WEBVTT - One Man Race War: Joseph Paul Franklin, Pt. 1 0:00:01.680 --> 0:00:09.479 Col Zone media. It was already dark when the marcher 0:00:09.520 --> 0:00:14.320 set off. On November thirteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Thousands of 0:00:14.360 --> 0:00:17.240 people had gathered just outside the gates of Arlington National 0:00:17.239 --> 0:00:22.119 Cemetery outside of Washington, d C. Each marcher carried a 0:00:22.160 --> 0:00:26.320 candle and a small placard. At the head of the march, 0:00:26.960 --> 0:00:29.680 Judy Draws cupped her hands around the flame to shield 0:00:29.680 --> 0:00:33.240 it from the freezing wind. The sign she carried said 0:00:33.280 --> 0:00:39.880 only Donald Glen Draws, Missouri. At twenty three years old, 0:00:40.600 --> 0:00:43.320 she'd been a mother for ten months and a widow 0:00:43.360 --> 0:00:49.080 for seven. For the next thirty nine hours, nearly fifty 0:00:49.120 --> 0:00:53.680 thousand people walked from Arlington National Cemetery to the White House. 0:00:55.320 --> 0:00:57.720 Each marcher carried with them the name of a United 0:00:57.760 --> 0:01:02.400 States service member killed in the warren vying noam. They 0:01:02.400 --> 0:01:06.920 didn't chant or saying. The only sound came from the 0:01:06.959 --> 0:01:13.880 six drummers slowly tapping out a funeral cadence. Inside the 0:01:13.880 --> 0:01:20.440 White House, Richard Nixon fumed as peace activists marched overnight 0:01:20.480 --> 0:01:23.600 in the freezing rain. He joked about sending a low 0:01:23.600 --> 0:01:29.160 flying helicopter to blow out their candles. By Saturday morning, 0:01:30.000 --> 0:01:34.240 half a million people were in Washington, d c. Demanding 0:01:34.280 --> 0:01:38.280 an end to the war. It's easy to say now 0:01:39.240 --> 0:01:43.440 that they were right, but in nineteen sixty nine, the 0:01:43.480 --> 0:01:47.880 widows and clergy and students who opposed the war were 0:01:47.920 --> 0:01:52.800 beaten and tearcast. They were sneered at and called hippies 0:01:52.840 --> 0:01:58.040 and communists and traders. It wasn't just Richard Nixon who 0:01:58.080 --> 0:02:02.000 was upset by the demonstration. The night before the Three 0:02:02.080 --> 0:02:05.040 Day March against the War was scheduled to begin, a 0:02:05.080 --> 0:02:08.480 small group of neo Nazis snuck into the DC offices 0:02:08.560 --> 0:02:11.600 of the New Mobilization Committee to end the war in Vietnam, 0:02:12.480 --> 0:02:17.800 one of the groups organizing the event. Whatever happened on 0:02:17.840 --> 0:02:20.280 the ninth floor of that office building on Vermont Avenue 0:02:20.840 --> 0:02:24.720 barely made the news, but it left a lasting impression 0:02:24.840 --> 0:02:29.080 on two teenage Nazis. James Mason would go on to 0:02:29.120 --> 0:02:32.400 tell that story for years, including it several times in 0:02:32.440 --> 0:02:36.760 his book of essays extolling the Virtues of Terrorism. For 0:02:36.880 --> 0:02:41.080 Joseph Paul Franklin, it was an introduction to a thrilling possibility. 0:02:42.520 --> 0:02:46.920 If someone is doing something you don't like, you can 0:02:47.000 --> 0:02:54.040 hunt them down and hurt them. I'm Molly Conger and 0:02:54.160 --> 0:03:14.520 this is We're little guides. This is a story about 0:03:14.520 --> 0:03:20.000 a serial killer, part of it anyway. I'll be honest 0:03:20.000 --> 0:03:23.040 with you. I had a hard time concentrating this week, 0:03:23.880 --> 0:03:25.720 and when I ran out of time and sat down 0:03:25.760 --> 0:03:29.440 to write, I felt like I was out of words. Actually, 0:03:31.040 --> 0:03:33.400 I got bogged down in the details and my heart 0:03:33.440 --> 0:03:36.080 wasn't quite in it. But I did promise you and 0:03:36.120 --> 0:03:39.360 not see serial killer. So we will start the story 0:03:39.840 --> 0:03:41.200 and get through as much of it as I can 0:03:41.240 --> 0:03:43.440 get onto the page before Rory starts asking where the 0:03:43.440 --> 0:03:50.320 file is. Joseph Paul Franklin was a murderer. I've written 0:03:50.360 --> 0:03:55.760 about murderers before, but this one's different. He's not a 0:03:55.800 --> 0:03:59.600 mass shooter or a