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Missouri Executes White Supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin for the 1977 Sniper Killing of Gerald Gordon at a Synagogue

It was Missouri's first execution in nearly three years and its first using pentobarbital. Franklin was convicted of seven other racially motivated murders.

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Joseph Paul Franklin in an orange prison uniform holding a Missouri Department of Corrections placard

Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist, targeted Black and Jewish people in a killing spree across the country from 1977 to 1980. On November 20, 2013, Missouri executed him.

Franklin, 63, was pronounced dead at 6:17 a.m. at the state prison in Bonne Terre, a Missouri Department of Corrections spokesman said. It was the state's first execution in nearly three years and its first using the single drug pentobarbital. The execution went ahead after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal appeals court ruling that overturned two stays granted the evening before by federal district judges; his lawyers had challenged the drug and argued that he was mentally ill. Franklin declined to make a final statement. Gov. Jay Nixon said the synagogue shootings were part of Franklin's "long record of murders and other acts of extreme violence across the country, fueled by religious and racial hate."

On October 8, 1977, Franklin fired five shots at the parking lot of the Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue in Richmond Heights after a bar mitzvah, killing Gerald Gordon, 42, a father of three. He was also convicted of murders in Madison, Wisconsin, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Chattanooga, Tennessee, and he admitted shooting civil rights leader Vernon Jordan and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, who survived. FBI agents arrested him in Lakeland, Florida, on October 28, 1980. Years later, in federal prison, he admitted the St. Louis County killing, and he was sentenced to death for it in 1997.

BBC News placed the synagogue shooting in the city of St. Louis, while the Associated Press said the synagogue was in suburban Richmond Heights.

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