Briery Knob -- Chapter 6 -- Another Confession
"I can be mean as fuck or sweet as candy. Cold as ice and evil as hell, or loyal like a trooper. It depends on you."
Born James Clayton Vaughn in Mobile to a poor family, Franklin became fascinated with two things, but not simultaneously. First came evangelical Christianity. Then came Nazism. Later in life, Franklin would be a card carrying member of both the National Socialist White People's Party and the KKK.
"Men Kampf," Franklin said, inspired him to start a race war.
"I never felt that way about any other book I read," Franklin would reflect years later. "It was something weird about the book."
Much of his life he drifted up and down the East Coast looking for chances to rid the world of people he considered inferior -- especially blacks and Jews.
An evil man, Joseph Paul Franklin admitted to 20 murders. Some investigators and detectives believed he minimized the number.
Franklin took pride in being a neo-Nazi and white supremacist. He was convinced interracial marriages were a sin and he saw himself to be God's instrument in handing out punishment.
Franklin's preferred sniper attacks as he hunted humans for sport. Sometimes he chose other methods, but not always.
At 3:17 in the morning on July 25, 1977, Franklin loaded his pick-up truck with dynamite and parked in front of pro-Israel lobbyist Morris Amitay's home. The explosion damaged the house, but everyone in the residence escaped -- except the family's six-year-old beagle.
Four days later, Franklin firebombed Beth Sholom synagogue in Chattanooga.
In October, the same year, Franklin cradled his hunting rifle as he hid in the tall grass behind a pole near Brith Shalom. When the worshipers inside the house of worship in Richmond Heights, Missouri left, Franklin fired into the group and killed Gerald Gordon.
In March 1978, Franklin grabbed his .44 caliber rifle and waited in the alley next to La Cazuela Mexican Restaurant on West Crogan Street, in Lawrenceville and waited for Hustler publisher Larry Flynt to return to court after lunch. Franklin later told authorities the shooting was retaliation for an interracial photo spread in the magazine.
The next year, 1979, from 150 yards, Franklin shot Harold McIver, a Taco Bell manager in Doraville, When Franklin confessed, he said McIver had been in "close contact" with white women.
The murderous rampage continued with civil rights activist Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne, Indiana and cousins Darrell Lane and Dante Brown in Cincinnati.
Convicted and sentenced to two life sentences for killing Lane and Brown, Franklin also confessed to killing an interracial couple in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Each of Franklin's victims offended his sense of decency "between the races."
Franklin also confessed, in 1997, to using a .44 Ruger to kill Santomero and Durian.
Melissa Powers, an Ohio assistant prosecutor, interviewed Franklin while he lived on death row for the Gordon killing.
Powers, an attractive and petite lawer, was busy working the Cincinnati shootings when her boss sent her to to Missouri's death house to interview Franklin.
"Melissa!" called the burly prosecutor as the petite attorney passed his office.
"Yes?"
"Pack your bags. You're going to Missouri."
Tossing a two-inch thick folder on the chair, the balding barrister said, "Read this and, after lunch, let's talk."
Picking the folder up, Melissa looked at the label. Franklin, Joseph Paul.
"Why do killers always have two first names?" she scrunched her face.
"Killers and Southern Boys. Read it and let's talk.”