On Friday, August 13, the prosecution rested its case after four days of testimony, and the defense opened its case the following Monday. Franklin took the stand in his own defense, as he had previously said he would do.
“Mr. Franklin, did you shoot Vernon Jordan?” his attorney asked.
“No, I did not,” Franklin asserted.
After running through a number of hair-splitting semantics involving his racism, his attorney questioned where he was on May 28 to 29, 1980, if not in Fort Wayne. Franklin responded, “I have no idea.”
The only other defense witness was Kenneth Owens, a convicted burglar and prison escapee who said he and Franklin had been close friends at the Medical Center in Springfield and that Frank Sweeney had a bad reputation among fellow inmates for honesty. I took that to mean they didn’t place much faith in what he said.
By midday, the defense had rested its case.
In his instructions to the jurors on August 17, Judge Sharp confirmed that they not only had to decide whether Franklin shot Jordan but also that, if they did, they must also decide whether Franklin shot him in order to prevent Jordan from using the public accommodation of the Fort Wayne Marriott Inn, for that was the definition of a civil rights violation.
The jury retired at 12:30 P.M. and deliberated for about eight hours before returning to the courtroom. The court clerk read the verdict: not guilty. Franklin raised his right hand in the V for Victory sign and exclaimed, “All right!”
“Your decision, while a controversial one, in a controversial case, is well within the law and well within the evidence,” Sharp said to the jurors as marshals guarded their exit from the courtroom.
Outside the courthouse, prosecutor Daniel Rinzel, who had assisted Kowalski, said, “The jury has considered the evidence and made their decision, and we accept what they did.”
When reporters asked him if the federal government would look into other means of prosecuting Franklin, he replied, “This case is finished.”
Vernon Jordan had no comment.
Moments after his victory, U.S. marshals surrounded Franklin and escorted him away to continue serving his multiple life sentences at the Marion federal penitentiary. He was back behind Marion’s walls within twelve hours.
Later, once Judge Sharp had rescinded his gag order preventing the news media from talking to the jury members, two of them told reporters that most of them believed Franklin actually had shot Jordan, but they couldn’t prove it, nor could they prove Franklin’s motive of depriving Jordan of his right to use the Marriott’s accommodations. One juror said they thought Frank Sweeney’s testimony about Franklin’s pronouncements in jail was credible. Another said he “didn’t believe anything” Robert Herrera said.
As reported by the Indianapolis News, “The second juror said deliberations on guilt or innocence came down to looking at the wording in the indictment about the civil rights violations.”
“ ‘That was the one point we came down to. If it wasn’t for that point, I think he would have been convicted.’ ”
Chapter 13
Within days of the trial and verdict in Fort Wayne, Indianapolis prosecutor Stephen Goldsmith said he saw “very little useful purpose to be served” in proceeding with trying Franklin for the January 1980 murders of Leo Watkins and Lawrence Reese. He said that if he went ahead, he would have to call some of the same witnesses who had just testified in the Jordan case. He was concerned about the believability of the prison inmates. He was also influenced by Fort Wayne prosecutor Arnold H. Duemling, who announced that he did not have enough evidence to indict Franklin for the Jordan shooting in state court. So, as it stood, the Jordan shooting remained open, and the person who had shot him might still be at large.
This is often a difficult decision for a prosecutor. Every murder victim’s family I’ve ever dealt with wants justice for its loved one. And that means charging the alleged offender with the specific crime. It is not enough that he has been convicted of a similar crime against others, as I saw firsthand in the Atlanta child murders when prosecutors felt their best case against Wayne Williams was for two of the cluster of close to thirty murders that took place from 1979 through 1981.
On the other hand, the resources of any prosecutor’s office are limited, and if an alleged killer has already been convicted in another court or jurisdiction and has been put away for a long time, the head of the office has to weigh the chances of a conviction against the fallout of an acquittal, whether it is worth his staff’s time and energy, and whether a guilty verdict will add any effective prison time to the inmate’s already lengthy sentence; in other words, if the end result of a successful prosecution is to impose punishment, are you actually achieving any practical results from another trial? The federal government, encouraged to prosecute by President Jimmy Carter himself, had a different reason for pursuing the Jordan case even though a conviction wouldn’t have added appreciably to Franklin’s time in prison. What the feds were after, instead, was a highly publicized warning to anyone who considered trying to assassinate another African American civil rights leader.
“When a notorious public crime is committed and the government believes there is sufficient evidence to prosecute the case, we have an obligation to do so,” prosecutor Rinzel declared.
There was another issue. For many years, crimes against African Americans, particularly anti-civil-rights-oriented crimes, went largely unprosecuted and unpunished. For a man of Franklin’s psyche, it was natural to think that certain crimes were righteous expressions rather than despicable acts. During our study of the assassin personality, we noted that John Wilkes Booth expected to be received as a great hero and savior in the South after he killed Abraham Lincoln. I suspected that something similar was likely going on in Franklin’s mind with regard to Jordan.
For Stephen Goldsmith in Indianapolis, if he felt there was any reasonable possibility of Franklin being released from prison while he was still physically able to commit another violent crime, I feel certain he would have wanted to proceed with his case.
