Killer's Shadow
Page 12
The story made national headlines, as did the role behavioral science had in the arrest. During Williams’s subsequent trial, the prosecutor, Fulton County assistant district attorney Jack Mallard, asked for our help in strategizing ways to get Williams to show his true character to the jurors. I thought he might be arrogant and self-confident enough to take the stand, and that was where our opening would be.
As I’d predicted, Williams did testify in his own defense. After several hours of cross-examination, Mallard had caught him up in a number of glaring inconsistencies, but Williams maintained the same calm, mild-mannered attitude that he’d shown to the public since his arrest. Then, as we had rehearsed, after leading up to one of the murders, Mallard moved in close to the witness box, put his hand on Williams’s arm, and in his low, methodical south-Georgia drawl, asked, “What was it like, Wayne? What was it like when you wrapped your fingers around the victim’s throat? Did you panic, Wayne? Did you panic?”
In a low, weak voice, Williams said, “No.” Then, realizing what he had done, he flew into a rage. He pointed his finger at me and screamed, “You’re trying your best to make me fit that FBI profile, and I’m not going to help you do it!”
That was the turning point in the trial. And it was also a turning point for the FBI profiling program. The success in apprehending Franklin, and then the publicity surrounding Atlanta, made believers out of the headquarters brass. We had proved our effectiveness in helping catch criminals and put them behind bars.
A number of notable cases followed. We flew up to Anchorage, Alaska, and assembled a profile that convinced a judge to issue a search warrant on Robert Hansen, a baker in his mid-forties whom the police suspected of the murders of prostitutes found shot to death in remote wooded areas. We described a proficient hunter who had tired of shooting animals and was now imitating “The Most Dangerous Game,” flying women he had picked up out into the wild and hunting them for sport to compensate for the way he had been treated by women in the past.
In June 1982, I was asked to provide a profile and analysis of the 1978 murder of twenty-three-year-old Karla Brown of Wood River, Illinois, a beautiful, all-American girl who was found stripped, her hands tied with an electrical cord, and her head shoved into a ten-gallon barrel filled with water in the basement of the house she was about to move into with her fiancé, Mark Fair. Coming up with a visualization of the crime based on all the evidence, I profiled an UNSUB who matched two of the individuals police had questioned. Karla’s body was exhumed, and bite marks matched one of the suspects, adding to the evidence against him. He was convicted and sentenced to seventy-five years in prison.
These were only two of the hundreds of cases we were now handling each year. Jim McKenzie, one of our greatest advocates, sold headquarters on the need for “more John Douglases” to handle the ever-growing caseload, even though it meant stealing slots from other programs. That was how I got my first four full-time profilers: Bill Hagmaier, Jim Horn, Blaine McIlwaine, and Ron Walker. Shortly after that, Jim Wright and Jud Ray came onboard. That group represents the foundation of what came to be the Investigative Support Unit (ISU).
And we continued our study of incarcerated serial killers and violent offenders. Around this time, I was collaborating on an article for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin about lust murder with Roy Hazelwood. Roy introduced Bob Ressler and me to Dr. Ann Burgess, a professor of psychiatric nursing at the University of Pennsylvania who was also associate director of nursing research for the Boston Department of Health and Hospitals. Ann was widely known as an authority on rape and its psychological consequences, and she and Roy had done some research together. Ann was impressed by the serial killer study Bob and I had embarked on, and we agreed to work together. In 1982, she secured a four-hundred-thousand-dollar grant from the government-sponsored National Institute of Justice to formalize our study, and, with our input, developed a fifty-seven-page assessment protocol that we would fill out after each of our subsequent interviews. That study would further our understanding of the violent criminal mind and support the type of behavioral profiling and criminal investigative analysis the FBI practices to this day. It led to the publication of the book Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives that the three of us coauthored and eventually to the Crime Classification Manual (CCM), which we intended to be the equivalent for law enforcement personnel of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). It presents the range of violent crimes and motives and helps investigators identify the type of crime and why the offender might have committed it. Some, like bank robbery, are easy to understand. Others, like torture murder, can be far more perplexing. What we ultimately wanted to do was translate our psychological and behavioral research into concepts and terminology that would be useful to law enforcement. For example, telling a detective that an UNSUB appears to be a paranoid with schizoid tendencies may not help him or her very much in an investigation. Saying the offender is organized, however, could, with other profile descriptors, help them narrow down a suspect list. CCM has been revised several times and is now in its third edition.
And yet, as I moved on from Joseph Paul Franklin, as I interviewed other killers and my unit gained notoriety within the bureau, there was something about Franklin and his crimes that continued to haunt me. The more killers I’d talked to, the more I’d come to understand their psyches and root motivations, the clearer it became that Franklin’s personality represented something deeper and even more disturbing. Every serial killer and violent predator is trying to compensate for their own inadequacies and to vent their anger and resentment at the world, or the part of it that they perceive has denied them their due. But as I’d suspected when Dave Kohl first asked me to study his case and now felt even more strongly, Franklin, even behind bars, remained far more dangerous than most. His unwavering dedication to fomenting hate made him a potential inspiration and symbol to others with similar orientation. Infamous killers can inspire occasional sick minds like theirs, but it stops there. Joseph Paul Franklin had the capacity to inspire untold numbers of like-minded young men to embark on the same journey he had: from words to action, from resentment to murder. I knew that one way or another, I was not finished with Joseph Paul Franklin.
