At around this time, a neighborhood resident named Sefo Manu noticed a dark maroon Chevrolet Camaro driving northbound at a high rate of speed on the west loop of the park. He noticed details of the car, including its red trim lines, rear spoiler, dual exhaust pipes, mag wheels, and tires with raised white lettering, because he owned an older Camaro. He said the driver, who had shoulder-length hair, ran a red light, made a U-turn, and pulled into a field.
Inside the park, the four friends jogged south along the west loop. When they reached an area of tennis courts, the girls stopped to rest. The young men later circled back to join them and the four resumed jogging together. Around ten fifteen, as they crossed a road in a crosswalk, they heard a loud bang, which Karma described as sounding like a firecracker. Terry felt a sudden burning pain in her arm, looked down at it, and saw blood. Then there was a second shot, then two more as David stumbled into Ted’s arms. He gasped something like, “Oh my God, Ted, they got me!”
The three others frantically pulled David toward the curb, and Ted shouted for the girls to run. While Ted was trying to pull David all the way back to the curb, two more shots rang out and Ted collapsed onto the pavement.
As it turned out, there were several witnesses to various aspects of the crime. Gary Snow and Mary Biddlecomb were standing outside their apartment building when they saw the four joggers pass by. Snow was backing his car out of the driveway when he heard the first of the shots. He later told police he heard six shots in total. He got out of his car and ran back to his apartment to call the police.
Twelve-year-old Michelle Spicer and her friend Carrie Beauchaine were looking out a kitchen window when Carrie saw a man in a field rise from a kneeling position with a rifle.
Clarence Albert Levinston Jr. was in his car when he saw David Martin stumble. As soon as he heard the next shot, he determined the direction they were coming from and swung his car onto the crosswalk in front of the joggers to give them some protection.
Gary Spicer came out of his house when he heard the shots and saw a man firing a rifle, then crouching and running to a maroon Camaro parked next to his house. The man opened the trunk and threw the rifle in before driving away. He was able to describe for police the shooter’s wide-brimmed hat and waist-length jacket.
Marilyn Diane Wilson was inside a nearby 7-Eleven when she heard the shots and rushed out to the crosswalk, where Levinston was already out of his car trying to help the two men. She rolled the victims onto their backs and detected pulses on both. But in the few minutes it took ambulances to reach the scene, Ted had died. David was still alive but died at the hospital a few hours later.
The morning after the shooting, a crime scene team returned to the cordoned-off area and conducted a thorough search. They photographed and measured tire tracks and recovered six .30-30 bullet casings. They recovered the slugs from the victims and sent them with the casings to the ATF lab in San Francisco, where ballistics expert Ed Peterson determined they had all been fired from the same rifle, possibly a Marlin or Glenfield. Detectives fanned out to local gun shops and scoured classified ads for recent offers. They tested each weapon they could locate, but the ballistics didn’t match on any.
Not only was the murder weapon elusive, there was no apparent reason for the shooting. Detective Donald Bell talked to Terry at the hospital that was treating her wound and checked into the background of all four victims. He found nothing. None had ever been in trouble or had associated with suspicious people. They were all upstanding young people. Ted’s father was a minister. Terry had been raped months before, and there was speculation that perhaps she was the primary target to keep her from identifying her attacker or testifying against him. But nothing ever came of that.
Could the motive possibly be racial, or was the fact that the two murder victims were Black not significant? Police soon learned that Karma’s father, Lee Ingersol, who had driven with his brother Mel to the scene as soon as Karma called him, had been against his daughter dating an African American, but said it was nothing against the race; he just thought the social stigma would make things more difficult for Karma. He volunteered to take a polygraph and it was determined he had nothing to do with the crime or the shooter. Terry’s father, Ralph Elrod, was also considered, being a member of a biker gang and rumored to be a Klan sympathizer, but he turned out to have liked Ted and said he had no problem with his daughter dating African Americans. He also passed a polygraph.
