Joseph Paul Franklin, a neo-Nazi serial killer, saw prosecutions stall in 1986 when William Bradford Reynolds—Reagan’s DOJ civil rights chief—pressured local attorneys to drop charges amid his own political scandals. Despite confessions to murders (Madison 1977, Synecock bombing), cases faltered due to legal confusion, like Franklin’s acquittal for shooting Vernon Jordan in 1982, where prosecutors failed to prove racial motive under federal law. His 1981 conviction in Utah under civil rights protections and dual sovereignty was later overshadowed by Marion Prison’s brutal conditions, including a disputed stabbing and The Order’s violent rise, revealing how political messaging and prison chaos shaped justice for white supremacist terror. [Automatically generated summary]
If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would.
That's when his life took a disturbing turn.
A one-night stand would end in a courtroom.
The media is here.
This case has gone viral.
The dating contract.
Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.
This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
I'm Stephanie Young.
Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023.
But what if we didn't get the whole story?
The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed.
What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?
Oh my God, I think she might be innocent.
Listen to Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall.
In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world.
The Sixth Bureau podcast 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 iHeart Radio 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 wife 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?
They 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.
Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming.
Is it a self-help miracle?
A shady hypnosis scam?
Or both.
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Coolzone Media.
On February 27th, 1986, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to close their file on a serial killer.
William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, said there was no remaining public interest in continuing to investigate the case.
Joseph Paul Franklin had already been convicted in a pair of double homicides.
And with a stack of consecutive life sentences to serve, there was just no chance he would ever be paroled.
In fact, he wrote, further attempts to prosecute Franklin would only endanger society, given his history of escape attempts.
Reynolds didn't just want the FBI to drop the matter.
He wanted it closed entirely.
In his memorandum to the director of the FBI, Reynolds wrote that he'd personally spoken with local prosecutors in at least three of the jurisdictions where Franklin was still wanted for murder, and he'd convinced them to abandon any attempt to prosecute those cases.
Best to just close it.
And so they did.
Jurisdictions all over the country packed up those case files and put them on a shelf.
Until eight years later, when a convicted killer says he had a prophetic dream instructing him to keep confessing to murder.
I'm Molly Conger.
And this is Weird Little Guys.
I was a little bit lost again this week, trying to make sense of this story that I can't stop writing.
And I know I'm telling it out of order, but I think it's less of a biography of one man and more of a dissection of the world he lived in, the world he killed in.
And I've got my timeline of what our killer was doing, but that's useless to me, unless I've got a timeline of the world he was doing those things in.
Which means I'm off again down a 12th degree tangent searching for context that I won't know until I see it.
Context like William Bradford Reynolds.
I thought I was done researching.
I have plenty of research.
I had an outline for an entirely different episode sketched out.
And then I looked at that memo closing the case again.
And I looked at the name at the top of it.
Didn't mean much to me, some DOJ official, but I popped his name in the search bar on a lark.
And wouldn't you know, it actually does seem like remarkably relevant context that Ronald Reagan had picked him to head up the DOJ's civil rights division in May of 1981.
So Reynolds took the job after Franklin's federal civil rights conviction in Utah and before a botched federal prosecution that resulted in an extremely rare and very embarrassing acquittal at trial in Indiana in 1982.
When Reynolds wrote that memo closing Franklin's file in 1986, he was under pressure to resign after a disastrous Senate hearing a few months earlier.
Despite Strom Thurmond's best efforts, the Senate had refused to confirm Reynolds as Reagan's pick for Associate Attorney General.
In front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Reynolds was accused of being evasive and deceptive, particularly when it came to answering questions about voting rights.
Senator Arlen Specter said Reynolds took legal positions that were, quote, directly at variance with established law on issues like desegregation and employment discrimination.
So Reynolds wasn't confirmed by the Senate to that number three position of the DOJ, but he did keep his job heading up the civil rights division.
And around the time he was encouraging local prosecutors to quietly close their files on Franklin, Reynolds was issuing public statements denying the existence of an epidemic of racial violence in America.
And he was downplaying public concern over a spate of recent high-profile incidents.
In 1987, in response to Ed Kennedy's accusation that the Reagan administration was, quote, creating a climate that encouraged discrimination, Reynolds dismissed reports about things like the murder of a Guyanese immigrant in Queens by a white mob and a massive violent confrontation between civil rights activists and Klansmen in Georgia,
calling those isolated incidents that absolutely do not indicate what they were calling a rising tide of racism.
