Killer's Shadow

by John E. Douglas

  “I’m glad there’s no pressure,” I responded. As usual, Dave’s tone was affable and gregarious, but the subject matter, we both knew, was grave.

  Dave had collected all the case materials and had them arranged for me in four or five expandable file folders; this was in the pre-computerized-file days. We sat down to exchange ideas about the challenge before us.

  “We really haven’t had one this mobile before,” he said. “Especially in Civil Rights. Most of those guys are one and done. Franklin’s never stayed in one place long enough to get him.”

  Though it still wasn’t part of the cultural lexicon, by then we were already using the phrase serial killer to reference a predatory offender who killed three or more victims at different times and places, usually with a cooling-off period after each kill. However, the cases we had seen and heard about in the United States and Europe to this point tended to be motivated by perverse sexual gratification—the acting out of the offender’s ultimate fantasy. This guy had a different sort of fantasy, and it had to do with ridding the country of people he considered undesirable simply due to their race. He was clearly resourceful, took precautions, and in most instances seemed to plan ahead. Neither Dave nor I would have been surprised to learn that he stalked his victims for days or weeks before each sniper attack. He was not going to be caught by any of the methods that we’d been able to use for men like Devier and Soult.

  What the Civil Rights Section was particularly interested in, Dave said, was whether it would be possible to predict where Franklin would land or even gravitate to next, knowing he was now a high-profile fugitive.

  “So, what do you think?” Dave asked. “This within your strike zone?”

  “Well,” I said, wanting to sound confident but give him as straight an answer as I could, “sometimes when the local cops ask for a profile, it’s like they think I’m going to be able to give them the UNSUB’s name and address. This time, we have the guy’s name, so that’s a plus. We can work with an actual biography rather than informed speculation.”

  “And we’ve got agents seeking out any family members they can find,” Dave added.

  “That’ll be helpful. The challenge is that his victims of preference are such a broad category. But we know he’s got to be under stress as a fugitive, so we’ve got to up the pressure on him, raise his ass-pucker factor. We’ll try to key on his strengths and weaknesses and figure out if he has any comfort zones. I’ll have more of an idea about that once I’ve gone through this material.”

  The pressure would certainly be on Franklin, but just as much on us. The local newspapers and television stations in places like Missouri, Utah, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky were already all over the case, and the national media had picked it up. Law enforcement has a complicated relationship with the press. When we want to get out information the public might respond to, like setting up the context in which someone might have seen, overheard, or been told something, or if we’re trying to get an UNSUB to react to a particular proactive tactic or strategy, then reporters are our friends and we are very cooperative. When they release details that we’d rather they didn’t, or keep up the public pressure in a case we’d rather keep quiet for any number of reasons, they can be a pain in our collective ass. We and they both understand the tension; we’ve each got our job to do. We need each other, but sometimes those job requirements don’t mesh.

  This case was a perfect example of the tricky nature of press coverage. Getting out a description of our UNSUB could be critical in terms of generating leads as to his whereabouts. At the same time, as far as FBI brass was concerned, unless we got him quickly, mounting publicity about a resourceful serial killer who’d already slipped through the police’s grasp would be nothing more than a distraction and potential embarrassment. And the one cardinal rule of FBI culture, a carryover from early in the ironclad Hoover days, was Never embarrass the Bureau!

  If I couldn’t come up with anything useful—or, worse, if my assessment diverted manpower and resources in the wrong direction; if this exercise screwed up in any possible way—Dave wouldn’t be able to protect me, as his not-so-veiled reference to Butte, Montana, suggested. It could even bite him in the ass, since he was the one who recommended that headquarters put its trust in behavioral science (or BS, as they usually called it).

  “Good luck, John,” Dave said as I was leaving.

  Good luck to all of us, I thought.

  Chapter 2

  I carried the files down to the car and headed back to Quantico. Rather than sit in my windowless office with work conversation all around me, my favorite place to go when I was analyzing cases and wanted to concentrate was the top floor of the library, several stories above. For one thing, there was actual natural light from the large windows, and I could look out onto the rolling green Virginia countryside, which to a certain extent counteracted the grim material I was always working on. And there were no telephones or other distractions, so I could concentrate for as long as I wanted to.

  I sat alone at a library table that seated eight or ten and spread the case materials in front of me, so I could start connecting dots and establishing relationships in my mind.

  I started off with the basic facts—I wanted to get as strong a sense of the individual as I could before delving into the actual case files. Date of birth: April 13, 1950, though some identification listed it as February 9, 1950; probably his way of keeping anyone trying to get to know him off base, like his use of so many aliases. Either way, that made him thirty years of age. Place of birth: Mobile, Alabama; no surprise he was from the South, growing up in a time of intense racial tension. Hair: brown. Eyes: blue. Eagle tattoo on left forearm. Grim Reaper tattoo on right forearm.

  The last solid address was in Mobile, from 1977, and his occupation was listed as security guard. Parents were James Clayton Vaughn and Helen Rau. He was previously affiliated with the American Nazi Party in Texas and the Worldwide Church of God in California.

