It held that the evidence supported two aggravating circumstances: depravity of mind, and a great risk of death to more than one person in a public place. It rejected a third, a history of serious assaultive convictions, because the synagogue bombing convictions did not involve assaults on people. It found the sentence proportionate.
About two months later Franklin said he had changed his mind and asked to file a late appeal. The Missouri Supreme Court refused. His pro se motion for postconviction relief was denied without a hearing, and that court affirmed in 2000.
In federal court the case went further. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri granted relief on two grounds: that his waiver of counsel had not been knowing, voluntary and intelligent, and that the trial court had failed to give a required penalty-phase instruction. The state appealed. On July 24, 2007, the Eighth Circuit reversed in Franklin v. Luebbers. It held that the state courts' finding that he was competent had not been rebutted, and that his voluntary waiver of his direct appeal was a procedural default barring review of all his claims. It sent the case back with directions to dismiss his petition.
While he was on Missouri's death row, Franklin was taken to trial or plea in two more states. In Tennessee he pleaded guilty to the murder of William Bryant Tatum and received a life sentence. In Ohio a Hamilton County jury convicted him in 1998 of the aggravated murders of Darrell Lane and Dante Evans Brown. The Associated Press, reporting his execution in 2013, totaled his murder convictions at eight: two in Madison, two in Cincinnati, two in Salt Lake City, one in Chattanooga and one in St. Louis County.
Franklin gave a series of interviews over the years, and what he said changed. In 1996 he told the Indianapolis newspapers that he had abandoned his racist views in 1985 after taking up meditation, though the Star reported that he still made anti-Black and antisemitic remarks during the interview. He also said, "I am very pro death penalty."
In 2013 he told Hatewatch that he had renounced his racist and antisemitic beliefs and was sorry for what he had done. He said he had cured his mental illness by reading and meditation, which he called "bibliotherapy." He had spent most of nearly three decades in prison in solitary confinement. He told CNN that he had killed about 22 people. Days before his execution he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as other outlets reported, that he no longer hated Black people or Jews, and that in the St. Louis County Jail he had come to see Black inmates as "people just like us."
Shortly before his scheduled execution he asked his only child, a daughter, to forgive him, Hatewatch reported. A woman who survived the 1980 shooting in Salt Lake City told Hatewatch she had forgiven him but still wanted him executed.
On August 14, 2013, the Missouri Supreme Court set his execution for 12:01 a.m. on November 20, 2013. Larry Flynt publicly opposed it. In a piece for The Hollywood Reporter in October, quoted by NPR, he wrote that "a life spent in a 3-by-6-foot cell is far harsher than the quick release of a lethal injection." Flynt also said he was not ready to "turn the other cheek" and had no wish to meet Franklin. According to CBS News and the AP, Flynt went to court to try to stop the execution, arguing that the death penalty does not deter crime.
Missouri had planned to use propofol, but after Governor Nixon stayed another execution amid concerns that the European Union would restrict exports of the drug, the state switched to pentobarbital obtained through a compounding pharmacy. Franklin's lawyer, Jennifer Herndon, filed three challenges: that he was mentally ill and incompetent to be executed, that the jury had been wrongly instructed at sentencing, and that the use of pentobarbital was improper. She said he was a paranoid schizophrenic. She told the AP that he had refused to call its St. Louis office because he considered its phone number unlucky. In the days before the execution, Governor Nixon denied clemency, calling the killing of Gerald Gordon a "cowardly and calculated" shooting.
On November 19 the Missouri Supreme Court denied his claim of incompetence. That evening two federal district judges in Missouri granted stays. Judge Carol E. Jackson stayed the execution so that his claim of incompetence to be executed could be examined; her order recorded Dr. Lewis's view that he believed, "like Jesus," that he was destined to be executed by the state, and examples of decisions he made by numbers, letters and dreams. Judge Nanette K. Laughrey separately stayed Missouri executions while a lawsuit by Franklin and 21 other death row prisoners over the execution method was pending. A federal appeals court overturned both stays, and early on November 20 the U.S. Supreme Court let that ruling stand without comment.
Franklin was executed at the state prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri, on November 20, 2013. The execution began more than six hours later than scheduled and took about 10 minutes. He was given five grams of pentobarbital, the first time Missouri had used that single drug in an execution, and the state's first execution in almost three years. He declined to make a final statement. A Department of Corrections spokesman, Mike O'Connell, said he was pronounced dead at 6:17 a.m. Corrections Director George Lombardi read a statement from Governor Nixon that began, "The cowardly and calculated shootings outside a St. Louis-area synagogue..."
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Ted Fields and David Martin (federal and Utah verdicts, 1981); of Alphonce Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn (Wisconsin verdict, 1986); of Gerald Gordon, with the assaults on William Ash and Steven Goldman (Missouri verdict, 1997); of William Bryant Tatum (Tennessee plea); and of Darrell Lane and Dante Evans Brown (Ohio verdict, 1998). Also proven: the 1977 bombing of the Beth Shalom synagogue in Chattanooga (federal conviction, 1984).