And in fact, Reynolds said, quote, all the available evidence collected on such matters indicates quite the opposite.
So he's standing in front of the press, he's standing in front of civil rights groups, and he's saying, there is no rising tide of racism.
I don't know why you keep saying that.
So it just wouldn't be a great public relations move to have another high-profile trial where a gallery full of reporters was writing down that a former Klansman had killed more than 20 people all over the country.
Charges and Offenses00:15:20
It just wouldn't do to have another round of headlines about a Nazi serial killer who hunted black men.
That's not the message the Reagan administration wanted to be sending.
You see, crime is political.
Not necessarily the acts themselves, although they can be, but the idea of crime, what we consider crime, what we choose to criminalize, whose acts we choose to scrutinize, who gets prosecuted, how they get charged, how they're presented in the media, how they're punished, the stories we tell.
All of that is political.
Always.
The decision to prosecute a crime, any crime, is always a political choice.
It's not always an important or meaningful, difficult, or noteworthy choice, but it is quite literally always a choice.
Prosecutors have what's called prosecutorial discretion in deciding whether to charge someone with a crime and what specifically to charge them with.
And the prosecutor has incredibly wide latitude here.
We like to imagine the law is clean cut and black and white, and it'll be the same every time.
But the same crime, the exact same set of facts, the same criminal act, could be a misdemeanor punishable by fine or a felony that sends you to state prison, depending on how one person chooses to charge it.
It's a choice.
Someone sitting at a desk in a county office building can decide whether you end up in a diversion program or subject to a draconian mandatory minimum sentence.
If you pay attention to your local elections, you're probably familiar with this idea.
Candidates competing for your vote in the district attorney race might have different opinions on a particular type of crime.
Maybe one of them is campaigning on a promise not to prosecute marijuana possession.
Even in states where the drug is still illegal, your county prosecutor can promise that he'll prioritize other kinds of cases and simply decline to file charges in cases where it's just simple possession.
Or maybe it goes the other way, and you've got a guy running on a platform of seeking maximum penalties in all drug cases and he's promising he's going to go after every drug user in the county.
Those are political choices.
Where I live here in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Albemarle County prosecutor chose not to file charges against any of the white supremacists who march with torches at the University of Virginia in 2017.
That decision was so controversial that his opponent campaigned on charging those cases.
And he won.
And he did it.
So as I was putting together my timeline of the years after 1980, after Joseph Paul Franklin's three-year killing spree came to an end, this was on my mind.
Because when I'm just looking at the timeline, it's confusing.
He's convicted of that 1980 double homicide in Utah in 1981.
He's convicted of the 1977 double murder in Wisconsin in 1986.
And then he goes a decade before he's convicted of another murder.
Even though those cases were all but solved all along, from the day he was arrested, he is credibly, publicly linked to the majority of the murders he was eventually confirmed to have committed.
What he did was never a mystery.
But when I was trying to make a table showing each crime, the date it was committed, the date it was charged, the date the case was resolved, it made even less sense.
Because sometimes cases were charged and then nobody ever mentioned them again.
The charges were quietly dropped or even weirder, left open, charges pending, indictment growing stale, but never trying to extradite him to face the charge.
And sometimes things would be quiet for a while and then he would burst back into a news cycle confessing to some new crime.
I made my timeline, but then I had to make sense of it.
I had to build up the context around it.
Why was he choosing to confess?
And why did some of those confessions go unanswered?
I know I've said this before, but trying to make sense of Joseph Paul Franklin is an impossible task.
Putting together his statements over the years, it seems like he just says whatever comes to mind, whatever feels good at the moment, with absolutely no consistency from conversation to conversation.
In 1996, he told a reporter that he'd had a spiritual awakening back in 1985 that made him not racist anymore.
And he'd gotten into meditation and now he was into New Age religion.
In other interviews, he's clearly espousing beliefs consistent with Christian identity, that neo-Nazi bastardization of the Bible.
After he claimed he didn't hate Jews anymore, he told an investigator that his only regret was that killing Jews was illegal.
In 1997, he said the only crime he regretted was shooting Larry Flint.
