Joseph Paul Franklin, a neo-Nazi serial killer, shifted from bombings—like the July 1977 Maryland and Tennessee synagogue attacks (killing only a beagle)—to murders after seeing interracial porn in Hustler, linking it to Jewish subversion. His August 1977 Madison shootings of Alphonse Manning and Tony Schven, framed as racial retaliation, followed failed bombings and a bank robbery near Larry Flint’s home. Though he claimed divine approval from traffic lights, his actions often mirrored neo-Nazi propaganda, like Attack’s calls to kill Judge Archie Simonson. Execution in Missouri on November 20, 2013, capped decades of violence tied to extremist ideology, leaving a legacy of copycat crimes like Frasier Glenn Miller’s 2013 synagogue attack. [Automatically generated summary]
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband Mike was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama?
This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo.
The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race.
To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr.
It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget.
I'm Hans Charles, our mental Iklamova.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast.
A Horrendous Lie Destroyed Lives00:03:39
This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.
Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime.
The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything.
I was a monster.
Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
In the early morning hours of November 20th, 2013, Joseph Paul Franklin's luck ran out.
After three decades in prison, half of which he'd spent on death row, he spent his final months in a flurry of appeals.
There were, after all, legitimate legal, ethical, and logistical questions about what the state of Missouri was putting in that needle.
On the afternoon of November 19th, just hours before Franklin was scheduled to die, a federal judge granted him a stay of execution, ruling that the lawsuit over the drug cocktail should be resolved first.
The man who'd executed more than 20 people seemed to have, metaphorically at least, dodged a bullet.
He was relieved.
He spent that evening on the phone.
He talked to his lawyers, one of his sisters, and an old friend.
He didn't even bother ordering a last meal.
He wasn't going to die after all.
As he lay in his cot that night, celebrating his good luck, a small army of lawyers typed furiously, exchanging filings in a frantic legal battle that lasted all afternoon and late into the night.
At 1 a.m., the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the stay.
The execution was back on.
At 3 a.m., they refused to reconsider.
An hour later, Franklin's attorneys got the issue into Justice Samuel Alito's hands.
A little after 5 a.m., the Supreme Court of the United States declined to intervene.
And that was it.
There was no one else to ask.
Within minutes, Franklin was led into the execution chamber.
His opinion on the death penalty had changed a few times over the years.
At various points, he was quite vocal about wanting it.
He'd confessed to this crime in particular because he knew the state of Missouri would kill him for it.
And he preferred that over the alternative.
He'd been stabbed in prison once before, and he told reporters that getting murdered by some punks in jail was a dishonorable way to die.
He'd rather let the state do it.
Franklin had once lamented to a reporter that he wished they'd given him the death penalty for those murders in Utah.
He liked the idea of going out by firing squad.
There's no glory in quietly going to sleep like a sick dog.
He didn't say a word as he was strapped to the gurney.
He made no final statement, and there was no one there to say goodbye.
At 6.17 a.m. on November 20th, 2013, 10 minutes after being injected with five grams of pentabarbitol, Joseph Paul Franklin was dead.
Five months later, on his birthday, he killed again.
Raymond's National Guard Confessions00:15:19
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
I realized something as I was procrastinating frantically this week.
I don't actually like writing about murder.
It's an odd thing to say, two years into writing a true crime podcast and a month into a series of episodes about a serial killer.
I write about murderers all the time.
But I don't think I've noticed before that I write myself into a corner and then try to write myself the long way around the block to avoid actually writing about the murder.
I once wrote two episodes about a murder-suicide, and I think there was about a paragraph that was about the actual moment that a Holocaust denial blogger shot and killed his ex-wife.
People die on this show all the time, and I make a conscious effort to avoid sensationalizing or exploiting their deaths for your entertainment.
I try to, even if it's just a single line, tell you about the person they were before they died.
I don't like to spend a lot of time telling you about their wounds and how they suffered or how afraid they were or how they were tormented or degraded or God knows what else.
I don't really like that.
And in this story, there are so many victims.
So many single lines to tell you, so I don't have to tell you how they died.
I read 100 issues of Nazi newspapers and tracked down a vintage issue of Hustler so I could put off telling you about these murders.
I spent a lot of time trying to learn about them.
These people.
Alphonse Manning and Tony Schven in Madison, Wisconsin.
Gerald Gordon in St. Louis.
Johnny Brookshire in Atlanta.
William Tatum in Chattanooga.
Johnny Noyes Jr. in Jackson, Mississippi, Harold MacIver in Doraville, Georgia, Raymond Turner in Falls Church, Virginia, Jesse Taylor and Marion Brissette, killed in front of their three children in Oklahoma City.
Mercedes Masters in Atlanta, Lawrence Reese and Leo Watkins in Indianapolis, Rebecca Bergstrom in Mill Bluff State Park, Wisconsin, Daryl Lane and Dante Evans Brown in Cincinnati, Arthur Smothers and Kathleen McCula in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Nancy Santamero and Vicki Durian in Bocahannis County, West Virginia, Ted Fields and David Martin in Salt Lake City.
Those are the 22 people we're quite sure that he killed.
I could tell you what the newspapers saw fit to print about them.
There wasn't always much and it wasn't always very nice.
When cops arrive at a murder scene and find no obvious motive, they shrug and they say maybe it was a drug thing.
Maybe it was a sex thing.
