There were no independent witnesses to the crime. Coleman had noticed that the teens who had taunted them at the traffic light had then pulled into a fast-food restaurant parking lot, and the FBI agents who investigated the case didn’t believe they would have had time to get to the hotel and set up the shot.
The paramedics said the chest exit wound was about the size of a fist. The surgeons at Parkview Hospital who operated on Jordan five times over the next day reported the bullet fragment missed his spine by about a quarter of an inch and easily could have killed him from intestinal damage and blood loss. As it was, he nearly died in the hospital several days later from kidney failure and pneumonia.
Two weeks after the shooting, when Jordan’s condition had been stabilized, President Jimmy Carter sent an air force medical evacuation plane to transport Jordan to New York.
With Carter’s backing, FBI director William Webster declared the case a civil rights violation and possible conspiracy if more than one individual was involved, bringing the Bureau directly into the case. Their investigation determined that the shot came from the trampled tall grassy area on the far side of an interstate highway off-ramp about sixty yards away, by someone firing from a prone position. An ejected .30-06 cartridge matched the bullet fragments surgically removed from Jordan’s body and could have come from about ten different makes of .30-06 rifles.
This sure seemed to match Franklin’s presumed M.O., which meant he wasn’t afraid to assassinate prominent people. I could see why the Secret Service was nervous and wanted him out of circulation.
The FBI summary stated, “Jordan shot on the night of May 28–29, 1980, from a grassy knoll on an interstate highway while he was exiting a vehicle in a motel parking lot.” The phrase “grassy knoll” immediately caught my attention because of its association with the second-shooter conspiracy theory in the John F. Kennedy assassination and reminded me we were on the hunt for another potential presidential assassin. The three components of a successful crime are means, motive, and opportunity. Franklin already had the first two. If he was after President Carter, we had to stop him before he got the third.
The list of possibly linked cases went on. On June 15, 1980, twenty-two-year-old African American Arthur D. Smothers and his sixteen-year-old white girlfriend Kathleen Mikula were walking across the Washington Street Bridge in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, when both were shot from a distance. Smothers was hit first and fell off the sidewalk and into the gutter, shot in the back and groin. Mikula started shouting at passing cars for help. Another shot rang out but missed her and shattered a chunk of concrete on the bridge. Not knowing which way to turn, she stood still for a moment, which gave the shooter time to aim at her again, this time striking her in the chest. Two more shots were fired, one entering her shoulder and traveling down her torso until it lodged in her hip. Smothers and Mikula were both rushed to nearby Lee Hospital. Mikula died during emergency surgery. Smothers died two hours later. None of the people passing in cars could tell police from which direction the shots had been fired. The bullets were believed to have come from a .35-caliber rifle.
The two had been together for about three years and enjoyed popularity among a large group of friends, both Black and white, despite Art’s mom, Mary Frances Smothers’s concern that Johnstown might not be ready for a mixed couple. Kathy was a gifted artist and Art a talented athlete who wanted to start his own home remodeling business. He ran in the 1978 Boston Marathon, finishing in well under three hours. They were completely committed to each other. At one point, Kathy told Mrs. Smothers she wouldn’t want to live without Art.
And once again, the murderer escaped just as efficiently as he had killed.
LOOKING AT THESE POSSIBLY LINKED CRIMES, WHAT IMPRESSED ME WAS THE degree of cooperation between law enforcement agencies. This is not always what happens. Those of us at the academy who used to teach new agents and police fellows used to joke that if you were a killer who wanted to really screw up an investigation, the best thing you could do was drag the body across a county or state line. Fortunately, the investigators in the sniper shootings were a lot more sophisticated.
As investigators in the different states were laying the groundwork for their own cases, Salt Lake City PD continued pursuing local leads. Following up on Micky McHenry’s lead, Detective Don Bell found the registration card for Joseph R. Hagman in the motel where she said he was staying. There was no such individual in the FBI databases, confirming Bell’s belief that it was a phony name. The FBI lab also searched for latent fingerprints but couldn’t find any. This guy had been careful.
The Salt Lake City police investigators visited all of the motels within a thirty-mile radius and examined the guest registration cards. They identified eight that appeared to have similar handwriting characteristics, though all in different names, to the Hagman card. One from the Scenic Motel was from the actual date of the shooting. The Scenic was only nine blocks from Liberty Park.
At one motel, the police were told that a man matching the UNSUB’s description stormed out of the lobby when he saw that the establishment employed African Americans.
At another motel, the Sandman, detectives found a registration card during the proper time frame for a dark brown Camaro. Curiously, there were two license plate numbers listed. It turned out that the first number was the one the guest had listed. But the elderly—and wary—motel owner had a habit of walking the parking lot in the wee hours of the morning and checking plates against what guests had written down. The plate that was actually on the car was from Kentucky: BDC678.
Two Salt Lake City detectives were then able to trace the car’s history to a previous owner in Lexington, Kentucky, and contacted the police department there. Though the buyer had given his name as Ed Garland, a Lexington police sketch artist was able to get a good visual description of him from the seller. Cincinnati and Salt Lake City detectives now had a solid car license plate number and several corresponding sketches of the UNSUB.