In 2000, he told a court TV documentary crew that he regretted killing mixed race couples.
But when he was interviewed by a Nazi magazine a few months later, he said that's not true.
He had no regrets at all.
Sometimes he was adamant that he would always been on a mission from God.
In the 90s, he briefly flirted with Satanic Panic, claiming that he became possessed by the devil during the murders.
And when he was appealing his death sentence, he changed his mind about how mentally ill he'd been, despite having spent years fighting with his own attorneys when they tried to introduce evidence of mental illness.
In one case, he sat there quietly and let his lawyers put on a decent defense in a trial for bombing a synagogue, only to stand up at the very end of the trial and give the jury a bizarre speech about how he'd set off that bomb because the Jews were trying to destroy the white race.
He's all over the place.
But once Franklin was in prison after his first conviction, everything else was a choice.
What he chose to confess to and when, whether anyone drove out to the federal prison to ask him any follow-up questions, how he chose to frame his narrative, and how the world around him reacted.
And on all sides of this equation, these choices had a messy mix of motivations.
And that's kind of what I want to explore here.
For detectives, prosecutors, the press, the broader white supremacist movement, for the murderer himself, there are, sometimes at least, discernible personal and political incentives for what they chose to do.
It looks random.
But what if I told you?
I don't think it is.
He wasn't making good choices.
But after another maddening week spent trying to reconstruct the world he was living in, I think I have a better idea why he kept changing his mind about what he wanted his own story to be.
Franklin's last murder was the first one to put him in prison.
The August 20th, 1980 attack at a park in Salt Lake City that left two young black men dead.
He'd shot them because they were jogging with white female friends.
The federal government took the first crack at him, convicting him under a federal civil rights statute in March of 1981.
The state of Utah took him to trial next, convicting him on two homicides later that same year.
Now you might be asking yourself, Molly, isn't that double jeopardy?
How could he be convicted twice for those same two murders?
Fair question.
Franklin asked that too.
And there's no reason anyone who didn't go to law school would need to know this.
But there is something called the dual sovereignty doctrine.
The law sees the federal government and the governments of the individual states as separate legal entities, entities with their own laws and their own court systems.
And those entities may have separate legal interests in enforcing those laws, and they can make independent decisions about prosecuting offenses under those laws, even if it means they both try the same defendant for the same criminal act.
Double jeopardy prevents you from being tried twice for the same offense.
And the word offense is really important here, because under the dual sovereignty doctrine, a singular criminal act is an offense against both the state and the federal governments.
I'm not kidding.
Here's what William Howard Taft had to say about it in a 1922 Supreme Court opinion.
Quote, here, the same act was an offense against the state of Washington because a violation of its law and also an offense against the United States under the National Prohibition Act.
The defendants thus committed two different offenses by the same act.
And a conviction by a court of Washington of the offense against that state is not a conviction of the different offense against the United States.
And so is not double jeopardy.
Don't worry, there's no quiz.
And honestly, I only learned this was possible back in 2018 when federal charges were filed against James Alex Fields, the Unite the Right car attacker.
I was surprised to learn that he could be prosecuted twice for murdering Heather Heyer.
And in both of these cases, my example about James Alex Fields and this case against Joseph Paul Franklin in Utah in 1981, the federal government is choosing to send a strong message.
Neither of these federal prosecutors had to do that.
In both of these cases, the local prosecutor had everything he needed to put a racist murderer away forever.
And in both cases, they did.
But federal prosecutors brought their own cases, not just to ensure the defendant went to prison and stayed there forever, but to communicate the federal government's commitment in these high-profile cases to prosecuting civil rights violations.
Because that's what's being charged in this federal case.
Murder isn't a federal crime.
Plain old, regular murder, that's state business.
The federal government only gets involved if the murder is a very particular kind of murder.
Sometimes it's about who the victim is.
A federal judge, a congressman, a U.S. Marshal, an FBI agent's wife, or where it happened.
Murders on federal property are obviously the federal government's business.
You might joke about maritime law, but it is a real kind of law.
And if you murder someone on a ship, that's a federal crime.
Murder for hire, murder by mail, murder at an airport, murder during a bank robbery or a kidnapping, all of these are federal crimes for various and specific legal reasons.
The federal government can't just intervene in any old murder because they want to.
