Killer's Shadow

by John E. Douglas

  To see how far we could take the assassin aspect, we started off by asking him if he had been aware that President Carter was going to be making a campaign stop near him in Florida in October 1980. He admitted he knew about it. But when we asked him, given the letter he’d written to the then-candidate, whether he had planned an assassination attempt, he seemed to slough off the possibility. Not that he wouldn’t have minded shooting the president from a distance, but he said, like Arthur Bremer, that since the assassination of President Kennedy, it had been too difficult to knock off a president, and that he certainly didn’t think he could have pulled it off from a sniper’s nest. He said he didn’t consider President Carter important enough to sacrifice his own life, even if he had been able to get close enough with a gun.

  That didn’t mean he had backed off any of his racist and anti-Semitic philosophy. Just as with the previous interviews he’d had with investigators, he was completely matter-of-fact with his views. His only regret was that he hadn’t been able to start a full-scale race war, though he knew he had inspired other like-minded individuals.

  What struck us both was how sincere Franklin was about his beliefs, how unashamed he was, and how little he cared whether he was popular or what the general public thought of him. This is not to say he was indifferent to the response of people who thought the same way he did; he definitely saw himself as a hero to that cohort and wanted their approval. More important, he made clear that he felt he was in essence writing a script for them to follow. That is fairly unusual for a repeat killer. Either they are only interested in fulfilling their own dark fantasies and getting away with each crime, or, like David Berkowitz, they want the wide-scale notoriety and sense of power that instilling fear gives them. Franklin had a clear-cut distinction in his own mind about who he wanted to influence. I would therefore have to characterize him as thoughtful, at least about the subjects that interested him.

  I asked him about the Vernon Jordan attack—the one crime he had never admitted to—setting up the scenario in Indiana and describing how I thought it went down. In response, he smiled like the Cheshire Cat, and with an expression I can only characterize as pride asked, “What do you think?” I shrugged, indicating he should continue. “I’ll just say that justice was done,” he said. I detected a real internal conflict here. When Ken and I talked about it afterward, we strongly believed Franklin was afraid that if he admitted that one, word would get out in the prison and the Black inmates would figure out a way to get at him.

  On the other hand, he freely admitted shooting Larry Flynt for publishing features with mixed-race couples. He made it clear that despite what he considered his strongly Christian beliefs, he was not against pornography; he was actually quite an avid consumer. But when he saw the pictorial involving the interracial couple, he blew up.

  Originally, he had gone to Hustler headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, where he looked up Flynt’s home and office addresses in the local telephone directory. But when he got there, he said, he discovered Flynt was in Georgia for the obscenity trial and was staying with President Jimmy Carter’s evangelist sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton. We had checked this out before the interview and it is true that the two of them had a relationship and Stapleton even converted the pornographer for a while. Franklin drove by her house but didn’t see any sign that he was there.

  Later, in Atlanta, he heard more about the trial taking place in Lawrenceville, so he found it on a map. When he found out it was close, he drove there, checked into a motel, and started surveilling the courthouse looking for a good hidden sniper’s perch. He read that Flynt liked to take his lunch breaks at the V&J Cafeteria, so he walked the route between it and the courthouse to look for a good sniper’s nest. He found an abandoned house nearby. Once he fired, he thought the shot had been good enough to kill Flynt, and he was disappointed when he learned he had lived. He told us he even considered going into the hospital to finish him off but couldn’t figure out a way to safely escape.

  He described in detail how he planned his sniper crimes, how he would try to visualize every detail beforehand, just as an actor or dancer might before going onstage. He said he tried to think of and plan for every contingency that might come up, such as if a cop happened by or heard the gunshots. He always had his escape routes mapped out and knew how he was going to dispose of the weapon. When he only managed to wound a victim, he considered the mission a failure.

  In many interviews, the nonverbal cues are at least as important as whatever the subject says. As Franklin stood before us, he would act out what he was describing, demonstrating his shooting techniques and martial arts skills. I’m pretty sure he thought he was impressing us, but as Ken and I glanced at each other, we had to control ourselves not to laugh at his absurd antics. I kept reminding myself he was proudly acting out his methods of killing innocent human beings.

  What is always so interesting to me about these encounters, and Franklin was no exception, is how the subject may be very vague and claim not to remember certain features of his life, or even entire time spans. But when it comes to describing the crime itself, once they transport themselves back into that mindset, they can recall every fine detail. They may remember little about the victim’s reaction, unless that is part of the signature aspect, but they can often recapitulate every move they made during the commission of the crime. And in every instance with Franklin, he could tell us exactly where he was, recall the car he was driving, if and when he got out, the model of weapon and caliber of ammunition he used, and where he aimed to get the most effective shot.

  When I set up for him the murders of Darrell Lane and Dante Evans Brown, the two young boys in Cincinnati, and mentally placed Franklin on the railroad trestle looking down on them through his gunsight, he responded in a dispassionate and matter-of-fact manner. He could re-create the exact moment when he squeezed the trigger for each kill. Yes, he had been hoping for a mixed-race couple to kill, but when the boys came along, it was at least an opportunity to eliminate two Black people.

