Killer's Shadow Read online

  These name choices signified to me that this was certainly a mixed-up young man, conflating the values of an American patriot and inventor with a key strategist for the Nazi campaign of hatred, lies, cruelty, and mass murder. While Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin were both media moguls of their day, what stood out clearly was that these were famous, “important,” and influential men—again, something James Clayton Vaughn Jr. was not. It reinforced to me that no matter which of the listed crimes Franklin had committed, he was trying to overcome an overwhelming sense of insignificance and inadequacy. I thought that if we got to talk to him, we’d find out that his personal heroes would be assassins—people like Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray.

  Marilyn Garzan also told the FBI that her brother mentioned he had joined the National States’ Rights Party after quitting the American Nazi Party because someone in the Nazi party “was conspiring against him.” Now, guys who join these types of organizations tend to be paranoid to a certain extent to begin with. But when you start suspecting your fellow comrades of conspiring against you, you are probably seriously paranoid. This fit in perfectly with what we knew of the typical assassin personality. It helped explain all the aliases and his hostile suspicion of everyone who was different as wanting to take over or diminish him in some way. This meant he would always be hypervigilant, but it also meant we understood one of his emotional hot buttons and might be able to exploit it in some way.

  Garzan said she had visited her brother in 1976 in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Hyattsville, Maryland, where he was working as a maintenance man in an office building complex that housed several law firms. He lived in a room in one of the buildings, along with several handguns. She said he seemed to have calmed down somewhat by this time and had dropped out of both the KKK and the States’ Rights Party. He said he had left the Klan because of “FBI harassment.” Since the Bureau was trying to infiltrate and spy on extremist groups by this point, I couldn’t say whether this was his instinctive paranoia, or if he thought he had ever actually come in contact with an FBI informant. But during his time in the Klan, he was exposed to the literature being freely circulated on how to bomb churches and create Molotov cocktails, as well as advanced weapons training.

  In any event, he moved back down south, to Birmingham, Alabama, and lived in a rooming house. When Garzan saw him at the mall in 1977, she said, she didn’t believe he was working because he had saved a lot of money from his job in Maryland. I found that hard to fathom, given his occupation. If he had money, which he apparently did, I thought he would have gotten it through means other than lawful employment. The two most logical possibilities for where this money was coming from were burglary and robbery.

  At the mall, Franklin had told her he had just joined some radical right-wing organization, but she wasn’t sure if it was the KKK or not. He had expressed interest to her in rejoining, but she didn’t know if he actually had.

  Then he told her something that really scared her. He said he had been sitting in his car in the parking lot of an apartment complex and shot a Black man in the chest. He said the police had set up a roadblock, but he had managed to evade it. He wouldn’t tell her where or when this had happened, and she didn’t know whether it was true or not, but she told the special agents that she thought her brother was quite capable of killing. She was more afraid of her brother now because she had married a man of Hispanic descent and she didn’t think he would consider her husband as white. The time she had run into him at the mall, he had pressed her, “You still dating spics?” She said he refused to eat in restaurants that employed African Americans, and that if he ever saw a mixed-race couple out in public, he had no compunction about approaching them and telling them how disgusting it was for them to be together.

  While I was surprised he had not gotten into more documented altercations with that kind of brazen offensiveness, it fit the larger portrait that was coming into focus. Looking at the family history alongside the murders he was accused of, I saw an individual who was like a pot of steaming water that had already boiled over. The verbal attacks—and the Mace attack on the interracial couple in Maryland—were just warm-ups for his sniper killings. When he got away with them—remember, though he was arrested for the Mace assault, he didn’t show up for trial and so was never punished—he felt emboldened to escalate his action to better satisfy his purpose. Already imbued with a sense of mission that was inextricably tied to his identity and self-worth, once he had experienced the triggering event—his first murder—and realized he had gotten away with that, too, any previous inhibitions he may have had would have evaporated. And after he perpetrated that first killing and experienced the thrill of feeling the ultimate power over his victims’ life and death, the assassin within him had been released and the long-held fantasy satisfied. But like every other serial killer, regardless of motive, that satisfaction doesn’t last long, and the fantasy must be fed again.

  At first his crimes were situational, but as he evolved as a violent criminal, they became more advanced and better planned, lowering the risk for himself and making him even more dangerous. He would keep on killing until he was caught.

  Chapter 6

  Having gone through the case files, the FBI memoranda, news articles (which was a lot more difficult in those pre-internet days), and any additional sources I could access, I spent the day composing my fugitive assessment.

  The next day, I sent it off to headquarters, as well as a copy to Roger Depue, the Behavioral Science Unit chief. Roger had recently taken over from the previous chief, who had been an exceptional instructor in the area of practical police problems but wasn’t crazy about Criminal Profiling becoming such a popular course and morphing into an operational component of the BSU. Still, he couldn’t deny that the positive feedback we were getting both from police departments and field agents around the country as a tool for investigating violent crime was making the whole BSU, as well as the academy itself, look good.

