Joseph Paul Franklin is unblinking and empty as he talks about his victims.
Do you know how many people you murdered? "I'd rather not mention it," he says flatly.
By my count, it's 22 people. "That's approximately it."
And those two young boys, just 13, 14 years old.
"Yeah, I regret the fact that I shot them now," he replies.
Franklin has been away from the civilized world for more than 30 years, serving several life sentences behind bars.
We're meeting at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, where on Wednesday he is scheduled to die by injection.
A glass partition separates us, and we're speaking via a closed line telephone. The prison guard has put a wireless microphone on Franklin, who is shackled at the ankles, his wrists cuffed to the chain around his waist. Franklin's hair is wild and alive, unlike his expressionless answers when he speaks about his murder victims.
This is one of the last interviews this serial killer will give.
"I felt like I was at war. The survival of the white race was at stake," he says. Franklin compares himself to a U.S. soldier in Vietnam, trained to be a sniper in the war. The enemy, he explains, were Jews, blacks and especially interracial couples. "I consider it my mission, my three-year mission. Same length of time Jesus was on his mission, from the time he was 30 to 33."
What was your mission? "To get a race war started."
Franklin spent 1977 to 1980 trying to accomplish that goal, committing more than a dozen bank robberies in addition to the murders. He stalked his victims, usually finding a sniper's nest yards away, looking down the scope of a high-powered rifle to kill his targets at will.
Short Stories Of some Serial Killers
Authorities said DNA recovered from the body of Mary Sullivan matches that of her suspected killer -- the confessed Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo. After a sample was secretly collected from a relative, DeSalvo's body was exhumed in July for more DNA testing. DeSalvo was stabbed to death in 1973 while serving a prison sentence for rape. Click through to see more of history's infamous killers.
Ed Gein killed at least two women and dug up the corpses of several others from a local cemetery in Wisconsin, using their skin and body parts to make clothing and household objects in the 1950s.
In 1973, Juan Corona, a California farm laborer, was sentenced to 25 consecutive life sentences for the murder of 25 people found hacked to death in shallow graves.
Joseph Paul Franklin was convicted in 1997 of murdering Gerald Gordon outside a St. Louis synagogue in 1977. Franklin was also convicted of at least five other murders, receiving a string of life sentences, but he has suggested he's responsible for 22 murders. He's best known for shooting Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, who was paralyzed from the attack. Franklin is scheduled to be executed November 20 for Gordon's murder.
In 1977, David Berkowitz, also known as Son of Sam, confessed to the murders of six people in New York City. Berkowitz, now serving six consecutive 25-to-life sentences, claimed a demon spoke to him through a neighbor's dog.
Cousins Kenneth Bianchi, seen here, and Angelo Buono were charged with the murders of nine women between 1977 and 1978. Also known as the Hillside Stranglers, the cousins sexually assaulted and sometimes tortured their victims, leaving their bodies on roadsides in the hills of southern California.
Wayne Williams killed at least two men between 1979 and 1981, and police believed he might have been responsible for more than 20 other deaths in the Atlanta area. Williams was convicted and sentenced to two life terms in 1982.
After serving 15 years for murdering his mother, Henry Lee Lucas was convicted in 1985 for nine more murders. Lucas was the only inmate ever spared from execution by then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
Richard Ramirez, also known as the Night Stalker, was convicted of 13 murders and sentenced to death in California in 1989. The self-proclaimed devil worshipper found his victims in quiet neighborhoods and entered their homes through unlocked windows and doors.
During a routine traffic stop, a policeman found a dead U.S. Marine in the front seat of a car driven by Randy Steven Kraft. Kraft was linked to 45 murders and sentenced to death in 1989. He would pick up hitchhikers, give them drugs and alcohol, sexually assault them and then mutilate and strangle them.
Ted Bundy raped and killed at least 16 young women in the early to mid-1970s before he was executed in 1989. A crowd of several hundred gathered outside the prison where he was executed, and they cheered at the news of his death.
Jeffery Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms for the murders of 17 men and boys in the Milwaukee area between 1978 and 1991. Dahmer had sex with the corpses of his victims and kept the body parts of others, some of which he ate. Dahmer and another prison inmate were beaten to death during a work detail in November 1994.
