Joseph Paul Franklin

Franklin was born April 13, 1950 and died November 20, 2013 by lethal injection in Bonne Terre, MO. He was a white supremacist and serial killer active in the 1970s and 1980s. Franklin was from Alabama. He likely has over 20 victims and operated in multiple states. He previously went by James Clayton Vaughn Jr. Apparently his father left when he was 8, and he was abusive. His mother was a perfectionist but did not abuse her children. Franklin entered high school and developed an interest in Nazism. By the 1970s, Franklin had attended meetings with the American Nazi Party.

Franklin targeted Black and Jewish people. He supported himself by theft and blood donations. The blood donations would help with his eventually capture by the FBI. With one attempted murder and two kills that already occured in diferent states, Franklin killed in STL as of October 7, 1977 near a synagogue, killing Gerald Gordon and injuring two others. He goes on to kill multiple people in other states, seeming to stay around the Midwest but never returning to Saint Louis.

After two murders in Utah, Franklin went through Kentucky where he was detained because of a gun in his car. He fled the area, but police had collected enough evidence to link him to some of his killings. He was identifiable with his tattoos and investigators alerted blood banks about him. He was arrested in Lakeland. He tried to escape during his judgement over Gerald Gordon's murder, but was convicted anyway. Franklin was believed to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia.

Franklin was held on death row in Potosi. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled in August of 2013 that he would be executed on November 20. On November 17, Franklin did an interview where he revealed he had renounced his racist views in an interview with St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This was the first lethal injection in which pentobarbital was used instead of three other drugs mixed together due to an export ban.