terrorist with a single mass casualty event, 0:03:59.720 --> 0:04:02.640 or some guy who snapped and drove his car into 0:04:02.640 --> 0:04:08.080 a crowd. This is a serial killer. This is the 0:04:08.120 --> 0:04:10.160 first time that our weird little guy has been the 0:04:10.200 --> 0:04:15.360 subject of TV true crime documentary shows like Criminal, Mindscape, 0:04:15.400 --> 0:04:21.119 FBI Files, and Mugshots. He's been covered by true crime 0:04:21.160 --> 0:04:26.839 podcasts with names like Murder in America, Death Cast, True Murder, 0:04:27.200 --> 0:04:30.760 True Crime, All the Time, Killer Stories, Murder Files, Unsealed, 0:04:31.080 --> 0:04:38.080 Crime in Comedy, Serial chillers, mamicide, and something called tequila. 0:04:38.200 --> 0:04:43.480 She wrote Limes, crimes, and murder times. I mean, there 0:04:43.480 --> 0:04:45.520 are a lot of true crime podcasts out there. I 0:04:45.560 --> 0:04:48.440 don't know what's going on here, and I didn't actually 0:04:48.440 --> 0:04:51.200 listen to any of those. I'm sure they're all perfectly fine. 0:04:52.720 --> 0:04:58.920 This is, technically, I guess, a true crime podcast. I mean, 0:04:58.960 --> 0:05:02.680 look at your podcast app. That's where the show's categorized. 0:05:04.360 --> 0:05:07.279 That's not how I would describe my work, but I 0:05:07.279 --> 0:05:11.560 can understand how that decision was made. These stories are 0:05:11.560 --> 0:05:16.800 true and there's usually a lot of crime. I'm not 0:05:17.080 --> 0:05:19.279 trying to pick a fight with the marketing department or 0:05:19.360 --> 0:05:22.560 the true crime girlies, don't get me wrong. I just 0:05:22.560 --> 0:05:25.880 think this show occupies a slightly different place in the 0:05:25.920 --> 0:05:30.000 information ecosystem. But that's something I learned while I was 0:05:30.040 --> 0:05:34.440 writing it. I didn't know what I was writing until 0:05:34.440 --> 0:05:39.080 I had been writing it for a few months a 0:05:39.160 --> 0:05:41.400 year and a half ago, when I suddenly found myself 0:05:41.440 --> 0:05:45.640 responsible for writing a weekly podcast. I didn't know what 0:05:45.720 --> 0:05:49.719 it was about. I mean, I had a general concept. 0:05:49.839 --> 0:05:52.960 I wrote some pitch notes that someone approved. The bones 0:05:52.960 --> 0:05:56.719 were there, the idea was solid. I loved telling a 0:05:56.760 --> 0:06:01.560 story about a weird little guy. That's why it's called that. Sophie, 0:06:01.600 --> 0:06:05.880 our eternally patient executive producer, jotted that phrase down on 0:06:05.920 --> 0:06:09.080 a notepad during a meeting months before I had any 0:06:09.120 --> 0:06:12.360 plans of hosting my own show, because she noticed how 0:06:12.400 --> 0:06:16.320 often I used that particular phrase to describe some awful 0:06:16.360 --> 0:06:19.320 extremists whose life and crimes I'm excited to dig into. 0:06:20.960 --> 0:06:23.520 She knew it was a good idea, and I knew 0:06:23.560 --> 0:06:26.080 she'd produced enough podcasts to know what she was talking about. 0:06:27.200 --> 0:06:29.359 So I dove right into the deep end and committed 0:06:29.360 --> 0:06:31.720 to a production schedule that meant coming up with an 0:06:31.720 --> 0:06:36.240 exciting new idea every week. I mean, how hard could 0:06:36.240 --> 0:06:41.800 it be. I'd never done this before. I have no 0:06:41.920 --> 0:06:45.720 idea what people want. I wasn't sure what the tone 0:06:45.800 --> 0:06:48.400 was supposed to be, or how to make coherent, interesting 0:06:48.480 --> 0:06:53.560 narratives out of my own peculiar and intense obsessions. The 0:06:53.600 --> 0:06:58.280 first episode aired on August eighth, twenty twenty four, and 0:06:58.320 --> 0:07:02.640 it was fine. The second episode was already done and 0:07:02.720 --> 0:07:04.920 I was struggling that week to write the third one. 0:07:06.240 --> 0:07:08.560 I actually don't care for the way that one came out, 0:07:08.640 --> 0:07:11.160 If we're being honest, but it was a learning curve 0:07:12.560 --> 0:07:16.200 and I was starting to panic. Not even three episodes 0:07:16.240 --> 0:07:18.320 into this thing I had committed to, and I'd hit 0:07:18.360 --> 0:07:21.240 a brick wall. How was I supposed to come up 0:07:21.240 --> 0:07:25.080 with a new good idea every week? But I'm a 0:07:25.080 --> 0:07:28.840 white woman in my thirties. I've listened to true crime podcasts, 0:07:29.920 --> 0:07:32.040 and if that's what the network thought the show was, 0:07:32.160 --> 0:07:36.880 then maybe that's what it was supposed to be. Looking 0:07:36.920 --> 0:07:39.640 at the version history now on a Google document that's 0:07:39.720 --> 0:07:44.200 just called ideas, the very first bullet point I typed 0:07:44.240 --> 0:07:49.200 on August ninth, twenty twenty four, just says Joseph Paul Franklin, 0:07:50.080 --> 0:07:54.240 Nazi serial killer. I ordered a used copy of a 0:07:54.240 --> 0:07:58.080 book about him that afternoon, and I started reading it 0:07:58.080 --> 0:08:02.520 the day it arrived. I felt a little defeated, but 0:08:03.640 --> 0:08:05.640 maybe there's no shame in reading a book and then 0:08:05.800 --> 0:08:08.120 finding a way to repackage it in an interesting way. 0:08:09.240 --> 0:08:12.559 Plenty of people do it. A lot of shows don't 0:08:12.600 --> 0:08:15.400 cite their sources, but if you've read the book they're summarizing, 0:08:15.960 --> 0:08:21.560 you can spot it. I got thirty nine pages in 0:08:21.880 --> 0:08:23.760 before I put the book down on the floor near 0:08:23.760 --> 0:08:26.800 the laundry pile in my office, and I left it 0:08:26.840 --> 0:08:32.120 there for sixteen months because on page thirty nine of 0:08:32.160 --> 0:08:35.320 mel Aton's book Dark Soul of the South, The Life 0:08:35.360 --> 0:08:40.240 and Crimes of racist killer Joseph Paul Franklin, Ayton describes 0:08:40.320 --> 0:08:43.760 a conversation Franklin had with another inmate at the federal 0:08:43.800 --> 0:08:47.880 prison where he was being held in nineteen eighty one. 0:08:48.000 --> 0:08:50.240 After I closed the book, I added a new bullet 0:08:50.240 --> 0:08:56.240 point to the list, Frank Abbott Sweeney. This offhand mention 0:08:56.360 --> 0:08:58.920 of a conversation between a serial killer and a con 0:08:58.960 --> 0:09:04.160 man in the prison yard had potential. I needed to 0:09:04.240 --> 0:09:06.600 find out more about the guy bragging to the serial 0:09:06.679 --> 0:09:11.720 killer about his time as a Rhodesian mercenary. I think 0:09:11.760 --> 0:09:15.480 that's when I realized that this could be fun. I 0:09:15.480 --> 0:09:19.040 don't have to write stories I already know, or stories 0:09:19.040 --> 0:09:22.000 whose details all already exist in a book someone else 0:09:22.040 --> 0:09:25.000 already wrote, or are spread across filings in a single 0:09:25.040 --> 0:09:29.200 docket in a single court case. I can write stories 0:09:29.200 --> 0:09:32.680 that don't exist yet. I can do my own original 0:09:32.720 --> 0:09:36.000 research and run headlong down every single rabbit holes days 0:09:36.040 --> 0:09:40.800 reading old Nazi newsletters pieced together painstakingly detailed timelines, and 0:09:40.920 --> 0:09:44.679 follow my curiosity wherever it takes us, no matter how 0:09:44.720 --> 0:09:48.840 long it takes to finish the story. Yeah, it's a 0:09:48.880 --> 0:09:52.000 true crime show, I guess, but that doesn't mean I'm 0:09:52.000 --> 0:09:56.240 beholden to the conventions of the genre. I'm not interested 0:09:56.280 --> 0:09:59.520 in breathlessly recounting the details of every single murder and 0:09:59.559 --> 0:10:03.080 the trial as they were presented in the newspaper. I 0:10:03.080 --> 0:10:05.079 want to find out about that failed mercenary who was 0:10:05.080 --> 0:10:10.720 addicted to mail fraud. So now, almost half a million 0:10:10.760 --> 0:10:13.160 words into what, I didn't realize that the outset was 0:10:13.200 --> 0:10:16.800 going to be a convoluted attempt at a comprehensive history 0:10:16.800 --> 0:10:20.120 of the American far right. I want to come back 0:10:20.679 --> 0:10:23.240 to that first bullet point on my list of ideas. 