Or maybe they say nothing at all.
When the night manager at a Burger King in Northern Virginia was killed by a bullet that came through the restaurant's front window, it was just a passing mention.
Two lines in the newspaper about a 27-year-old black man who died for no reason at all.
It isn't even clear whether his name was Raymond Turner or Raymond Taylor.
Sometimes these unsolved murders would get a follow-up story on the anniversary of their deaths.
But cops don't like talking about murders they can't solve.
Especially not the ones they might not care that much about solving.
Johnny Brookshire was killed in front of his wife.
Joy Williams survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down.
She was eight months pregnant and Franklin shot her in the stomach because her pregnancy was proof that the couple was polluting the white race.
The newspaper doesn't say what happened to her baby.
Alphonse Manning had only recently moved to Wisconsin in search of more opportunities than a young black man could find in Mississippi.
He hadn't even told his family about his new girlfriend yet.
Gerald Gordon was a paper salesman and a father of three.
Harold MacIvor wasn't even supposed to be working that night.
He'd only recently been promoted to management, so when he got the call that the register was off when his employees went to lock up the Taco Bell, he crept quietly out of the house so he wouldn't wake his two children.
Mercedes Masters was only 15 years old when her killer picked her up hitchhiking and paid her for sex.
Dante Evans Brown and Daryl Lane were just 13 and 14 years old when they snuck out of their grandmother's house one night to buy candy at the corner store.
Dante had just graduated from middle school and he spent most of the $10 he got as a graduation gift on a new light for his seven-year-old brother Levon's bike.
Levon was too young to understand why the top bunk in their bedroom was empty after that night.
Daryl didn't get to attend his middle school graduation.
The week of his funeral, his sister Linda attended a banquet for student athletes at Crest Hills Middle School and she accepted a football trophy on his behalf.
But their killer didn't know any of that.
He didn't know anything about them.
He was just shooting people at random, picking them off with a sniper rifle from across the street without ever getting a good look at their faces.
He didn't need to know anything about them.
He could tell from 100 yards away that they were black or that they were race mixers.
That was all that mattered.
The only victims he did admit to interacting with up close were white women.
Women who revealed to him that at some point in their pasts, they'd slept with black men.
But those, those were the people he killed.
And as we work our way through the timeline, I don't think I'm going to linger on the murders themselves.
I spent a lot of time taking notes on them, but I don't know how useful it is to explain over and over again that he was in some particular city, buying a gun from a classified ad and staying in a motel under a fake name, and at night he drove around looking for a target of opportunity.
He wasn't a mastermind, he was a drifter.
He's not interesting or impressive or mysterious or crafty.
He wasn't clever or meticulous or brilliant.
He was messy, chaotic.
He was a loser.
He was looking for big fish that he never caught.
Most of these victims were completely random.
But he was on a quest to make a name for himself by killing someone important.
He had two opportunities to do it.
He shot, but did not manage to kill, hustler publisher Larry Flint in 1978 and civil rights attorney Vernon Jordan in 1980.
Vernon Jordan hadn't even been his first choice.
He was trying to find Jesse Jackson.
But as he was driving around Chicago looking for Jackson, he got too scared of how many black people there were in Chicago.
He was a coward and a mediocre shot.
It's just not that hard to shoot people who don't know you're aiming at them.
But here I am talking in circles again.
The victims were random.
But after weeks of banging my head against the holes in this story, I'm not sure his movements were.
Let's go back to my timeline.
I've gotten a little bit out of order here, so let's reorient.
In 1976, James Clayton Vaughan Jr. legally changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin.
He wanted to go to Rhodesia to serve as a mercenary, but it didn't work out.
He said he changed his mind, but it might have been because the week he changed his name, he was back in court for attacking an interracial couple.
And this is the first definitive incident of what would become his primary obsession.
He didn't shoot or kill this couple.
He just chased them down in his car and maced them.
In December of 1976, he skipped town to avoid showing up to court for this attack.
He resurfaced a few months later back home in Alabama, where he tried to join the Alabama National Guard.
I was skeptical when I read his claim that he'd done this because he didn't remember very much about it, like how long he was in the National Guard or what month he did it.
But this is actually confirmed.
Later reporting quotes a sergeant with the Alabama National Guard who says records do show that Franklin was discharged for failing to report for drill after a few months in the guard in early 1977.
It's not entirely clear why he joined.
He doesn't really say.
Maybe the Alabama National Guard under Governor George Wallace was the closest thing to the Rhodesian army he could think of on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
I don't know.
He says he tried enlisting in the Marines first, but due to that childhood accident that left him blind in one eye, he wasn't eligible.
He memorized an eye exam chart so he could fake his way through the screening to join the National Guard.
Now if I had to guess, he probably wanted to join the military for the same reason so many right-wing extremists do even to this day.
He wanted the best training you can get.
Nobody makes killers like the United States military.
A lot of this lore manufactured later about his prowess as a sniper killer makes it sound like he was preternaturally gifted with a rifle or something.
But he most assuredly was not.
There are two separate incidents in his life where he accidentally discharged a weapon into his own leg.
And again, he's completely blind in one eye and doesn't have great vision in the other.
So he probably wanted some marksmanship training.
Stealing from the armory was another very popular option, particularly among Klansmen of this era.
To this day, there are more than a few cases of neo-Nazis stealing weaponry from the military.