African Americans in the area weren’t convinced the attack wasn’t racially motivated. The Mormon church was the dominant force in Utah society and culture, and there was a long history of antipathy and exclusion of Blacks from the upper reaches of the church. It had only been two years since African American men were allowed to be ordained for the priesthood. In addition, a KKK chapter had recently been established in Salt Lake City. Police Chief Elbert “Bud” Willoughby tried to reassure the public that the crimes had nothing to do with race. He and Mayor Ted L. Wilson met with James Dooley, NAACP Utah chapter president, to discuss the investigative belief that the crime was not racially motivated. In retrospect, moving the focus away from race just wasted time and resources.
Drug connections and revenge by underworld pimps were also explored—not because the victims were involved in criminal enterprise personally. A close friend of Ted’s said the two of them had dated two nineteen-year-old prostitutes and tried to convince them to give up the trade; perhaps the reason David was targeted was because from a distance he looked like Ted’s friend. Police questioned the women and their pimps but came up with nothing.
When all the other leads had been exhausted, the police returned to the racial angle. The U.S. Department of Justice assigned Assistant United States Attorney Steve Snarr to oversee the investigation for possible federal civil rights violations. Snarr wasn’t sure one way or another. The FBI got into the case through the Salt Lake City field office under the supervision of Special Agent Curtis Jensen. By this time, both the Bureau and the police had concluded the gunman had left the area, so the Salt Lake City field office sent out a teletype notice nationwide on October 2 with details of the case. The same day, the director’s office sent out the teletype listing by place and date all the crimes of which Franklin was suspected, which I had read in the file.
One possible lead interested Detective Bell. A college student named Micky McHenry had been trying to make ends meet by working a couple of nights a week as a hooker. The Sunday night before the shootings, she was sitting on a wall at her usual pickup spot on South State Street when a man in a brown Camaro drove up and asked her to go with him. She told him her rate and then got into the car. He said his name was Joe Hagman. They drove around for a while, stopped to get a sandwich, then drove back to his motel room. In the course of their conversation, he told her he hated Black people and asked if she had ever been with a Black man. He said he didn’t approve of white women even speaking to Black men. He added that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and, according to a complaint later filed by the FBI at the request of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and quoted by the Associated Press, he indicated he had killed Blacks in the past and asked Micky to make him a list of Black pimps in the area so he could kill them.
What particularly interested Bell was that as they drove past Liberty Park and Hagman asked her who hung out there, she told him the east side of the park was mostly white, the west side was mostly Hispanic, and the middle was where the Blacks and pimps hung out.
Hagman showed her two handguns he had in his car. By this time, she was pretty nervous about him and said she didn’t want him to kill anyone. When he took her back to his room in the Regal Inn, she noticed two rifles leaning against the wall in the corner. As they were undressing for sex, she noted he bore tattoos of an eagle and the Grim Reaper.
When they were finished, Hagman took McHenry back to her apartment, where she introduced him to her roommate Cindy Taylor. The three of them talked for a while and then he left.
&
nbsp; Bell asked McHenry if she could identify the rifles from a photo array of various weapons, but she wasn’t able to. She was able to help police with a composite sketch of Hagman. Several other women who had talked to a man driving a brown or dark maroon Camaro in Salt Lake City, alternately calling himself Joe and Herb, also recognized the sketch. Each one recalled his ranting about African Americans. One of the women mentioned she was a lifeguard at a public pool in Liberty Park. He replied that he wouldn’t go because Black people swam there. Two other female hitchhikers he picked up on the afternoon of the shooting remembered him using a racial slur to say that he hated to see white girls with Black men “because it wasn’t right,” and were then frightened of him until he dropped them off.
If all of these encounters were with the same man, Bell reasoned, then the murders were racial, and this was a very dangerous individual indeed.
