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. He supported himself by robbing banks and often sold or traded the guns he used to kill others. Despite being partially blind in his left eye and completely blind in his right eye, Franklin was a proficient marksman, and killed most of his victims from more than 100 feet (30 m) away. He attacked the majority of victims from a distance. He was a highly organized killer who would plan in advance several escape routes and techniques in which to leave no evidence.
Franklin's level of violence escalated; before he committed his first known murder, he fire-bombed a synagogue and sprayed mace at a racially mixed couple. Starting in 1977, he went on a murder spree, while continuing to rob banks. He has admitted his racist ideology; God, he said, wanted him to start a race war.
His target were mixed-race couples, which he called "MRCs." In interviews, he explained that he planned the murders and his exit in advance, often changing his hair style and color, as well as changing clothes and vehicles often. He would listen to a police scanner during his escapes.
On one occasion, he threatened to kill President Jimmy Carter for his pro-civil rights views. He had also intended to shoot Jesse Jackson, but felt that Jackson's security detail made an assassination attempt impossible. He shot Vernon Jordan in 1980 instead, nearly killing him.
Due to his careful planning, he eluded law enforcement for years. He was eventually caught when a nurse in Florida taking the blood he was selling recognized a bald eagle tattoo on his arm as one publicized for the suspect in several murders. She contacted the police. Arrested in 1980, Franklin provided detailed confessions. He has been tried and convicted in several states. Convicted in a murder case in Missouri in 1997, he was sentenced to death.
Franklin has been linked by either indictment or confession to 20 murders, six aggravated assaults, 16 bank robberies and two bombings. He has confessed to eight murders, and has received six life sentences and a death sentence. He made several confessions in 1997 on the condition that he confess to "an attractive white female investigator."
Read more about this topic: Joseph Paul Franklin
Famous quotes containing the word crimes:
“The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)