Killer's Shadow

by John E. Douglas

  During the course of the conversation with the hitchhikers in West Virginia, he either asked whether or perceived that they went out with Black men. He said he shot them both with the same .44 with which he had killed the previous hitchhiker.

  As appalling as this kind of crime was—killing white female hitchhikers upon their self-reporting of relationships with African American men—as revolting as I personally found it, it didn’t really surprise me. Rather, it confirmed Franklin’s obsession with race mixing and the erosion of white America. But there was another factor that spoke directly to the neurotic insecurities of Franklin and his ilk. One of the most powerful tropes in American racism is the fear of Black male sexuality. While it was common for white men in the antebellum South to rape their female slaves, the notion of Black men having sex with white women was about as abhorrent an idea as a racist male could conceive of. Though miscegenation was the stated concern, and though African Americans have fought the stereotype and depiction for more than a century, the subtext that racist men felt they were sexually inferior to Black men and therefore in danger of losing their women has been a motivating factor for much of the hate and violence visited upon African Americans throughout our history. As soon as I learned of Franklin’s murders of hitchhiking women, I was certain this fear of inadequacy was combined with all of his other compensatory criminal behavior.

  He told Wallden no more about the incident in West Virginia, but this would develop into one of the most perplexing and controversial cases attributed to Joseph Paul Franklin.

  They spoke for a little over half an hour. After the call, Wallden telephoned Tomah PD, which confirmed that there had been an unsolved homicide in the area Franklin described, in which a white female was shot twice with a .44 Magnum. Her name was Rebecca Bergstrom, she was a twenty-year-old student, and the crime had taken place in Mill Bluff State Park. Her body was found the next day, May 3, by two teenagers and she was identified by the passport she was carrying. She was fully clothed and there was no sign of sexual assault. Since money was found in the wallet in her purse, robbery was also ruled out. A local newspaper article at the time said she had recently returned from a ten-day vacation in Jamaica and had a summer job waiting for her at a Frederic bank. She had been shot in the head and back, and spent shells were found nearby. There were no suspects, though Sheriff Ray Harris speculated she had been shot by someone who had offered her a ride. She was described by those who knew her best as friendly and loving.

  Unexpected as these revelations were, the unsolved crime Franklin was mainly calling Wisconsin law enforcement about concerned Alphonce Manning Jr., who was Black, and Toni Schwenn, who was white, both twenty-three years of age. They were shot to death at four thirty on the afternoon of August 7, 1977, in the parking lot of the East Towne Mall in Madison, near the JCPenney department store. After checking out his information, Captain Wallden sent Detectives Greg Reuter and Ted Mell to interview Franklin at Marion on February 16 and 17, 1984.

  Investigators from Madison PD and the Intra-County Major Crimes Investigative Unit had only sketchy details to work with. There was a description of a white male in his early twenties with ear-length brown hair, driving a Chevrolet Impala with out-of-state license plates. The recalled color scheme of white with green numerals matched plates from Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, and Indiana. Witnesses said the car bumped the black Oldsmobile Toronado Manning was driving, at which point Manning stopped and got out of his car, whereupon the driver shot Manning several times as he approached. Then he got out of his car and went over to where Schwenn was sitting in the passenger seat and shot her through the car window as she was trying to escape, shattering the glass. The suspect was described as about five feet ten, 170 pounds, and wearing a dark green tank top and blue pants. A broad-brimmed hat found behind Manning’s car was believed to belong to the killer.

  Madison police officer Martin Micke was at the mall investigating a stolen car report and talking to the owners in his squad car. When he heard two or three loud gunshots, he had the couple immediately get out of the car and Micke sped to the scene and radioed for assistance. As he approached, one of the witnesses waved for attention and pointed to the green Impala racing out of the parking lot. Micke took off after it but lost it in a confusion of traffic and pedestrians. Responding to Micke’s call, police set up roadblocks on highways leaving Madison but didn’t find the Impala.