They have to have a constitutionally grounded rationale.
It has to affect interstate commerce or something, you know?
The newspaper articles about the charges brought in Utah are so vague.
They just say it's civil rights related.
But if you want to be specific about it, Franklin was indicted for violating Chapter 18 of the United States Code, Section 245B2.
And that particular statute became federal law as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which was signed just a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
The federal charge isn't murder.
It's bias-motivated interference with federally protected activity.
So Joseph Paul Franklin murdered Ted Fields and David Martin in Salt Lake City, but the federal government has to charge him with a federal crime.
And those young men had been engaged in a federally protected activity when Franklin violated their civil rights by interfering with their ability to engage in that protected activity.
And he did so because of a federally protected characteristic.
And that all sounds like nonsense.
But the victims were jogging in a city-owned park.
So that legally counts as, quote, participating in or enjoying any benefit, service, privilege, program, facility, or activity provided or administered by the state or subdivision thereof.
And shooting and killing them certainly meets the threshold for willfully injuring, intimidating, or interfering with or attempting to injure, intimidate, or interfere with their ability to keep using that public park.
And he did all of that specifically because they were black.
It's a long walk, but when you really boil it down, it's actually not complicated.
Black people have a constitutional right to exist in public.
And shooting them for using a public park is murder.
But it's also a very specific federal civil rights violation.
And the federal government has an interest in protecting those constitutional rights.
Richard Roberts' Controversy00:04:18
That same code section appears in the federal indictment against James Alex Fields for Heather Heyers murder.
And I think it's a pretty similar prosecutorial motivation in both of these cases.
I mean, they were huge cases.
National news, international news, headlines all over the country about a vicious racist murderer.
It's very important in these high-profile cases to send a message that the Department of Justice is invested in enforcing civil rights laws.
When Joseph Paul Franklin was indicted in November of 1980, Jimmy Carter was technically still the president, even if only for a little bit longer.
And so it was his Department of Justice that wanted this prosecuted as a civil rights case.
And maybe on some level, Jimmy Carter himself wanted to see this prosecuted.
Remember, way back before the 1976 election, when Jimmy Carter was still just a candidate for president, the Secret Service went to Maryland looking for Franklin because he'd sent Carter a threatening letter.
One of the U.S. attorneys who worked on this case called it, quote, one of the most significant civil rights victories in the recent past.
And he told reporters that he hoped this verdict would show other racists that they could not expect to get away with victimizing the poor and defenseless.
They were sending a message.
And I guess it doesn't hurt that this kind of thing can make a career.
Christopher Kavanaugh, the federal prosecutor who handled that case against James Alex Fields, was named the U.S. attorney for Virginia's Western District not long after that case resolved.
Richard Roberts, that DOJ civil rights specialist who helped prosecute Franklin in Utah, would go on to lead the DOJ civil rights division in the 90s.
When President Bill Clinton nominated him to the federal judiciary, he named this case as one of the most important of his career.
It would be irresponsible not to mention here, just briefly, that Richard Roberts retired from the bench in 2016 after he was accused in a federal lawsuit of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a teenage girl.
The teenage girl in question had been a witness in the Joseph Paul Franklin case he handled in Utah back in the 80s.
Terry Mitchell had been injured in the attack that killed her friends.
In her lawsuit filed in 2016, she claimed that Richard Roberts had taken her out to dinner to discuss the case and then sexually assaulted her.
Her lawsuit was dismissed, but an investigation by the Utah Attorney General's office did conclude that Richard Roberts had sex with Terry Mitchell multiple times under the guise of witness preparation, though they found there was insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.
And because she was 16 at the time, she was old enough under Utah state law to consent to sexual activity with an adult.
I don't want to get into it.
Really, some of the allegations in her lawsuit are really upsetting.
But like I said, it would be unethical not to mention that the celebrated civil rights attorney who put Franklin away the first time was sexually abusing one of Franklin's surviving victims.
I'm Clayton Eckard, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.
Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan.
He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected.
The internet turned on him.
If I could press a button and rewind it, all I would.
But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines?
It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal.
The media is here.
This case has gone viral.
The dating contract.
Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.
Agree to Date Me, But00:03:16
Green search warrant.
This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.
I have done nothing except get breaked by the bastler.
Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.
The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.
