NOT ALL OF FRANKLIN’S MURDER CLAIMS PANNED OUT OR COULD BE CORRELATED with evidence. Authorities started speculating that since he knew he was behind bars for the rest of his life, he was trying to get his kill score up to record levels.
In July 1997, authorities in Nashville, Tennessee, said they couldn’t link Franklin to the death of a woman named Mary Jo Corn, whose decomposed body was discovered by hunters in the Harpeth River on August 28, 1977, despite his claim to a Post-Dispatch reporter of having been responsible. Franklin had said he had “picked up a white woman at a truck stop along Interstate 65 near Nashville.” He said he decided to kill her after she said she had slept with a Black trucker. He took her to a “wooded area near a creek, pushed her in and shot her” in the head with a .41-caliber Smith and Wesson handgun, which is a pretty rare weapon. But Corn had been strangled. It was possible Franklin was talking about a different victim whose body had never been found or was in a different jurisdiction, and Metropolitan Nashville Police detective Brad Putnam said he had sent out a teletype message asking other departments if they had any other unsolved murders of white females from 1977.
A few days later, investigators in Robertson County, just north of Nashville, concluded that Franklin’s description appeared to match the unsolved murder of Deborah R. Graham, whose bound, gagged, and bullet-ridden body was found by fishermen floating in Sulfur Fork Creek on November 17, 1977.
“Based on the basic information reported in the newspaper, it seems to match up,” said county sheriff’s captain Bill Holt, who had worked the case as a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent when the body was first discovered. He confirmed that Graham had been shot with a .41-caliber firearm. He had previously helped clear the prime suspect in the case, a trucker who had been seen with Graham at a truck stop on Interstate 65 several days before she died. But that left law enforcement with an unsolved murder.
By the end of the month, though, Franklin had clammed up. “He doesn’t want to be interviewed at this time,” Bill Holt announced. “We’re just at a stopping point right now.” It was rumored Franklin was dissatisfied with his treatment at Potosi.
Next on Franklin’s list was DeKalb County, Georgia. He told the district attorney’s office that he had killed Doraville Taco Bell manager Harold McIver on July 12, 1979, and fifteen-year-old prostitute Mercedes Lynn Masters on December 5 of the same year. McIver had been enjoying the first day he’d taken off work in three weeks when he came in on a Sunday evening to fix a problem with one of the cash registers. He was shot twice as he left the store, once in the left side of his chest and once under the right shoulder blade. Police quickly ruled out robbery; he was shot from a distance and he was carrying cash when they arrived. Police began to consider Franklin a suspect around 1981, when his other sniper attacks became known. But as with many of his crimes, there just wasn’t enough evidence to proceed.
Mercedes Masters’s body was found on Christmas Day, 1979, near Lithonia, east of Atlanta. She was lying in the backyard of an abandoned house and discovered by prospective land buyers looking at the property. She had been missing three days when her mother heard reports of a pair of boots found near the body, marked on the insides with the initials MM. She had a gunshot wound in the back of her head. Police had no motive for the murder.
Up to his old tricks, Franklin said he was only willing to confess to these crimes in person to “an attractive white female investigator,” so in March 1998 DeKalb District Attorney J. Tom Morgan assigned Assistant DA Carol Ellis to go see Franklin and asked police lieutenant Pam Pendergrass to accompany her. The Associated Press reported that Morgan compared Ellis’s “role to that of Jodie Foster’s in the movie ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ in which she plays an FBI agent sent to interview the demonic killer Hannibal Lecter.” Ellis was well-suited for the job. Both attractive and a crack shot, having previously served as a DeKalb police officer, she worked in the Crimes Against Children and Crimes Against Women units of the DA’s office and had a reputation for being cool under pressure.