Acquitted: the shooting of Vernon Jordan. Franklin later said he did it, but a jury found him not guilty, and he could not be retried.
Indicted but never tried: the shooting of Larry Flynt and Gene Reeves. The Gwinnett County charges were dismissed. Missourinet in 2013 said no charges were ever filed; Atlanta magazine, Isthmus and the JTA report the indictment.
Charged but never tried, or charges dropped: Lawrence Reese and Leo Watkins in Indianapolis; Jesse E. Taylor and Marion Bresette in Oklahoma City.
Confessed only: Nancy Santomero and Vicki Durian in West Virginia, where another man was convicted and later acquitted; Arthur Smothers and Kathleen Mikula in Johnstown; Mercedes Lynn Masters and Harold McIver in Georgia. These rest on his own statements. In the West Virginia case a trial judge and the state Supreme Court in 1993 and 1995 found his statements unreliable as evidence, though his later sworn deposition helped win the other man a new trial.
Other claims: in 2007 the St. Louis Jewish Light reported that Franklin had admitted bombing the home of an Israeli lobbyist in 1977, and Mississippi Today wrote in 2025 that his victims included Johnnie Noyes Jr., a Jackson State University student who was washing his car. No court ruling on either claim has been reported.
Accounts of the total differ. The AP said he claimed as many as 20 killings; NPR said he was suspected in as many as 20 others beyond his eight convictions; he told CNN about 22; WCPO said as many as 18; the FBI says at least 15 people in about 11 states, and possibly more than 20. The number of his life sentences is also reported differently (four, six or seven), depending on the date and on which sentences are counted.
April 13, 1950: born James Clayton Vaughn Jr. in Mobile, Alabama.
1968: marries; the marriage ends within months. Moves to Arlington, Virginia, and joins the American Nazi Party.
September 18, 1970: photographed in Nazi uniform at a White House protest during Golda Meir's visit.
1972: convicted of carrying a concealed weapon in Fairfax, Virginia.
1973 and 1976: joins the National States' Rights Party and the United Klans of America.
1976: mace attack on an interracial couple (Atlanta per the FBI; Washington, D.C., per the Tenth Circuit).
July 29, 1977: bombs the Beth Shalom synagogue in Chattanooga; no one hurt.
August 7, 1977: kills Alphonce Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn in Madison, Wisconsin.
October 8, 1977: kills Gerald Gordon and wounds William Ash and Steven Goldman outside Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel in Richmond Heights, Missouri.
March 6, 1978: Larry Flynt and Gene Reeves shot in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
July 29, 1978: William Bryant Tatum killed in Chattanooga.
1979: Mercedes Lynn Masters and Harold McIver killed in DeKalb County, Georgia; Jesse E. Taylor and Marion Bresette killed in Oklahoma City.
1980 (January or June): Lawrence Reese and Leo Watkins killed in Indianapolis.
May 29, 1980: Vernon Jordan shot and wounded in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
June 8, 1980: Darrell Lane and Dante Evans Brown shot in Cincinnati.
June 1980: Arthur Smothers and Kathleen Mikula killed in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
June 25, 1980: Nancy Santomero and Vicki Durian killed in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
August 20, 1980: Ted Fields and David Martin killed in Salt Lake City.
September 1980: questioned in Kentucky; escapes.
October 28, 1980: arrested by the FBI in Lakeland, Florida.
February 23 to March 4, 1981: federal civil rights trial in Utah; convicted; two consecutive life terms.
August 27, 1981: Utah jury convicts him of both murders; two life terms.
August 1982: acquitted in federal court of the Jordan shooting.
1982: stabbed by other inmates at Marion, Illinois.
February and March 1984: confesses to the Madison killings and to the Chattanooga bombing; indicted for the bombing.
1984: indicted in Georgia for the Flynt shooting (charges later dismissed).
March 1, 1984: tells a Wisconsin agent he killed two women in West Virginia.
June 13, 1984: sentenced to 31 years for the synagogue bombing.
February 1986: convicted in Dane County, Wisconsin; two consecutive life terms.
June 4, 1993: another man is convicted of the West Virginia killings.
November 8, 1994: tells FBI agents he shot at the Richmond Heights congregation.
1995: confesses to the Tatum killing.
February 1996: tells Indianapolis newspapers he shot Vernon Jordan.
January 1997: convicted of capital murder in St. Louis County; sentenced to death.
April 13, 1997: confesses to Melissa Powers to the Cincinnati killings.
June 16, 1998: Missouri Supreme Court dismisses his appeal at his request and affirms the death sentence.
1998: convicted in Hamilton County, Ohio; pleads guilty in Tennessee to the Tatum murder.
January 1999: new trial ordered in the West Virginia case; the other man is acquitted on May 31, 2000.
July 24, 2007: Eighth Circuit reverses a federal grant of relief.
August 14, 2013: execution date set.
November 2013: clemency denied; on November 19 two federal stays are granted, then overturned.
November 20, 2013: executed at Bonne Terre, Missouri; pronounced dead at 6:17 a.m.