Cover Story

By Kevin Lee Associate Editor

There are plenty of serial killers, but there’s only one Joseph Paul Franklin.

Franklin’s case is devoid of the lurid deviance that makes for blockbuster movie fare. No captives in the basement; no adornment of his victims’ skin; no cannibalism or clown make-up or riddles mailed to law enforcement, but his victims are just as dead.

What sets Franklin apart are a couple of things. The first is his stated motivation of racial prejudice. Exceedingly rare are serial killers who list bigotry as their prime impetus.

The other is his point of origin. Franklin is Mobile’s only claim to this particular fame.

Little Jimmy

His formative years weren’t necessarily common, but they were hardly remarkable for a hardscrabble place like mid-20th Century Mobile.

Franklin came into the world as James Clayton Vaughn, Jr. on April 13, 1950 in Mobile, the second of four children born to James and Helen Vaughn. Helen’s oldest child, by another man, was born out of wedlock.

James was specifically a laborer and generally a drunk. The family moved with frequency, residing in New Orleans and the Midwest before settling into Mobile, and even then, they shifted around through lower middle-class neighborhoods.

Helen’s parents, Otto and Elise Rau were German immigrants. Once in America, they settled onto 40 acres in rural Semmes, and proceeded to fulfill every existing negative stereotype of Teutonic inflexibility and sternness. They raised their eight children accordingly.

In turn, Helen’s offspring – the Vaughn kids – were raised under the same harsh dictates she experienced. Family members tell of children being slapped for eating too slowly, “cold-cocked” for moving while sitting on the couch or beaten for tarrying on the phone too long.

When the Vaughn children brought stray animals home, Helen physically abused and injured the animals, too.

James left home for indeterminate periods of time and celebrated his sporadic returns by beating the children, especially Jimmy.

Unsurprisingly, Jimmy’s best grades at Arlington Elementary School were for his sterling conduct and childhood companions remarked on his quiet demeanor. He had learned the hard way what misbehavior brought.

Eventually, after Helen and James parted company, she baby-sat children to earn money. Those kids, the progeny of others, were set upon by Helen as well.

Little Jimmy Vaughn sought refuge from the domestic maelstrom in a familiar avenue. He took to church with a passion, seeking salvation in the fire and brimstone of Southern fundamentalism. His sister Carolyn told a reporter in 1998 that Jimmy “carried a Bible with him everywhere he went. He visited every church in Mobile he could.”

When Jimmy started Murphy High School, the Civil Rights movement and desegregation were just beginning to be fully felt in Mobile.

And little Jimmy would soon disappear forever.

Change

Jim Crow was dying. The neighborhoods were changing and so was Jimmy Vaughn.

In the mid-1960s, Jimmy enrolled at Murphy. The state’s largest high school sprawled beneath a canopy of Midtown oaks, and it would still be a few years before racial riots tore at the school and the community. But, something got to Jimmy early.

During this time, Vaughn eased into the central branch of the Mobile Public Library and stole a copy of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” He told a reporter he was “in awe of” Hitler’s intelligence.” The failed despot’s philosophies flickered in Vaughn’s mind, lighting his bitter path like a Klansman’s torch.

It was then Vaughn began to formulate his life’s purpose. He wanted to rid the world of blacks, Jews and “race mixers” through murder or the instigation of a race war. He would later claim God called him to that mission.

Around this time, an accident severely hampered his eyesight. He was rendered totally blind in his right eye, partially blind in his left and would wear thick glasses the remainder of his life.

Jimmy dropped out of Murphy in 1968 during his 11th grade year, per school records, and married. His damaged vision lowered his draft eligibility and kept Vaughn from the Vietnam War.

Not long after marriage, his wife noticed a change in Vaughn, “like night and day,” as he returned to the ways of his childhood and violence became a frequent visitor to their home. Other times, his wife would find him unexplainably weeping. Though it bore a daughter, their marriage lasted less than a year.

His previously white neighborhood began to integrate and the catalyst was in place.

Vaughn started to associate with Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis. After his mother’s death in 1972, he plunged headlong into the white supremacy movement and tore himself from his former identity.

Vaughn moved to Atlanta and joined the neo-fascist National States Rights Party while simultaneously holding full-fledged membership in the KKK. He began to insult interracial couples in public and assaulted one such couple in 1976 with chemical Mace.

There was a last telling incident with his family. A cousin by marriage told a Mobile Register reporter that Vaughn showed up on her doorstep in the summer of 1977. Dressed entirely in black and sporting a knife on his side, Vaughn lived off of her for a couple weeks until she caught him telling her teenaged son that Hitler was a great man. Vaughn’s welcome was over.

Then Jimmy Vaughn faded away permanently. Around the time of the national bicentennial, he legally changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin, taking cues from Third Reich propaganda minister Paul Josef Goebbels and American founding father Benjamin Franklin. He considered himself akin to Franklin, in that they were both “revolutionaries.”