0:10:24.559 --> 0:10:27.360 Not because I'm suddenly interested this week in telling you 0:10:27.400 --> 0:10:31.840 a straightforward true crime story about a serial killer, but 0:10:31.920 --> 0:10:35.800 because I see something else there now, because what have 0:10:35.840 --> 0:10:39.920 I been telling you all this time? Everything is connected 0:10:41.200 --> 0:10:49.559 and there are no lone wolves. Joseph Paul Franklin was 0:10:49.600 --> 0:10:54.280 a murderer and he was a racist, and those two 0:10:54.320 --> 0:11:00.240 things cannot be disentangled. He killed because he was trying 0:11:00.320 --> 0:11:06.960 to start a race war. Officially, he was only convicted 0:11:06.960 --> 0:11:11.840 of eight murders Tony Schenn and Alphonse Manning, an interracial 0:11:11.880 --> 0:11:16.880 couple in Madison, Wisconsin, in nineteen seventy seven. Gerald Gordon 0:11:17.000 --> 0:11:19.040 as he was leaving a bar mitzvah at a synagogue 0:11:19.040 --> 0:11:23.440 in Saint Louis, Missouri in nineteen seventy seven. William Bryant Tatum, 0:11:23.600 --> 0:11:25.160 a black man who was out to dinner with his 0:11:25.200 --> 0:11:29.280 white girlfriend in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in nineteen seventy eight. Daryl 0:11:29.360 --> 0:11:32.520 Lane and Dante Evans Brown, two young black boys who 0:11:32.520 --> 0:11:34.600 snuck out of their grandmother's house to buy candy at 0:11:34.640 --> 0:11:38.440 the corner store in Cincinnati, Ohio, in nineteen eighty. And 0:11:38.520 --> 0:11:42.559 Theodore Fields Junior and David Martin, young black men who 0:11:42.559 --> 0:11:44.720 were jogging with their white female friends at a park 0:11:44.760 --> 0:11:49.400 in Salt Lake City in nineteen eighty. He was never 0:11:49.440 --> 0:11:52.040 prosecuted for more than a dozen other murders he either 0:11:52.080 --> 0:11:56.600 confessed to or was credibly linked to. In the last 0:11:56.600 --> 0:11:59.920 eight months alone, right before his capture. Outside of Blood 0:12:00.240 --> 0:12:07.440 in Florida, he murdered eleven people across six states. For 0:12:07.520 --> 0:12:13.439 three years, he roamed the country, robbing banks, building bombs, 0:12:13.480 --> 0:12:17.680 and shooting the enemies of the white race. Interracial couples, 0:12:18.600 --> 0:12:23.480 Jewish people, black men and boys, and white women who 0:12:23.520 --> 0:12:29.400 dated black men. He hunted them, preferring to shoot his 0:12:29.440 --> 0:12:33.520 victims from a distance. Two of the men he shot 0:12:33.640 --> 0:12:38.800 but failed to kill, were planned assassination attempts, pornographer Larry 0:12:38.840 --> 0:12:43.120 Flint and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. But for the 0:12:43.160 --> 0:12:46.480 most part, he just found parking lots to sit in 0:12:46.720 --> 0:12:53.360 and wait, hoping to spot an interracial couple. And he 0:12:53.440 --> 0:13:00.600 acted alone. That part's true. He killed alone. By the 0:13:00.600 --> 0:13:03.160 time he started killing, he was out there on the 0:13:03.240 --> 0:13:07.360 road on his own. He wasn't part of an organized 0:13:07.440 --> 0:13:10.880 terror cell. He wasn't taking orders, he wasn't getting outside funding. 0:13:12.360 --> 0:13:16.520 If anyone could be called a lone wolf, I guess 0:13:16.520 --> 0:13:21.640 it's him, And you'll certainly find both journalists and academics 0:13:21.679 --> 0:13:26.760 who do call him that. I can't blame them for it. 0:13:26.760 --> 0:13:29.840 It makes sense depending on what you think that means. 0:13:31.840 --> 0:13:35.880 The problem is, no one knows what it means, or 0:13:35.920 --> 0:13:40.319 if it means anything. Academics in the field of terrorism 0:13:40.400 --> 0:13:45.000 studies have been using the phrase lone wolf for thirty years, 0:13:46.440 --> 0:13:49.040 but it made its way into the scholarly lexicon by 0:13:49.120 --> 0:13:52.960 way of Tom Metzger the leader of White Arian Resistance. 0:13:54.840 --> 0:13:57.640 Metzger was the one who popularized the term in the nineties, 0:13:58.520 --> 0:14:02.400 and if you read what Metzker actually wrote about the idea, 0:14:03.520 --> 0:14:05.960 I don't understand why you would try to repurpose the 0:14:06.040 --> 0:14:11.600 term into something sincere. He was pleading for plausible deniability. 0:14:13.200 --> 0:14:16.400 In nineteen ninety, Tom Metzger was found civilly liable for 0:14:16.480 --> 0:14:19.600 inciting one of his followers to commit a hate crime murder. 