I wasn’t the only one interested in him and his motivations. By the late 1980s, Kenneth Baker, a distinguished Secret Service agent who had served on presidential details and who, like me, had a doctor of education degree based on studies and methodologies he had developed in the field, temporarily came over to my unit for a joint Secret Service–FBI project on assassins. One of the first interviews he conducted for this joint project was with Mark David Chapman, imprisoned at the time at the Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, New York, for the December 8, 1980, murder of ex-Beatle John Lennon. Chapman, then twenty-five, had shot the forty-year-old Lennon at close range as he and his wife, Yoko Ono, were returning from a recording session to their apartment in the Dakota, on Seventy-second Street at Central Park West in Manhattan. He fired five hollow-point bullets from a Charter Arms .38 Special revolver, four of which hit the rock and roll superstar.
We uncovered a range of critical similarities and differences between an up-close-and-personal assassin, like Chapman or would-be assassin John Hinckley, who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton hotel less than four months after the Lennon assassination, and a sniper-style assassin like Franklin. My unit was heavily involved with the Hinckley investigation.
Chapman and Hinckley, like Franklin and virtually all assassins we have studied, felt deeply inadequate. Eventually, that inadequacy became overwhelming and had to be acted upon. Hinckley got it through his shallow and misguided head that he could impress the object of his romantic fantasies, actress Jodie Foster, by killing the president and having her join him on a commandeered airplane, from which they would fly off to some undefined land of happily-ever-after. Both Chapman and Hinckley looked to the book, The Cat
cher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger’s saga of disillusioned youth, for their personas, just as Franklin looked to Mein Kampf for his. What every assassin convinces himself—from Brutus and Cassius, through John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, and up to the present—is that things will get better as a result of his bold and historic act.
When Ken Baker interviewed Chapman at Attica, what he found was someone who had a strong emotional connection with his target on a superficial level. He collected all of the Beatles’ and Lennon’s records and even went through a string of Asian girlfriends in imitation of Lennon’s marriage to Ono. Ultimately, Ken learned from the interview, Lennon became an impossible model for Chapman to live up to, so he fabricated in his own mind a reason to kill him: the contrast between Lennon’s preaching of love and peace and eschewing material possessions with his glamorous and expensive lifestyle, and Lennon’s supposed religious sacrilege after Chapman’s born-again embrace of Christianity.
But these were mere excuses, like Franklin’s having other groups to blame for his own shortcomings. Chapman could no longer deal with the disparity between himself and his erstwhile hero, so he had to kill him. This would achieve a twofold aim. Lennon would no longer be around for him to have to compare himself with, and at the same time, his name would be forever linked with Lennon’s. He did not have the power to become like John Lennon, but he did have the power to destroy him. Whatever he had failed to accomplish in his miserable life thus far, he was now no longer a nobody.
We pursued the assassin study with the same rigor we had devoted to serial killers and sexual predators, and it yielded important insights into their psyches. You might think someone like Arthur Bremer—the man who shot and paralyzed former Alabama governor George Wallace while he was campaigning for the presidency in a Laurel, Maryland, shopping center in 1972 and whom I interviewed for the project—might be the diametric opposite of Joseph Paul Franklin. After all, he tried to kill one of the most powerful symbols of segregation and racial bigotry, the man who stood in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to prevent African American students from registering.
But the more I learned, the more I came to realize that Bremer was simply trying to prove his own worth. He had previously stalked President Nixon for several weeks but could never get close enough. So, in desperation, he trained his sights on a more accessible target. When I interviewed him, I found he had no particular issue with Governor Wallace at all.
The one factor that is clearly different between Franklin and these others is that Franklin was not up-close-and-personal, which signifies that he intended to get away with his crimes rather than go down in flames as a martyr or engage in some ridiculous fantasy like Hinckley. But as we will see, that doesn’t mean he figured everything out ahead of time.
The one ironclad procedure we’d developed for all of our prison interviews was that before going in, we had to learn everything we possibly could about the criminal and his crimes. And we had seldom encountered one with as much proficiency, mobility, and determination as Franklin. His background was complicated, and his list of crimes was long and probably incomplete. But as I started considering Franklin as a subject for our study and began reading about his life behind bars and all that had transpired since he was sent to prison in 1981, I realized that our understanding of him as a killer was far more incomplete than I ever could have realized.
As it turned out, there was a lot more to uncover, learn, and study about his life and crimes before we attempted to meet him face-to-face.