  Schwenn died instantly at the scene. Manning died in a local hospital about an hour later.

  According to the local Capital Times newspaper the following day, narcotics and vice squad officers were called to the scene to determine whether the broad daylight murders were drug related. This was routine procedure in daytime attacks in crowded areas, but the detectives didn’t uncover anything that would lead them to suspect a drug deal. Detective Captain Stanley Davenport said there was nothing in either victim’s background that would explain why they were murdered.

  In an open letter published by the newspaper the following Wednesday, Toni’s close friend Cathy Teegardin publicly speculated that the murders were the result of “racism” by a “maniac assassin.”

  I thought this must have been a particularly difficult case for the police emotionally because Schwenn had worked in law enforcement, as a typist-receptionist with the Dane County Juvenile Detention Center. For the past two years since he arrived in the city, Manning had been a janitor at Madison East High School, from which Schwenn had graduated five years before. She had been in the concert and dance bands.

  Schwenn’s mother, Janet, told Capital Times reporter Ed Bark, “To us she was the greatest. You can ask any of her friends.”

  Judy Manning described her older brother as a “nice person who did not bother anybody.” He had been a star football player on his high school team in Ruth, Mississippi. Friends said he was always eager to help anyone who needed it.

  “He had a strong work ethic. He didn’t sit back and let people take care of him,” his cousin Tenia Jenkins-Stovall told a UPI reporter. He and Toni had met at a nightclub shortly after he arrived in Madison.

  Toni’s best friend, Linda Langlois, recalled, “She was real outgoing and physically beautiful. Alphonce was on the quiet side and Toni was loud and silly, so it was a good pair.”

  To me, the victimology has always been a critical part of any case, and I am often struck by the comparison in personalities between the victims and the offender. And here we had it again—warm, sensitive, life-loving individuals who had their young lives cut short by a sociopath who didn’t even know their names, but could easily pull the trigger repeatedly because they were of different races from each other and were moving their car too slowly to get out of his way.

  After being Mirandized, Franklin told Detectives Reuter and Mell he had originally gone to Madison with the intention of killing Dane County Circuit Court judge Archie Simonson, a Jewish judge who’d presided over a case of three Black men who had been accused of raping a white high school student and later freed. He told Reuter and Mell, “When I heard about that, I just decided to go up there and kill the bastard.”

  I found his plan fascinating as an insight into the criminal mind:

  At first, what I was going to do was just going to walk up to the door—found out where he lived—first go to his chambers during the day and find his court, so I was pretty sure I wasn’t getting the wrong person, ya know. I hate to kill an innocent person, ya know, so I figured I would just find out how he looked, would just walk up to his door one day, like on a weekend or something, when he would be home, and would have the pistol right back here, so I could fast draw it.

  Among other things, this passage tells us that he is operating strictly within his own belief system and that he holds it higher than established law. He is the one who gets to decide who is innocent and who is guilty and what the rules of society should be.

  If he couldn’t shoot the judge, he had a backup plan: “I just got through bombing a Jewish synagogue down in Ch
attanooga, Tennessee, ya know, and plus, a Jew’s home on the grounds [He seems to be referring to the rabbi’s home] . . . I was also considering about wiring, I had five or six sticks of dynamite saved and some number eight blasting caps, was going to wire this Jew’s car when he got in, ya know, if shooting wasn’t very feasible.”

  What happened instead, in his account, was that he was driving toward the capitol building to get a look at Simonson before going to his house later on to shoot him when he saw two young women waiting at a bus stop. He picked them up and gave them a ride to East Towne Mall. As he was leaving the mall, another car pulled out of a parking space, blocking his way. It drove very slowly down the middle of the lane. Franklin leaned on his horn. The other car stopped, and the driver, who was Black, got out and starting walking toward Franklin’s car. A white woman remained in the car. Since he had two guns and a load of dynamite in his trunk and thought he might have been spotted by a patrol car, he didn’t want to get into a fight with the man and draw police attention. Then, as he sometimes did, he turned fatalistic. If he was going to prison, he would do so in service to his “mission.” He opened his car door, shot the man, Alphonce Manning Jr., twice, then walked over to the car and fired two shots through the driver’s-side window at the woman, Toni Schwenn, as she tried to get away. He recalled his black felt hat dropping to the ground as he went back to his car. He described the hat in such detail that the detectives were certain it was the one found at the crime scene.

