Sharp Shooting "White Supremacist" Serial Killer Scared Investigator

[Rev.Cambeul]

Remember "Hunter" by Dr William Pierce? This true story appears to be the inspiration for Hunter ...


'A paranoid lone wolf filled with anger': Real Mindhunter John Douglas explains why white supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin was the only one who scared him

 * Douglas pioneered criminal profiling in the 1970s and specialized in serial killers
 * He retired in 1996 and wrote books that were the basis of Netflix's Mindhunter
 * Douglas' latest book details his encounter with a white supremacist killer
 * Joseph Paul Franklin murdered a suspected 20 people in the 1970s and 80s
 * Franklin was arrested in October 1980 and executed in 2013, aged 63
 * Douglas said he showed no remorse and spoke of killing people like deer

Harriot Alexander | Daily Mail (UK) | 10 February 2021

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9242831/Real-Mindhunter-John-Douglas-explains-white-supremacist-killer-Joseph-Paul-Franklin-scared-him.html

Excerpt: The former FBI special agent who pioneered criminal profiling has revealed why one of the serial killers he hunted shook him more than any other in his 25-year career.

John Douglas, now 75, joined the FBI in 1970 and initially worked as a hostage negotiator before specializing in analyzing and tracking down serial killers.

As part of his research, he interviewed infamous figures such as serial killers Charles Manson and Ted Bundy, and Robert F. Kennedy's killer Sirhan Sirhan.

Following his retirement in 1996, Douglas became an author, and his book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, was turned into a wildly popular 2017 Netflix series, executive produced by Charlize Theron and David Fincher, among others.

Douglas' latest book tells of his encounter with white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin, who he described as the most disturbing person he ever met.

Franklin was convicted of eight murders in the late 1970s and 80s, and suspected of carrying out 20. He also shot and almost killed Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, leaving Flynt paralyzed.

In all cases, his motive was racism.

'The victim could have been anyone,' Douglas told Fox News.

'He targeted interracial couples, Jewish people, black people. Just his attitude alone was disturbing.

'Many of the murderers I've interviewed, there's usually a sexual bent to their crimes. Sometimes they'll show emotion, even if it's BS.

'But he was a different animal. I was hoping for a faint glimmer of remorse. Instead, he was always bragging, boasting, even trying to educate us on how he planned all his crimes.'

Franklin was executed in November 2013, aged 63.

He was put to death in Missouri for killing Gerald Gordon, 42, in a sniper shooting at a suburban St. Louis synagogue in 1977.

Gordon's case was the only one that carried the death penalty.

Franklin was born in Mobile, Alabama, as James Clayton Vaughn Jr.

The eldest son of an alcoholic drifter who frequently abandoned his family for months or years at a time, Franklin was frequently beaten by both parents, and came to particularly despise his mother.

'My mother was full-blooded German who was 5-foot-9 and weighed about 170 pounds,' he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Douglas writes that Franklin suffered an eye injury as a young child which his mother refused to treat, leaving him with severely impaired eyesight.

'It only made him despise his mother more,' Douglas explained. 'He ends up dropping out of high school. He wants to become a police officer, but he can't.

'So he's feeling inadequate and is filled with rage. He then becomes gravitated towards extreme groups like the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

'But he decides that's not enough and wants to take matters into his own hands. This was the birth of a lone wolf.'

He changed his name to honor Joseph Paul Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, and Benjamin Franklin.

In the early 1970s, Franklin traveled on a road trip to an American Nazi Party conference in Virginia with David Duke, who at the time was a student, and KKK fanatic Don Black.

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, he was in his mid-20s in 1977 when he began drifting alone across America, selling blood to make money and robbing up to 16 banks to fund his travels.

In 1977, he bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

No one was hurt, but the killings soon began.

His first victims were interracial couple Alphonse Manning Jr. and Toni Schwenn, murdered in a parking lot in Madison, Wisconsin.

That same year, he picked out a synagogue from the Yellow Pages in St. Louis and fired five shots at the parking lot after a bar mitzvah. One struck and killed Gordon, a father of three.

In March 1978 he ambushed Hustler publisher Larry Flynt as he left a courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

Franklin was enraged by the 1975 issue of Hustler that featured a black man with a white woman.

'It just made me sick. I think whites marry with whites, blacks with blacks, Indians with Indians. Orientals with orientals,' Franklin told CNN in 2013.

'I threw the magazine down and thought, I'm gonna kill that guy.'

Flynt survived the shooting but was paralyzed from the waist down.

He continued his rampage for another three years, criss-crossing the country and murdering people often at random.

In May 1980 Franklin shot and seriously wounded civil rights activist and Urban League president Vernon Jordan after seeing him with a white woman in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Vernon Jordan and once-upon-a-time HNIC

Franklin initially denied any part in the crime and was acquitted, but later confessed.

A week after shooting Jordan, he killed two children tar babies - cousins Darrell Lane, 14, and Dante Evans Brown, 13 - as they walked across a bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio.

He finally stumbled after killing two young black men in Salt Lake City in 1980.

He was arrested a month later in Kentucky and questioned about the firearm he had with him. He briefly escaped, but police had sufficient information to launch a nationwide hunt.

In October 1980 his tattoos, publicized by the FBI, drew the attention of a blood bank worker, who contacted the FBI. Franklin was arrested in Lakeland, Florida on October 28. 

He told CNN in 2013 that his aim throughout had been to start a race war.

'There was no remorse when I interviewed him,' said Douglas. 'His only disappointment was that he didn't kill more people. He felt accomplished in life by killing people.

'He felt it was important to carry the torch, to carry out this act of hatred. Deep down, he hoped to create a race war for others to carry the torch for him.

'He admired Charles Manson, whom I interviewed because he felt it was remarkable that Manson could get other people to carry out his dirty work to launch a race war.'

'When I interviewed him he was still fighting the death penalty. He spoke [to us] about his shootings like he was hunting deer. He laughed and joked.

'He didn't care who the people were because, in his mind, they were the enemy.

'He wanted people to listen, but he wasn't that articulate, he certainly wasn't charismatic.

'He was a paranoid lone wolf huffing and puffing because he didn't trust anyone and was filled with anger.'

Douglas told Fox he hopes his book will give new insight into the mind of a killer that has haunted him for years.

'But he was certainly different. And that's what makes him so disturbing.'