Everyone thought they knew how it ended.
A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Lettby.
Lucy Lettby has been found guilty.
But what if we didn't get the whole story?
The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses.
I'm Amanda Knotts, and in the new podcast, Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was.
No voicing of any skepticism or doubt.
It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment that this is wrong.
Listen to Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby 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 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 the 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.
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.
Mind Games00:13:45
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.
By the end of 1981, Joseph Paul Franklin had been convicted for those murders in Utah by both state and federal courts.
So he'd racked up four life sentences to be served consecutively.
The jury in the state trial was asked to consider the death penalty, but several female jurors just couldn't do it.
So far, everything makes sense.
At this point, Franklin still maintains his innocence, and he's trying to fight the case and he's filing appeals.
Jimmy Carter's DOJ wants a high-profile civil rights case.
And prosecutors all over the country are waiting their turn.
By the time Franklin's convicted in Utah, Oklahoma City and Indianapolis have already indicted him and they're talking about preparing for extradition.
They're just trying to figure out who's going to go first.
Cincinnati said they were thinking about filing charges and cops in Pennsylvania really want to talk to him.
After his sentence was imposed in Utah, he was moved into federal custody to begin serving his federal sentences first.
In October of 1981, he was moved to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.
There's no indication that he was ill, not physically anyway, but that is where they would park him if they wanted to do some more thorough psychiatric examinations.
And after a few months at the medical center, he was moved to his final destination, the place that would be his home for the next 15 years.
Marion.
The United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.
Marion is a nightmare.
It opened in 1963, the same year Alcatraz closed, and it filled the need left by the loss of Alcatraz.
It was the end of the line.
Home of the worst of the worst.
If you got in trouble somewhere else, they'd send you to Marion.
Marion was the first Supermax-style federal facility in the United States, inventing the control unit in the early 1970s.
On a control unit, every prisoner is kept in lockdown isolation 23 hours a day.
And although Marion no longer operates as a Supermax, today it's home to one of the country's two communication management units.
People held on a communication management unit are typically people who've been charged with crimes like terrorism or organized crime or have a history of repeated attempts at witness intimidation.
And their access to the outside world is severely restricted.
All of their telephone calls are actively monitored and all of their mail is photocopied and read by staff, or in some cases, a dedicated FBI agent.
Prison is by its nature, very cruel.
There's no nice place to go to prison.
But in the 1970s, Marion was the prison system's laboratory for human experimentation.
They weren't actually allowed to engage in medical experiments on prisoners against their will anymore.
But cutting-edge techniques in behavior modification were being explored at Marion anyway.
They were torturing people.
And I say this because as we discuss Franklin's desperation to get out of Marion, I want to make sure you understand he wasn't just being picky.
This really was a situation where anywhere else would have been better.
And for all the things he does make up, he was not lying about how bad things are at Marion.
Just four days after arriving at Marion, Franklin was stabbed.
In February of 1982, he was stabbed 15 times in the throat and abdomen with a makeshift weapon described as ice pick-like.
And that part we know is true.
He was taken to the hospital with 15 stab wounds, and the homemade weapon was found on the ground nearby.
Everything else is a little hazy.
Initial statements from the prison said they had no idea who'd done it or why.
They didn't even know how many assailants there might have been or what their races were or what the motivation might have been.
After a few days, the FBI said they had a suspect, but they wouldn't say anymore.
A month later, the FBI announced they'd completed their investigation and there would be no criminal charges because there were no suspects and no witnesses, and Franklin didn't want to cooperate.
In the immediate aftermath of the stabbing, his sister told reporters that he'd told her that he was jumped by six or seven black inmates, seemingly without provocation.
In Mel Aiton's 2011 biography of Franklin, it says he entered another inmate's cell one evening when all the doors were open after dinner.
And inside that cell, he was cornered by a group of black inmates.
The version recounted in Aiton's book doesn't have any citations, which is a little bit odd.
And it provides no explanation, not even for Franklin's version of events as to why he entered someone else's cell.
And the lack of citations is really noticeable because Aiton's book is well researched and well cited.
There are a lot of footnotes, and so it was strange to see several paragraphs without any citation.
Usually claims like this would be cited with something like letter to the author, indicating the source was his correspondence with Franklin.