  I read more from the first teletype in the files, dated October 2, 1980. Back then, all-points bulletins—APBs—went out by teletype, the same type of system news organizations like the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) used to get their stories out to their client newspapers. It was a large, squarish, dark metal box that sat on a table. The paper came out of the top from a roll, and when a message finished printing, you would tear it off. When a particularly important message came in, a bell in the machine would go off, alerting the person attending it to “Rip and read!” The number of rings indicated the importance of the communication. You grew conditioned to react to the sound of that bell. Unlike today’s laser printers, when a teletype machine was printing out you could hear the clack-clack-clack all the way down the hall. Less urgent messages and reports were sent by airtel, which was essentially first-class mail that you were required to type up and send out the same day. Among the other facts listed in the teletype, I read: “Vaughn allegedly had his name changed in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, to Joseph Paul Franklin and stated that he was having his name changed so he could go to Rhodesia to kill Black people.” There was no evidence he’d ever gone to Africa, though.

  What immediately struck me as I read through the teletype was under “Physical Characteristics.” Aside from the fact that he wore wigs as disguises, which we pretty much knew from piecing together eyewitness reports, he was nearly blind in his right eye, the result of a childhood accident. Accounts varied as to whether the injury was caused by crashing on a bicycle or playing with his brother Gordon with a BB gun. Was his expert marksmanship a means of compensating for this handicap, this perceived inadequacy? I’m frequently asked if there is one event in any violent offender’s background that triggers his future path. Did this unfortunate accident become a trigger for Franklin’s life of crime? Not likely, though it may have influenced the method he used to commit his violent crimes.

  The file listed several of Franklin’s earliest crimes, some juvenile: disorderly conduc
t, a few weapons possessions, and some where the system didn’t bother to prosecute him. The first one that seemed particularly relevant took place a few months after he changed his name. On September 8, 1976, he was arrested on charges of assault and battery the previous day against a mixed-race couple whom he followed in his car from near the Kennedy Center in Washington, where they had attended a concert, to about ten miles out in Montgomery County, Maryland. He trapped them on a dead-end street, opened his window, and sprayed them with Mace. The man, Aaron Keith Miles, noted Franklin’s license plate number and went to the police. Montgomery County police officers arrested Franklin. He did not appear for his December trial date, thereby forfeiting his bond and having a warrant issued for his arrest. As far as I could tell, this seemed to be Franklin’s first violent action against an African American or mixed-race couple, and had I known no more about him, I still would have predicted an escalation in his racial violence. From there, the list of cases shifted to the most recent events—beginning in northern Kentucky a little over two weeks before I’d gotten the call from Dave Kohl.

  AT 2:10 IN THE EARLY MORNING OF THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1980, POLICE in Florence, Kentucky—just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati and considered part of the greater Cincinnati metropolitan area—received a report of a robbery at the Boron service station at State Route 18 and Interstate 75. The attendant described the getaway vehicle as a silver and maroon 1975 Chrysler with Indiana plates.

  Police found the car across the road at Florence’s Scottish Inn, and several police cruisers converged on the motel. It was registered to the man in room 137, nineteen-year-old Gary R. Kirk of Dillsboro, Indiana. Officer Dennis Collins knocked on the door and arrested Kirk on suspicion of robbery.

  In room 138 next door, one Joseph Paul Franklin was not happy about all the noise and commotion in the middle of the night. He called down to the front desk to complain. He even threatened to check out if the noise continued. Then he went even further. He called the Florence Police Department and complained to the dispatcher, adding that the Chrysler in the parking lot was blocking in his own car. When, after a while, the Chrysler was not moved, he called the police again to complain. He may have called as many as five times, eventually prompting the chief to get on the phone himself and explain that they were investigating a robbery and it had nothing to do with him.

  As Officer Collins was getting ready to leave, the motel clerk told him about the man in the room next to Kirk’s who had been complaining about his car being blocked in and wanting to know when the police would be gone.

  “I went up and talked with [Franklin] and he said he was interested because Kirk had parked his car behind his Camaro,” Collins later told a UPI reporter.

  Collins then went back to look at the Camaro and spotted a revolver on the front seat. He called in the license plate for a computer check and came up with a hit: the car matched the description of one connected to a double homicide in Salt Lake City, and the description of the individual police were looking for—a slender male Caucasian with a southern accent—corresponded to the man Collins had spoken to in room 138. A team of officers went back to Franklin’s room to arrest him. He offered no resistance. They confiscated two rifles and an additional handgun.

  As I would see in future cases, it’s not unprecedented for a killer to unwittingly bring about his own apprehension, sometimes simply by complaining to the authorities and thereby putting himself on their radar. Franklin’s arrest stemming from a noise complaint is similar to that of Dennis Nilsen, the Scottish necrophiliac serial killer and so-called Muswell Hill Murderer. A few years after Franklin’s arrest, toward the end of January 1983, Nilsen, a British army veteran, cook, night watchman, and, for a brief period, junior police constable, strangled the last in a series of young men he had lured to his succession of London flats. In his previous apartment on Melrose Avenue in North London, he had buried his victims under the floorboards and eventually taken the bodies out back and burned them. For his last three, after he moved to Cranley Gardens, in London’s fashionable Kensington neighborhood, he dissected each one, boiled the heads, hands, and feet in a pot on his kitchen stove to remove identifying characteristics, and then stuffed the cut-up remains down his toilet.

