Joseph Paul Franklin White Supremacist Serial Killer FBI Files

Joseph Paul Franklin White Supremacist Serial Killer FBI Files

This collection contains a total of 705 pages.

Joseph Paul Franklin was convicted of committing eight murders and is suspected to have murdered as many as twenty. The official FBI count is at least 15 murders. His most well-known act of violence was the 1978 shooting of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt. Franklin was never charged for shooting Flynt. In 1980 attorney, business executive and civil rights activist Vernon Jordan Jr. was shot in the parking lot of the Marriott Inn in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Franklin was charged with attempted murder for shooting Jordan. However, he was acquitted in 1982. Franklin later confessed to both shootings.

He was born James Clayton Vaughn Jr. in 1950. He later changed his name to reflect his admiration of Benjamin Franklin and Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. He was attracted to white supremacist ideologies at an early age.  However, he found supremacist groups to be lacking in actions.

His first known act of racial violence was in 1976 when he sprayed an interracial couple in Atlanta with mace. He bombed a synagogue in Tennessee in 1977. Soon after the bombing he confronted a black man and a white man in a parking lot in Wisconsin and killed them.

He went on a killing spree from 1977 to the end of 1980, killing at least 15 men, women, and children across 11 states. During this time, he roamed across the country, robbing banks and using a sniper rifle to target his victims. Killing as many as 20 people and seriously injuring at least six. Franklin mostly targeted black men and boys, interracial couples, and Jews.

On November 11, 2013, he was executed in Missouri for the 1977 murder of a man, Gerald Gordon, who was shot while he was standing in front of a synagogue in St. Louis after attending a bar mitzvah.
 

FBI Files 

513 pages of FBI files dating from 1980 to 1996 covering Joseph Paul Franklin. The files cover his entire crime spree and contains material from local police agencies, particularly Wisconsin law enforcement. 

Key documents amongst the files include:  A psychological personality assessment of Franklin produced by the FBI Academy's Behavioral Science Unit. Transcript of an interview of Franklin by the Madison Police Department taken at the Federal Penitentiary near Marion, Illinois. Copies of transcripts of interviews of witnesses taken by the Madison Police Department.

The crimes most covered are the two cases of the murders of Alphonse Manning and Toni Schwenn on August 7, 1977, in Madison, Wisconsin and the murders of Theodore Tracy Fields and David Loren Martin on August 20, 1980, in Salt Lake City.

On August 7, 1977, Alphonse Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn, a young interracial couple, were shot and killed by Franklin in a parking lot at East Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin. 

On August 20, 1980, Franklin killed two black men, 20-year-old Ted Fields and 18-year-old David Martin, near Liberty Park located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Franklin had earlier seen them as part of an interracial group of friends jogging together at the park. They were the last murders in the spree to take place in which Franklin was convicted.  

Other material in the collection includes: 

Court Documents 

125 pages of text transcripts of court documents from five cases, documents are mostly opinions from appellate cases in which Joseph Paul Franklin is a party. Documents date from 1983 to 2012. Documents often contain detailed narratives.

 
Congressional Documents

36 pages of excerpts from a Congressional report and hearing transcripts of sections containing content covering Franklin. The hearing was titled, "Increasing violence against minorities: hearing before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-sixth Congress, second session, on increasing violence against minorities, December 9, 1980."

 
Lone Wolf Terrorism in America - Using Knowledge of Radicalization Pathways to Forge Prevention Strategies (2015) 

A 28-page report published by the U.S. Department of Justice, mentioning Franklin.