In one of the early episodes of this show, I talked about a relatively recent case of a Nazi gun running ring that involved the theft of military equipment by U.S. Marines.
In one of his confessions, Franklin does discuss having purchased some of his guns from a guy who was doing this, a guy he knew was stealing them from the army.
But he doesn't say much more than that, at least not in the transcript I could find.
And there's no proof he ever got into the armory himself during his brief stint in the National Guard.
I'm just saying he might have considered it had the opportunity presented itself.
But he wasn't in the National Guard for very long.
In the spring of 1977, he was arrested in Alabama for illegally carrying a concealed firearm, something he'd done before.
And he went AWOL.
He didn't show up for court.
He didn't show up for drill.
And by the summer of 1977, he was on the road.
And we've talked about what was going on around him in 1977.
Those Nazi newspapers he was probably reading that were full of stories about men who were killing for the movement.
There were a lot of them in 1977.
Frederick Cowan, Ray Schultz, Kenneth Wilson, these men all killed because they were neo-Nazis.
They killed black people and Jewish people, and they did it with hate in their hearts.
It was very clear.
And they were hailed as heroes in the newsletters written by men that Franklin knew and respected.
Last week, I left you with a pretty wild insinuation.
I implied that there might be some sort of connection between Joseph Paul Franklin and James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.
Now, I have to say, I was being a little dramatic.
I'm not even going to argue there's any direct connection between them.
And I can't prove there was any connection at all.
Congress sure couldn't.
They tried to prove that there was a wider conspiracy to the king assassination, and they couldn't.
In the end, the official story is that James Earl Ray acted alone.
He was a lone wolf.
That's what we've all agreed on.
And I'd hate to be called a conspiracy theorist.
But we're looking at the world that Franklin lived in in 1977.
What he was consuming, what he was surrounded by.
And in the summer of 1977, Congress was asking questions.
They had a lot of questions.
They wanted to hold a congressional inquiry so they could ask those questions to people like James Earl Ray's brothers, John and Jerry, and National States Rights Party chairman J.B. Stoner.
By 1977, Jerry Ray was no longer working as J.B. Stoner's bodyguard, a job he'd held for the first half of the decade.
And John Ray was serving a little bit of time in prison for bank robbery.
Members of the Congressional Committee probing the King assassination believed that the murder had been funded by one of John Ray's bank robberies.
That he robbed the banks, we know.
Whether it was to fund his brother's assassination of Martin Luther King was never satisfactorily proven.
It remains in the realm of conspiracy theory.
And there's hardly a mention of any of this in Franklin's biography.
There's no indication that he was focused on this developing story in the summer of 1977.
FBI Knowledge Revealed00:03:36
Though his biographer does note several times that J.B. Stoner was one of Franklin's heroes.
So you might assume that he would have been paying close attention to the mounting legal pressure Stoner was facing.
In the summer of 1977, as this talk of congressional hearings about the King assassination was intensifying, Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley was poised to make good on a promise.
When he took office in 1971, he said he was going to reopen some old civil rights cases.
The kinds of cases that earned Birmingham the nickname Bombingham.
And he did.
He tried.
Right after he was sworn in in 1971, he reopened the case of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
In an oral history recorded in 2016, Baxley said that the day he was sworn in, he was given a whole stack of things, a badge and credentials and certificates, just a mess of papers.
And in that stack of official papers, there was a wallet-sized card with the number for the switchboard operator in all of Alabama's major cities.
It was the kind of thing he would probably have to pull out all the time just in the course of doing business.
So on that card, the one he knew he would see every day, he wrote one name in each of the four corners.
Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.
The four little girls who were killed in that bombing.
He wanted to be reminded every day that it was his job to find out who killed those little girls and prosecute them.
The problem was, the FBI already knew who did it.
They knew all along.
The FBI already knew who set off most of those bombs in Alabama in the 50s and 60s.
There weren't always FBI fingerprints on the bombs themselves, but they didn't have clean hands.
So they held back records.
They stonewalled.
They refused to share their records with the state's investigators.
And that's not just my commentary now based on what we know 50 years later.
When Baxley was interviewed for an article in Penthouse in 1977, he said the FBI started sharing some records with him in 1975 after a reporter from the LA Times threatened to write a front-page story about how the FBI was protecting the bombers.
But even after that, the FBI was still denying him access to the agents who'd worked those cases back in the 60s.
Even in 1977, Penthouse magazine could see the obvious.
The FBI was withholding evidence that showed they were involved in the bombings until they didn't.
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
Saskia's Awakening00:02:56
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
So keep this secret.
For so many years, he's like a seasoned pro.
This is a story about the end of a marriage, but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark.
You're a dangerous person who preys on vulnerable and trusty people.
You're invited to Michael Evan good.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the A Building.
I'm Hans Charles, our mental icle Mumba.
It's 1969.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America was out of breaking point.
Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.
In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Alma Mada, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution.
I mean, people would die.
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
This story is about protest.
It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.
Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind games is the story of NLP.
Its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to mind games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world.
Mind Games in Nashville00:15:47
But in 2017, the FBI got inside.
This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall.
This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him.
But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary.
Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast.
I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life.
And that's a unicorn.
No one had ever seen anything like that.
It was unbelievable.
This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets.
Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In June of 1977, the FBI suddenly started taking Baxley's calls.
The timing is remarkable.
