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Joseph Paul Franklin is a serial killer convicted of several murders. He is the man who admitted that he tried to kill Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and advisor to former President Jimmy Carter and civil rights activist Vernon Jordon. This man is believed to be a drifter with a love of violence who wanted to kill people he considered inferior such as blacks and Jews. His primary target of choice was mostly black men with white women. Despite being partially blind he was a proficient marksman, and killed most of his victims from a distance using a rifle. He would plan his murders in advance several escape routes and techniques in which to leave no evidence. He killed at random. He was a follower of Nazism and held memberships in the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1977, he started his murdering spree. In August of 1977 he fatally shot Alphonse Manning and Toni Schwenn, a black man and a white woman. Joseph Paul was trying to get away from a bank robbery he committed in Madison, Wisconsin, when he wound up behind a car being driven by Mr. Manning. Wanting a speedy get away and was frustrated with the pace of Mr. Manning’s driving. When Manning stopped and got out of the car, Franklin shot him and the woman he was with.
In October of 1977, Joseph Paul Franklin hid outside Brith Shalom synagogue in Richmond Heights, Missouri and used a Remington 700 hunting rifle and killed Gerald Gordon and injured Steven Goldman and William Ash. After his capture and conviction, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection in the Potosi Correctional Center in Potosi, Missouri.
In March of 1978, he claims he used a rifle to ambush pornographer Larry Flynt and his lawyer Gene Reeves in Lawrenceville, Georgia. He claimed that it was in retaliation for an edition of Mr. Flynt’s Hustler magazine that featured interracial sex. The confession came years after the shooting and there is no evidence to support his claim.
In July of 1978, he killed Bryant Tatum, a black man with a white girlfriend, with a shotgun. In July of 1979, he killed Harold McIver, a black man who Franklin believed was trying to have sex with a few white women. In August of 1978, he killed a black man at a Burger King in Falls Church, Virginia. In October of 1979, he used a rifle to kill a mixed race couple, the black Jesse Taylor and the white Marian Bresette, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In December of 1979, he killed the white fifteen year old prostitute Mercedes Lynn Masters in Dekalb County, Georgia, with a shotgun for having black customers.
He went on to kill a black man in Indianapolis, Indiana. He killed Rebecca Bergstrom with a handgun in Monroe County, Wisconsin. He tried to kill Vernon Jordan, Jr. after he had seen Mr. Jordan with a white woman in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He killed fourteen year old Darrel Lane and his cousin thirteen year old Donte Evans Brown in Bond Hill, Cincinnati. He killed the mixed race couple Arthur Smothers and Kathleen Mikula in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He confessed to killing two hitch hikers he picked up, Nancy Santomero and Vicki Durian in Pocahontas County, West Virginia after one of the them admitted to having a black boyfriend. He killed two black men as they jogged with white women in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Joseph Paul Franklin was captured when he went to give blood at a blood bank, the nurse recognized his tattoo and called authorities. He received several life sentences for his crimes in several states. But in 1997 he was sentenced to death in Missouri. This man has been linked to twenty murders, six aggravated assaults, sixteen bank robberies and two bombings. He has confessed to eight murders, and has received several life sentences or death sentences for others. He is currently being held on death row at the Potosi Correctional Center near Mineral Point, Missouri for a crime he committed more than thirty years ago. He was recently featured on the MSNBC television program Criminal Mindscape where Veteran FBI criminal profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole interviewed the serial killer who admitted his mission was to start a race war in America. He is still awaiting execution.
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