He revealed that in the darkness, he wasn’t sure whether the man in his gunsight was Jordan or not. But since it was a Black man with a white woman, this looked like a prime target.
Franklin also owned up to the murders of the two African American men in Indianapolis in January 1980—Lawrence Reese and Leo Thomas Watkins. “I like Indianapolis,” Franklin said. “I had a good time there. The cops didn’t like what I did, but I had a good time there. The alleys in Indianapolis are a sniper’s dream.” He said that he decided to kill for the second time there when he didn’t see any news coverage of the first killing. Once again affirming how he, like so many killers, followed the media reports of their crimes.
After the Watkins murder, both cases finally made the news. That was when he said he destroyed the rifle and scattered the pieces in different locations.
In the same Sunday edition of the Star, Gelarden ran a write-up of a phone interview he did with me, seeking to answer what makes someone into a serial killer. He quoted from the section of the Crime Classification Manual in which we had used Franklin as an example of the Political Extremist Homicide category, and then elaborated on some of my ideas about the effects of abusive or neglectful upbringings on certain vulnerable personality types.
“Franklin decided that as an adult he would not be deprived of the need to belong and to be special that his childhood had denied him,” Gelarden quoted me. “This lack of attention and the feelings of insignificance it produced required that he take special measures to give his life value and communicate the central theme of his life: cleaning up America.
“Franklin decided his message would be taken seriously if it was spelled in blood.”
When reporters contacted three jurors from the Vernon Jordan assault trial and told them of Franklin’s admission, they said they were not surprised, but that the federal prosecutors had not presented sufficient evidence to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt.
In addition to these confessions, Franklin owned up to a crime in Mississippi that someone else had claimed responsibility for. At around 9:30 A.M. on Sunday, March 25, 1979, two people washing their cars at a Jackson, Mississippi, self-service car wash discovered the body of an African American man local police identified as Johnnie (sometimes spelled Johnny) Noyes, twenty-five, who had lived nearby, sprawled beside his car. He had been shot once in the chest, apparently while drying his car. Noyes was the eldest of eight children, a student at Jackson State University who had decided he wanted to pursue a medical career after college. He was recently divorced and had two young daughters.
His mother, Emma, knew something was wrong when he didn’t show up for lunch at her home in Hallandale, about ninety miles away. She had prepared catfish, his favorite dish.
Her sister in Jackson called with the horrible news.
Police could not determine a motive; they couldn’t find a weapon; there were no witnesses and no suspects.
The case remained open with no significant leads until 1984, when Henry Lee Lucas, a forty-seven-year-old serial killer and lowlife drifter from Blacksburg, Virginia, started confessing to hundreds of murders around the country while being held in a Georgetown, Texas, jail. This sent law enforcement agencies scurrying, seeing if they could close any of their unsolved cases.
Jackson police detective David Fondren was one of them. He traveled to Texas to interview Lucas, who claimed credit for three murders in Jackson, including Noyes. Lucas said he spotted Noyes as he was driving down Interstate 20 in Mississippi, where the highway swings close to the intersection of U.S. 80 and Valley Street, where the car wash was located. He told Fondren he shot him with a .357 Magnum handgun.
When Fondren returned with his information, the story seemed believable, and the police were motivated to solve the case. They informed Emma Noyes they thought they were close. But the more they looked into it, the more Lucas’s story began to unravel. Fondren was able to confirm that Lucas was elsewhere on the day of the murder. The proverb about “honor among thieves” seems to apply here, and each one has his own sense of it. Lucas—who, like Franklin, had an alcoholic father, had severely injured an eye in a childhood accident, and had spent much of his life as a drifter—probably murdered between three and eleven victims, though he claimed over a hundred. The motivation was probably a combination of boredom and notoriety, since he had no other accomplishments in his life. Franklin, just as much of a lowlife, did have a sense of honesty about his own crimes. It is a fact of law enforcement that unsolicited and uncoerced confessions are common, and it is part of detective work to separate out legitimate from false claims. That is why it is so important to know as much as possible about the suspect to determine his overall credibility. Though Franklin certainly played the system and often denied statements he had made earlier, I never knew him to claim a crime that wasn’t actually his.
That’s where things stood until early May of 1996, when Franklin reached out from his Missouri jail cell and claimed credit for this one, too. Jackson homicide detective Chuck Lee investigated the claim and said Franklin offered details only the killer would know. “We’re convinced and the district attorney’s office is convinced he’s the right guy,” Lee told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.
He discussed with the D.A. going to Missouri to interview Franklin, just as Fondren had interviewed Lucas, but they concluded that there was no point in beginning another legal proceeding and decided to finally close the case and give the Noyes family the certainty they had all sought for seventeen years. Emma Noyes passed away in November 1997, finally knowing who had killed her son.
THE TRIAL FOR THE MURDER OF GERALD GORDON BEGAN ON MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 1997, almost twenty years after the crime. Douglas J. “Doug” Sidel led the prosecution. Acting as his own attorney, Franklin was assisted by public defenders Karen Kraft and Richard Scholz, but he wouldn’t let them intervene or offer objections to any of Sidel’s witness questions. The jury was all white and all male. Franklin maintained he excluded women because they are more compassionate than men and would be less inclined to impose the death penalty he claimed to seek.