John Wayne Gacy killed 33 men and boys between 1972 and 1978. Many of his victims, mostly drifters or runaways, were buried in a crawl space beneath his suburban Chicago home.
Joel David Rifkin was stopped by police for driving without a license plate when a body was found in his pickup truck. Rifkin killed 17 women in New York City between 1991 and 1993 and was sentenced to life in prison.
Charles Ng, seen here, and accomplice Leonard Lake tortured, killed and buried 11 people in northern California between 1984 and 1985. After the men were arrested for shoplifting, police found bullets and a silencer in their car and took them into the police station for questioning. Lake killed himself there with a cyanide pill. Ng was later sentenced to death.
Robert Lee Yates Jr. killed 15 people, most of them between 1996 and 1998. He buried one of them in a flower bed by his house in the Spokane, Washington, area. Most of his victims were prostitutes or drug addicts he killed in his van. He is on Washington's death row.
Gary Leon Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, confessed to 48 killings after his DNA was linked to a few of his victims. Remains of his victims, mostly runaways and prostitutes, turned up in ravines, rivers, airports and freeways in the Pacific Northwest.
Aileen Wuornos was executed in Florida in 2002 for the murders of seven men whom she had lured by posing as a prostitute or a distressed traveler.
Derrick Todd Lee was accused of raping and killing six women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, between 2001 and 2003. He was arrested in Atlanta for the murder of Charlotte Murray Pace, convicted in 2004 and sentenced to death.
Danny Rolling pleaded guilty to the 1990 murders of five students he raped, tortured and mutilated in Gainesville, Florida. Rolling was also responsible for a separate 1991 triple homicide in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he was executed in 2006.
Angel Maturino Resendez, also known as the Railway Killer, was a drifter from Mexico. During the 1990s, he would rob and kill his victims near railroad tracks on both sides of the border, then hop rail cars to escape. Resendez was executed in 2006.
Pig farmer Robert Pickton was charged with 26 counts of murder after police found the bodies of young women on his farm in Port Coquitman, British Columbia, Canada. He was convicted of six murders in 2007, and he is serving a life sentence.
Finding comfort in 'Mein Kampf'
He explains his hate was bred from his origins and upbringing.
Franklin shown following a murder conviction in Salt Lake City in 1981.
Franklin's birth name was James Clayton Vaughn and he was born in Mobile, Alabama. He grew up in poverty and lived a childhood of abuse, he says.
"My momma didn't care about us," he explains, saying it affected him emotionally and stunted his mental development. He says he was locked up and not allowed to play with other children. He claims he was fed such a poor diet that it affected his development. "I've always been least 10 years or more behind other people in their maturity," he says.
He found a family and comfort in the white supremacy groups of the American South in the 1960s. Hitler's autobiographical manifesto, "Mein Kampf," moved him from hate to action. "I had this real strange feeling in my mind," he says. "I've never felt that way about any other book that I read. It was something weird about that book."
At 26, he changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin. Joseph Paul in honor of Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, and Franklin after Benjamin Franklin.
He tattooed the grim reaper into his right forearm as a "symbol of my mission," he explains. He shows it to me, the ink now faded green blue, the image blurry and difficult to see. "It used to be blood there, red dots falling from it," he points out. Franklin explains he asked the tattoo artist to draw the words "Helter Skelter" on his other arm in red, with blood dripping down. Helter Skelter references '60s serial killer Charles Manson and his desire to start a race war from California. The tattoo artist refused, Franklin said, worried about law enforcement reprisal.
Franklin says he was obsessed with killing by example. "I figured once I started doing it and showed them how, other white supremacists would do the same thing."
Do you think you're a hero to those hate groups?
"Well that's what they tell me," he says, finally laughing. "I'd rather people like me than not like me, like most people. I'd rather be loved than hated."
Even if they are hate groups? "Yeah, and they're not the only ones who love me, though. There a lot of Jews who love me, too."
It's a preposterous notion, but I can't resist delving further.
Why do the Jews love you? "When you commit a crime against a certain group of people, a bonding takes place. It seems like you belong to them," he says.