But here, there's no citation offered for things like the claim that Franklin was unarmed because he had turned down the Aryan Brotherhood's offer of a weapon.
The only other place I find that particular claim predates Aiton's book by a decade, so it may be the source.
And it's a 2001 issue of Resistance Magazine, the quarterly magazine published by White Power Music label Resistance Records.
By 2001, that label and its magazine were owned by William Luther Pierce, head of the Nazi group National Alliance.
And the anecdote about the Aryan Brotherhood had apparently been relayed to the author of the article by a man named Richard Scutari, a member of the Nazi terror cell, The Order, who served a bit of his own time at Marion later in the 80s.
It doesn't seem far-fetched, though, that Franklin would have been turned off by the Aryan Brotherhood.
I mean, they were racist, absolutely.
But their commitment to Nazi philosophy is sometimes just skin deep.
And if he didn't think they were true believers in Nazi ideology, that would have put him off.
The newspaper reports about the stabbing are all so vague.
Franklin wouldn't talk.
No one would.
So by most accounts, most of which come from Franklin, he's just randomly jumped by a large group of black men.
And there's no provocation offered.
There's no context here.
The only alternative version of this event that I could find was in the first issue of a newsletter published in 1982 by the Committee to Defend New African Freedom Fighters, a coalition dedicated to supporting members of the Black Liberation Army, which was a militant Marxist-Leninist Black nationalist group.
So despite these statements from the FBI that no one had any idea what happened, The New African Freedom Fighters relayed an account from another man on Franklin's cell block at Marion.
Willard Walker, a young black man, was sitting in his own cell when Franklin entered and lunged at him with a weapon, which Walker was able to wrestle away from him in a physical struggle.
This newsletter omits the part where Franklin is actually stabbed, perhaps to avoid implicating others, because it does seem like additional parties may have intervened at this point, and Walker may not have been the only one doing the stabbing, if he did it at all.
And Walker told this group that he was still under investigation by the FBI, but he had already been found guilty of assault through the prison disciplinary process and served 60 days in isolation.
Now, obviously, I can't verify any of this.
The prison was very tight-lipped about it.
And I've tried getting prison disciplinary records in much more recent cases and never had any luck.
So I don't know if that's true.
But at the very least, Willard Walker was real.
The contact information provided in that newsletter includes an inmate number.
And the Bureau of Prison records do show that that number belonged to a man by that name who would have been the right age and was in federal prison at the time.
The Willard Walker that I found had a prior escape attempt from a prison in Virginia.
So that makes him a likely candidate to have been moved to Marion.
I mean, we'll never know who lunged at who first with a homemade shiv.
It makes decent enough sense either way, right?
Franklin was there for life.
Why not establish yourself in your first week by stabbing a random black man?
That's perfectly in character for Joseph Paul Franklin.
But I can also imagine a black man not being particularly happy to see Joseph Paul Franklin, a Nazi who murdered little black boys for fun.
However, this went down, Franklin never forgot it.
This stabbing was a major factor in his later decision to demand the death penalty.
He was terrified of being murdered in prison, and he couldn't bear the thought of going out like that.
But once he's at Marion, people aren't really talking about him anymore.
Those prosecutors in Oklahoma City and Indianapolis, the ones who'd already secured indictments against Franklin, they weren't making any moves towards extradition.
Those prosecutors in Indianapolis hinted that they weren't exactly eager to try to prosecute him for the murders of Leo Thomas Watkins and Lawrence Reese, young black men killed a few days apart in January of 1980.
It looked like they were starting to get cold feet.
By 1982, Ronald Reagan was the president.
He'd replaced the head of the Civil Rights Division with his own man, William Bradford Reynolds.
Reynolds' approach to civil rights has been described using words like, mean-spirited and racist.
A 1982 report by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights found that in his first year as the head of the Civil Rights Division, Reynolds had in fact been waging a war on the very idea of civil rights.
And the report accused the Department of Justice of abdicating its responsibility to enforce the law.
Under Reynolds' leadership, the Civil Rights Division had, quote, established itself as the locus of anti-civil rights activity in the federal government, reaching into other agencies to try to curb policies deemed overly protective of civil rights.
And this report, made public in early 1982, seems like it really hit a nerve.
I mean, Reynolds reacted quite badly to it, and they needed a win.
They had midterm elections coming up.