  Clearly, that pretty much matched the account witnesses had given police right after the shooting almost seven years before. Franklin described how he turned off East Washington Avenue onto Interstate 90, then turned off, returned to Madison, stopped at a McDonald’s, then drove around until the police presence had diminished, and returned to the Ramada Inn where he had stayed the night before. He left town the next day.

  As he was getting back on the interstate, he saw several police officers, but they apparently didn’t see him. “Evidently God blinded their eyes,” Franklin said. It later came out that the police were there to deal with a cattle truck accident and that they were consumed with helping injured motorists and rounding up cows.

  This all seemed pretty credible to me. This was not the kind of murder in which he would get glory, so I didn’t think it was made up or embellished. In fact, it was a failure of sorts, since it diverted him from his professed mission of assassinating Judge Simonson. While manipulation, domination, and control were still prime motivators for Franklin, he didn’t seem to have much interest in lying when it came to revealing another crime.

  Looking at this double murder within the larger timeline of his crimes, it was clear that these killings were a significant turning point. This crime was the one that opened his emotional floodgates, that truly unleashed Franklin’s reign of terror. He had already threatened presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. He had also apparently bombed a synagogue. But on his way to murder a supposedly Jewish judge, he had accidentally run up against the personification of his hatred and mission and found himself spontaneously able to kill. Now, suddenly, he knew he could do it, and he could get away with it.

  Every serial killer has a number of formative experiences along his pathway. This was a critical one for Franklin. He didn’t think about it ahead of time; it wasn’t a planned assassination. But the fact that he could take such “decisive” action on the spur of the moment would have given him the confidence, even if he only realized it subconsciously, that he could kill in any situation without hesitation. This, to a man like Franklin, would be liberating. It would represent the ultimate power.

  Though Franklin was not a traditionally minded sexual serial killer, I could see here a trait he had in common with just about all of them: the depersonalization and objectification of his victims. They were not individual human beings to him; they were merely stereotypes of African American men and white women. This complete lack of empathy not only drove him, it actually allowed him to commit these senseless and outrageous crimes and then talk about them dispassionately years later. By fitting the stereotypes in his mind, the victims were no longer “innocent” and therefore the murders were justifiable.

  At the same time that he depersonalized his victims, in typical paranoid fashion, he had an exalted view of his own importance and a detailed systematized belief in the machinations of organizations he perceived were out to get him personally:

  I think they’re trying to get rid of me, man. I just know too much about the government, international Communist-Jewish conspiracy, ya know, what the Jews are doing, all the right wing, all the Nazis. The Jews run every one of them, so they can just get the names of all the people who feel like I do, white racists and all, ya know, keep files on us, monitor activities, stuff like that. If you’ve ever been a member of it, they can automatically convict you of any charge, like if you’ve been with the Nazis, Ku Klux Klan or American Nazi Party, all they gotta do is get in front of that jury and say he is a member of this, and this is professional killing, therefore he is guilty, so they could, you may as well forget it if you go on trial or anything.

  He gave the detectives some printed pamphlets. “Read those pamphlets there I gave you there,” he suggested.

  “Yeah?” said Mell.

  “There’s a lot of truth in there.”

  “Okay,” said Reuter.

  “That’s what’s happening in the world.”

  Chapter 14

  Franklin was getting a lot of official visitors. Shortly after his phone conversation with Captain Wallden and the two-day interview with Detectives Reuter and Mell, Ronald Pearson, chief deputy of the Monroe County, Wisconsin, sheriff’s department, went down to Marion with Ernest V. Smith, an agent from the Wisconsin Department of Justice, to talk to Franklin himself about the murder of Rebecca Bergstrom, the lone female hitchhiker. Pearson and Smith came away with a confession and Pearson said he expected charges to be filed the following week.