  I was listening closely to see if I could detect even a hint of remorse about victims so young. The grief of the two families must have been unimaginable. And I did think Franklin spoke with a slight tinge of regret about this one, but not, in my estimation, enough for him to lose sleep over.

  What was most revealing to me was not even the details he recalled so much as the manner in which he related them. There was neither triumph nor remorse. If he talked about achieving only one kill with five shots, it was as if he were a professional baseball player describing how he only went one-for-five in yesterday’s game. While he was forthright and passionate about his racism and stated plainly that he felt the survival of the white race was at stake, his description of the crimes themselves was completely procedural.

  When we brought up the spontaneous Manning and Schwenn murders in Madison, he shifted to telling us about how he had planned to kill Judge Simonson. But as we directed the conversation back to the East Towne parking lot, he admitted that his temper got the better of him and he was diverted from his original goal. He conceded that this had been a stupid move on his part and that he was lucky to get away. He kept coming back to Simonson and contrasted how carefully he had plotted that one out, even down to making sure he could positively identify him and not kill the wrong individual. Most violent offenders are a mass of contradictions, and these observations helped us delineate the organized and disorganized components of Franklin’s criminal orientation. When he was able to keep his highly systematized belief structure intact, he was a well-organized offender. But when his hair-trigger temper was set off, though he would fall back on that belief structure for the targets of his rage, the organized aspects of his criminal personality went out the window. Yet despite his admission that going after the couple in the parking lot was ill-advised and risky, the way he told the story, it was as if the couple had gotten in the way and therefore bore the blame for his not being able to complete his mission. He seemed to imply that
being able to rid the world of one more interracial couple was at least some accomplishment, though.

  It wasn’t just that he was personally offended by Blacks and whites socializing together. What he was ultimately afraid of was their mating, which was why he had reacted so strongly to the Hustler pictorial. “Miscegenation is the genocide of the white race,” he said. From his tone and casual body language we got the impression it was one of his frequently quoted slogans. In fact, I had come to feel that the racist declarations and rants were a sort of shield for him, a way to protect himself from having to delve into the reasons for his own inadequacies.

  Like many serial killers whose crimes are sexually based rather than mission oriented, Franklin told us he was always looking, always on the hunt, for a target. This helped explain the continuum of his activities, from highly planned crimes like the bombing in Chattanooga, to the East Towne parking lot shooting in Madison because a car in front of him wasn’t moving quickly enough, to the default shooting of the two teenage cousins in Cincinnati after he couldn’t spot a mixed-race couple to kill. The point is, in each case, he was prepared to take a life; he was ready for the opportunity to present itself.

  The difference between him and a typical serial killer is that rather than return to the scene of the crime or body dump site, or taking souvenirs from the victim, all in an effort to relive the power, pleasures, and satisfaction of the crime, as soon as Franklin pulled the trigger or detonated the bomb, he was through with that crime and already thinking about the next one.

  With the types of predators I’ve dealt with, the distinction between modus operandi—M.O.—and signature is very important. M.O. is what an offender does to accomplish the crime, such as bringing a gun and a demand note to a bank he intends to rob. Signature is what he does to satisfy himself emotionally in the crime. For example, with Dennis Rader, the BTK Strangler, it was binding, and watching his victims die slowly.

  This was why Franklin’s description of his methods was so revealing. I have to say, one of the aspects of his criminal career that would have thrown us off in any UNSUB analysis was that he employed both firearms and explosives, and that he targeted both African Americans and Jews. This is pretty unusual and probably led to what we call linkage blindness—the inability to connect two or more crimes and attribute them to the same individual, whether that individual is known or remains an UNSUB. Once we got to examining Franklin’s case and background, it made sense. After his eye accident, he had trained himself to be a crack shot, which made him a skilled sniper. And from immersing himself in Nazi and right-wing extremist literature, he had learned how to make rudimentary but effective bombs. So, the M.O. wasn’t important to him except in how effective it would be in killing his intended targets. No other serial killers I can think of quite fit this description. Generally, once they find one method that works for them, they stick with it. And, of course, if the means of killing is part of the offender’s signature, that will not change at all, though it might easily become more elaborate over time.

  Now, Franklin was no Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who felt a need to show his intellectual prowess by creating complex and elaborate bombs and sent them off through the mail to his carefully chosen targets. Franklin was not nearly that sophisticated. He had to rig up his bombs on the spot with dynamite and blasting caps and be there to detonate them. He was not concerned with the “art” of the murder method, only the result.

  When we asked him how he chose whether to use a gun or a bomb on an intended victim, he really didn’t have an answer. He said that a bomb has the potential to kill more people, which is what he hoped to do at Beth Shalom Synagogue in Chattanooga, but that didn’t explain his decision to blow up Morris Amitay’s house rather than simply wait in hiding to shoot him. We suspected it had to do with the fact that he had just set off a bomb, so he felt comfortable with it.