Three states to the southwest, though, Oklahoma County district attorney Robert Macy announced his intention to begin extradition proceedings to have Franklin transferred to the federal prison in Oklahoma City so he could stand trial for the 1979 killing of Jesse Taylor and Marion Bresette outside the grocery store by their car, where her three young children waited and witnessed the murder. Since Oklahoma was a death penalty state, Macy figured a conviction might ensure that Franklin never walked the streets again.
He remained in Marion and relatively out of the public eye, with the Oklahoma case never coming to trial. In January 1983, Macy dropped the murder charges, saying the chance of gaining a conviction did not justify the cost of prosecution. Some of the evidence had gone stale and he wasn’t convinced all of the relevant police reports were accurate.
Reading about the decision, I have to admit, I was disappointed. I don’t believe in the death penalty across the board, but here was one killer who I thought certainly deserved it. We can debate whether capital punishment is a general deterrent; the fact that it is administered so infrequently leads me to believe it isn’t much of one. But it is certainly a specific deterrent—no one who has been executed has ever committed another murder. And given Franklin’s propensity for escape, I wasn’t convinced his life-taking days were over until he’d given up his own.
PROSECUTORS AROUND THE COUNTRY WERE OPTING OUT OF GOING AFTER Franklin, and for many killers that would have been the end of the story—the unsolved crimes they were suspected of committing would remain unsolved. Most convicted criminals consider themselves lucky when other cases against them are unprovable short of a confession or new physical evidence, so they keep their mouths shut. Instead Franklin began doing the opposite.
Though Robert Herrera had associated Franklin with the attempted murder of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, there was no hard evidence he was the sniper who shot Flynt in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Flynt had been i
n a wheelchair and in constant pain ever since, pain he had tried to quell with massive quantities of narcotics that led to addiction and several surgeries. Eventually, he suffered a stroke that left him with difficulties in speaking.
The case had never gone anywhere because like so many other sniper incidents, no one saw the shooter. Flynt had spent considerable time and money trying to uncover the identity of his attacker. While he was still in the hospital recovering from his two severe abdominal wounds, he told Rudy Maxa, then a reporter for the Washington Post, that he was “convinced the attempt on his life was the work of an assassination team with ties to the government. The motive: to silence his inquiry into the JFK killing.”
At various times after that he had told interviewers he thought he had been gunned down by “the same man who shot Vernon Jordan.” On another occasion, as reported in the Atlanta Constitution, he said “a number of Georgia legislators and politicians were involved in his shooting to stop him ‘from exposing what’s really going on in this country.’ ”
In August 1983, Franklin wrote a letter to the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office, headed by Daniel J. “Danny” Porter. It said, “My name is Joseph Paul Franklin. I shot Larry Flynt. If you bring me to Gwinnett County, I’ll tell you about it.”
Instead, the next month, Captain Luther Franklin “Mac” McKelvey and Sergeant Mike Cowart went to Marion and spent four hours meeting with Franklin. At first, he said the letter was a hoax, but then agreed to talk seriously with the officers.
“In the initial contact with us, he felt us out, and we felt him out,” Cowart told Constitution reporter Rob Levin. “He indicated a good bit of knowledge about the case and gave us enough leads that we felt we had probable cause to seek an indictment. The more we checked his background, the more of a suspect he became.”
Following the visit, McKelvey had several telephone calls with Franklin. Though he knew Franklin had been reading up on the case in the newspapers, he said the convict provided a piece of information that only the gunman could have known.
As for motive, the original theory seemed likely—that Franklin didn’t like Hustler’s portrayal of mixed-race couples in its sexually explicit pictorials.
This brings up another question: Why would Franklin suddenly rat himself out if he actually was the shooter?
With his notoriety and the previous brutal attempt on his life, Franklin must have felt that even though he was now in Marion’s protective wing, he was a marked man. He clearly stated he wanted to be moved to another, less dangerous prison, possibly in one of the state correctional systems. Being tried and found guilty of a state crime might achieve that goal. And given his previous experience, there was always the possibility he could escape again as he was being transferred to a local jail or in a courthouse.
There are a number of reasons violent offenders confess. If they already have been convicted of the crime, they might figure they have nothing to lose. Likewise, they might talk if they aren’t getting out of prison in their natural lives and the crimes they talk about that have not been tried are not eligible for the death penalty. Some are just plain bored. And others want the perverse credit and recognition that comes from being regarded as a big-time criminal.
And this brings up an additional motive for Franklin’s selective confessions. The simple way to describe it is: What good are your “accomplishments” if you don’t get recognition for them? A serial killer who takes pride and personal satisfaction from his crimes is always going to be in an emotional bind. He can’t let anyone know without being arrested, but as long as it’s a secret, he’s still a nobody. For criminals for whom the act of killing is the most important aspect of their lives—the aspect that gives their lives meaning—it is emotionally difficult not to be publicly associated with the murders.