On September 15, investigators from the Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, Johnstown, Cincinnati, and Salt Lake City PDs convened at the office of the Hamilton County coroner in Cincinnati, presented evidence, and compared their cases. They agreed there wasn’t enough evidence to say they all involved the same individual—for example, similar rifles were used in all the cases, but ballistics tests revealed that bullets from at least the Indianapolis and Salt Lake City shootings came from different weapons—but the automobile descriptions were compelling, and the composite sketches looked enough like each other to suggest it might be the same UNSUB.
And ten days after the multi-jurisdictional law enforcement conference, when Franklin was identified, questioned, and escaped police custody in Florence, Kentucky, the investigators were all pretty sure they had identified their killer.
I mention all of these seemingly mundane details and the tedious shoe-leather police work that went into discovering them because this is how a real and responsible criminal investigation generally unfolds. It’s not some hotshot detective cleverly squeezing a confession out of a suspect who slips up in one response at the crucial moment. And it’s not a profiler like me looking at crime scene photos and autopsy protocols and magically coming up with the neighborhood and block where the UNSUB lives. It’s the meticulous work of analyzing every piece of evidence and following up every possible lead and then working methodically to see how the puzzle pieces fit together or the dots connect. And if people like me and my former unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico can aid in that effort and help the local investigators narrow their suspect list or refine their proactive strategies, then we’ve done our part of the job.
Federal investigators had also stepped into the search. After the police found weapons in Franklin’s car in the Florence motel parking lot, and he escaped from custody, Special Agent Frank Rapier of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms began constructing a chart of places Franklin had been witnessed or identified, including motels, restaurants, and places where he’d had
his vehicle worked on. The chart included stops in Florence, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Panama City, Florida. As a result, ATF and the FBI were able to secure three federal warrants for Franklin’s arrest: for interstate transportation of stolen firearms; purchasing firearms out of state under false names; and unlawful possession of Quaaludes (methaqualone), a prescription sedative that was classified as a Schedule I controlled substance because of its abuse and popularity as a recreational drug.
Cincinnati homicide squad commander Lieutenant Donald Byrd told the Cincinnati Enquirer that the escapee had to be considered a serious suspect in the murders of Lane and Brown. A description of Franklin—five feet, eleven inches, 205 pounds, long brown hair, thick prescription eyeglasses, and an eagle tattooed on his right arm—was included in the article. And by this point, Salt Lake City police chief E. L. “Bud” Willoughby, who had initially discounted the shootings in his community as being racially motivated, was now ready to tell the Enquirer’s reporters he had learned that though Franklin was normally polite and well-mannered, “he would go into an absolute rage” at the mention of Black people.
This work that the group of local police departments had done establishing the connections between the crimes had been essential to the FBI response that was now in motion. In the following years, establishing the links between crimes would become one of our evaluation tools in the Investigative Support Unit. Though not definitive on its own, we would pose the question: What are the chances that more than one repeat killer is operating in a given area—which could be most or all of the United States—with similar M.O. and similar apparent motivation and signature, such as targeting African Americans, at the same time? The more specific the M.O. and signature, the less likely several cases were merely coincidental and not linked.
One of the things every detective and criminal investigator always has to be careful about is linkage blindness between crimes. Sometimes, you can miss the indicators that two or more cases are related because they took place in different jurisdictions and neither agency reported its case to the others, or because the M.O. wasn’t similar enough, the victim profile was different, or any number of other reasons. Linkage blindness can operate in the opposite direction, as well. You can start to link cases that actually weren’t committed by the same offender because the motive or victim profile seems to match up, or even because similar weapons were used.
This idea of linkage blindness and M.O. became particularly important as I reviewed Franklin’s file, because along with the crimes that appeared connected where local law enforcement had already worked together—Salt Lake City, Cincinnati, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania—there was another open investigation that had been included in his file. It was mentioned as possibly the work of Franklin because it had a racial angle, which was still pretty unusual.
The case involved the murder of four African American males in and around Buffalo, New York. Just three weeks before, on September 22, 1980, a fourteen-year-old boy named Glenn Dunn was shot and killed while sitting in a car in a supermarket parking lot in Buffalo. The next day, thirty-two-year-old Harold Green, an assistant engineer at a local plant, was killed in a Burger King parking lot in the northeast suburb of Cheektowaga. That same night, thirty-year-old Emmanuel Thomas was killed while crossing the street in front of his own house, not far from where Dunn had been gunned down. And the next day, September 24, forty-three-year-old Joseph McCoy was walking down a street in Niagara Falls, about twenty miles away, when he was suddenly struck and killed by two shots.
All four victims had been shot with a .22-caliber sawed-off rifle, leading the media to dub the UNSUB the .22-Caliber Killer. And all four of the victims were African American.
Though we couldn’t rule it out, from these details, I was skeptical that Joseph Paul Franklin was the .22-Caliber Killer. Though the motivation appeared similar, Franklin tended not to hang around a location after he had accomplished a sniping kill, whereas the Buffalo killer stayed in the general area. The kills tentatively attributed to Franklin were from farther away, with higher-caliber weapons, which usually were discarded after each crime. The planning had been methodical enough to allow him to slip away unnoticed time after time. The .22-Caliber Killer was more impulsive.
