His name was Joseph Paul Franklin, and he went on a horrific killing spree beginning in 1977 at the age of 27. Before his reign of murder ended in 1980, he took the lives of at least 15 men, women, and children in some 11 states. He also admitted shooting civil rights leader Vernon Jordan and paralyzing pornography publisher Larry Flynt.
Franklin—born James Clayton Vaughn, Jr. before changing his name to reflect his admiration for Benjamin Franklin and Nazi Joseph Goebbels—was drawn to white supremacist ideologies as a teen. Dropping out of high school following a severe eye injury, he got married, became an abusive husband, and began racking up minor legal violations.
As his association with white supremacist groups grew, Franklin became increasingly confrontational toward minorities. By the mid-1970s, he had rejected even the most radical hate groups because he didn’t think they took their hatred far enough. He wanted to attack, not just sit around complaining. His self-directed “mission,” he later suggested, was to incite his fellow supremacists to action.
The summer of 1976 marked a turning point. On Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, Franklin followed an interracial couple and sprayed them with mace. This was his first known physical attack…it escalated from there. On July 29, 1977, he bombed a Tennessee synagogue; a few days later in Wisconsin, he killed two men—one black and one white—after encountering them in a parking lot.
For the next three years, Franklin drifted across the country, robbing banks (with some proficiency, according to law enforcement investigators) and using a sniper rifle to target his victims. He killed possibly more than 20 people and seriously injured six more.
He was sentenced to life in prison and received the death penalty in several states. On November 11, 2013, he was executed in Missouri for the 1977 murder of a man standing in front of a synagogue in St. Louis
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