Baxley was primarily interested in that 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
And there were rumors that J.B. Stoner had been involved.
He hadn't actually done that one, they determined in the end.
But by pushing the investigation forward, the FBI gave Baxley a reason to subpoena Stoner.
Right around the time that the federal government was really trying to put pressure on Stoner in their Martin Luther King inquiry, it was convenient to help the state of Alabama drag him in front of a grand jury on an unrelated matter.
Maybe.
I mean, it's an interesting coincidence.
Baxley ended up indicting and eventually convicting Stoner on a different bombing in Alabama.
And in the midst of all this, James Earl Ray escaped from prison.
He'd done it before.
He killed Martin Luther King Jr. a year after his first prison break while he was still on the run.
But this time he was caught within days.
And like I said, maybe it's a coincidence that Joseph Paul Franklin robbed his first bank that week.
Maybe it's a coincidence that he drove to Atlanta to do it.
I couldn't tell you what he was doing back in Atlanta that summer or why he returned to Atlanta every few months throughout his three-year crime spree, despite having no connection to the Atlanta area aside from the year and a half he spent living there, working for J.B. Stoner.
Stoner, of course, as we discussed last week, claimed he barely knew the man.
After the first bank robbery, Franklin used the money to buy dynamite and an explosive material called Tovex, traveling to Tennessee and West Virginia to make separate purchases under his birth name rather than his new legal name.
He never did quite say who taught him how to make a bomb, though Aiton implies it was something he learned during his time in the Klan.
Honestly, kind of embarrassing for whoever it was because the two bombs he admits to setting off didn't even hurt anyone.
At the end of July, just a few days apart, he bombed the Maryland home of Morris Amate, the executive director of APAC, and the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Amateur's home was badly damaged, but the damage was mostly to the ground floor.
Amateur, his wife, and their three children were all unhurt in their beds upstairs.
The only victim of the bombing was Ringo, a beagle puppy who was confined to the family room downstairs overnight.
After failing to kill any Jews in Maryland on Monday, he drove to Tennessee and set off a very similar bomb at an Orthodox synagogue on Friday night.
But he got the timing wrong.
Everyone had gone home by the time the bomb went off.
Beth Shalom Synagogue was destroyed.
If anyone had been inside, they certainly would have been killed.
So the bomb worked.
It's the bomber that's the problem.
Things just were not going according to plan.
Officially, the next place I can pin him down on the timeline is in Columbus, Ohio on August 2nd, four days after that bombing in Chattanooga.
He was definitely there on that date because he robbed a bank there.
But unofficially, I think he went back to Atlanta first.
Years later, when he was finally on trial for the synagogue bombing, there was some discussion of bombs.
That's to be expected.
If I had all the time in the world and access to all the records in the world, which is actually my fondest dream, I would love to track down a copy of that trial transcript.
The full appellate record or something.
Anything that might explain a very intriguing footnote.
In the Tennessee Supreme Court opinion that upheld his conviction for the Chattanooga synagogue bombing, the court notes that the bombing was motivated by his racist beliefs.
And the court can't just offer an opinion, so that assertion is supported in a footnote.
And the footnote briefly lists some of his other known crimes.
It reads, quote, defendant has roamed the United States, committing racially motivated murders in Utah, planting a bomb in the house of an Israeli lobbyist in Maryland, and robbing up to 15 banks to support his activities.
He claims to have bombed the Socialist Workers' Party headquarters in Atlanta as well.
Hang on a second.
Back up, back up.
The murders in Utah I know about.
He was convicted for those.
Twice, actually, but we'll get to that.
The Israeli lobbyist house is the one we just talked about.
He was never actually charged for that, but he did admit to having done it.
And the banks, sure, I know about the bank robberies.
I got about a dozen of those on paper, and there were a few others.
But this is the first and only time I'm hearing about another bombing.
He must have admitted to that at some point, maybe during the trial or an interrogation or something was produced as evidence in that trial.
I don't know.
He must have admitted to that and nobody followed up on it.
It was not worth elaborating on because there are no specifics offered here and I can't find this mentioned anywhere else.
But a bombing attempt fitting this description did happen.
Someone placed a pipe bomb in the Atlanta office of the Socialist Workers' Party on August 1st, 1977.
It malfunctioned and didn't go off.
The mayor of Atlanta made a public statement demanding a full investigation, but I don't see it mentioned ever again.
I don't think there's any evidence that there was a full investigation here.
Vince Egan, the Socialist Workers' Party candidate for mayor that year and the apparent target of the bomb, said he didn't have a lot of faith that the police were that interested, noting that officials in Los Angeles failed to follow through on their promise to find out who'd blown up the party's LA office a few years earlier.
Now at the risk of reintroducing too many old side characters, I think we do know who committed both of these unsolved bombings, both of these bombings of Socialist Workers' Party offices.
We have Franklin copying to that one in Atlanta, and the bombing in Los Angeles that was never investigated was something Joseph Tomasi openly bragged about.
He once told the Los Angeles Free Press that, quote, We know the cops don't care if we bomb the left.
He told a reporter that he and his stormtroopers bombed that office.
Now, Tomasi is another guy who definitely deserves his own episode, but for now, he is someone that Franklin met at least twice.
They both attended their first Nazi conference in Virginia in 1969.
And by the time Franklin visited the National Socialist White People's Party offices in Los Angeles in 1971, Tomasi was serving on the party's national council and he was running the California chapter.