Taken as a whole, the details from Buffalo just didn’t seem to match what we knew of Franklin as a killer. But because both Franklin and the .22-Caliber Killer were targeting African Americans with rifles, investigators weren’t prepared to rule out the linkage completely. Still, I had my doubts.
As fate would have it, about a week after I was brought into the Franklin case, I was called up to Buffalo to work up a profile of the .22-Caliber Killer, who had possibly killed again. On October 8, two days before Dave Kohl had called me about Franklin, a seventy-one-year-old Buffalo taxi driver named Parler Edwards was found in the trunk of his cab with blunt force trauma to the head and his heart cut out. The next day, the body of another taxi driver, forty-year-old Ernest Jones, was discovered on the bank of the Niagara River, with his throat slashed and his heart also torn out of his chest. His blood-covered cab was found within Buffalo city limits. And the next day, a man roughly matching one possible description of the .22-Caliber Killer burst into the hospital room in the Erie County Medical Center of thirty-seven-year-old Collin Cole. He shouted a racial epithet and lunged for Cole’s throat with a ligature. Only the opportune arrival of a nurse caused the intruder to flee, leaving Cole with serious neck injuries. Edwards, Jones, and Cole were all African American.
“This is the first time that we have had this type of thing on this level,” said FBI spokesman Special Agent Otis Cox. “We’re looking for either one person or a group of persons with the same types of things in mind.”
Thomas Atkins, general counsel for the NAACP, was quoted in the Washington Post as wanting to know “whether or not there is some secret and organized effort being made to foment racial strife.”
“The rash of murders has fallen like hot embers on a patchwork of school racial battles, cross burnings on lawns and other strife in cities from Boston to the suburbs of Portland, Ore., and from Miami to Richmond, Calif.,” the Post reported.
FBI director William Webster, with whom I’d had several personal dealings, told reporters in Atlanta, who had started noting Black children disappearing and later found dead beginning the year before, “I think it’s a natural temptation born of legitimate fright that a national conspiracy is under way,” but didn’t think the evidence supported that. I sure hoped not, but this cluster of seemingly racially motivated murders was alarming.
The Buffalo community was in an understandable uproar when Richard Bretzing, the SAC up there, asked me to come from Quantico and work on a profile to see what we could tell about the .22-Caliber Killer. The first thing he wanted to know was whether he was the same UNSUB who had killed the two cabbies, even though the M.O. was different.
It was pretty clear to me that the four shootings from September were all the same offender. They were mission-oriented, assassin-style killings in which the shooter had no relationship with the victims but demonstrated a pathological hatred of African Americans. Within his own prejudiced and delusional system, this was an organized individual who liked firearms. I could see him having joined the military, but he would have soon realized its mission didn’t square with his own, and he would have had trouble adjusting to the disciplined military culture. Ballistics tests eventually confirmed that all the victims were killed with the same weapon.
The knife attacks on Edwards and Jones, though, showed much more personal involvement with the victim. They would have taken a longer time and the killer could not quickly run away. Though all of the crimes appeared motivated by racial hatred and fear, for them to have been perpetrated by the same individual with such different M.O.s, I thought, would indicate a pretty severe psychosis, since the sniper crimes were fairly low risk for the shooter while the slashing and evisceration murders were high risk, reflecting ra
ge, overkill, and disorganization.
While it remained unclear whether the .22-Caliber Killer was behind the stabbing murders of Edwards and Jones, by the time I was done working up the profile, none of this matched Franklin, and I was even more convinced that he had nothing to do with these crimes.
Though we wouldn’t have it confirmed until a few months later, Joseph Paul Franklin was not the .22-Caliber Killer. In January 1981, a twenty-five-year-old army private named Joseph Gerard Christopher, who had just been inducted the month before, was arrested at Fort Benning, Georgia, after slashing a Black fellow soldier with a paring knife in an unprovoked attack. A search of Christopher’s old house near Buffalo turned up a sawed-off rifle and a large cache of .22-caliber ammunition. He was charged with the Buffalo shootings along with some racially motivated knife slashings in midtown Manhattan the previous December, during a window of time when Christopher was on leave from the army, that earned the killer the title Midtown Slasher. Two other Black victims narrowly escaped being murdered. Interestingly, Captain Matthew Levine, the army psychiatrist who examined Christopher for a possible insanity defense, to whom Christopher confessed that he “had to kill Blacks,” said he was amazed how closely the subject fit the .22-Caliber Killer profile I had created.
Ultimately convicted for the Midtown Slasher attacks and the .22-Caliber Killer shootings, Christopher was to serve consecutive sentences for the crimes that exceeded his lifespan. He would end up serving less than thirteen years, succumbing to cancer at age thirty-seven while incarcerated at Attica Correctional Facility in New York State. He remains an interesting psychological case study for us, though, because while his motive was similar in all of his crimes, the variance in M.O. between gun and knife is highly unusual. To this day, it is uncertain whether he committed the murders and eviscerations of Parler Edwards and Ernest Jones.
Killer's Shadow Page 5
