The next day, Wednesday, October 29, while in a holding cell in the U.S. Marshals office, Franklin confessed some of the murders to Henry Bradford, a federal prisoner in the same cell. When FBI agents contacted Bradford two days later, he told them Franklin had admitted killing Ted Fields and David Martin. This was not uncommon or completely unexpected. Any interrogation is highly stressful for most people, and afterward they need a tension release. We knew from experience that this often comes in talking to or even confessing to someone the accused considers a peer. Another prisoner facing serious charges would certainly fit that bill.
In the Wednesday court arraignment and bail hearing before a United States magistrate, Franklin again denied any killings and claimed the murder charges were trumped up against him because of his avowed racism. “I’m innocent,” the Orlando Sentinel Star quoted Franklin telling reporters as he was led in by two FBI agents. He was wearing dark glasses, and a small contingent of African Americans watched from across the street. “They’re trying to pin it on me because of my racist views. I’m against race mixing and communism,” he explained.
In what sounded to me like a pretty ironic twist, upon hearing of Franklin’s arrest, John Paul Rogers, grand dragon of the Florida chapter of the United Klans of America, was quoted in the Sentinel Star as saying that he’d never heard of Franklin, that Franklin was not a member of the Florida KKK (“I doubt he’s a member of anything”), and that reports of his membership were just an attempt to smear the Klan’s “good name.”
On the other hand, Harold A. Covington in Raleigh, North Carolina, titular head of the National Socialist White Peoples’ Party, said to Los Angeles Times reporter Jeff Prugh while Franklin was still on the run, “I’m not going to tell you a damned thing that might help get him caught,” and described Franklin as “typical of the decent, white, working people who are fed up with our rotten system.”
Prugh also reached James Clayton Vaughn Sr., remarried after divorcing Franklin’s mother, in his Birmingham home. Commenting about the hunt for his son and the murders in Salt Lake City, he said, “It’s outrageous. Jimmy wouldn’t do anything like that. He’s got intelligence. He’s been taught better.”
Inside the courthouse, Franklin was charged with the federal crime of violating the civil rights of Theodore Fields and David Martin III, the two murder victims of the Salt Lake City attack. Citing at least thirteen aliases, numerous attempts at disguise, and “no ties to any community,” U.S. Attorney Gary Betz asked that an extremely high bail be set. Betz then went through the list of crimes of which Franklin was suspected, including murders in at least four cities, the wounding and attempted murder of Vernon Jordan, and bank robberies in Tennessee and Georgia. Franklin denied all charges.
He also denied he was in Lakeland because of President Carter’s scheduled appearance, replying, “I’m not interested at all in Jimmy Carter.”
I didn’t put much faith in this statement. I thought it was quite possible that Franklin didn’t know Carter was going to be there and Franklin’s own arrival in the city was coincidental. But we did know Franklin was interested in Jimmy Carter because of the letter he had written regarding the hottest of all of Franklin’s hot-button issues. Second, had he known of Carter’s upcoming appearance, I believe he would have sensed the same rendezvous with destiny that Lee Harvey Oswald felt when he learned that President Kennedy’s motorcade would pass right below his new place of employment.
What greater personal glory could there have been for a man like Franklin than to take out the greatest target an assassin can possibly hope for—the president of the United States— especially when the president symbolized to him a southerner who had turned against his heritage by embracing civil rights and race mixing? Franklin was no martyr; he only would have attempted the crime if he was reasonably sure he could get away with it, and he had already successfully employed the sniper techniques that might have helped him do so. He was highly confident in his own abilities in this realm. And even if he could not have revealed what he had done had he been successful, I believe it would have been the most fulfilling action of his life, because in his own mind, at least, it would have connected him with history, as he believed, like so many other assassins, he deserved.
Though considerations of that sort were important in our ongoing efforts to understand and attempt to predict the behavior of various types of violent criminals, the threat of presidential assassination, thankfully, was now behind us. More pressing was the strategy on how to move forward with Franklin and figure out what we could prosecute him for.