  What it seemed to come down to, as Franklin explained it, was what he could get hold of at the moment, and in some places, explosive material was easier to come by than in others. In other words, unlike a Ted Kaczynski, someone with a genius IQ who took pride in his bomb-making craft, to Franklin, both the guns and the bombs were simply M.O.—means to an end. This versatility of M.O. had nothing to do with his level of organization; it merely served his signature—striking out against Blacks, Jews, and race mixing.

  He was practical in other ways, too. He told us he would never rob a bank in a city or town where he was intending to commit a murder, or vice versa. He knew that most banks had video surveillance systems, and even if he disguised himself, as he routinely did, he wouldn’t risk being linked by witnesses and security footage from the two events.

  Unlike a Rader or even a Kaczynski, Franklin didn’t fantasize about the act itself; that wasn’t what aroused him. Rather, it was the mission, so it really didn’t matter to him whether the tool was a gun, a bundle of dynamite sticks, or some other explosive. As long as it killed his enemies, he was satisfied and could move on.

  Even that, I sensed listening to him, was not a complete explanation. As he roamed from place to place, he regularly picked up hitchhikers. But only teenage girls and young women, some of them prostitutes, most of them not. When I asked him about this, he repeated his line about wanting to protect them from danger, particularly the danger of Black predators, though the irony of his having been probably the most predatory individual out there at the time was lost on him.

  Assessing him as we listened, what we realized was that in his own way, Franklin was just as much of a profiler as we were. Every time he picked up one of these women, he began conducting his own assessment protocol, asking questions to elicit the kind of information he found relevant to his “work.” He made it clear that he thought of himself as a vigilante and he was looking at victimology, just as I did when I worked a case. The difference was that I was evaluating the victim after the fact, trying to figure out how much risk the situation had placed her in and what had made the offender choose her for his crime. Franklin, on the other hand, had the strategic advantage of having the unsuspecting young woman there in his car and under his control when he decided whether she was to be a salvation project or a victim.

  Nor should these hitchhiking murders be confused with the East Towne Mall parking lot murders in evaluating organization versus disorganization. While each pickup was spontaneous, the methodology and criminal intent were not. He may have chosen whom he stopped for by their looks or how he was feeling at the moment, but what he was going to do once the young woman got in the car was all planned out, and he knew how he would qualify her on one side of his personal moral ledger or the other.

  Or, to put it into a more psychosexual context, he was picking up these women and girls because they appealed to him, and then, like a stern but loving daddy or a dominant master, he got to decide whether they were deserving of reward or punishment—in this case, life or death. And here is where he hearkened back to my general experience with violent serial predators. As we have noted, he and his siblings were subjected to harsh physical and psychological punishments, often when they didn’t perceive they’d done anything wrong. With these girls and young women, he was reversing roles with his parents and acting out his own childhood trauma, but on a far higher and deadlier order of magnitude. His frame of reference for the ultimate misbehavior was race mixing. So, if he found out that one of the women had engaged in it, it was his privilege and obligation to punish her, whether or not she perceived she had done anything wrong. And for almost any serial killer, even if the sexual component of the crime is secondary, having the power to punish his victim is a huge motivator and turn-on.

  Though he wouldn’t admit it to us, I suspected that he cruised for female hitchhikers to pick up secretly hoping they would turn out to have associated with Black men so he could mete out his form of discipline and justice.

  We’ve found that family has tremendous influence on the development of almost all predatory criminals. What they become and d
o is deeply rooted in family. As we got into his formative years, it was clear that Franklin had had a pretty miserable time of it. Aside from the physical abuse from both parents, he described how his mother insisted that he and his brother Gordon come home directly from school every day and sit on the couch, watching television if they wanted to, rather than stay outside and play with other boys. Though it wasn’t violent in and of itself, this was certainly a manifestation of extreme control by an unstable woman, and Franklin told us he thought it stunted his emotional growth. I wouldn’t disagree with that. Frequenting prostitutes, whom you don’t have to impress with charm, is a common manifestation of that stunted emotional growth in adult men. He also mentioned that his mother said her mother used to beat her as a child. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon pattern, as we see when he started beating his second wife, Anita.

  At one point, he said, he came across photographs of his mother’s family back in Germany. The young boys were dressed in Hitler Youth uniforms. We could tell from his hesitation in speaking and the way his body tensed up that Franklin’s conflicted views of his family were further confused and complicated by this revelation. He hated his mother and wasn’t too crazy about his father, so on one level, he would have been predisposed against their families. On the other hand, knowing that he was descended from pure Aryan stock would have given him a sense of pride in his heritage and strengthened his sense of mission and purpose in fulfilling his Nazi destiny.

  Franklin’s memories of his childhood accident were vivid. The family was living in New Orleans at the time. Though it has been alternately reported as an incident with a BB gun and a calamitous fall off a bicycle, he told us that what actually happened was that he and Gordon were out back trying to pull the spring out of an old window shade, each from the opposite side, when suddenly it sprang out and hit him squarely in the right eye. If it had been a BB gun that caused the accident, I had theorized that his preoccupation with precise shooting might have been a psychological attempt to master and dominate the object that had hurt him so badly, but when I heard the real story, I had to abandon that theory.