Joseph Paul Franklin

Early life

James Clayton Vaughn, Jr. was born in Mobile, Alabama on April 13, 1950, as the eldest son of James Clayton Vaughn, Sr. and Helen Rau Vaughn, and brother to Carolyn, Marilyn and Gordon. James Clayton Vaughn, Sr. was an epileptic World War II veteran and butcher who left the family when Vaughn, Jr. was eight. Vaughn's sister Carolyn recalled "Whenever [Vaughn, Sr.] came to visit he'd beat us," and their mother had Vaughn, Sr. jailed twice for public drunkenness. Helen Rau Vaughn was described by a family friend as "a full-blooded German, a real strict, perfectionist lady. I never saw her beat any of [her children], but they told me stories." Vaughn later stated that he was rarely given enough to eat and suffered severe physical abuse as a child, and that his mother "didn't care about [him and his siblings]". He claimed that these factors stunted his emotional development, and said he had "always been least 10 years or more behind other people in their maturity."

As early as high school, he had become interested first in evangelical Christianity, then Nazism, and later held memberships in both the National Socialist White People's Party and the Ku Klux Klan and even changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin in honor of Paul Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin. In the 1960s, Franklin was inspired to try to start a race war after reading Mein Kampf. "I've never felt that way about any other book that I read," he would reflect later. "It was something weird about that book."

Crimes

For much of his life, Franklin was a drifter, roaming up and down the East Coast looking for chances to "cleanse the world" of people he considered inferior, especially blacks and Jews. His primary source of financial support appears to have come from bank robberies. He supplemented his bank robbery income with paid blood bank donations, which eventually led to his subsequent capture by the FBI.

1977

1978

1979

1980

Apprehension, conviction, and imprisonment

Following the two murders in Utah, Franklin returned to the midwestern United States. Traveling through Kentucky, he was detained and questioned regarding a firearm that he was transporting in his car. Franklin fled from this interrogation, but authorities recovered sufficient evidence from the vehicle to point suspicions that potentially linked him to the sniper killings.

Franklin's distinctive racist tattoos, coupled with his habit of visiting blood banks, led investigators to issue a nationwide alert to blood banks. In October, 1980, the tattoos drew the attention of a Florida blood bank worker, who contacted the FBI. Franklin was arrested in Lakeland, Florida on October 28, 1980.

Franklin tried to escape during the judgment of the 1997 Missouri trial on charges of murdering Gerald Gordon. He was convicted of the murder charge. The psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who had interviewed him at length, testified for the defense that she believed that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and unfit to stand trial. She noted his delusional thinking and a childhood history of severe abuse.

In October 2013, Larry Flynt called for clemency for Franklin asserting "that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself."

Franklin was held on death row at the Potosi Correctional Center near Mineral Point, Missouri. In August 2013 the Missouri State Supreme Court announced that Franklin would be executed on November 20. Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said in a statement that by setting execution dates, the state high court "has taken an important step to see that justice is finally done for the victims and their families".

Execution

Franklin's execution was complicated because it took place during a period when various European drug manufacturers refused or objected on moral grounds to having their drugs used in a lethal injection. In response Missouri announced that it would use for Franklin's execution a new method of lethal injection, which used a single drug provided by an unnamed compounding pharmacy.

A day before his execution, US District Judge Nanette Laughrey (Jefferson City) granted a stay of execution over concerns raised about the new method of execution. A second stay was granted that evening by US District Judge Carol E. Jackson (St. Louis), based on Franklin’s claim that he was too mentally incompetent to be executed. An appeals court quickly overturned both stays, and the Supreme Court subsequently rejected his final appeals.

In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper published on November 17, 2013, Franklin said he had renounced his racist views. He said his motivation had been "illogical" and was partly a consequence of an abusive upbringing. He said he had interacted with black people in prison, adding: "I saw they were people just like us."

Franklin was executed at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri on November 20, 2013. The execution began at 6:07 AM CST and he was pronounced dead at 6:17 AM. His execution was the first lethal injection in Missouri to use pentobarbital alone instead of the conventional three drug cocktail.

An Associated Press news agency journalist said that 5g of the barbiturate pentobarbital was administered. Franklin was pronounced dead ten minutes later.

Three media witnesses said Franklin did not seem to show pain. He did not make any final written statement and did not speak a word in the death chamber. After the injection, he blinked a few times, breathed heavily a few times, and swallowed hard, the witnesses said. The heaving of his chest slowed, and finally stopped, they said.

Representation in other media

White supremacist William L. Pierce wrote a novel, Hunter (1989), published under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald, which chronicles the story of serial killer Oscar Yeager, a fictional racist who commits the murders of numerous interracial couples. Pierce, founder of the National Alliance and author of another racist novel, The Turner Diaries, dedicated the book to Joseph Paul Franklin.