He had denied having committed any murders, bank robberies, or other serious crimes, both when he was interviewed at the FBI office and in open court. Legally, as we all are taught in school, according to the American justice system a defendant is considered innocent unless or until proven guilty. That has a nice and reassuring sound to it, and in fact it is a safeguard against, or at least a discouragement to, capricious or vindictive charging and prosecution. But that doesn’t mean that the public or we in the law enforcement community have to assume that we are holding or bringing to trial a presumably innocent man or woman. The very idea is absurd on its face. What the “presumption of innocence” principle—which originates long before British common law, in the ancient Hebrew and Islamic codes—really means is that the prosecution or charging entity holds the entire burden of proving guilt beyond some rigid standard (ours is “beyond a reasonable doubt” for criminal offenses) and that the person charged does not even have to mount a defense if he or she chooses not to. In other words, in court, for the prosecution to win, it must remove all reasonable doubt from every juror’s mind that the defendant might not be guilty. I’ve always considered it significant that a defendant is asked to plead “guilty” or “not guilty,” rather than “guilty” or “innocent.” In our system, the person charged never has to prove his or her innocence.
So, could we get Franklin to admit anything to an actual law enforcement official that would hold up in court? That was the next challenge.
Chapter 9
On November 2, U.S. magistrate Paul Game Jr. in Tampa determined he had seen sufficient evidence to conclude that Joseph Paul Franklin was the man the Salt Lake City Police Department and the FBI believed was responsible for the murders of Fields and Martin, despite his official pleas to the contrary. Among the most compelling elements were the fingerprints on the brown Camaro that had been identified near the Salt Lake City crime scene. Game ordered Franklin’s extradition to Utah and granted the government’s motion to take handwriting samples from Franklin for comparison with driver’s licenses, motel registration cards, and other exemplars with different aliases that investigators believed to have been written by Franklin. If positive, these would help confirm his whereabouts at critical points in the crime timeline.
The same day, Salt Lake County deputy district attorney Robert L. Stott filed a complaint and warrant charging Franklin with two first-degree murder counts. But these were held up while the federal government pursued its civil rights case. The U.S. Marshals Service would be responsible for transporting Franklin from Florida to Utah, accompanied by Special Agent Robert H. Dwyer from the FBI’s Tampa field office. This presented us with a possible opportunity: with Franklin handcuffed on a plane for several hours—an unusual and stressful setting, to say the least—he could face an unconventional kind of interrogation, one that might produce the kind of confession that he had avoided previously.
The trip to bring Franklin to Salt Lake City was scheduled for November 8. The Marshals Service had chartered a twin-engine Mitsubishi MU-2 turboprop plane. Along with Franklin and Dwyer, there would be a pilot, a copilot, and three deputy U.S. marshals aboard. In the days leading up to the flight, Dwyer read my assessment of Franklin, and the day before the trip, he called me at Quantico to get advice and strategy on what to do during the flight to get the most out of him.
The private plane rather than seats on a commercial carrier was a
great idea, and I advised Dwyer to have the pilots file the longest possible flight plan to keep the plane in the air for as many hours as possible. We knew Franklin wasn’t crazy about flying and that he felt uncomfortable whenever he was not in control of the situation. The way he had staged his sniping crimes had proved that trait. Therefore, his stress level would be high to begin with, and he would look for some kind of emotional support from whoever else was on the plane. The only complication was that headquarters had advised the Tampa field office that any conversation regarding the crimes had to be initiated voluntarily by Franklin, and if this happened, it had to be documented with a tape recording.
