Killer's Shadow

by John E. Douglas

  The confession was clearly believable to the jurors, who took only two hours to return a guilty verdict on two counts of first-degree murder. “The defendant’s history of violence, terror, and murder prompts this court to do all it can so that he will never kill again,” Judge Byrne stated as he pronounced the two consecutive life sentences that were mandatory under Wisconsin law. When he asked if Franklin had anything he wished to say, Franklin, showing no emotion as the sentence was passed, replied, “No, Your Honor.”

  Afterward, standby defense counsel Olson made several comments reported by Sunny Schubert for the Wisconsin State Journal that I found highly astute. He said he had once come to see Franklin in jail unexpectedly, which really threw Franklin off. “He was quite upset with me. I figured, the guy’s in jail, what does he have to do? But he was angry because I upset his schedule,” which Olson reported consisted of meditating, praying, exercise, and reading the Bible. Saying he was “wily,” with “the skills of a hunter,” Olson noted, “He’s not good at abstract thinking. We all had fantasies when we were nine, ten, of being Superman or the Lone Ranger. Franklin never grew out of his.”

  That was all true, but you couldn’t deny that Franklin was criminally sophisticated. In spite of a scattering of eyewitnesses who thought they had seen him in motels or the vicinity of shootings that had just taken place, in all the killings attributed to him or that he was suspected of, no one had actually seen him holding a weapon in the firing position, pulling a trigger, or committing an act of murder. Had it not been for the fact, as Hal Harlowe suggested, that “He wanted to talk about it. It was bottled up too long,” this case would not have been brought to trial. So, on two levels, both the original acts and the compulsion to talk about them, Franklin had sealed his own fate.

  Outside the courtroom, Harlowe commented, “I am opposed to capital punishment, but Mr. Franklin puts those beliefs to a sore test. Mr. Franklin is a pathetic creature who will be dangerous until the day he dies.”

  Chapter 16

  Though Joseph Paul Franklin’s list of crimes had grown substantially since I’d put together my initial profile of him, the review of his time behind bars had prepared me to meet him face-to-face for the first time.

  As part of our joint Secret Service–FBI study project on the assassin personality, Secret Service special agent Ken Baker and I signed out a Bureau car and drove from Quantico to the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. Ken and I met originally when he was assigned by the Secret Service to attend the FBI’s Police Fellowship program at Quantico. This was a nine-to-twelve-month training course in criminal investigative analysis, including interview and interrogation techniques, investigative and proactive methods, prosecutorial strategies, and expert witness testimony. Ken was an exceptional agent with an impressive Secret Service background, and after the completion of the Police Fellowship, he was permanently detailed to our unit. We also had an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms special agent, Gus Gary, working with us, and those two dramatically increased our scope and expertise.

  My involvement with the Secret Service had begun in 1982, two years after I did the fugitive assessment on Franklin, when a Secret Service supervisor contacted me about doing an assessment on a character who signed himself C.A.T., who had written a threatening letter to President Carter, and now had written a series of them to President Reagan. The question the Service most cared about was whether this guy was actually dangerous, since one letter included photographs that he had been able to take close-up with a New York senator and congressman. Also worrisome was that the letters were postmarked from around the country, suggesting that C.A.T. was highly mobile, like Franklin.

  After I constructed a profile, we placed a carefully worded ad in the New York Post, which C.A.T. answered, thinking he was responding to a newspaper editor, whom he was encouraged to call to arrange a secret meeting. The “editor” was, in fact, a Secret Service agent, whom we coached on how to speak with the UNSUB on the phone and draw him out. I thought he would call from a pay phone in some public place, like Grand Central or Pennsylvania Station or one of the large libraries. We put a trap and trace on the phone line and kept him on the phone long enough for a combined Secret Service–FBI team to locate and pick him up at a phone booth in Penn Station. Alphonse Amodio Jr. was a twenty-seven-year-old native New Yorker who had a grudge against the world for not paying any attention to him. He had no particular political agenda. He was institutionalized after his trial judge requested a psychiatric evaluation. I didn’t think he was immediately dangerous, but what you always worry about with these types is when the strains of life become greater than the fear of death.

  Our first stop on this trip, though, was to see someone far more mission oriented. On the way to Marion, Ken and I took a slight dip southward to stop at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Morgan County, Tennessee, in the northern part of the state. Our subject there was James Earl Ray, who had assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., sniper style, in Memphis, on April 4, 1968. I wish I could say we got a lot of insight from him, but by this time, more than twenty years after Dr. King’s murder, Ray was so bound up in his own paranoid fantasies that we couldn’t be sure what he actually remembered, and we certainly couldn’t get into his headspace regarding the time immediately before, during, and after the assassination.

  Generally, we had found, the assassin-type personality is delusional and paranoid to some extent, but not in the sense of being insane. They are personally angry at specific types or groups of people, and anyone whose belief system is different from their own. But Ray was at the extreme. Though he had originally pleaded guilty, he now had recanted his confession and said he realized he was the unwitting dupe of a complex conspiracy to kill the civil rights icon. None of this rang true, but I can’t say we were able to get any valuable understanding or useful information out of him. Not all of the prison interviews go the way you hope.