Chapter 4
In Cincinnati, the deadly June 8 shooting of two African American male teens there had obsessed city homicide detective Thomas Gardner for months. When Franklin was identified as a sniper suspect across the river in Florence, Kentucky, Gardner thought he might have the break he’d been looking for.
Cincinnati cousins Darrell Lane, fourteen, and Dante Evans Brown, thirteen, were shot with a high-powered hunting rifle from the Bond Hill railroad trestle as they walked along Reading Road below on a hot Sunday evening.
“The weapon has been identified as a .44-caliber Magnum carbine,” the file stated. This seemed in keeping with Franklin’s perceived modus operandi (M.O.), which covers the elements necessary to commit the crime, such as a means to break into a house, bringing a gun to a robbery, or the way an offender lures a victim into his control. The M.O. can evolve as the criminal becomes more experienced and learns what works best. Along with M.O., we consider what we call the offender’s “signature,” which describes the elements of the crime that satisfy or emotionally fulfill the offender. These could include taking souvenirs, torturing the victim in a particular way, even coming up with a script for the victim to perform during a sexual assault. Unlike M.O., signature doesn’t change much, although it can become more elaborate over time. In Franklin’s case, shooting victims from far away with a high-powered rifle would be classified as M.O., while selecting African American victims would be signature.
The two young Cincinnati victims, Darrell and Dante, had just left their grandmother’s house to go buy candy. Darrell’s sister heard the shots and raced out of the house. By the time she reached them, first responders were ministering to the two boys. Darrell’s father, a paramedic, was in the first rescue squad unit that arrived on the scene.
But his son had died instantly. Dante was brought to the hospital clinging to life. His mother, Abbie Evans, was attending Darrell’s funeral a few days later when she was given the message to get back to the hospital right away to be able to see her beloved middle child alive for the last time.
“It’s devastating. It’s a void. You never get over it,” she told a USA Today reporter more than thirty years later.
At the time the two boys were killed, my wife, Pam, and I had two little girls: Erika was five and Lauren was six months. Pam had recently returned from maternity leave to her job as a reading specialist teacher in the Spotsylvania County, Virginia, public school system. I have always tried to put myself mentally and emotionally in the victim’s head, as well as that of the killer. But this was just staggering to me, the idea that two innocent children could be taken away from life for no reason on their way to buy candy. It was sickening, and I’d be less than candid if I denied that a lot of people in law enforcement like me have a very hard time giving their kids the freedom and independence they need to grow, seeing all that we’ve seen.
Likewise, Detective Gardner couldn’t fathom why someone would lie in wait to kill two adolescent boys he most likely had never even met. Maybe it was simply a sick thrill killing, but he wouldn’t discount the possibility that this was a racial hate crime.
After seeing the director’s and Salt Lake City field office teletypes, Detective Gardner got in touch with Salt Lake City PD sergeant Robert Nievaard, and the two men agreed there were similar elements in their two cases that were worth looking into, along with the other possible connections suggested by the two teletypes.
As it turned out, this was just the first of several connections that came about because of the Salt Lake teletype. The two cases certainly seemed to fit in with the M.O. of a sniper-style shooting of a mixed-race couple in Oklahoma City the previous October, a nineteen-year-old African American at an Indianapolis shopping mall in January, and another mixed-race couple in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in June. If they all did turn out to be linked, then we were dealing with a particularly efficient and deadly serial killer, one who traveled with ease from state to state and never got up close and personal enough with his victims to leave much behavioral or physical evidence, other than the rifle ballistics.
Taken together, all of these incidents described a killing spree that, at a minimum, had been going on for at least a year and probably longer.
The first case under consideration for possible linkage took place in the late afternoon of Sunday, October 21, 1979. As described in an FBI report on a multi-agency intelligence meeting held on October 16, 1980, forty-two-year-old Jesse Eugene Taylor had just left a food store in Oklahoma City and was carrying grocery bags across the parking lot toward his white Ford, in which his common-law wife Marion Vera Bresette, thirty-one, and her three children by a previous marriage, ages nine, ten, and twelve, were waiting. Taylor was Black and Bresette was white. They were coworkers at a nursing home in the city.