She and Pendergrass smiled at Franklin and acted impressed as he spoke. Ultimately, they were able to get a videotaped confession out of him, in which he said he spent several days with young Mercedes and learned from her that she had had sex with Black men. “She went out with gay dudes. But once she told me she [had sex with Black men], that’s when I decided to kill her,” Franklin told the two investigators. He said he took her out to a wooded lot and shot her in the head and back. He decided to kill McIver because he had white girls working with him and he was sure the African American man had tried to take advantage of them.
Franklin was indicted for both murders on Thursday, April 3, 1998.
Morgan called Franklin “the most evil individual I have ever come across.” He said there was no point in trying Franklin because the crimes would not qualify for the death penalty under Georgia law and because he was already facing execution in Missouri. “We just wanted to solve these crimes,” he said. “We’ve contacted the family members and they are relieved. This has been gnawing at them for nineteen years.”
In late October 1999, from his cell at Potosi, Franklin told Atlanta PD homicide sergeant Keith Meadows and detective Tony Volkodav that he was the gunman in the murder of Johnny Brookshire and his wife Joy Williams in northeast Atlanta around 8:00 P.M. on February 2, 1978, when both were shot. Johnny was killed. Joy, who was pregnant, was wounded and ended up paralyzed from the waist down. Johnny, twenty-two, was Black. Joy, twenty-three, was white. The case had remained open for more than twenty years. For Franklin, it was an all-too-familiar motive; he said he didn’t like seeing a Black man and white woman walking down the street together. The murder took place the month before he shot Larry Flynt in nearby Lawrenceville.
“He knew facts about the murders that only the murderer could have known,” Meadows told a local television reporter. “He was able to tell us exactly what the victims were wearing at the time the shooting took place.”
Again, there seemed no point in incurring the expense and complication of bringing Franklin back to Georgia for another trial that would interrupt the process of moving him closer to execution in Missouri.
AND YET, DESPITE ALL OF HIS TALKING, THERE WAS STILL ANOTHER CASE YET to settle, a double murder Franklin had first mentioned when he began his confessional acrobatics in 1984, a crime he had brought up again when he spoke with Melissa Powers in 1997, and yet again when he spoke with Carol Ellis in 1998. His assertion that he had killed two young female hitchhikers—white women who told him they’d either dated Black men or were open to the idea—and left their bodies on the side of a rural road in West Virginia only grew more insistent over time.
Even so, it took until 2000 for the case finally to be resolved, and it remained the most complex and muddled crime investigation ever associated with Franklin as well as the one that inflicted the greatest legal jeopardy on other people. So many of Franklin’s confessions had been in cases where he was already a suspect, or police had had no significant leads. The murders in West Virginia were different, demonstrating how easily a murder investigation can go off the rails, as I have seen too often in my career.
On Wednesday evening, June 25, 1980, a man on his way home drove past the bodies of two women lying side by side in a small clearing near Droop Mountain in West Virginia. When he stopped to check on them, he discovered that both had been shot. Both were fully clothed and the medical examiner found no evidence of sexual assault. They couldn’t be immediately identified, but under her sweatshirt, one was wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow design, which led investigators to believe both women were probably on their way to the Rainbow Family gathering, a sort of counterculture be-in expected to attract about ten thousand participants from July 1 through 7 in Monongahela National Forest, about forty miles away. Since 1972 the group had been meeting annually to spend a week getting back to nature. This was the first such gathering to be held east of the Mississippi.
Not everyone want
ed the Rainbow Family in their midst. West Virginia governor Jay Rockefeller said he wished the family would stay away, and Secretary of State A. James Manchin publicly complained that group members looked “like a bunch of gypsies.” Part of what people objected to was the frequent complete nudity at these gatherings, something officials didn’t think would mix well with the indigenous Appalachian community. Rainbow Family members had reported several shots being fired into their preliminary camp, presumably by locals, so maybe one of them had gone too far.
West Virginia state medical examiner Dr. Irvin Sopher informed Pocahontas County prosecutor J. Steven Hunter that both victims had been shot twice in the chest and one had also been shot in the head. The weapon was likely a high-powered rifle.