  Likewise, I had no idea how the interview with Franklin would go or how he would react to us, so as we drove up through Kentucky on our way to Illinois, Ken and I talked out a strategy. We had already extensively researched his criminal file and read every newspaper story we could find. The approach I suggested to Ken was that we present ourselves as special agents from two different law enforcement agencies who were in awe of his criminal “accomplishments” and wanted to learn how he was able to outsmart us for so long. We decided it would be best if we wore our dark suits rather than the casual clothing that we normally wore when we interviewed serial killers, in an attempt to put them somewhat at ease and symbolically narrow the distance between us and them. With Franklin, we thought a different approach was called for. While our formal appearance would reflect our authority, we would let him take the lead in the interview process. We would also encourage him to ask us questions or suggest topics if he wished. This would feed his fragile but sizable ego and let him feel that he had the edge on us and was once again in control.

  Interviewing assassin types is somewhat different from interviewing serial killers, rapists, or other violent offenders. They would almost always define themselves as mission oriented, though that mission might be political, social, or deeply personal. Though David Berkowitz, for example, had no sexual contact with any of his victims, his crimes were certainly a compensation for his own sense of sexual inadequacy. In addition to the motive of killing couples who had found relationships that he had not, his mission was to achieve fame and notoriety. He derived a sense of power from creating mortal fear throughout the city of New York.

  We always tried to make the most efficient use of our travel time when conducting the prison interviews, so Franklin was not the only apparently politically motivated killer that Ken and I were planning on speaking with at Marion. We also wanted to meet Garrett Brock “Gary” Trapnell, who was serving a life sentence in federal prison for air piracy, kidnapping, and armed robbery.

  Together, Trapnell and Franklin made for a study in contrasts in almost every way, except for th
e fact that both were very good at robbing banks. Trapnell was one of the smartest and, dare I say, the most clever and “charming” offenders I have ever dealt with, as well as the most resourceful. He had made his living as a con man, bank robber, and burglar. He robbed a string of banks in Canada, stole about a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry in the Bahamas, took on a variety of pseudonyms and disguises, and carried on marriages with at least six women at the same time. In 1978, he was able to convince a forty-three-year-old woman friend, Barbara Ann Oswald, to hijack a helicopter in St. Louis and get the pilot to fly to Marion, land in the prison yard, and rescue him, perhaps the boldest jailbreak idea of all time. During the landing, pilot Allen Barklage, a Vietnam veteran, managed to wrestle a gun away from Oswald and kill her, thereby thwarting the plan.

  His most notorious crime was what got me interested in him as a subject. On January 28, 1972, he boarded TWA Flight 2 in Los Angeles with a .45-caliber handgun hidden inside a plaster cast on his arm. Midway through the flight to New York, he hijacked the plane and made a list of demands: $306,800 in cash (he had recently lost that amount in a court case), the release of imprisoned Black professor and political activist Angela Davis, and a formal pardon for himself from President Richard Nixon.

  When the plane landed at Kennedy Airport in New York, Trapnell released the ninety-three passengers but held the crew at gunpoint so he could negotiate. He threatened to crash the plane into the terminal if his demands were not met. After about eight hours, he agreed to allow a crew switch and refueling. During the switch, an FBI team dressed as ground crew boarded the aircraft and managed to shoot Trapnell in the arm. As he was being led off the plane, he again repeated his demand regarding Angela Davis.

  His first trial ended in a hung jury when one of the jurors bought his insanity defense, based on a multiple personality claim. He second trial resulted in conviction.

  As we neared Marion, Ken and I expected to confront two politically minded criminals on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Trapnell took a huge risk in trying to get Dr. Davis freed, even greater than Franklin took every time he killed a Black victim. But I couldn’t figure out the reason for Trapnell’s demand. Nothing I could find in his background indicated any particular connection to left-wing, civil rights, or radical causes. There were rumors that he had a romantic obsession with Davis, but that would have been out of character for him. So, what was his actual motive? We wanted to see whether Trapnell and Franklin were actually similar characters with opposite missions. If so, that would give us important insight into the mission-oriented criminal personality.

  Marion is a large, bland complex of buildings enclosed by two parallel rows of fencing and surrounded by a perimeter road. It is in the midst of a green field cut out of the surrounding forest. The access, appropriately, is from Prison Road. We pulled into the parking lot outside the main gate and then checked in. It was funny to look at a row of buildings, imagining the prison yard behind them, and wonder how many ways both Trapnell and Franklin had thought of to try to escape from its confines.

  Chapter 17

  When we met with Franklin, he was still being held in the protective basement K Unit. He came up from the cellblock by a staircase with a metal railing that Ken and I could see through the door of the small room where we were waiting. You could hear the jailhouse chatter from down below. Word had gotten out that two FBI agents were in the prison. We were surprised that Franklin came up on his own, unaccompanied by a guard.