I thought the best strategy was for Franklin to be accompanied by a senior, authoritative Caucasian agent from the Tampa field office, and Dwyer himself fit the bill perfectly. I suggested he wear the classic FBI “uniform”—crisp white shirt, sharp black or very dark suit, black shoes, the whole works. I wanted him to convey ultimate authority and carry props that suggested we already knew a lot more about Franklin than we were letting on. We knew that Tampa had created a Visual Investigative Analysis (VIA) chart that set out the known activities Franklin had engaged in over the last two years. This would be a perfect prop for Dwyer to have with him, persuading Franklin of the Bureau’s high degree of professionalism, suggesting even omniscience.
Dwyer’s initial plan had been to attack Franklin’s ego and try to intimidate and break him down. I thought intimidation was a good idea, but I thought we should take a different approach to achieve it. I didn’t think bringing up the bank robberies again would have much of an impact on Franklin, because this was just his way of making a living, not his raison d’être. I didn’t want Dwyer to initiate conversation, which headquarters had already ruled out anyway, but I thought that with the high stress of a long flight in a small plane and the kind of atmosphere we were planning to create, Franklin himself would start talking soon enough.
Once he did, I proposed to Dwyer that he try to lull him into an “us versus them” attitude. I wasn’t suggesting he assert that the Nazis or the KKK were good or righteous organizations—Franklin would have seen through that tactic anyway—but that he use what we had already concluded from Franklin’s past regarding how he felt about them.
A significant component of behavioral profiling is extrapolation from known facts. We knew that he had joined various hate groups, and that he had subsequently parted company with them. We knew that he had become violent and targeted African Americans, so he hadn’t left those groups because of a change in personal philosophy. And we knew he had paranoid tendencies. We also knew from FBI infiltration of extremist groups that a lot of what they did was sit around and talk about their hatred and resentment. Therefore, though we hadn’t heard it from Franklin personally (that would come later), it was logical to conclude that the reason he had become a lone wolf, as we called such figures, was because he was fed up with all the talk and no action and/or was fearful of snitches and undercover agents. It would later turn out that we were correct on both counts.
I suggested to Dwyer that he should share the belief that the groups he had once been part of were becoming less and less effective because so many of the members were just talkers or drunks or complainers and weren’t really dedicated to any action in furtherance of their aims. That way, even though the agent obviously didn’t approve of the murders, he could imply his admiration for Franklin’s dedication and sense of mission.
It was the same approach Bob Ressler and I had just used when we interviewed David Berkowitz at Attica State Prison in New York. My dad, Jack Douglas, had been a pressman in New York and then head of the printers’ union in Long Island. For the Berkowitz interview, he had supplied me with copies of local tabloids with big headlines about the Son of Sam murders. I held up a copy of the New York Daily News and passed it across the table to Berkowitz. I said, “David, a hundred years from now, no one is going to remember Bob Ressler or John Douglas, but they will remember the Son of Sam.” I cited the then-current case of the BTK Strangler in Wichita, Kansas, and said that he was writing boastful letters to the police and media and mentioning the Son of Sam in them.
“He wants to be like you because you have this power,” I asserted.
I knew that some part of Berkowitz wanted the credit and recognition for his kills, and that was how we initially got him to talk. And the tactic worked. When he went into his much-publicized rendition that it was a three-thousand-year-old demon operating through his neighbor Sam Carr’s black Labrador retriever that ordered him to kill, I had heard enough to respond, “Hey, David, knock off the bullshit. The dog had nothing to do with it.” He laughed and admitted I was right, that he simply thought it enhanced his story and stature.
I thought the same thing could happen with Franklin if we approached him the right way.
The flight began at 6:00 A.M. from St. Petersburg, which in November meant total darkness. We thought this would add to the spookiness and agitation for Franklin. Dwyer played his part perfectly, arriving at the plane in a three-piece black suit, long-sleeved white shirt, and severe necktie. Early on in our work interviewing serial killers, we had stopped recording our sessions with them when we realized how paranoid they were and how knowing their words were being recorded could inhibit what they told us. But because we knew the tape recorder was required here, we had Dwyer carry it with him to show he was prepared for anything. He also carried copies of the New York Times and Newsweek reporting on Franklin, and a maroon file folder with the FBI seal on the front. The folder was actually the type handed out to students at the FBI Academy, but it looked very official. Inside, Dwyer had placed several blank sheets of FBI stationary, which also looked very official when the letterhead stuck out of the folder.