0:14:20.880 --> 0:14:25.080 He lost his house when he told the racists to 0:14:25.200 --> 0:14:29.120 read his newsletter to work alone, say nothing, don't join 0:14:29.160 --> 0:14:30.960 a group or go to meetings, and for God's sake, 0:14:30.960 --> 0:14:34.800 don't keep any records of your actions. He was trying 0:14:34.800 --> 0:14:37.480 to avoid going back to court the next time a 0:14:37.520 --> 0:14:41.400 skinhead murdered someone after being trained and directed by top 0:14:41.520 --> 0:14:46.480 ranking members of the organization, he led be a lone 0:14:46.600 --> 0:14:50.600 wolf just meant keep killing, but keep me out of it. 0:14:52.400 --> 0:14:54.520 And in the thirty years since the term first showed 0:14:54.600 --> 0:14:58.600 up in an academic journal, no one can actually agree 0:14:58.640 --> 0:15:02.400 on what they mean by it. A twenty fifteen report 0:15:02.520 --> 0:15:06.520 called lone wolf Terrorism from the National Security Critical Issue 0:15:06.560 --> 0:15:11.320 Task Force at Georgetown University has eight findings, and finding 0:15:11.400 --> 0:15:14.440 number one is that there is no single definition of 0:15:14.440 --> 0:15:18.280 what the term means. A twenty eleven paper in a 0:15:18.360 --> 0:15:23.000 Journal for the Study of Political Violence proposes four subcategories 0:15:23.040 --> 0:15:28.920 of the lone wolf, the loner, the lone wolf, the 0:15:28.920 --> 0:15:35.440 lone wolf pack, and the lone attacker. Of those four categories, 0:15:35.520 --> 0:15:41.520 only the loaner is described as actually acting alone. The 0:15:41.560 --> 0:15:44.320 other three subtypes are either acting in concert with a 0:15:44.360 --> 0:15:48.040 small group or are an individual who is in direct 0:15:48.120 --> 0:15:51.720 contact with a larger group while carrying out a physical 0:15:51.760 --> 0:15:57.280 act alone. If three of the four subtypes of lone 0:15:57.320 --> 0:16:01.720 wolves are not alone at all, well what are we 0:16:01.760 --> 0:16:07.840 talking about. A twenty seventeen paper in Studies in Conflict 0:16:07.880 --> 0:16:12.400 and Terrorism suggests that maybe it's time to reconsider the 0:16:12.520 --> 0:16:17.800 usefulness of the concept entirely. Obviously, that is also my position, 0:16:19.480 --> 0:16:23.760 because somewhere in between completely isolated individual acts entirely on 0:16:23.800 --> 0:16:26.680 his own with no outside influence of any kind, and 0:16:27.480 --> 0:16:30.880 organized networked group with a hierarchical structure and detailed written 0:16:30.880 --> 0:16:33.960 plans directs individual duce paying members to carry out specific acts, 0:16:35.520 --> 0:16:42.480 there lies the vast majority of actual political violence. This 0:16:42.520 --> 0:16:45.080 is an idea we've bumped up against a few times 0:16:45.080 --> 0:16:48.560 on the show, but revisiting the story of Joseph Paul 0:16:48.560 --> 0:16:51.440 Franklin really sent me back to the academic literature on 0:16:51.480 --> 0:16:54.840 the subject, and it's something we'll talk more about next week. 0:16:56.600 --> 0:17:01.800 He acted alone, I don't dispute that, but he could 0:17:01.840 --> 0:17:05.720 not have acted in this way without the earlier influence 0:17:05.760 --> 0:17:08.960 of these groups that he was a member of. And 0:17:09.080 --> 0:17:13.320 after those actions, the ones he did take alone, he 0:17:13.400 --> 0:17:18.160 became a symbol within those same groups, inspiring other men 0:17:18.520 --> 0:17:23.760 to do as he'd done and act alone. You can 0:17:23.800 --> 0:17:26.960 call him a lone wolf if you want, but he's 0:17:26.960 --> 0:17:31.920 in conversation with the pack. But I'm getting ahead of myself. 0:17:33.760 --> 0:17:36.600 I ended up digging mel Aiden's biography of Franklin back 0:17:36.600 --> 0:17:39.040 out of that pile of sweaters under my office chair, 0:17:39.920 --> 0:17:42.400 because over the year I spent writing about other things, 0:17:43.560 --> 0:17:47.159 I kept coming across his name more often than I 0:17:47.160 --> 0:17:50.320 would have expected to, given the initial presentation of him 0:17:50.359 --> 0:17:54.439 as a pretty bog standard serial killer who just happened 0:17:54.480 --> 0:18:00.080 to also be a Nazi. The man who would be 0:18:00.119 --> 0:18:04.320 come serial killer. Joseph Paul Franklin was born James Clayton 0:18:04.400 --> 0:18:09.720 Vaughan Junior in Mobile, Alabama on April thirteenth, nineteen fifty. 