  When Roger took over, though, it was a different story. He had a lot of practical experience as a former police chief in Michigan and was 100 percent behind us. He testified effectively before Congress on the need for more resources to fight the then rising level of violent crime, and we eventually received more personnel as a result. He is both a deeply spiritual man, having spent some time in a seminary, and also the founder of the Academy Group, Inc. consulting service after he retired from the Bureau.

  I thought it important to contextualize Franklin’s psychic development and motivation both for those hunting him and those who would be dealing with him once he was caught. Even though this was a different type of violent offender than we had previously studied, I felt we could use the same techniques to evaluate and classify him. What I thought would be most important was to try to predict where he might go; that is, to define his comfort zone. Would the publicity and the nationwide manhunt put him under more stress, leading him to grow sloppy and make mistakes, or would it gratify his sense of his own importance? We were clearly hoping to up the ass-pucker factor, but either way, I thought it likely that the knowledge that we were after him would make him both more careful and more erratic. For example, if he’d been making his living by robbing banks, he might be more careful, knowing how heavily surveilled they were, but there were certain things he would have to do, such as find a place to sleep and get some money, and that was where I was hoping his thinking would get more ragged. After all, he had escaped from the Florence police station with nothing, having abandoned his car and whatever he had in the motel room. So, he was essentially starting from scratch. Under the circumstances, I thought he would be like a homing pigeon, going back to places with which he was most familiar. That was the element on which I was betting the heaviest, so I sure hoped I was proved right.

  My memorandum to Roger accompanying the document detailed the aim:

  The personality assessment will hopefully paint a clearer picture of Franklin to arresting agents as well as agents res
ponsible for interrogating Franklin. Furthermore, this assessment is designed to show personality weaknesses as well as strengths of Franklin and to make the future arrest of Franklin as safe as possible for both him and particularly for our Special Agents detailed on this assignment.

  After reviewing his background and upbringing, the assessment explained:

  Franklin is part of a cycle that continues even now as an adult. He felt his needs, desires and emotions were never really considered; that they were never listened to or considered valuable and important in their own right. Consequently, he felt ineffectual and often worthless. He never had much sense of joy or pleasure in life or any reliable expectation that people would be good to him. He began to think of success only in terms of avoidance of punishment, criticism and ridicule. As a teenager in high school he was delinquent and disruptive. He never graduated from high school although he is average to above average in intelligence. The effects on his psychological and physical development were catastrophic for him. Not only was he abused physically and psychologically, but an early childhood accident left him blind in his right eye. This handicap may have led him to overcompensate for this handicap by becoming obsessed with weapons as well as firing them with superior accuracy—even with a visual handicap. The effects of his prior experiences as set forth above have created an individual who has a low self-esteem; chronic, low-grade depression; a sense of hopelessness and a lack of basic trust; with corresponding disbelief in the availability of any “helping” authoritarian figure. He believes he should try to solve problems alone rather than share them with others. He does not trust anyone.

  Now, any reasonable and empathetic person merely reading that description would have great compassion for that individual, and I’m no different. When I delve into the childhood and teen years of so many of the people I’ve studied and hunted—the psychological and sexual abuse, the neglect, the accidents, and the punishment they’ve endured—I can’t help but feel sorry for them and be eternally thankful I had a mother, father, and sister who loved me unconditionally, even when I screwed up, which wasn’t all that infrequently.

  But though it may explain how they came to be the way they are, nothing excuses the way these violent criminals choose to express their frustrations, their anger, their psychic wounds. Because as we’ve made clear throughout our writing, unless an individual is so psychotically ill that he is delusional, he can always choose his actions. So, as badly as I felt for what young James Clayton Vaughn Jr. suffered, while I even understood why he had turned to the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and the National States’ Rights Party for a feeling of strength, purpose, and belonging, my only aim now was to help put him permanently out of business if I could.

  I went on to describe a significant transformation that had clearly taken place in Franklin. He had ultimately left the Nazis and the Klan, not only because he felt both groups were infiltrated by the FBI, but also because he saw them as a group of frequent drunks who only wanted to complain about the Blacks and Jews taking over the country and find camaraderie in their mutual resentment. Franklin, on the other hand, wanted action. He wanted to take action.

  “What happened to Franklin since leaving high school,” I wrote, “is a transformation from a follower in groups with a strong need to belong, to his present need where he now is a leader of his own group—even if it is a group consisting only of himself.”