The Rainbow gathering went off as planned, a throwback to the Summer of Love and the flower children of the 1960s. But the murder of the two still-unidentified women hung over the festivities.
The gathering was over by the time the two murder victims were identified, on Friday, July 11. They turned out to be nineteen-year-old Nancy Santomero of Huntington, New York, and twenty-six-year-old Vicki Durian of Wellman, Iowa. Nancy’s sister Kathy and later Vicki’s brother Joseph identified the bodies after Kathy saw a sketch she said resembled her sister. Kathy was actually supposed to meet up with her sister at the gathering, and they’d travel home together. When Nancy didn’t show, Kathy hoped it was because she’d made other plans at the last minute. After the gathering, though, when Nancy hadn’t been in touch with anyone, Kathy looked at the sketch and made the terrible trip back to West Virginia to confirm that the police had found Nancy. Kathy told police her sister and Vicki had been traveling together to Rainbow, possibly with another woman she only knew was named Liz, which raised the question: Was there a third victim out there somewhere?
With identification came the larger impact of the violent deaths. Nancy’s mother, Jeanne, said her daughter was passionate about environmental causes and wanted to use her life to effect change. Vicki was a licensed practical nurse who went out of her way to help people.
A few days later, the third woman believed to have been traveling with them was identified as Liz Johndrow, nineteen, who parted from her two friends at a truck stop near Richmond, Virginia, after getting a premonition that she shouldn’t go to the Rainbow gathering. The last thing Nancy and Vicki said to her before resuming their hitchhiking was “Be careful!” Liz went back home to Northford, Connecticut, a suburb of New Haven, expecting to meet up with the other two, whom she described as free spirits, after Rainbow at her father’s and brother’s houses in Vermont. She contacted police after she heard about her friends’ deaths and learned there was fear she had been murdered, too.
In December, on the last day of deer hunting season, hunters found the two women’s backpacks in underbrush near Clifftop in Fayette County, West Virginia, about eighty miles from where the bodies were discovered. This confirmed investigators’ belief that the perpetrator or perpetrators must have been locals who knew the area well. It fit in with the theory that the Rainbow people were not welcome and that the murders were the next step after the warning shots that had been fired into their camp.
What followed was a twenty-year legal spectacle in which a group of people were charged and tried for the murder. The theory of the case, based on what, in retrospect, appeared to be dubious accounts by various supposed participants ratting each other out, and well-meaning but questionable eyewitness accounts, was that seven local men in various pickup trucks and a van learned about the two “hippie girls” hitchhiking to Rainbow, picked them up in the van, drove them to the entrance of Droop Mountain Battlefield Park, and demanded sex. The girls refused, threatened to go to the police, and were then driven to a clearing in the woods, forced out of the van, and shot.
I can’t think of a case I’ve investigated that was this convoluted and involved so many offenders working together. There is a principle in philosophy and science known as Occam’s razor, which states that all factors being equal, simpler hypotheses tend to be better than more complex ones. This applies to criminology as well. If you have to jump through a lot of logical hoops and assume a lot of connections, your explanation probably veers more toward conspiracy theory than truth.
Local investigators and prosecutors were aware of Joseph Paul Franklin’s confessions beginning in 1984, but discounted them because they were convinced the offender had to be local, that Franklin had merely read about the crime and claimed it for his own purposes. They said his account was riddled with inconsistencies and that he got some of the details wrong when he drew a map of the area and where he said he had dumped the bodies.
In July 1992, charges against all seven local men were dropped because “improper investigative procedures” employed by the police “seriously compromised the case and were going directly to the credibility and sustainability of the evidence on which they were obtained,” according to the prosecutor.
The next year, in January, five of the men were reindicted, including the supposed triggerman, Jacob “Jake” Beard. Beard’s trial began on May 18, 1993. He took the stand himself and denied all of the accusations. He said he had no idea who had killed the Rainbow girls.