0:18:10.520 --> 0:18:15.240 He had a terrible childhood with abusive alcoholic parents, But 0:18:15.400 --> 0:18:17.560 that's a chunk of this story usually trotted out to 0:18:17.840 --> 0:18:21.239 illicit sympathy from jurors or try to explain to you 0:18:21.280 --> 0:18:25.399 how someone could become so violent. It's well covered in 0:18:25.440 --> 0:18:27.959 Aiden's book, and that is probably the source for this 0:18:28.000 --> 0:18:30.640 section of his biography. In most of the true crime 0:18:30.680 --> 0:18:34.919 podcast episodes about him, I don't usually waste time on 0:18:34.960 --> 0:18:38.560 a nazi's childhood sob story, but it does seem to 0:18:38.640 --> 0:18:42.240 be fairly well corroborated that he had a miserable time 0:18:42.280 --> 0:18:47.560 growing up. Trying to make sense of Franklin's life is 0:18:47.560 --> 0:18:52.119 a minefield. The most thorough account is mel Aiden's book. 0:18:52.960 --> 0:18:55.760 He spent years writing it, and he corresponded with Franklin 0:18:55.840 --> 0:18:59.960 and interviewed him multiple times. In any piece of media 0:19:00.080 --> 0:19:03.240 about Franklin produced after the book was published after twenty eleven, 0:19:04.119 --> 0:19:07.080 a surprising number of the quotes they use are pulled 0:19:07.119 --> 0:19:12.520 directly from Aiden's book, from the recorded interviews between them. 0:19:12.680 --> 0:19:15.960 In his introduction, Aiden cautions the reader up front that 0:19:16.880 --> 0:19:19.879 he was able to access a lot of primary source 0:19:19.920 --> 0:19:24.880 material police files, trial transcripts, prison records, interviews with people, 0:19:24.880 --> 0:19:29.120 who knew Franklin. But the best source of information about 0:19:29.119 --> 0:19:33.760 what Franklin did when he was alone is Franklin himself, 0:19:35.160 --> 0:19:42.280 and Ayton calls him a notorious fabricator and manipulator. This 0:19:42.320 --> 0:19:44.440 is something I see in a lot of material produced 0:19:44.480 --> 0:19:49.240 by or about Nazis. He's lying on purpose, and the 0:19:49.280 --> 0:19:54.720 lies he's telling don't necessarily stay consistent over time. He's 0:19:54.800 --> 0:19:57.920 just saying whatever feels good or whatever he thinks will 0:19:57.920 --> 0:20:00.440 get him what he wants in the moment where he's 0:20:00.440 --> 0:20:05.480 saying it, and other times the person relaying the information 0:20:06.240 --> 0:20:11.880 is wrong by accident. People get confused, they forget, They 0:20:12.080 --> 0:20:15.680 confidently say things that were never true, just because there's 0:20:15.720 --> 0:20:18.040 an FBI agent sitting in a chair in their living room, 0:20:18.080 --> 0:20:20.280 drinking a cup of coffee asking them for details about 0:20:20.280 --> 0:20:22.320 things they didn't think were important at the time, and 0:20:22.359 --> 0:20:26.000 now they're just talking nonsense. When his sisters were questioned 0:20:26.000 --> 0:20:28.119 about his whereabouts in the weeks before his arrest in 0:20:28.200 --> 0:20:31.080 nineteen eighty, one of them told the FBI she was 0:20:31.160 --> 0:20:33.639 quite sure he'd moved away to Washington, d C. In 0:20:33.720 --> 0:20:37.399 nineteen sixty five, and he'd been seventeen or eighteen at 0:20:37.440 --> 0:20:41.359 the time, and he'd joined the Klan before he left. 0:20:42.200 --> 0:20:44.320 None of those things are true, and some of them 0:20:44.320 --> 0:20:49.160 aren't even possible. She wasn't being malicious. She was just wrong, 0:20:50.800 --> 0:20:54.720 and you can sort of untangle things like that. You 0:20:54.760 --> 0:20:57.280 can give her a pass on the year. It had 0:20:57.280 --> 0:21:01.720 been more than a decade. Probably moved from Alabama to 0:21:01.760 --> 0:21:06.560 the DC area in nineteen sixty eight, not nineteen sixty five. 0:21:07.480 --> 0:21:09.760 And in