Despite the fact that Franklin had already confessed to killing Gerald Gordon and wounding William Ash, the prosecution laid out a carefully constructed timeline showing how Franklin bought the Remington .30-06 rifle in Dallas with money he had obtained by robbing a bank in Little Rock, already intending to kill Jews with it. He considered several possible areas in the Midwest before deciding that St. Louis had the largest Jewish population. He found Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel Congregation in the phone book, along with several other synagogues, drove around to look at them, and chose this one because of its easy access to the highway for his getaway.
William Ash, who had lost a finger from a gunshot, and Steven Goldman, who had been near Gerald Gordon in the synagogue parking lot and had been grazed by another bullet, testified. It was the first time either one had seen Franklin in person.
One of those sitting in the courtroom each day was Richard Kalina, now a married, thirty-two-year-old father of two. It was Kalina’s bar mitzvah Gerry Gordon had been leaving the day he was murdered. Kalina went through therapy in his twenties to deal with the post-traumatic stress he suffered from the day he said he lost his innocence and his “whole life changed in a matter of seconds.”
The prosecution screened a taped interview for the jurors in which Franklin, referring to the Jews, declared, “I believe they are responsible for all of the evil, either directly or indirectly, in the world.”
When Sergeant Zwiefel asked if he was sorry for any of his actions, he replied, “I’m just sorry it’s not legal.”
“What’s not legal?”
“Killing Jews.”
Franklin, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and ankle shackles over his high-top black sneakers, cross-examined the state’s witnesses, but called none of his own and didn’t even present a defense.
“It was a premeditated, deliberate killing, and he wished he had killed more people,” S
idel stated in his summation. Franklin gave neither an opening nor closing statement.
On Thursday, January 30, the jury took less than forty minutes to return a verdict of guilty to the charge of first-degree murder in the death of Gerald Gordon and two counts of first-degree assault. When the verdict was read, Franklin gave the jury a thumbs-up sign and mouthed, “Right on!”
The next day, jurors came back to the courtroom to decide on the sentence. Sidel addressed them first, saying, “This act was absolutely sick and depraved. And because of it, there are three young girls who grew up without their father, who will never have their father walk them down the aisle at their weddings. Death is the only appropriate response.”
When it was Franklin’s turn, he looked at Sidel and said, “What he just stated was true. Shortly after I arrived here at the St. Louis County Jail, I had a conversation with an inmate up here who told me, ‘You know, Franklin, if they don’t give you the death penalty here, you should kill somebody to make sure they do the next time.’
“And I thought about that statement, you know, and I decided that if you guys did not vote for the death penalty, then that’s what’s going to happen. I’m already doing six consecutive life sentences already, plus some more time. And it would just be a farce if you guys did not sentence me to death. So that’s all I’m asking. I don’t have a lot of argument about that. Thank you. That’s all.”
They deliberated for a little over an hour, deciding that the crime fit the legal parameters for capital punishment. They also recommended two more life sentences for shooting at the two other men. The death sentence would now take precedence over the six consecutive life sentences Franklin was already serving for the Madison and Salt Lake City murders.
In opting for the death sentence, according to the court record, “the jury found the existence of three statutory aggravating circumstances: 1) that Franklin had a substantial history of serious assaultive convictions; 2) that Franklin, by his act of murder, knowingly created a great risk of death to more than one person in a public place by means of a weapon which would normally be hazardous to the lives of more than one person; and 3) that the murder was outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible or inhuman in that it involved depravity of mind.”
On February 27, Judge Robert L. Campbell officially imposed the sentence, and on March 10, Franklin’s public defenders filed a notice of appeal. On June 16, 1998, the Supreme Court of Missouri affirmed the conviction and sentence. After almost twenty years in prison, Franklin was facing the prospect of the death house, and it was due to his own voluntary confession.
Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel Congregation honored Lee Lankford for his dedicated pursuit of justice, arranging for the planting of a grove of trees in his name in Israel.
When asked by reporters for a comment, both Hal Harlowe, the district attorney who had prosecuted Franklin for the East Towne Mall murders, and Archie Simonson, the judge he had gone to Madison to kill before he got distracted, said they didn’t believe in the death penalty but couldn’t work up much sympathy for Franklin.
He had finally achieved one of his goals, however: after the formal sentencing on February 27, he was transferred to the Potosi Correctional Center in Mineral Point, Missouri. He would not be going back to Marion.
Chapter 20
More than a few of the deadly predators I’ve helped hunt and analyzed have been sentenced to death, and every time that happens, I’ve confronted my feelings about the ultimate punishment. I’ve never believed that execution is “legalized murder,” because that equation ignores the critical distinction between the victim and the murderer, which I think demonstrates a moral vacuity. Though I don’t believe the death penalty is appropriate for all, or even necessarily most murder cases, for the types of monsters I often deal with, I consider it fundamentally moral for society to state that it will not tolerate in its midst people who have done such things.