On the move

Franklin moved to the Washington D.C. area and familiarized himself with weapons and explosives. Like Charles Manson before him, Franklin was set on igniting a war between whites and blacks.

Authorities say Franklin spent the next three years wandering the South and Midwest. They estimate he used as many as 18 pseudonyms, that he changed appearance with matching regularity – dying his hair so much it began to fall out – and traded out cars and weapons often.

In 1977, he began his campaign of terror in earnest. He told a reporter he raped a woman in Birmingham that year.

Franklin funded his “revolution” by robbing banks. He claimed to have researched the work of Jesse James and John Dillinger in preparation. Authorities tally 16 bank robberies under his name.

He bombed synagogues and took aim at minorities. He preferred targeting interracial couples, or “MRCs” as he called them.

Franklin ran to stay in shape. He abstained from drugs and alcohol, even coffee as he heard that caffeine “hurt your aim.”

Franklin also cited an obsessive-compulsive disorder that he maintained provided him with meticulous habits, of checking and rechecking every step.

The evidence doesn’t always bear this out. In 1977, he decided to bomb the Rockville, Md., home of Morris Amitay, an Israeli lobbyist. His miscalculations resulted in damage to only one room of the house: the kitchen. Though he harmed none of the human occupants, Franklin killed the family pet. He laughed when he told a reporter that he “blew the kosher dog up.”

In July 1977, he tried to blow up a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tenn. His fumbling and shoddy electrical work resulted in missing the human targets within and only damaging the building.

As far as killers went, Franklin wasn’t measuring up. He took a new route with his tactics.

In August of that year, he killed an interracial couple in Madison, Wis.

In October, he used a sniper rifle to kill a man and wound two others as they left a synagogue in Richmond Heights, Mo.

In March of 1978, he took aim at Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Franklin was angered by the pornographic magazine’s depictions of interracial sex. He sniped Flynt and his lawyer as they left a Lawrenceville, Ga., courthouse. Flynt remains a paraplegic as a result.

Over the next two years, he laced across the South and Midwest – traditional stomping grounds of white supremacy – taking aim at minorities. He took an estimated 17-20 lives and wounded five others. It’s believed there may be more unaccounted victims.

Among those injured was political high-roller Vernon Jordan. Originally, Franklin attempted to stalk and kill the Rev. Jesse Jackson, but unsurprisingly failed. He settled on then-Urban League President Jordan and in 1980, in Fort Wayne, Ind., Franklin sniped him from 140 feet away.

Franklin thought he was on the path to fame. What he actually met was a lot less glamorous.

Inside

On June 8, 1980, Franklin laid flat on a railroad trestle in Cincinnati, Ohio. The neighborhood around him was racially mixed and he felt sure to find an interracial couple out on a stroll in the evening air. However, Franklin had none of the patience possessed by truly professional snipers and grew restless.

He saw two figures in the darkness. Cousins Darrel Lane, 14, and Donte Brown, 13, had slipped out of the house to go buy some candy and were returning from the grocery store.

Franklin took aim and fired, killing both.

In 1997, before being prosecuted for those murders, Franklin was interviewed by then-Hamilton County prosecutor Melissa Powers. Authorities were aware of Franklin’s refusal to speak with males and chose the attractive blonde attorney to gather information.

Initially, he declined the first date of the interview, April 20, 1997, as he would be celebrating Hitler’s birthday. Franklin instead agreed to meet with Powers on April 13, his 47th birthday.

What she found in that five-hour session was less than Franklin would have others believe.

“Well, first of all, the only reason he met with me was because of some crazy fixation with numbers,” Powers recently explained. “Something about the number of letters in my name. It all added up to 13. He kept asking me, ‘You’re not a witch, are you?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. What if I was?’ And he said, ‘If you were, I could tell you so much more.’”

Powers had been briefed by federal agents on aspects of the interview, what to expect, what look for, how to stay on guard. “The one thing they did say about him is that if you do talk to him, don’t talk to him across the table, sit at a 45-degree angle,” recalled Powers. “Keep your back to the door.”

The success of the tactic? “He moved his chair around the table, he did it, I didn’t even have to do it,” Powers said. “He did it. Apparently it’s not perceived as a confrontation and helps get the information.”

Franklin wasted no time. “The case in Cincinnati, he came right in and admitted it,” Powers said. “He came in and said, ‘I did it.’

“I said, ‘Did what?’”

“He said, ‘You know, I killed those dudes. So what else you want to talk about?’”

Powers seized the opportunity to explore some more and the perverse territory she charted was a place to which she would not want to return….

In the next Lagniappe, officials reveal Franklin’s details of murders across the country including one revelation that frees an innocent man.

Kevin Lee is Lagniappe associate editor. Contact him at klee@lagniappemobile.com.

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