He was born James Clayton Vaughn junior in Mobile, Alabama, on April 13, 1950, into a violent and impoverished household, and was partly blinded in one eye by a childhood accident. As a teenager he read Mein Kampf, joined the American Nazi Party and then the Ku Klux Klan, and in 1976 changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin, after Paul Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin.
From 1977 he travelled the country killing. He shot Black men and women, interracial couples, and people leaving synagogues, from cover and at distance, with a rifle, and funded it by robbing banks. He bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga. Among his victims were two young Black men shot in Salt Lake City in 1980 while jogging with two white women, and two boys, one thirteen and one fourteen, shot in Cincinnati in 1980 for being Black. His stated aim was to start a race war. The press called him the Racist Killer, which is what the record supports: he selected his victims by race and by who they were with.
In March 1978 he shot Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, outside a courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia, because the magazine had run a photo spread of an interracial couple. Flynt was paralysed from the waist down for the rest of his life. In May 1980 he shot and wounded Vernon Jordan, then head of the National Urban League, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
He was arrested in October 1980. He was convicted in a series of trials and confessed to around twenty killings, and was sentenced to death in Missouri in 1997 for the murder of Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue in St Louis in 1977. Larry Flynt publicly opposed his execution, arguing that he did not want to be responsible for another man's death. Franklin was executed by lethal injection on November 20, 2013.