Killer's Shadow Page 6

  AS I REVIEWED FRANKLIN’S FILE IN THE LIBRARY IN QUANTICO, THE RESOLUTION to the 22-Caliber case was still years in the future. But because I believed that Franklin was not behind the Buffalo shootings, I was left with a disturbing new realization: in such a short period of time we were seeing two multiple murderers who were motivated not by lust or any kind of sexual perversion, but by pure hate for Black people.

  To that point, I’d dealt with crimes of interpersonal violence every day, but they were mostly the result of the sick narcissism of individual human monsters. Though we saw copycats and serial killers who were influenced by other serial killers, there was no danger these crimes were going to spread to a wider group of susceptible people; just as now, while violent video games may stimulate individuals already prone to violence, they are not going to make killers or rapists or carjackers out of ordinary teenage boys or young men who play the games.

  As horrible as urban gunmen like David Berkowitz, rapist killers like Ed Kemper and Richard Speck, and sadistic torture murderers like Lawrence Bittaker, Roy Norris, Leonard Lake, and Charles Ng are, there is no chance their perverse designs and deviant psyches are going to achieve larger social purchase and motivate others. We may have a fascination with them and what makes them tick, but that fascination is mixed with revulsion.

  With a Joseph Paul Franklin or a .22-Caliber Killer, though, their venomous ideas and increasing victim count are not only imminent dangers in and of themselves, they are the embodiment of a philosophy that actually can draw in and inspire other weak, disenfranchised losers.

  That, I think, is one of the main reasons Charles Manson has held such a prominent place for so long in the firmament of American monsters; why he has maintained such a morbid fix on the public imagination. Though he probably shot drug dealer Bernard Crowe and believed he had killed him (Crowe later testified at Manson’s trial), Manson never killed anyone himself. What was terrifying about him, though, was his ability to attract seemingly normal, middle-class followers and inspire them to do his murderous bidding without any question of conscience or pang of remorse. This is a power beyond the ability to kill. Even after the trial and his incarceration, he inspired one of his followers, twenty-six-year-old Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromme, to attempt to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford in 1975. Seventeen days later, forty-five-year-old Sara Jane Moore also tried to assassinate President Ford. They were the only two known female presidential assassins in American history.

  When Bob Ressler and I interviewed Manson at San Quentin, he didn’t make a lot of sense with his rantings and ravings against society. But close up, we could see his charismatic dominance and the way he could have exerted control over reasonably intelligent but impressionable people who were looking for some direction and meaning in their lives, and a guru to define it for them.

  As I sat in the library staring at the files laid out on the table in front of me, this was what disturbed me so much about Joseph Paul Franklin. Though he didn’t have the dark charisma or up-close-and-personal verbal skills of a Charles Manson, his crimes could be just as influential and dangerous—even if only within white supremacist circles.

  I had come of age during the civil rights struggles and urban riots of the 1960s, and I saw how they tore apart the country. If we were now on the verge of seeing a new breed of serial killer, one whose motivating energy was nothing more nor less than a hatred of a race that was all too belatedly starting to gain its rightful place in society, then I truly feared for what we in law enforcement, and the nation at large, could be about to face. Vicious and cruel as Franklin was, he represented something far larger and more dangerous than his own miserable existence.

  Chapter 5

  Franklin was now a highly wanted man. Law enforcement personnel throughout the United States would be on the lookout for him. Another teletype went out from the Louisville, Kentucky, field office to the Civil Rights Section at headquarters and the other field offices in areas where Franklin was suspected of having been, describing how he had been positively identified on August 10 and 27, and September 16, as well as purchasing wigs in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, so we knew he was taking precautions in addition to using various IDs in different names. And from his previous experience and track record, we knew he could be anywhere.

  In early October, the FBI had issued a federal warrant charging Franklin with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. A teletype from the director’s office to all field offices about Franklin gave his birth name, James Clayton Vaughn Jr., and all of his known aliases: James Cooper, Joseph R. Hagman, William R. Jackson, Joseph R. Hart, Joseph H. Hart, Joseph Hart, Charles Pitts, Ed Garland, and B. Bradley.