The pattern that I feel like is emerging here is that Joseph Paul Franklin was a loser.
He's desperate for approval.
He wants to belong.
He doesn't want to be a lone wolf.
He wants to copy his heroes.
He wants to be noticed.
He blew up a synagogue because that's what J.B. Stoner was famous for doing when he first got started in the movement.
He put a bomb in the Socialist Workers' Party office because that's what Joseph Tomasi bragged about doing.
He says he was on a mission from God, but I think God would have had newer material.
He's just trying to impress the other Nazis.
So a week into this new career as a terrorist, he's over three.
The bomb in Maryland killed a puppy, but no Jews.
The bomb in Tennessee didn't even destroy the Torah, and no one was hurt.
Maybe he drove back to Atlanta for some guidance.
Maybe not.
Maybe he put that bomb in that office in Atlanta.
Maybe not.
But by August 2nd, he's robbing that bank in Columbus, Ohio.
I spent a wasteful amount of time trying to figure out his travel itinerary, plotting things on a map, figuring out how many hours it would take to drive from city to city.
It seems random.
I mean, as random as his victims, there's no rhyme or reason.
He's just drifting around and shooting the unlucky enemies who happened to cross in front of his rifle scope.
Between the end of July and the beginning of October 1977, he drove from Maryland to Tennessee to Atlanta to Ohio to Wisconsin to Arkansas to Dallas to Oklahoma to St. Louis.
And he doesn't have any reason to be in any of those places.
He wasn't working.
He didn't live anywhere.
He wasn't in touch with his family.
He's just on the road.
And I get that he felt like he had to move from city to city to avoid getting caught.
He would leave town immediately after committing a crime most of the time because he can't arrest a guy who's not there.
But you don't need to drive 500 miles between crimes.
And if you're just looking for any old target, you don't have to go far.
But what if it wasn't random?
After those failed bombings, I think he was feeling frustrated.
Remember last week, the thing that set him off in the first place, the thing that made him decide to start committing acts of violence, was that interracial porn he saw in Hustler.
So he sets up a bomb in Maryland, July 25th, a bomb in Tennessee, July 29th, a bomb in Atlanta on August 1st.
What's he doing in Ohio?
Now, just a quick aside, as I'm reading my script here, I realize That might sound completely unrelated.
But within his worldview, it makes perfect sense to him to blow up a synagogue because he's mad about pornography.
It's a very common belief for neo-Nazis that pornography is a tool of Jewish subversion.
So the fact that he is seeing this filthy pornography is because of Jewish influence in society.
So it doesn't make sense to me.
It doesn't make sense to you.
But those things are related.
He's mad about the pornography, so he blew up a synagogue, right?
But again, it's August 2nd, and he's in Ohio.
Why?
Well, he's robbing a bank.
That's what he did there.
We know that.
But that's where Larry Flint lived.
Franklin spent a couple of days in Columbus this week.
When he was interviewed by Ohio prosecutor Melissa Powers in the 90s, he admitted that he went to Columbus twice while he was stalking Larry Flint before he eventually shot him in March of 1978 down in Georgia.
So I think that's what he's doing in these missing few days, right?
So at this point, he hasn't killed yet.
He's done those bombings, but he hasn't committed his first murder.
So I think he's skulking around Columbus, Ohio, trying to find Larry Flint's house.
And he doesn't get it done.
So he has to figure something else out.
He's been trying so hard to become a murderer, and it isn't working.
Maybe when he was down in Atlanta, he picked up some fresh reading material.
The local paper, sure.
But maybe he picked up some Nazi newspapers, like the August issue of Attack, the Nazi newsletter by William Luther Pierce.
He was a huge admirer of Pierce's.
Everybody said so.
His sister, the FBI, his prison pen pals, they'll all tell you.
He read Pierce's work religiously for years.
And if he did read that month's issue of Attack, he would have seen Pierce implying that Archie Simonson, a judge in Dane County, Wisconsin, was an enemy of the white race who should be killed.
So after he couldn't find Larry Flint, he drove to Wisconsin.
He was on his way to shoot Archie Simonson when he got sidetracked.
His first murders were unplanned.
He panicked.
I ended the episode two weeks ago with a description of this first murder.
He shot and killed Alphonse Manning and Tony Schven in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Madison, Wisconsin, because he felt like they were driving too slowly and he was in a hurry to leave.
Franklin already had a documented history of attacking interracial couples.
So it seems obvious that that would have been his primary motivation.
Green's First Murder00:02:46
And by most tellings, it certainly was.
But I read the transcript of his original confession.
And the first time he told this story, it's a little different.
This idea that he had to kill them because they were an interracial couple reads like more of a justification after the fact than the actual primary motive.
I wonder if maybe he would have shot Alphonse Manning no matter who he was, whether or not he had a white girlfriend in the car with him.
Franklin panicked because he was getting into a screaming argument with this man, and he had a car full of dynamite, a bag of stolen cash, and a stolen gun on the front seat.
He was on his way to the judge's house.
He wanted to impress his heroes by killing that judge, and he couldn't risk this guy ruining it by calling the cops on him.
I think it certainly increased the tension.
I think it made him angrier, made him more likely to rise to the level of violence because he was looking at a black man with a white girlfriend.
That's certainly a factor.