Chapter 12
In the immediate aftermath of Franklin’s conviction in 1981, law enforcement authorities around the country with pending cases against him had to make decisions about which of the multitude of cases against him would come next.
Back in Utah, Franklin’s defense attorney Van Sciver had filed an appeal based, along with some other procedural issues, on the fact that Judge Jenkins allowed evidence that Franklin had Maced a mixed-race couple in 1976. Part of the defense attorney’s legal reasoning was that the incident had been too far in the past. But the other part was more interesting and, I thought, turned normal defense strategy on its head. Van Sciver claimed that the Mace attack should not have been introduced to show motive, because it was well established that Franklin was a racist; he was merely denying his participation in the murders in Liberty Park, and therefore the Mace incident was prejudicial to him receiving a fair trial strictly relating to the charge at issue.
While Franklin was in the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, for evaluation and assignment into the federal corrections system, there was jockeying among the various jurisdictions in which both state and federal charges were pending as to who would try him next and who would give up a place in the queue. When a suspect is charged with murder in more than one jurisdiction, it is not uncommon for there to be bargaining and maneuvering to decide which one gets first crack at him. The Justice Department decided to drop federal bank robbery charges in Arkansas and Kentucky so that Franklin could be turned over to state authorities for prosecution on the murder charges. Utah would be up first.
By the time the state of Utah was ready to try Franklin for the Liberty Park murders, he was on his fourth set of court-appointed defense attorneys. As if that volatility weren’t enough, Franklin also requested that the presiding judge, Third District Court judge Jay Banks, disqualify himself from presiding because he “has demonstrated a prejudiced and bigoted attitude toward the defendant . . . and is a complete and total lackey and stooge of the federal government.” Not only is this not the greatest way to endear oneself to a judge, I thought it was rather ironic that this self-proclaimed racist would comment on someone else’s supposed bigotry. In the same hearing, Franklin asked that four newspaper and television reporters be barred from his trial because they had slandered him and were “paid FBI informants and snitches.” Franklin’s inherent paranoia was on clear display, but at the same time, he had become a hero to white supremacist groups, who were making death threats against the prosecution team.
In June 1981, Judge Banks ruled that trying Franklin on murder charges in state court after he had already been tried in federal court for civil rights violations against the same two victims did not constitute double jeopardy. After first turning down Franklin’s request to serve as his own attorney and reminding him of the old adage “He who represents himself has a fool for a client,” Banks reversed himself the next week and allowed it. The condition was that he conduct himself in a proper manner in the courtroom and accept assistance from actual legal defenders. Former Utah attorney general Phil Hansen agreed to take the case on Franklin’s behalf, as did David E. Yocom and D. Frank Wilkins, a former justice of the Utah Supreme Court.
The trial began on Monday, August 31, with jury selection. The final panel was made up of seven men and five women, all white. Opening statements were delivered on Thursday, September 3. Franklin, attired in a dark blue three-piece suit and striped tie, his longish, reddish-blond hair neatly combed, claimed he had just been “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” passing through Salt Lake City on his way to San Francisco.
Micky McHenry, now going by the name Micky Farman-Ara, the prostitute Franklin had picked up shortly before the murders, testified in the trial. Terry Elrod and Karma Ingersoll told about the shootings while they were jogging with Fields and Martin. When Franklin’s ex-wife Anita Cooper took the witness stand and said that her former husband had confessed to the Liberty Park killings, he cross-examined her, saying, “You made that up to get back at me, didn’t you? Isn’t that a malicious lie, a cold-blooded lie?”
After a fifteen-day trial in which seventy-five witnesses took the stand, the jury received the case on Friday, September 18, and deliberated for about six and a half hours before returning with a guilty verdict. Franklin’s sisters, Marilyn Garzan and Carolyn Luster, were in the courtroom and sobbed quietly when they heard the verdict. Franklin himself showed no emotion.
Police and marshals fanned out in the building and on the surrounding streets, which were cordoned off with a frantic hunt in progress. Franklin, meanwhile, took the elevator down two floors to another courthouse holding area. John Merrick, the jail guard who had sat behind Franklin during the trial, found and confronted him as he was attempting to remove the pins from the hinges on a door leading to the public hallway. Guards also noticed he had pulled out a small grating in the elevator, apparently considering escaping through the elevator shaft like in the movies. After they cleaned him up, Merrick and an angry Sheriff Pete Hayward brought him back to the courtroom, without the jury knowing what had happened. He had enjoyed all of fifteen minutes of freedom.
Because Utah had the death penalty, the jury also had to decide whether Franklin deserved it. In pleading against the death penalty, defense attorney Yocom pointed out that Franklin continued to maintain his innocence, implying that they would be taking a big chance in opting for capital punishment, which he characterized, correctly, as an “irretrievable, final act.” Then he said, “Joseph Paul Franklin is an intelligent, religious, humorous, useful human being. And given the chance by you, I’m sure he could make a contribution to the world, this country, this society. The defendant has enriched my life. I’m sure he could do it for another.”