Beard was convicted in June and sentenced in July to two life terms without possibility of parole. Over the next year the charges against the others were dropped. Beard’s attorney petitioned the West Virginia Supreme Court for a new trial, based on Franklin’s confession, but was turned down.
Not everyone in West Virginia was convinced they had the right man, though. One investigator who believed Franklin to be the real culprit was Deborah E. DiFalco, a top-flight detective and the state’s first female trooper. She’d met with Franklin at Marion, and after several denials, he told her he had killed the Rainbow girls. In a report dated January 2, 1986, DiFalco wrote, “I feel that Mr. Franklin had the motive, opportunity and capability to be the perpetrator of the crimes against the victims, Nancy Santomero and Vicki Durian.”
DiFalco was not the only one who believed Franklin’s account. Deborah Dixon, an accomplished reporter with WKRC-TV in Cincinnati, had been following Franklin’s trail ever since the murders of teens Darrell Lane and Dante Evans Brown in 1980. She had gone down to Mobile, Alabama, to learn more about Franklin and then to Florida after he was arrested. She later interviewed him twice in prison. During one of those interviews, he told her there was a man in prison in West Virginia for the Rainbow Murders that Franklin said he was responsible for. Her investigative work found its way to the 60 Minutes II producers at CBS, who aired a story on the connection Dixon had established between Franklin and the Santomero-Durian murders and how Jacob Beard was likely innocent. This led to renewed interest and national attention for the Rainbow killings.
The lead investigator would not abandon his theory of the case, the one the jury had confirmed with its conviction. During a hearing on a motion for a new trial, the lead investigator said he had attempted to get in touch with Franklin back in 1984, although he had no record of his attempt(s). He also admitted that my original fugitive assessment had been made available to him, but he had not read it. After learning this, I checked my notes on the case and found we had consulted on the case in March 1984, received details from the state police, and furnished them with our information. I doubt if any of our material would have changed his mind if he had read my report, but along with DiFalco’s report and Dixon’s interview, it might have made him realize that the Rainbow murders were very much in Franklin’s wheelhouse.
In January 1999, the trial judge, Charles Lobban, reviewed Franklin’s several confessions, particularly the one to Melissa Powers, set aside the conviction, and decreed there was reason to grant Beard a new trial. Beard was released on bond from prison and the prosecutor was given until February 11 to decide whether to go forward. The prosecutor and sheriff still believed Beard was the killer and forged ahead with a re-prosecution.
Beard’s new trial began on May 16, 2000, in B
raxton County. Jurors watched a two-hour video deposition of Franklin. “One of them told me she had dated Blacks . . . and the other one told me she would if she had a chance, so I just decided to waste them at that time,” Franklin stated. His veracity was called into question when he said he dumped the bodies “no more than fifteen minutes at most” from Interstate 64, when, in fact, they were found more than an hour away. His video testimony also contradicted witnesses who had said they saw Beard shoot the two women. But several police officers, testifying for the defense, said the witnesses had contradicted themselves a number of times.
The trial lasted a little more than two weeks. On May 31, after less than three hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
Beard’s attorney Stephen Farmer brought suit against the West Virginia State Police, the Pocahontas County Police Department, and the prosecutors, claiming his client’s civil rights had been violated through the coercion of witnesses and ignoring physical evidence that didn’t support their case. Beard was awarded a two-million-dollar settlement. He told reporters no amount of money could make up for his nearly six years in prison.
Those same authorities saw no point in trying Franklin for the murders. He never went to trial for the Rainbow murders, and the chief investigator and sheriff continued to believe in Beard’s guilt, as did the prosecutor until he died.
For my part, I strongly believe Franklin was “good” for the murders. They fit both his signature of picking up female hitchhikers and profiling them on their choices, and his M.O. of shooting them in remote areas when they failed his racial purity test. Over the years, Franklin confessed with consistent details to Melissa Powers, Carol Ellis, and Deborah Dixon, among others, and he was more likely to deny crimes he had already admitted to than to admit to crimes he had not perpetrated.
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