nineteen sixty eight he would have been eighteen, 0:21:10.960 --> 0:21:13.920 And by nineteen sixty eight he was already a card 0:21:14.000 --> 0:21:18.040 carrying member of a hate group. But it wasn't the Klan. 0:21:19.480 --> 0:21:22.800 If I had to guess, I think she probably had 0:21:22.920 --> 0:21:27.360 some vague understanding at the time that her brother had 0:21:27.440 --> 0:21:31.520 joined some kind of unsavory organization, some kind of hate group, 0:21:32.440 --> 0:21:35.680 and she probably learned later on that he did join 0:21:35.720 --> 0:21:39.480 the Klan, and being from Alabama, she would have had 0:21:39.520 --> 0:21:43.359 some general knowledge about the Clan. That is probably the 0:21:43.359 --> 0:21:46.280 hate group that would come first to her mind, so 0:21:46.320 --> 0:21:50.080 she just assumed that was the one he'd joined first. 0:21:51.920 --> 0:21:54.159 The organization he joined around the time he dropped out 0:21:54.200 --> 0:21:57.800 of high school wasn't the Klan. It was the National 0:21:57.840 --> 0:22:01.560 Socialist White People's Party. The name of the newly rebranded 0:22:01.560 --> 0:22:06.159 American Nazi Party. In nineteen sixty eight, just before he 0:22:06.200 --> 0:22:09.199 turned eighteen, he married a sixteen year old girl he'd 0:22:09.240 --> 0:22:13.240 gotten pregnant in the four months they lived together. After 0:22:13.240 --> 0:22:17.639 their shotgun wedding, he beat her mercilessly and started bringing 0:22:17.640 --> 0:22:21.879 home Nazi pamphlets. By spring, he'd left her behind in 0:22:21.920 --> 0:22:25.320 Alabama and moved to Virginia to become an active member 0:22:25.320 --> 0:22:28.720 of the party. He was gone before his daughter was 0:22:28.760 --> 0:22:47.200 even born. One of the frustrating things about my insatiable 0:22:47.359 --> 0:22:51.119 need to create the perfect timeline of a weird little 0:22:51.119 --> 0:22:57.000 guy's life isn't just that he's a forgetful liar. He 0:22:57.040 --> 0:23:01.080 was a drifter. I'm used of my weird little guys 0:23:01.320 --> 0:23:04.680 telling their self serving lies or mixing up the details 0:23:04.680 --> 0:23:08.120 of some event that was years ago. But usually when 0:23:08.160 --> 0:23:11.560 things don't line up, you can tell there's a piece missing, 0:23:12.400 --> 0:23:15.240 you know, where you need to start digging around to 0:23:15.280 --> 0:23:18.240 try to find an explanation, to find some other source 0:23:18.240 --> 0:23:21.160 to compare it to, and then weigh those competing truths. 0:23:22.680 --> 0:23:24.560 But for some of the gaps in the narrative of 0:23:24.560 --> 0:23:29.400 Franklin's life, some of these completely illogical sequences of events 0:23:30.520 --> 0:23:34.440 it's not because the facts we have are wrong. They're right. 0:23:35.440 --> 0:23:38.159 They just don't make sense because the way he was 0:23:38.240 --> 0:23:42.480 living didn't make sense. He bought cars out of newspaper 0:23:42.480 --> 0:23:45.920 classified ads using stolen cash and registered them with a 0:23:46.040 --> 0:23:50.320 rotating list of aliases. He lived in motels under fake names. 0:23:50.840 --> 0:23:53.800 His family didn't know where he was. He moved constantly 0:23:53.840 --> 0:23:57.080 and for no discernible reason. He went years without having 0:23:57.080 --> 0:24:01.560 a fixed address or a job. His second wife didn't 0:24:01.560 --> 0:24:04.280 even know that he'd somehow managed to legally marry and 0:24:04.480 --> 0:24:09.760 divorce her using an entirely fictitious identity. She and her 0:24:09.840 --> 0:24:12.520 daughter lived with a last name that he'd printed on 0:24:12.560 --> 0:24:15.720 a fake ID. He would take off for weeks at 0:24:15.760 --> 0:24:19.679 a time to rob banks and murder teenagers, and she 0:24:19.800 --> 0:24:23.760 thought he was a plumber named Jim Cooper. She didn't 0:24:23.800 --> 0:24:25.919 find out his real name until the FBI took him 0:24:25.920 --> 0:24:29.359 into custody, when he called her from jail to let 0:24:29.440 --> 0:24:33.000 her know where he was, and then he broke the 0:24:33.040 --> 0:24:36.199 news about who he was, and he told her he 0:24:36.240 --> 0:24:38.760 really