  After presenting a physical description and the notation that he often wore disguises, the fact that he was blind in his right eye, his known relatives, and his previous affiliations with the American Nazi Party in Texas and the Worldwide Church of God in California, the communication listed several unsolved crimes that were thought to be possibly associated with Franklin. Among them were the incidents in Oklahoma City and Johnstown, and the three shootings in Indiana, including the attempted murder of Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne on May 29, 1980.

  The last phrase of the multi-page teletype was clear and to the point: ARMED AND DANGEROUS.

  U.S. magistrate Daniel Alsup issued a federal warrant in Salt Lake City for Franklin’s arrest in connection with the shootings in Liberty Park.

  With the manhunt a national law enforcement priority, the FBI field offices down south had been working to expand our knowledge of Franklin through interviews with his family members. The next file document I had to work with was a report to the Civil Rights Division from the Mobile, Alabama, field office, detailing an interview with Carolyn Helen Luster of Prattville, Alabama, on October 2. Luster was Franklin’s older sister. He also had a younger sister, Marilyn—married name Garzan—and a younger brother, Gordon Vaughn, who, at the time of the Luster interview, had recently been released from state prison in Florida after serving time for a burglary conviction. Gordon had visited Carolyn back in 1973, when she lived in Mobile, and left with her money and jewelry.

  Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for brothers brought up in the same dysfunctional, abusive household to end up in similar circumstances; that is, committing crimes and antisocial acts. On the other hand, we see more cases of brothers raised under the same bad circumstances going in opposite ways. For example, Gary Mark Gilmore, the first person executed for murder after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, has a younger brother named Mikal who became a distinguished music critic and writer.

  Another commonality we see—though I would not go so far as to call it a generality—is an overbearing, domineering mother and a weak, uninvolved, or absent father. As we will see in the Vaughn family, the kids got the worst of both worlds.

  We are often asked why, in these abusive and dysfunctional families, it is the boys so much more often than the girls who end up as violent criminals. One answer is, they just do. Men are more combative than women, have more difficulty controlling their anger, and are quicker to get into violent confrontations. It may just be that nature created testosterone as a more aggressive hormone back in prehistory when hunting animals larger and fiercer than us was a matter of survival. Second, brutal fathers often take out their own aggression and rage more severely on sons than daughters. And third, we find that women who have been beaten or sexually molested as children tend to be self-abusive and self-punishing rather than lashing out at others, as men do. This could manifest as low self-esteem, substance abuse, prostitution, or unconsciously seeking out brutal or unsuitable men like their fathers in a repetition of their childhoods.

  Carolyn Luster said during the time she and Jimmy, as she called him, lived at home together in Mobile, he was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan, becoming involved when he was seventeen or eighteen. The last time she had seen Jimmy was seven years before, in 1973, when he came back home for a visit and found out his m
other had died the previous year. Carolyn said he was upset when he learned of her passing. Abused children who hate their parents often have highly conflicted feelings when the objects of their hurt, rage, and resentment are no longer alive to focus on. But Carolyn reported he also became irate when he saw she had a female African American maid working for her, and the argument between Carolyn and Jimmy nearly led her to call the police to get him to leave the house. She told the agents she did not know where Gordon was, and that their sister, Marilyn, might have more information.

  Special agents from the Mobile field office then contacted Marilyn Garzan that same day. She traced James’s residences from Arlington, Virginia, to Hyattsville, Maryland, to Birmingham, Alabama. She said he had left Birmingham two and a half or three years before and that she had last seen him around that time when she happened to run into him in the Eastdale Mall in Montgomery. She did not know his current whereabouts.