  Our meeting room had beige walls, windows covered with bars, a table, and plastic stacking chairs around it. Ken and I were wearing our darks suits. Franklin was wearing thick glasses, jeans, and a blue prison shirt. I remember that his light brown hair, which varied in length over the years, was long and wild. He seemed quite upbeat and gratified that two federal agents were there to see him. We indicated a chair, but he remained standing, as he would throughout the interview.

  We were not there to interrogate him or clear any cases, though I would be happy if we had. We were there to learn more about how his mind worked, and how we could apply it to our study of assassins, snipers, and similar types of offender. If you think it’s like a cross-examination in a murder trial, it’s not. If you think it’s like Clarice Starling’s confrontation with Hannibal Lecter, it’s not. The idea is to keep it calm and easygoing. You don’t want to get confrontational or in his face, because you don’t want him to manufacture any false memories because you’ve gotten him riled up. That would be counterproductive to the objective, which is to get a sense of his actual feelings and motivations and how they correlate to the crime itself. In most cases, we are dealing with what German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, called “the banality of evil.” Despite how emotionally satisfying it might be on a personal level, I’ve never been accusatory or expressed outrage or moral superiority in a prison interview; if it gets too tense from the subject’s perspective, then I will not achieve the objective.

  We had several goals, among them to see how closely Franklin matched my initial evaluation of him and to get a stronger sense of his actual motivations. Nine years before, in 1980, when I did my fugitive assessment, profiling and behavioral analysis were still new and experimental. Frankly, I was guessing at a lot of what I came up with. Now, with the program firmly established and an expert team working with me, I wanted to see how right or wrong I was on various pieces of the total picture.

  We knew that before Franklin set out on his murderous rampage, he had separated himself from the various right-wing groups he had joined when he decided they were more talk than action. But one of the things we were really hoping to determine was where and when his movement toward dangerousness actually began. What were the precipitating events in his life? How organized was he, actually? How much planning did he do? And what was going through his mind as he committed each crime, and in the hours and days afterward? As far as I have been able to learn, he had never claimed responsibility for a crime he didn’t actually commit, so I was at least confident that we would get reliable factual information from him.

  I can’t give a blow-by-blow account of our conversation with Franklin because after our first interview, with Ed Kemper, we stopped recording them. Unlike an interrogation, where you are looking to substantiate facts and disprove lies, the prison interviews were intended to be more subjective and expansive, to focus on emotions and sensations, and we wanted our subjects to think and speak freely, unencumbered by the concern that their words would be used against them. This was particularly important for paranoid types like Franklin.

  No matter what they’re in for or how long their sentences may be, most convicts entertain some vague hope of one day getting out, whether to go straight or resume their criminal careers. So I would usually begin with some kind of encouragement to cooperate, like, “We can’t guarantee anything, but by participating in this, you will be helping law enforcement with our understanding, and we will make it clear to the warden and other authorities that you answered our questions honestly and forthrightly.” This can be particularly effective with someone like Franklin; we knew from studying his background that he had once wanted to be a cop, so we tried to make him feel like a “partner” in this exercise.

  Through my words and body language, I tried to make it clear that our approach was to be agreeable and nonjudgmental. Just as in hostage negotiation, the aim is to listen to what the subject is saying, then restate the content and paraphrase it so he knows you’re both on the same level. If you let them hear back what you think they’re telling you, that can go a long way toward establishing trust and making sure you get the message clearly.

  Franklin was polite and almost affable. On one level, this didn’t surprise me. If he were sullen and withdrawn or overtly threatening when dealing with “challenging” interpersonal encounters, no hitchhiker would have ever gotten into a car with him. At the same time, he was wary, and his eyes kept dartin
g back and forth between Ken and me, trying to size us up. This was in contrast to the transcripts I’d gone over of his sessions with the police detectives and ATF agent, where he’d been forthcoming right from the beginning. I think the difference was that in those instances, he had initiated the meeting, so he felt in control. Since we had asked to speak with him, he didn’t know what our agenda was.

  Still standing, he asked me in a joking way if I was one of the FBI agents who had infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, because he said the Klan probably had more FBI informants in it than actual members.

  Once we made it clear that we had studied his background and rap sheet extensively, he started opening up more. We explained our assassin study and said that since he had been such a successful and prolific killer, we thought it was important to include him. He nodded and seemed to appreciate this validation. This tactic tends to work best with the more self-important killers, the ones who take themselves most seriously, which was certainly the case with Franklin.

  My technique in the prison interviews was to tell the subject about himself as I understood him and see how he reacted. This tended to compliment the subject that I had spent so much time and effort studying his life, and it also would get him to react in such a way that he would give a good sense of his own self-image.

  I reviewed his early life and his relationship with his parents. I said it was my understanding that he had started out as a good student but had lost interest in school. He was not much interested in athletic teams or extracurricular activities and pretty much kept to himself. He listened without saying much, which let me know we were on the right track.