I'm not saying that wasn't a factor here, but I don't know that that was the primary motivation.
I think maybe the first one wasn't entirely ideological.
It was just blind luck that he freaked out and shot the boogeyman from his nightmares.
But now he knew how good it felt.
And as he fled the scene after his first murder, all the traffic lights in his path turned green as he approached them.
He thought this was a sign from God.
God obviously approved of what he was doing because God was protecting him and helping him get away.
He didn't even bother trying to find that judge.
He'd clearly done what God wanted him to do, and now he had to get out of Wisconsin.
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
To keep this secret for so many years, he's like a seasoned pro.
This is a story about the end of a marriage, but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark.
Predator Michael Leppingood00:02:54
You're a dangerous person who preys on vulnerable and trusting people.
You're Predator Michael Leppingood.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the A Building.
I'm Hans Charles, our menelick Lamumba.
It's 1969.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America is at a breaking point.
Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.
In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Alma Mada, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in Black history: Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution.
I mean, people would die.
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
This story is about protest.
It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.
Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind games is the story of NLP.
Its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all?
NLP might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to mind games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world.
But in 2017, the FBI got inside.
This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall.
This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is onto him.
But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary.
Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast.
I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life.
And that's a unicorn.
Detectives and Florescent Details00:15:37
No one had ever seen anything like that.
It was unbelievable.
This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets.
Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Sometime in August, Joseph Paul Franklin got a tattoo in Chicago.
He robbed a bank in Little Rock in September, and he spent a week hanging around Dallas.
For these pit stops, we do have some proof, thanks mostly to a pair of detectives from the Madison, Wisconsin Police Department.
For all his crimes, again, that's 22 murders that we know of committed in 12 different states, 16 bank robberies that he can remember, an undetermined number of bombings all over the course of three years.
The actual investigative legwork that shows up in his FBI file was done by a pair of detectives from the Madison, Wisconsin Police Department.
When Franklin finally confessed in 1984 to those first two murders, it was those detectives who chased down all of the details.
You know it brings me no pleasure to say this.
These cops did their fucking job.
I say that because it's worth saying, because it's unusual.
As this story unravels, you will see jurisdiction after jurisdiction decide not to.
I mean, they all dropped the ball during the murders.
A lot of these were solvable.
A lot of these cases did not get investigated with a lot of gusto.
But when Franklin was in prison and he was actively confessing to more crimes, making detailed, clear, provable confessions, a lot of jurisdictions said, well, he's already locked up.
So it's not really our problem, is it?
It's not worth it.
It would be so expensive to get involved.
It would be so embarrassing if we messed this up and couldn't convict him.
We know what he did and isn't that enough.
But the prosecutor in Dane County, Wisconsin said the nature of these crimes required a public reckoning and a formal condemnation, saying, quote, we don't grant a racist murderer immunity and impunity just because he's killed so many other people and he's serving a lot of time.
And more importantly, they did the math.
A lot of these jurisdictions who were saying, well, he's already got life.
They were banking on the likelihood that you would misunderstand that.
Because life didn't mean life and he would have been eligible for parole.
And Wisconsin wanted to make sure that didn't happen.
So when those detectives sat down with Franklin for a few days in 1984, they recorded their conversation.
And then they started tracking down the proof.
They weren't just going to take his word for it.
Sometimes people make stuff up because they're bored in prison.
Sometimes people recant their confessions.
So they wanted to take as many details from this confession as possible and tether them to a corresponding cold, hard fact.
This isn't a false confession.
This isn't something he made up.
They nailed it to the wall.
They found and interviewed the tattoo artist in Chicago whose name Franklin couldn't remember.
Seven years after Franklin got that tattoo, they showed the artist a photo and he said, yeah, that looks a little more than five years old and that's my art.
He still had the stencil and he made a photocopy of it for the detectives.
They tracked down those teenage girls that Franklin picked up hitchhiking to the mall an hour before the murders.
Franklin told them he bought the car he was driving that day from a classified ad in some Atlanta newspaper, maybe a month before the murders.
And so those detectives scanned through microfiche archives of Atlanta area classified ads for the whole summer of 1977 until they found the ad and they interviewed the guy who sold him the car.
Franklin told detectives that the cowboy hat found at the scene of the murders had been his.
It blew off his head while he was running back to the car after shooting Tony Schven.
So they tracked down the store clerk who sold it to him and the factory that manufactured it.
Witnesses picked him out of photo lineups.
Handwriting samples from hotel registration books were matched to signatures on sales slips and car registrations.
I mean, credit where credit is due.
They did the damn job.
So a lot of the actual details we have are only because Dane County, Wisconsin wanted to try this case.
So after those murders in Madison, he hung around Chicago for a little bit.
He robbed a bank in Arkansas.
In Texas, he purchased a 3006 Remington rifle from a classified ad and he hung around Dallas for a week.
According to his biographer, at this point, he still thought the mission was going to be killing Jews.
He'd gotten a real kick out of killing that interracial couple, sure, but Jewish people were still his top priority.
That's what he thought he was working on.
And he says he went to Oklahoma City because he was looking for a synagogue to bomb.
On the surface, that seems believable.
He's already bombed a synagogue, so there's no reason to think this might not be true.
And he still had some dynamite on hand.
But here's the thing.
I'm not sure that was the plan.
In one of his confessions, he admits that he only had enough dynamite left at that point to build a small car bomb.