  When reporters asked him what the motive had been for the murder, he said, “Same as in Madison. It was a racist motive.”

  And sadly, police had been closer than anyone had previously realized in linking it back to Franklin. As would become clear after Franklin’s confession to Wisconsin law enforcement, police had been on his trail. Just after the murders in the East Towne parking lot, two Madison PD detectives, Charles Lulling and Steven Urso, narrowed the plates to Alabama and went to Montgomery to search motor vehicle records. After going through thousands of vehicle records, they were down to fifty-five people who owned 1967 Chevrolets and lived in the Mobile area. They intended to contact and interview all of them, but after they’d talked to about fifteen people, they were called back to Madison because police officials didn’t think they were making any progress.

  Lulling and Urso disagreed vehemently. They were convinced that the shooter was among those fifty-five and that as soon as they talked to him, they would know it.

  “All we needed was a confrontation with him and we would have scored,” Lulling, by then the head of a private detective agency, told the Wisconsin State Journal in 1984. “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind.”

  At a press conference on Friday, March 2, 1984, Madison police chief David Couper disputed Lulling’s evaluation, saying that Detective Captain Stanley Davenport had ordered them back home because they had not produced any specific leads.

  Either way, Joseph Paul Franklin went on to kill at least nineteen more human beings.

  IN THE WAKE OF FRANKLIN’S CONFESSION TO HIS WISCONSIN KILLINGS, HIS visitor list at Marion kept growing because he kept talking.

  One of the crimes Franklin had mentioned during his initial two-day interview with Reuter and Mell was the bombing of a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on the night of July 29, 1977, which law enforcement had never connected with him. The blast had leveled the Beth Shalom Synagogue and scattered debris for a block around the wood and brick building. It shattered windows in a nearby motel and woke Rabbi Meir Stimler
, who was asleep in his home behind the synagogue. According to the Associated Press, “Witnesses said a section of the roof was blown into the air and landed virtually intact 20 yards in front of the demolished structure.” Because of the time the bomb went off, no one was killed or injured.

  At first, apparently unable to conceive that someone would intentionally blow up a house of worship, Rabbi Stimler discounted the possibility of a bomb having caused the explosion, which left a crater two feet deep near the middle of the building.

  Police bomb squad experts had a different take. When they examined the wreckage, they found evidence of nitrate deposits beneath what had been the floorboards, and an electrical cord used to detonate an explosive device. A long electrical extension cord apparently had been run to a socket on the exterior wall of the Airport Inn motel, about two hundred feet away. A police explosives expert said the bomb was “high-grade and highly sophisticated.” A neighbor said that when he felt his house shake he thought an airplane had crashed.

  Still, more than six years later, the case remained unsolved. And when discussing the Wisconsin crimes, Franklin brought up his knowledge of explosives—a skill, like bank robbing, that he’d honed during his criminal career—which led him to recount the times he’d used bombs to try and kill people.

  “Not really hard,” Franklin related. “But if you don’t know anything about explosives, you can get yourself blown up to pieces, and I put fifty pounds of dynamite in there, ya know, right underneath the synagogue, and wired a line all the way through the grass, next to the hotel. So, I found out there were no Jews in it, so I just plugged the sucker in, and it just went Choom! And it just disintegrated, man. It made big news, ya know. Matter of fact, I read about it when I was up in Ohio.”

  The crime had gone into ATF’s cold case file and been there ever since, but perhaps sharing the story with Madison Detectives Reuter and Mell made Franklin more willing to talk, because once again, he called the police to come talk to him at Marion. On February 29, 1984, less than two weeks after Reuter and Mell had been there to interview him, ATF agent George Bradley and Chattanooga police inspector Charles Love arrived. Wisconsin investigators Pearson and Smith would be next in line after that.