had committed all twelve of the murders they were 0:24:38.760 --> 0:24:44.119 accusing him of. All that to say, I don't know 0:24:44.160 --> 0:24:46.359 why he was living in Birmingham in August of nineteen 0:24:46.400 --> 0:24:49.040 sixty nine, or if he was living in Birmingham in 0:24:49.080 --> 0:24:53.800 August of nineteen sixty nine. He really did abandon his 0:24:53.840 --> 0:24:56.960 first wife and mobile in the middle of nineteen sixty eight, 0:24:58.000 --> 0:25:00.360 and he does seem to have moved to Virginia at 0:25:00.359 --> 0:25:07.119 that time, but he must not have stayed. He was 0:25:07.119 --> 0:25:09.560 back in Alabama to signed divorce papers in January of 0:25:09.640 --> 0:25:12.680 nineteen sixty nine, and in June he was arrested in 0:25:12.760 --> 0:25:17.439 Mobile for disorderly conduct. In all the interviews I found, 0:25:17.560 --> 0:25:22.320 all the articles and recollections from other people, I couldn't 0:25:22.359 --> 0:25:27.480 find anyone asking him directly, what were you doing that year? 0:25:29.640 --> 0:25:34.080 I mean, why would they write true crime stories? Are 0:25:34.080 --> 0:25:37.960 concerned with the crimes, and he didn't start killing until 0:25:38.000 --> 0:25:42.080 nineteen seventy seven. His FBI file doesn't seem to have 0:25:42.119 --> 0:25:47.000 been concerned about where he lived in nineteen sixty nine. 0:25:47.359 --> 0:25:49.119 I know how much he paid for a hat he 0:25:49.160 --> 0:25:51.520 bought at a country Western wear store in Virginia in 0:25:51.600 --> 0:25:55.199 nineteen seventy seven, because a decade later, a detective in 0:25:55.200 --> 0:25:58.200 Wisconsin tracked down the store clerk who worked there that year, 0:25:58.200 --> 0:26:03.200 and she remembered having it in but five hundred pages 0:26:03.359 --> 0:26:07.560 of reports and memos show a remarkable lack of curiosity 0:26:07.600 --> 0:26:11.280 about what he was doing during his first year as 0:26:11.320 --> 0:26:16.159 a Nazi. But either way, at the end of the 0:26:16.200 --> 0:26:20.440 summer of nineteen sixty nine, he was in Birmingham, Alabama, 0:26:21.280 --> 0:26:23.679 and he must not have had a car because he 0:26:23.720 --> 0:26:26.600 needed a ride back to Virginia, and the man who 0:26:26.600 --> 0:26:33.000 gave it to him was David Duke. In nineteen sixty nine, 0:26:33.119 --> 0:26:36.720 the National Socialist White People's Party was struggling to forge 0:26:36.760 --> 0:26:39.600 ahead after the death of George Lincoln Rockwell two years earlier. 0:26:40.880 --> 0:26:43.240 They'd already been in the process of rebranding from the 0:26:43.280 --> 0:26:46.919 American Nazi Party before Rockwell was assassinated by a former member, 0:26:47.760 --> 0:26:50.520 and there was some splitting in the aftermath of his death. 0:26:52.000 --> 0:26:55.240 The party's new leader, Mattias Kale, announced in early nineteen 0:26:55.280 --> 0:26:57.320 sixty nine that they would be holding the first ever 0:26:57.400 --> 0:27:04.040 party congress that fall. Attendance would be required. They needed 0:27:04.040 --> 0:27:08.200 to tighten up. Local chapters were ordered to start submitting 0:27:08.240 --> 0:27:11.439 reports of their activities. New members would have to be 0:27:11.440 --> 0:27:16.040 interviewed in person at headquarters in Virginia, and everyone needed 0:27:16.040 --> 0:27:19.720 to get up to date on their dues cale. Needed 0:27:19.720 --> 0:27:23.520 to consolidate power and try to gain some momentum if 0:27:23.520 --> 0:27:27.800 the party hoped to outlive its founder. In nineteen sixty 0:27:27.880 --> 0:27:30.160 nine was the same year that they formed the youth 0:27:30.200 --> 0:27:34.399 wing called the National Socialist Liberation Front under the guidance 0:27:34.440 --> 0:27:40.639 of Wily Luther Pierce. He was very focused on recruiting 0:27:40.760 --> 0:27:44.800 eager teenage boys, and his messaging in those days was 0:27:44.960 --> 0:27:48.720 far more explicitly violent than the kind of messaging he 0:27:48.720 --> 0:27:52.080 would claim later in life when some of those young 0:27:52.119 --> 0:27:57.399 men had grown into terrorists. I found old copies of 0:27:57.440 --> 0:28:01.040