He'd saved just enough after the first few bombings because if he couldn't shoot that judge, who's going to put a bomb under his car?
And why did he go to Texas to buy a hunting rifle if the plan was to build more bombs?
He had plenty of handguns.
Why did he need a rifle?
And why didn't he ever actually build another bomb?
At least as far as we know, I don't think he wanted to bomb another synagogue.
He sucked at that.
That wasn't fun anymore.
He tried it and it didn't work.
But now, now he'd shot a man in the chest and then walked over to a terrified crying woman, looked her dead in the eye and fired at her.
And he liked it.
He would angrily deny that there was any sexual component to his crimes, but Ohio prosecutor Melissa Powers didn't believe him.
She said he got very weird when the subject came up.
But he says he drove to Oklahoma City looking for a synagogue.
He drove around a little bit and then he changed his mind and he set off for St. Louis.
He said he did this because he knew that St. Louis had a much larger Jewish population.
And it does.
It did then, too.
But did he know that?
He might have.
St. Louis had one of the larger populations of Jews that you were going to find that far south.
But if he knew that St. Louis had a larger Jewish population than most cities in the area, certainly more than Oklahoma City, he's implying that he has some actual knowledge of the number of Jews in both of those cities.
And if he knew how many Jews there were in Oklahoma, he wouldn't have bothered driving there in the first place.
Based on old copies I found of texts like the American Jewish Yearbook, the American Jewish Organization's Directory, and the American Synagogue Directory, he would have been hard pressed to find a synagogue to bomb in Oklahoma City in 1977.
The American Jewish Yearbook published in 1979 says that there were 6,000 Jews in Oklahoma in 1978.
About a third of them lived in Oklahoma City and the surrounding suburbs.
So there were three synagogues in and around Oklahoma City.
In the late 70s, Jews made up 0.2% of the population of Oklahoma.
So he was right.
There were more Jews in Missouri.
But he was already in Dallas, a city with plenty of synagogues.
Memphis was closer than St. Louis.
He could have kept going just a little further to Louisville or Chicago.
He could have gone back to Maryland.
If he was just looking for a synagogue, he had options.
I mean, St. Louis wasn't an illogical choice, but it wasn't the obvious choice or the only choice.
I think he chose St. Louis like he chose Madison.
He read about it in one of his newspapers.
Now, in that case, we have some substance to hold on to.
Franklin admits he was in Madison to find that judge, and he does at some point make a vague reference to having read about Judge Simonson in a newspaper that he picked up in Atlanta.
This time though, I'm guessing.
I mean, I'm completely untethered from proof.
I just have a weird feeling because I saw what feels like an impossible coincidence.
On the afternoon that Joseph Paul Franklin set up a sniper's nest across the street from a synagogue in the St. Louis suburb of Richmond Heights, there was a Nazi rally going on 14 miles away.
The group that got into a brawl that afternoon outside the Florissant City Hall was called the National Socialist Party of America.
That's its official name.
It was a splinter group formed by Frank Collin after he got kicked out of the National Socialist White People's Party in 1970.
And unfortunately, both of these groups are usually referred to as the American Nazi Party, despite that not being the official name of either group.
So that makes for some confusion when you read old newspapers, but in the end, it doesn't make a lot of difference.
That's what they were.
They were weird little guys in swastika armed bands constantly at war with one another over who Hitler would be most proud of.
And because the National Socialist Party of America had been formed in a split with the National Socialist White People's Party, there were a number of guys who at various points in time were members of both groups.
And the St. Louis unit leader, a man named Michael Allen, had recently switched from the National Socialist White People's Party to the National Socialist Party of America.
He'd been the local Nazi leader even before he switched allegiances.
He was promoted to the head of the local National Socialist White People's Party in 1975 after the last guy got kicked out for shooting somebody.
Not that it matters right now, but if you are working on your red string board, that guy, one who shot somebody in 1975, he went on to draw the pictures in the illustrated version of the Turner Diaries.
But we're not talking about Dennis Nix right now.
So in 1977, the local unit leader of the National Socialist Party of America, a man named Michael Allen, had been talking for months about this Nazi rally he's going to hold in Florescent.
He was in the newspaper.
The real newspaper and the Nazi newspapers.
You see, Frank Collins' little splinter group wasn't particularly big or very powerful, but he'd found a way to make himself, oh, a terrible nuisance.
If the name sounds familiar to you at all, or if there's some nagging familiarity you can't quite place to the name National Socialist Party of America, that's because you've probably heard of the 1977 Supreme Court case, National Socialist Party of America, v. Village of Skokie, Illinois.
Collin is the guy who wanted to march Nazis through a town in Illinois with an unusually high number of Holocaust survivors.
And in the summer of 1977, they kind of won their case.
The Supreme Court kicked it back down to the Illinois Supreme Court and they were going to be allowed to march in Skokie, but Illinois could stop them from displaying swastikas.
I mean, the legal battle continues from there and eventually the Illinois Supreme Court reversed that decision and ruled that the swastikas were protected by the First Amendment, but it's a mess and that's not what we're talking about.
And they never actually marched in Skokie, but we're in the middle of this battle, right?
In the summer of 1977, it's still kind of up in the air.
There's a lot of uncertainty.
They don't want to march without the swastikas because that wouldn't be any fun.
So they're making these threats that in the 4th of July weekend, they're gonna march in Skokie.