  For someone like Franklin, with his background of abuse, neglect, and lack of privilege or adequate education, violence was one of the few ways he could express his resentment and separate himself from all the other malcontents in his various organizations. And when you combine this with his paranoia, his wariness of those around him, then his transformation into the hero-assassin, brave and ready to take on all challenges, is the ultimate expression of self-actualization.

  This feeling of wanting to be a leader and in control, coupled with his innate feeling of inadequacy, was demonstrated in his relationships with women. In addition to his short-lived marriage to Bobbie Dorman when she was sixteen and he was eighteen, he had married again in 1979, when he was twenty-nine. Again, his bride, Anita Carden, was sixteen. They had met in a Dairy Deelite ice cream shop in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1978, and Anita gave birth to a daughter on August 25, 1979. By the time we had identified Franklin as a wanted man in the fall of 1980, they were already separated.

  As an adult, you do not marry a teenager unless you have a need to control her or him, and/or do not feel adequate in relationships with other adults. In other words, in terms of interpersonal and psychosexual relationships, Franklin had not progressed from his own late teen years. We also had evidence that in between those two marriages he had dated a number of women many years younger than he was.

  Not only did he feel threatened by women his own age, he had sexually assaulted an elderly female invalid. This is a clear sign of inadequacy. We see many rapists attack both the elderly and children, not because either is a victim of preference, but merely because they are vulnerable and can’t effectively fight back.

  We knew that Franklin had become a health food fanatic and an avid bodybuilder and runner. Again, this all had to do with a compensatory building up of his self-image. So, I advised that whoever arrested and interrogated him should pay close attention to his physical condition. If he appeared run down or had noticeably gained or lost weight, he would be more vulnerable. I was hoping that stress would not only lead to a mistake that would help us find him, but also make him more malleable during questioning. I noted:

  Basically, although Franklin is homicidal, he is equally suicidal. Franklin will appear arrogant, cocky and self-confident, but in reality, he is a coward. His crimes are those of a coward. He ambushes unsuspecting victims rather than killing them directly at close range.

  I warned that psychopathic or antisocial offenders like Franklin often change their M.O. to suit the situation and as they learn from their previous “successes.” Since he had been a former security guard, he would know police procedures and I predicted he would probably have a collection of police and security badges and other police paraphernalia in addition to all of his false IDs. His changing of weapons from one crime to another was certainly an indication of a certain type of sophistication about law enforcement.

  Despite the indicators that he had spent the past three to five years traveling around the country, I felt certain that with the stress he was now under, he would gravitate back down south, most likely Alabama or the Gulf Coast, to places he felt most comfortable. As distrustful and paranoid as he was, Franklin would have few loyalties. “However,” I proposed, “he will be emotionally drawn like a magnet to his young wife and child. They are all he has.

  Franklin has had few accomplishments in his life. His wife, his daughter and now his mission to eliminate blacks are his only accomplishments.

  We should expect a wife that is cooperative to a point, however fear of retaliation by her husband will stop her short from providing accurate information relative to the whereabouts of her husband.

  In a summary under the heading of “Franklin’s Weaknesses,” I wrote:

  While on the run, he will return to places that he is familiar with. He feels more comfortable in areas where he experienced pleasurable memories in the past. Once again, his wife and other members of his family that he was close to as a child will be contacted by Franklin. Returning to these areas is similar to an athletic team having the home court or home field advantage. If an apprehension attempt is made at one of these areas, he will feel better able to meet the challenge.

  He would likely still be meticulous in his planning and prepared for a police ambush.

  While I expected him to visit Anita, though they were separated, or perhaps his sisters or other relatives, he wouldn’t take the chance of sleeping in their homes. I warned that if police located him and attempted a nighttime assault, he was likely to be more familiar with the area and terrain than they were. I thought the best appr
oach, if possible, would be to approach him swiftly by surprise, because homicidal offenders of this type often glory in the fantasy of killing themselves when cornered, or at the moment of greatest drama, or force a “suicide by cop.”

  I added several pages about interrogation techniques that could be effective if or when he was caught and how police detectives or FBI agents should handle him. I concluded with the offer to discuss any and all aspects of the personality assessment and gave my academy contact information. I was hoping this offer would prove useful later, once Franklin was arrested and agents had a chance to interview him. But first, we had to catch him.

  Chapter 7

  On October 15, 1980, a couple of days after I turned in my assessment, agents in the Mobile field office located and interviewed Franklin’s estranged wife Anita.

  She was going by the name Anita Carden Cooper because when she met Franklin in Montgomery in 1978, he was calling himself James Anthony Cooper. She told the agents that shortly after they began dating, he left Montgomery for several weeks, and then returned with a large sum of cash. Later, in December 1978, he left again, and after about a week returned with even more cash. After they were married, early in 1979, he left frequently for various periods of time. He never said where he had been or what he had been doing, but he often returned with money.