  The story Marilyn related of the four Vaughn children’s upbringing provided even more insight into the commonalities between Franklin’s background and those of the other serial killers I’d encountered. Their father, James Clayton Vaughn Sr., was a butcher born and raised in Mobile, who came back from World War II as a disabled veteran, reportedly having suffered a head wound from enemy fire on Iwo Jima that left him with convulsions, a speech impediment, and need of a cane to walk. His wife, Helen, nine years his senior, was the daughter of Nazi-supporting German immigrants. The family lived a hand-to-mouth existence and the parents fought constantly. James would beat Helen, at one point causing her to lose a pregnancy. Jimmy was born in a low-income housing project across the street from a Black nightclub. The family moved to Dayton, Ohio, and then New Orleans, and James Senior finally left them when Jimmy was eight, returning infrequently. When he did, he was likely to be drunk and physically abuse the children. Sometimes he used his cane. Carolyn said he was arrested and jailed many times for public drunkenness.

  The children got it from both parents, which is fairly unusual. Carolyn said Helen had beaten Jimmy frequently and that he and Gordon were “always in trouble.” According to her account, all of the children received regular and severe physical punishment, often for slight or even merely perceived infractions. Carolyn remembered being whipped with a leather belt. Jimmy and Gordon, in turn, took pleasure and satisfaction in abusing cats, such as by hanging them by their tails from clotheslines. Cruelty to animals is one of the surest signs that, without serious intervention, a child may grow up to be antisocial or criminal.

  Mobile PD detective Ashbel White, who also was investigating Franklin’s background, concluded that the two brothers had essentially been raised more by the two sisters than by either of their parents. Though big for his age and apparently strong, James never went out for any school athletic teams and was considered a loner. None of his teachers seemed to remember him.

  Jimmy, Carolyn said, developed a severe hatred of their mother. He was seven years old when she said he suffered the injury that lost him almost all sight in his right eye.

  Marilyn said his best friend in high school encouraged him to join the Nazi party. “He was looking for something,” Carolyn added. “Before the Nazi thing, he had attended almost every church in Mobile to listen to the preachers. He was fascinated with religion, searching for the meaning in things.” He subscribed to several right-wing and white supremacist publications and took to wearing swastika armbands. He dropped out of high school at age seventeen, and soon after, he met, and two weeks later married, a sixteen-year-old named Bobbie Louise Dorman. With Bobbie looking on, he would frequently stand rigidly in front of a mirror, click his heels together, and practice a Nazi salute.

  Ten months later they were divorced, amid claims that he beat her, reprising his father’s domestic violence. She listed physical cruelty as the grounds and told authorities that she came to fear for her life. We believe this is more than just “learned behavior” on the part of the abuser. It is compensatory behavior. It represents the psychological need of someone who has been too weak to fend off physical abuse now being strong enough to inflict it on someone else, in this case, a sixteen-year-old wife.

  Shortly after they divorced, he moved to Arlington, Virginia, which was then home to George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, which he joined.

  The FBI summary I was working from stated that Franklin moved to Arlington in 1965, which didn’t seem likely since he would have been only fifteen at the time. Later research into his biography by the psychology department of Radford University in Virginia, as well as other sources, pegged his move to 1968, after he had dropped out of high school and after his marriage to Bobbie. In that case, he would not have met Rockwell, who was gunned down in 1967 as he was getting into his car in front of a self-service Laundromat in a shopping center near his Arlington home by John Patler, a former party member whom Rockwell had expelled for what Rockwell termed “Bolshevik leanings.” The organization, whose name Rockwell had changed officially in December 1966 to the National Socialist White People’s Party though still commonly referred to as the Nazi Party, was taken over by Matthias Koehl Jr. At its height, the party was estimated to have about five hundred members. By the time of Rockwell’s murder, it was probably down to about two hundred.

  In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Los Angeles of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others, Franklin became obsessed with Charles Manson’s professed plan for a race war throughout the United States. He was impressed that one leader with a small band of loyal followers could effect such decisive societal action. A confirmation of why Franklin scared and repulsed me as much as Manson did.