For me, Joseph Paul Franklin certainly fit into that category. He had destroyed the lives of men, women, and children to serve his evil purpose and assuage his own self-image. As far as I was concerned, he had forfeited his right to any claim on earthly mercy, and whether there was any mercy awaiting him in any afterlife, well, that was above my pay grade.
Still, whenever you’re contemplating the end of another person’s life, it is, or should be, a sobering experience. I had my own ritual whenever a death sentence was pronounced on one of “my” murderers or he faced imminent execution. I would go to my office, pull out the case file, and sit at my desk. I would stare at the crime scene photographs. I would review the autopsy protocols. I would read the detectives’ reports. And I would try to imagine what every victim was going through at the moment of his or her death. My last thoughts were always for the victims.
But while I was just beginning to contemplate the impact that my encounter with this killer would have on me, Franklin wasn’t done revealing just how prolific he’d been or, from my perspective, glorying in his feats of devastation and ruin. Franklin may have been sentenced to death, but he was still intent on taking claim for every murder he had committed. And I could not close the psychic books on him.
After the Gordon murder trial, Franklin once again reached out to the media. In an interview for the syndicated television program Inside Edition in March 1997, while he was still housed in the St. Louis County Jail, Franklin said he had killed Raymond Taylor, the twenty-eight-year-old Black manager of a Burger King in Falls Church, Virginia, on August 18, 1979. He had not previously been a suspect in the seventeen-year-old case.
A month later, in April 1997, Hamilton County, Ohio, assistant prosecuting attorney Melissa Powers came to interview Franklin about the killing of the two young African American boys, Darrell Lane and Dante Evans Brown, in 1980. DA Powers did a masterful job of staging the interview with Franklin, making him feel in control, even as she worked him toward a confession. But the way she got the conversation going to begin with was by explaining to him that at the time of the Lane and Brown murders in 1980, Ohio was between death penalty statutes, so he wouldn’t face execution in the state if convicted of the murder of the two Cincinnati teens. That turned out to be crucial. He then leaned in toward her across the table and said, “You know I did it. I killed those two dudes.”
He told Powers how frustrated he was that no one was taking notice of his overall plan, which caused him to escalate. “I was just getting very upset because the news media, the national media, wasn’t covering what I was doing. I guess they were afraid they’d start a race war or something. And that’s what I was trying to do.”
He later explained the reason this was one crime he had never wanted to confess, but that what Powers told him about the death penalty opened him up. “I didn’t want to be on death row in Ohio,” he told Kristen DelGuzzi of the Cincinnati Enquirer during a phone interview. “They have the electric chair there. I don’t want to die in the electric chair.”
While speaking with Powers, Franklin also confessed to the June 15, 1980, murder of Arthur Smothers and Kathleen Mikula as they walked across the Washington Street Bridge in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Powers found him much more animated and “turned on” about this crime and speculated that in addition to his self-styled mission, the murder of mixed-race couples had an additional sexual component for him. There is often a secondary motivating factor in violent crime because violent offenders tend to equate power with sexual potency, as we saw in the case of David Berkowitz. Then there is the basic fact, which Franklin admitted to, that being in prison he was deprived of any kind of female interaction, so when an attractive woman was willing to visit him, he certainly took advantage of the opportunity, thereby allowing Powers to use her looks and intelligent charm to her own investigative advantage.
On Tuesday, April 15, 1997, Powers and her fellow DA Joseph Deters held a news conference in which they announced their intention to present evidence and seek an indictment from the grand jury so they could bring him back to Cincinnati to stand
trial for the murders of Lane and Brown. Deters had been haunted by the murders. He grew up less than a mile from the railroad trestle from which the killer fired and was in law school when the crime took place. And it was lost on none of the officers and detectives who had worked so doggedly on the case that the time elapsed between the murders and the confession was three years longer than the older of the two boys had lived. Deters, who already had a solid reputation as a crusading prosecutor, said he owed a trial to the community and the families. “These two kids were citizens of this county when this derelict came into our community and snuffed out their lives,” he said angrily. “Their families are still grieving. They still need and deserve justice.”
Powers related the information about the Johnstown murders to Cambria County, Pennsylvania, officials, after which Assistant District Attorney Kelly Callihan and Johnstown police detective Jeannine Gaydos contacted him by phone and carried on several conversations over three months, establishing rapport and a bond of trust. Subsequently, Franklin agreed to meet with Callihan and Gaydos. During their interview with him, during which he was shackled with eight prison guards nearby, he agreed to tape a confession to the Smothers and Mikula murders. Assistant DA David Tulowitzki and Chief of Police Robert Huntley followed up and were convinced that Franklin was telling the truth. Tulowitzki reported that Franklin sounded increasingly excited as he described the murders.
“As he explained the murder,” Callihan told Tom Gibb of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “you could see this excitement in him as he relived it.” She speculated publicly that his motive might simply have been a transfer to a jail where he could attempt another escape.
Ultimately, Cambria County decided not to try the case due to the expense, the risks, and the logistical challenges of moving Franklin again, his history of escape, and their inability to add meaningfully to the life and death sentences he had already racked up.
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