Two of the most glaring cases of this in my career were New York City’s Son of Sam and the BTK Strangler in Wichita, Kansas. It wasn’t enough for seemingly mind-mannered postal clerk David Berkowitz to kill couples in cars in 1977 and then return to the scenes and relive the feeling of power and domination while he masturbated. He had to have recognition, which is why he styled himself the Son of Sam, acolyte of the three-thousand-year-old demon residing in his neighbor’s Labrador retriever, and wrote to NYPD detective Captain Joseph Borelli and Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. It wasn’t enough for municipal inspector, cop wannabe, and general loser Dennis Rader to carry out his cherished “projects” of breaking into homes, waiting for the occupants to return, tying them up in agonizing poses, strangling them, and watching them die; he had to let the police and media know that a serial killer was deserving of their attention and respect. Craving attention like Berkowitz, he also gave himself a moniker that appealed to him. Rader, living employed and undetected in Wichita, could not afford to reveal himself, though he flew as close to the flame of fame as he dared by sending letters to the media. And ultimately, it was a combination of written and digital communication that finally undid him. Were it not for that communication, he might never have been caught.
I don’t think Franklin was as undisciplined as either Berkowitz or Rader, though he was just as irrational in a lot of ways. But though he saw himself as mission oriented, the publicity and recognition were important to him. How was he going to lead a race war if no one knew who the leader was? It doesn’t matter whether the motive is sexual and “artistic” gratification, or a calling to foment a race war and become a hero of right-wing racist extremists. Franklin was already in prison, in all likelihood for the rest of his life, so the glory of the notoriety was a powerful lure. He had worked hard and devoted his life to these murders—in his mind, why shouldn’t he get the credit and attention he deserved?
The motivation is even more complex. Our research had already revealed to us that three urges to power were operant in the minds of just about every serial killer: manipulation, domination, and control. Reaching out to law enforcement agencies and the media, having them respond to his beck and call, alternately confessing and then denying, and getting a chance to show off and assert himself in a public courtroom would fulfill all three urges, as well as getting him out of Marion and temporarily alleviating the boredom of maximum-security lockdown.
Ironically, Flynt, at the time, was serving his own fifteen-month sentence in the hospital wing of the Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, North Carolina, for contempt of court in refusing to disclose how he obtained videotape evidence in the cocaine smuggling and trafficking case against automobile entrepreneur John Z. DeLorean. And from prison, Flynt told CNN reporter Larry Woods that he had put out a contract on the life of President Ronald Reagan and would kill him himself, “if I can ever get anywhere close to him.” Flynt was much fuller of bluster than Franklin, but, given my experience in law enforcement, I tend to take every threat seriously.
Gwinnett investigators still weren’t sure how solid their case was because at the same time Franklin had confessed to them, he gave a long, rambling telephone interview to the Cincinnati Enquirer in which he stated, “I hate Flynt . . . because he publishes Black-white dating. But I had nothing to do with shooting him.” By this point, my impression was that Franklin said whatever was in his head at the time, or whatever he thought would give him the easiest time going forward, with little or no regard to either truth or consistency.
And he was only beginning to talk. While Franklin was apparently willing to confess to crimes that he’d long been associated with, he was also willing to bring up crimes that had never been previously connected to him.
Late in 1983, an attorney representing Franklin contacted the police department in Madison, Wisconsin, and said his client wanted to talk about a murder in their jurisdiction in August 1977. By the time Detective Captain Richard Wallden was able to get in touch with Franklin the following February, Franklin told him of killing a Black man and white woman at a large shopping center and killing another woman in the spring of 1980 in Tomah, about midway between Madison and
Eau Claire in east central Wisconsin.
With regard to the Tomah murder, Franklin said he had spotted a young woman near the East Towne Mall and offered her a ride. He said he thought she was on her way to Minnesota. It turned out she was actually on her way to her parents’ hog farm in Frederic, Wisconsin, with a planned intermediary stop in Tomah to pick up her car, which she’d left at her uncle’s house. In the car, he asked where she had gotten her suntan. She said she had recently returned from Jamaica. According to Franklin, she said she preferred Jamaican men to African American men because they were better-looking, and with that, her fate was sealed.
When they were close to Tomah, he asked if she wanted to smoke some marijuana. He pulled off the road near what he thought was a state park. It was isolated. He pulled out his .44 Magnum and ordered her out of the car, as if he intended to rape her. As she was walking away from the car, he cocked the handgun and shot her in the back. He left the body there and threw her belongings out of the car.
He claimed to make a habit of picking up female hitchhikers because he didn’t think it was safe for them to be alone, but apparently, if they violated his own self-established rules of life, then they didn’t deserve to live.
Also in 1980, Franklin said he picked up two white females in what he thought was Beckley, West Virginia. He recalled that they were on their way to some kind of anti-nuclear demonstration. He remembered the phrase “Rainbow Meeting” as well as them telling him they were Communists, which I doubted. It would be one thing for two young women to say they were anti-nuclear protesters. I doubted in 1980 they would identify themselves as Communists. I thought Communist was simply one of Franklin’s all-purpose descriptions for people he did not approve of.
Killer's Shadow Page 14