And then they kind of backed out and they didn't do it.
They never marched in Skokie.
So the 4th of July weekend came and went.
There was no showdown.
So they had to find something else.
They didn't want to look like cowards.
And I think that's why St. Louis unit leader Michael Allen announced that they were going to do a big march in Florescent.
Why Florescent?
Honestly, I couldn't tell you.
I mean, it's a medium-sized suburb of St. Louis.
And like I said, there's more Jews in St. Louis than most cities in the South, but Florescent isn't notably more Jewish than any other St. Louis suburb, at least not that I could discern from reading a bunch of old issues of the St. Louis Jewish Light, a local Jewish newspaper.
But he picked Florescent and he filed the paperwork for a demonstration scheduled for October 8th, 1977.
City officials denied the application, stating that city ordinance prohibited the use of city facilities for demonstrations by groups whose membership was not majority residents.
Nazi Rallies and City Ordinances00:06:33
And so for the next six weeks, there was a lot of bluster.
August, September, into October, Michael Allen is telling reporters, come hell or high water, the Nazis will rally in Florescent.
And National Socialist Party leader Frank Collin is scheduled to give the headline speech.
The boys are all going to be there.
And the city warned him not to do it.
And they loudly insisted that they were absolutely going to do it.
They never made it to Skokie, but maybe they could have a showdown in Missouri.
I think 10 of them showed up in the end, and Frank Collin got arrested for attacking the police chief, but a story for another day.
Now, I'm not saying that Joseph Paul Franklin planned to attend this rally.
He didn't.
He couldn't have been there.
He was already on his way out of town after committing a murder by the time the rally started at 2 p.m.
And if he had made contact with Michael Allen, I think Allen would have told us.
I mean, he liked talking.
He was beside himself with excitement when he recognized John Hinkley Jr. in March of 1981, after Hinkley shot Reagan.
He was on the phone with a reporter the very next day, explaining that he'd met Hinkley in 1978, but they had to kick him out of the National Socialist Party in 1979 because he was too weird.
So I think if Michael Allen had been hanging out with Joseph Paul Franklin, he would have said so.
He would have loved to have said so.
I don't think Joseph Paul Franklin was invited to St. Louis.
But this does kind of fit this emerging pattern.
He's having this one-way relationship mediated by these Nazi newsletters.
He's reading about the movement and he's trying to do something that might impress the men whose newsletters he's reading.
If all the Nazis are fighting the Jews in St. Louis, he's going to go there and do it too.
And they'll see him.
They'll see that he's participating.
It's a little thin.
I know.
We're in guessing territory here.
I know that he read William Luther Pierce.
He told us that.
I know he read The Thunderbolt.
We have proof that he used to sell it on street corners.
I can confidently guess that he might have been reading Joseph Tomasi and James Mason, men that he met at that conference in 1969 and who he admired.
But what's his connection to the National Socialist Party of America?
It's a small, small world.
There were never really a ton of members of the National Socialist Party.
It was a splinter group led by an unpopular guy and it only existed for a decade.
For as much time as I've spent reading and writing about this whole milieu, if you asked me yesterday to name as many members of the NSPA as I could, I would probably only be able to come up with like three names.
After its founder, Frank Collin, and Harold Covington, the guy who later reported Colin to the police for child molestation and then wrested control of the party, I can only think of one other guy.
Frasier Glenn Miller never actually said that he knew Franklin in person.
He never denies it, though.
They both joined the National States Rights Party in 1974.
And by the time Franklin started killing, Miller had moved on and he was a prominent member of the National Socialist Party in North Carolina.
And for all the reading I did while I was researching this story, the newspapers I picked through, all the descriptions of murder I read, nothing made me feel quite so sick as the Nazi forum posts that Miller wrote about his friendship with Franklin.
It was that murder in St. Louis that sent Franklin to the execution chamber in Missouri in 2013.
The night before he died, he had a long conversation with his sister.
He talked to his lawyers, and he called his last best friend.
A man whose interest in Franklin's crimes had deepened into an obsession in the last few years of Franklin's life.
Buried deep in those forum threads, over years of mounting preoccupation with preserving Franklin's legacy, you can read a little defensiveness.
If you love the idea of mass murder so much, why don't you just do it?
Are you a coward, Glenn?
A hypocrite?
Opposer?
People asked him that sometimes.
And he could safely admit that he'd been involved in a few murders in his past, but he didn't really have an answer to this challenge.
Not until a few months after Franklin's death, anyway.
One of the other posters on the forum recognized Miller right away when he was arrested a few months later for opening fire on a Jewish community center in Kansas.
I read a little bit about Miller in other contexts over the years, so I was familiar with these shootings.
And I always thought it was so strange that he chose April 13th to commit mass murder.
I mean, a guy like that.
Surely he could have waited a week to do it on Hitler's birthday.
Guys like that love Hitler's birthday.
But April 13th was Joseph Paul Franklin's birthday.
If he hadn't been executed by the state of Missouri five months earlier, Joseph Paul Franklin would have turned 64, the day his only friend murdered three people for him.
Sophie Litcherman's Touch00:02:43
on Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Ollie Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Litcherman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcastGmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama?
This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo.
The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race.
To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr.
It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget.
I'm Hans Charles, our mental icle mover.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast.
This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.
Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime.
The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything.
I was a monster.
Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.