The crime that put him on death row
Franklin is talking about the crime that put him on Missouri's death row, the murder of Gerald Gordon. On October 8, 1977, Franklin was outside the Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue in St. Louis. Some 200 guests were leaving a bar mitzvah. Franklin had hammered 10-inch nails into a telephone pole to use as a makeshift gun rest for his hunting rifle. As the guests were leaving the synagogue, Franklin fired, killing Gordon in front of his wife and three children.
There would be other victims across the country.
Franklin was convicted of killing Alphonse Manning and Toni Schwean in Madison, Wisconsin, merely because they were an interracial couple.
Franklin confessed to police that college student Rebecca Bergstrom enraged him because she said on spring break, she once dated a Jamaican man. He shot her dead.
In Cincinnati, Franklin had been lying in wait for an interracial couple but 13-year-old Dante Evans and his cousin 14-year-old Darrell Lane came walking down the road. Franklin shot them both from his sniper's nest, striking them twice to make sure the boys were dead.
Joseph Deters, who prosecuted the Cincinnati case said of Franklin, "He's just a creep. There's no other way to describe him. And what he did to those two kids because of the color of their skin is incomprehensible."
Franklin also wanted to strike high-profile targets, stalking civil rights leader Vernon Jordan Jr. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1980, Franklin sat outside Jordan's hotel and waited. As Jordan returned from an event, Franklin shot him. Jordan was seriously injured but was not killed.
Sickened by Hustler and out for Larry Flynt
But Franklin hoped one of his biggest trophy killings would be Larry Flynt, publisher and founder of Hustler magazine. Flynt's crime according to Franklin?
"I saw that interracial couple he had, photographed there, having sex," he says. Franklin is referring to the December 1975 issue of Hustler that featured several photos of 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. I threw the magazine down and thought, I'm gonna kill that guy."
On March 6, 1978, Franklin was almost successful. Flynt was in Lawrenceville, Georgia, facing charges of obscenity. As he returned to the courthouse, two shots struck Flynt. Flynt would barely survive, and he was paralyzed from the waist down.
In a strange turn, Larry Flynt has filed a last-minute legal motion with the American Civil Liberties Union to halt Franklin's impending execution.
Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down by the 1978 assassination attempt.
Do not confuse this with mercy, Flynt explained to me days before I would meet with Franklin. "The government has no business at all being in the business of killing people," he said. Flynt is strongly anti-death penalty, pointing out the inmates on death row are "minorities and underprivileged people, not wealthy white kids."
Flynt believes it's "much more punishment to put somebody in prison for the rest of their lives than it is to snip their life out in a few seconds with a lethal injection."
Flynt said he never thinks of Franklin or cares about him, it is merely on principle the publisher is fighting to spare his life.
When I bring up Flynt to Franklin, he breaks into a smile. "My old pal Larry!" he exclaims. "Tell him I appreciate that. Thanks." He disagrees with Flynt, though, that the death penalty is less punishment than life in prison.
After 15 years on death row, freedom
'I'm willing to accept the will of the Lord'
"It's just not a system that operates according to the Bible. The scriptures tell us when someone repents, God forgives them. Everything is forgotten, once forgiven. But the state doesn't think that way," he says.
Franklin says he's no longer dangerous nor a racist.
Do you feel any hate looking at me? I'm not white. "I have no feeling whatsoever, no hatred to you. Especially not a female. You know what I mean?"
But you shot plenty of women. "That's true," he nods, "you got a point. But I felt they were enemies of the white race."
He's different now, he says, after poring through reams of books in prison. He's "cured his mental illness through education," he claims.
Is it strange knowing the exact date and time you're going to die? "Well I'm hoping to get a stay. It might not happen, but if it does, I'm willing to accept the will of the Lord."
Do you think something lies out there for you on the other side after November 20? "Yeah, but it's not a burning hell because I'm serving the Lord, though. It'll be the kingdom of heaven for me because I've repented."
I think we're just about out of time. "Well let's not say that. Let's just say we're gonna part temporarily."
Time is important to you now, isn't it? "Yeah it has been for a long time now. Maybe we'll meet again sometime."
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