As he approached the car, Taylor was struck by three shots, apparently fired from the empty state fairgrounds across the street, about two hundred feet away. He collapsed and Bresette ran around to his side of the car and knelt over him; she was hit in the chest. The children screamed. Both adults died on the spot.
There were several witnesses to the shooting, including sixteen-year-old supermarket employee Charles Hopkins and another shopper, Vince Allen. Police arrived within minutes, dealt with the carnage, questioned the witnesses, and took care of the children, whom they also questioned as delicately as they could. No leads were developed from the eyewitnesses. The bullets recovered from the parking lot were clearly from a high-powered rifle, as were the matching shell casings that were found in a grove of trees across the street.
The Indiana incidents had come next. On January 12, 1980, Lawrence Reese, a lifelong Indianapolis resident, was shot and killed by a bullet fired through the plate-glass window of a Church’s Chicken restaurant where he worked, shortly before closing time. The shot was estimated to have come from a rifle with a telescopic sight about 150 yards away.
Just forty-eight hours later, on the night of January 14, a nineteen-year-old Black male named Leo Thomas Watkins was shot and killed, again through a plate-glass window, inside a Qwic Pic Market grocery store at an Indianapolis shopping mall. Leo and his father, Thomas Watkins, were about to begin an exterminating job.
To show how we were still operating largely in the dark and on conjecture, the telegram noted, “Victims in above two incidents were not related.” The fact that Reese and Watkins had no known connection was making FBI investigators doubt if the same UNSUB was involved. They looked pretty similar to me, though.
The telegram went on: “Police speculate a Marlin 336 lever-action was utilized.” And, by the time I was creating my fugitive assessment, ballistics tests had confirmed that the bullets in the two murders were fired from the same Marlin .30-caliber rifle.
But the Indiana case included in the Bureau file that had generated the most public attention was a shooting that fortunately did not result in a death. It was the event Dave Kohl had mentioned and was listed as an “Ongoing FBI Case.”
On May 28, 1980, the forty-four-year-old attorney, civil rights activist, and president of the National Urban League Vernon E. Jordan arrived i
n Fort Wayne to speak to the league’s local chapter fundraising dinner and awards ceremony and checked into the Marriott hotel where the event was to be held. Jordan knew the state well. He had attended DePauw University in Greencastle as an undergraduate, one of the school’s few Black students at the time, before earning his law degree at Howard University in Washington.
After a speech to an audience of around four hundred, Jordan went to his ground-floor room to call his wife, Shirley, and then went to the hotel’s bar to greet and mingle with some of the dinner attendees. He got to talking to a thirty-six-year-old white woman named Martha Coleman.
When the bar closed and Jordan indicated he would still like some coffee, Coleman offered to drive him to her home in a racially mixed neighborhood in south central Fort Wayne. They drank coffee and talked for about half an hour, then Coleman drove him back to the Marriott. As they stopped at a red light about two and a half miles from the hotel, three white teens in another car shouted racial slurs at them, then sped away as the light changed. Coleman pulled her red Pontiac Grand Prix into the hotel parking lot shortly before 2:00 A.M., driving around to the side entrance near Jordan’s room.
They sat talking for somewhere between three and five minutes, and as Jordan got out of the car, he was hit in the back by a bullet that had fragmented when it first hit a chain-link fence around the parking lot. It ripped through the back of his jacket and exited through his chest. The impact lifted him off his feet and hurled him toward the trunk of the car. Through her rearview mirror, Coleman saw Jordan fall to the pavement. She immediately got out of her car and raced inside the hotel to report the shot and tell staff to call for help. As he lay there, never losing consciousness, Jordan later related, the pain was intense, and he was physically aware of the blood leaking out of his body.
Killer's Shadow Page 4