Franklin had manacles on his wrists and ankles, which had to make him feel powerless. We would have preferred to have Dwyer and Franklin sitting directly across from each other because I wanted their interaction to seem more like a conversation to Franklin than an interrogation, but the cabin layout made that impossible, so they sat side by side with the tape recorder between them.
It didn’t take long for Franklin to start talking. The moment he recognized Dwyer, he mentioned the interview at the Tampa field office several days earlier. Then, as soon as they were airborne, Franklin began asking Dwyer questions about his background and experience. He was impressed when Dwyer told him he had served in the Marine Corps. Franklin brought up Soldier of Fortune magazine, and Dwyer said he was familiar with it. That gave the agent the opportunity to mention that he knew a number of people fighting in Rhodesia at the time, which we knew from Franklin’s file he had wanted to do but never went through with.
When he noticed the newspaper and magazine articles Dwyer was holding, he asked to read them. Dwyer handed them over. After he read them, as we had hoped, he said he wanted to talk to Dwyer about the crimes he was accused of.
The agent replied that they could do that, but only if Franklin would allow the conversation to be tape-recorded. He agreed. Dwyer then pushed the buttons to activate the recorder and read aloud the “Interrogation: Advice of Rights” form, which Franklin acknowledged. Dwyer asked him to sign it before they continued.
Dwyer then launched into the “Son of Sam” strategy, stroking Franklin’s ego by noting the articles were proof that he was a figure of national interest and that he would be influencing a lot of people. Franklin seemed proud and gratified to hear this.
At that point, Dwyer took out the VIA chart. Franklin appeared sincerely impressed that the FBI had taken such an active interest in his travels and activities. As we had discussed, Dwyer didn’t bring up the bank robberies and focused on the string of shootings. Franklin acknowledged being in many of the cities where killings had taken place and even expressed familiarity with Liberty Park in Salt Lake City and a fast-food restaurant in Georgia, where another African American was shot and killed. During the course of the conversation, Franklin admitted using numerous
aliases, dyeing his hair, buying an assortment of wigs, and even purchasing several vehicles and an array of firearms and bulletproof vests.
The only incident in which Franklin showed little interest was the shooting of Vernon Jordan. Dwyer described his reaction as “flat” and reported that he kept looking out the window, which made Dwyer wonder whether maybe he had nothing to do with that crime.
As with the previous interview in Tampa, Dwyer found Franklin’s matter-of-fact racial views almost unreal; he sprinkled racial slurs and abhorrent beliefs into the most seemingly casual of subjects. The hatred seemed to transcend every part of his mind.
Dwyer reported that as Franklin “was a former member of the States Rights Party, it came as no surprise that he also detested Jews.” He was convinced that Jews controlled both the American and Soviet governments. He said he had gone on the FBI tour in Washington twice, and the second time—probably after the tour was moved from the Department of Justice to the J. Edgar Hoover Building—he noticed that the display identified as “the Crime of the Century,” the Rosenberg atom bomb espionage case, was missing. He commented that this was because all of the defendants were Jews and Jews had prevented the FBI from remounting the exhibit.
As part of his rant against African Americans, Franklin mentioned that in 1975 he had met a man named Charles who hated African Americans as much as he did, and that while in Franklin’s presence, Charles had Maced a Black man he had seen in the company of a white woman. Dwyer had the strong impression that “Charles” was a projection of Franklin himself. Afterward, he checked the files and learned of Franklin’s arrest for assault and battery in September 1976 in Montgomery County, Maryland, for the Mace attack on the interracial couple.
Killer's Shadow Page 9