  Though they grew up in the segregated and discriminatory Jim Crow South, Carolyn said she never noticed Jimmy having a severe hatred for minorities until he moved to Virginia and joined the American Nazi Party. At that point, she said, Adolf Hitler became his hero and he carried around a copy of Hitler’s memoir and manifesto, Mein Kampf. This may have been so, as Jimmy had little contact with African Americans while he was growing up until he was in high school, when the South was slowly starting to integrate. I wondered if that was when his obsessive hatred of African Americans began. I noted he was fifteen when he stole a copy of Hitler’s memoir from the Mobile Public Library and read it for the first time, fascinated by the führer’s strength of will and vision of racial purity—proof positive that words have both power and consequences. The fact that he had never knowingly met a Jew didn’t seem to matter. The Nazis had been committed to wiping them out before they could put their plan for world domination into effect.

  Eventually, James moved to Marietta, Georgia, and obtained his GED (General Education Development, or high school equivalency) degree in December 1974. The following March, he enrolled in DeKalb Community College in Clarkston, Georgia, for a while. By this time, he had also joined the Atlanta chapter of the far-right-wing, white supremacist, and anti-Semitic National States’ Rights Party. It was led by Jesse Benjamin “J.B.” Stoner Jr., a rabidly racist and segregationist attorney from Georgia who participated in the defense of James Earl Ray for the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. One of Stoner’s chief lieutenants was Ray’s brother Jerry.

  Stoner was a Holocaust denier, who at the same time regretted that it did not happen and was all for bringing back the instruments of control and death all legitimate thinkers knew the Nazis had employed. In 1980, the same year we were looking for Joseph Paul Franklin, Stoner was tried and found guilty for his role in the bombing of Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church back in 1958, for which he would serve three and a half years of a ten-year sentence. He died in 2005 at age eighty-one, never having renounced his philosophy of hate. Though Stoner only vaguely remembered Franklin when asked about him later, saying he wore thick glasses, this was the kind of leader who fired young James’s imagination.

  For some of these young men, poorly treated as children and poorly educated, hate groups like the Klan and Nazis can be appealing. They len
d a sense of purpose and mission—however erroneously—to an otherwise aimless life. They suggest strength in a group of like-minded people supposedly working for a common cause. They offer a palatable explanation of why these losers are not getting ahead in life and what unjust forces are holding them back. Perhaps most important, and tied to all the others, is the message that there are groups of people who are inherently inferior to you. Blacks, Jews, immigrants, now Muslims, and, for some, women, are favorite targets, but it can be just about any “other.”

  James said he wanted to join the Marine Corps but was exempt from military service during the Vietnam years because of his eye injury, and I suspected his obsession with guns was a way of compensating. He briefly joined the Alabama National Guard in 1967, certainly with the intention of feeling more macho and improving his weapons skills. But records showed he was discharged after four months for lack of attendance at drills and being charged with possession of a handgun whose serial number had been filed off. This didn’t surprise me. He joined other paramilitary organizations, like the American Nazi Party, which no doubt gave him a feeling of power and belonging, two elements that were severely lacking in his life. I didn’t doubt that he got a sexual turn-on as well from that power, just as “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz did, even though he never touched his victims. But with Franklin, the gratification of fulfilling the mission would still be the primary turn-on.

  There were two other things in Franklin’s biographical summary that struck me immediately. The first was the simple fact of his name change. There was the practical consideration of changing his name so he could escape his criminal record and join the Rhodesian army or some other military or paramilitary force. But given the fact that he shared the same name with a father who abused him and that he hated his mother as well, I wasn’t surprised that he would be motivated to want to disassociate himself from his previous identity. What was significant to me, though, was his choice of a new name. The “Joseph Paul,” according to sources, was derived from Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ powerful minister of propaganda, who committed suicide with his wife, Magda, after poisoning their six children, the day after Hitler and Eva Braun’s suicide in the Führerbunker as the Red Army closed in on Berlin. The last name came from Benjamin Franklin, one of the most prominent of the Founding Fathers of the United States.