  On February 4, Nilsen wrote a note to his landlord on behalf of himself and other tenants in the building, complaining that drains were blocked and backing up. Four days later, at the request of the landlord, the Dyno-Rod emergency plumbing company sent someone out to deal with the problem. Opening up a drain on the side of the building, plumber Michael Cattran discovered a bunch of fleshy globs and small bones clogging up the pipes. Cattran’s supervisor came out to take a look and the next morning, upon returning, the two suspicious plumbers contacted the Metropolitan Police. When Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay and two colleagues went to Nilsen’s flat to question him, they immediately smelled rotting flesh. It didn’t take long for Nilsen to admit to “twelve or thirteen” murders in addition to the three at Cranley Gardens. He was tried and convicted of multiple murders and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison. He died on May 12, 2018, of complications from abdominal surgery.

  Now, the similarity between both cases is that the offenders got themselves arrested by complaining, when, if each man was smart, he would have kept as low a profile as possible. What was different between the two was that when Nilsen was asked by detectives why he had committed his murders, he replied, “I’m hoping you will tell me that,” and could only offer that he “worshipped the art and the act of death.” As would eventually become clear, Joseph Paul Franklin had no question in his mind why he did what he did.

  From his room at the Scottish Inn, Franklin was taken to the Florence Police Station, where he was questioned by Detective Jesse Baker of the felony squad. Though his driver’s license was in the name of Joseph Paul Franklin, he had what police described as a “multiplicity” of ID cards in other names.

  As I read through the transcript of the interview, I saw a suspect who was quite talkative but, shall we say, considerably less than forthcoming. Even after Baker repeatedly warned him that it would be a lot better for Franklin if he said nothing rather than lied, he kept on talking, raising questions he couldn’t answer or outright contradicting himself. Finally, he had to admit that his car wasn’t even titled or registered in his name. Baker then told him the vehicle was listed as stolen. Nothing Franklin said added up.

  The thirty-year-old Franklin drove from place to place every couple of weeks, or even days, could not say what he did in each place other than “trucking around,” couldn’t explain what he lived on other than odd jobs whose specifics he couldn’t remember, and could not explain how he got the money to buy the car he was driving or why it had been identified in a homicide in Salt Lake City. He denied having been in Salt Lake City for at least five or six years, prompting Baker to state, “Now, if you were in Utah and I prove that you were in Utah, then you may not have ever stolen anything from anybody, but you sure lied to me, okay? Now, once I catch you in a lie, then I tend to disbelieve, you know, anything that you’ve said.”

  After a while, Franklin conceded that maybe he had driven through recently, and then recalled that he might have spent a few days there. He couldn’t explain the “coincidence” of firearms found in his car being of the type that were used in the homicides, or why his car had been identified as the one in the Salt Lake City killings, but he did seem particularly concerned that what the police were really going after was sexual encounters he may or may not have had with underage girls who, he said, looked older than they turned out to be.

  Franklin wasn’t sure when he’d been where, or where he had slept each night, other than “here and there.”

  “Most people don’t know where they’re going, but they know where they’ve been,” Baker observed with exasperation. “You don’t seem to know either.” The home address Franklin gave in Elsmere, Kentucky, also proved to be false.

  The detective condu
cted a good and professional interrogation, reminding the suspect that he was trying to prove one way or another whether Franklin was telling the truth. He stressed that he was in touch with a number of other police agencies that would soon be able to corroborate or refute what Franklin was telling him. He also said Florence PD was in the process of obtaining a search warrant for Franklin’s car.

  At some point, Baker left the interrogation room, leaving Franklin with Officer Jim Riley. Sometime after that, there was a knock on the door, Riley opened it, and another officer told him the search warrant had been granted. Just then, Baker returned and was speaking with Riley as they heard a noise and saw Franklin climbing out the window. They chased him, but he was gone. Trained police dogs were able to follow his scent for a few blocks, but then lost it.

  Detectives traced back where he had been staying in the area and checked out each location, but Joseph Paul Franklin had disappeared.

  Chapter 3

  It didn’t take the detectives in Florence long to reach out to Salt Lake City PD regarding the crime that had originally flagged Franklin’s car and resulted in his arrest. Salt Lake City already had three detectives assigned to finding Franklin. At the same time, detectives across the Ohio River in Cincinnati also wanted Franklin so they could question him about the murders of two African American teens the previous June 8.

  According to the Salt Lake City Police Department report, around 9:00 P.M. on Wednesday, August 20, Theodore Tracy “Ted” Fields had called his friend and former girlfriend, Karma Ingersol, to ask if she would like to go jogging with him in Liberty Park. She was with her friend Terry Elrod and asked her if she would like to join them. Ted picked up the girls in his car. His friend David Lemar Martin III was with him. Twenty-year-old Ted and eighteen-year-old David were African American. Karma and Terry were both fifteen and white. They parked the car at David’s house and started jogging toward Liberty Park.