And in the early 80s, Republicans were still at least making gestures towards trying to win black voters.
They needed something, something simple and clear-cut and low-risk, something they could point to and say, look, the Reagan administration cares if racists kill black people.
And in the spring of 1982, they had just the guy.
Joseph Paul Franklin had been making some friends in prison.
And he told several other inmates about that time he shot Vernon Jordan.
Vernon Jordan's Secret Friends00:03:53
I'm Clayton Eckard, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.
Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan.
He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected.
The internet turned on him.
If I could press a button and rewind it, all I would.
But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines?
It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal.
The media is here.
This case has gone viral.
The dating contract.
Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.
This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.
I have done nothing except get branded by the wrestler.
Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.
The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.
Everyone thought they knew how it ended.
A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Lettby.
Lucy Lettby has been found guilty.
But what if we didn't get the whole story?
The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses.
I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was.
No voicing of any skepticism or doubt.
It'll cause so much harm at every single level that the British establishment of this is wrong.
Listen to Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby 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 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.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of wife 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.
Jury Instructions Confusion00:11:30
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.
Now, most of the open cases against Franklin were just regular murders, and they were being handled at the local level.
But the May 1980 shooting of National Urban League president and civil rights attorney Vernon Jordan had been an FBI case from the very beginning.
And unlike Franklin's other victims, Vernon Jordan lived.
They could charge Franklin for violating Jordan's civil rights by shooting him while he was in a place of public accommodation.
That's a federally protected activity.
I mean, it worked in Salt Lake City, Utah.
It could work in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
It could have worked.
I think it could have worked.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've sat through quite a few trials.
And I think what happened here was a failure of communication.
I truly think that better jury instructions would have saved this case.
Agreeing on the jury instructions is the most boring part of the trial, but I think they should have invested more time in it here.
The jury instructions are that little packet of directions that the jurors get when they go out to deliberate.
It's not evidence, it's not argument, it's just neutral information about the law.
So the jury instructions might define legal terms or contain the text of the applicable laws or remind jurors of important legal facts like the right of the defendant to refuse to testify or explain concepts like burden of proof.
And in cases where the law is complicated, they're so, so important.
You have to help the jury understand how to apply the law to the evidence.
In this case, jurors who spoke to the press later said there had been no question in the deliberation room about whether Joseph Paul Franklin shot Vernon Jordan.
They believed he had.
But they were hung up on the actual charge, the language of this particular criminal charge, that the shooting had been a violation of Jordan's civil rights.
One juror speaking anonymously said they believed the conviction would have been a certainty, if not for some particular language the prosecutor used in framing this law.
They felt like they couldn't convict because the government failed to prove that Jordan was shot because he was using a public facility, that his usage of this hotel parking lot was the motive for the murder.
This case was charged under the same statute as the Utah murders.
In that case, Franklin violated the victim's civil rights because they had a right to use a public park.
And Franklin shot them in that park because they were black.
They were prevented from exercising that right because it was interfered with by someone with a biased motivation.
And so in this case, the argument was that Franklin had shot Vernon Jordan because he is Black and he was shot in a place of public accommodation, in this case, a hotel parking lot.
It's not rocket science, but it is a weird way to talk about what happened.
And if you don't have lawyer brain, you might overthink the whole thing and get confused about why the prosecutor is arguing that Vernon Jordan's use of the hotel parking lot was the motive for the murder.
I think they could have gotten there.
I think a better closing argument and clearer jury instructions could have saved this one.
But the statute was only a little over a decade old and it hadn't gotten a ton of use.
I think everyone was just confused about how they were supposed to try this case.
And this prosecutor probably thought that everything would fall into place once the jury believed that Franklin fired the gun and he did it because he was racist.
Because that part worked.
The jury believed that.
They just got confused about the rest of it.
This acquittal was kind of a shock.
I mean, an acquittal in a federal criminal trial is always a shock.
It's rare.
In 2022, 0.4% of defendants facing federal criminal charges were acquitted at trial.
That's 0.4%.
Four tenths of 1%.
Because most cases don't even go to trial.
90% of federal criminal cases end in guilty pleas.
Federal prosecutors don't even charge a case if they don't completely believe that it's a slam dunk.
So this was a pretty devastating loss.
And even though it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that the problem was never the evidence, it was poor communication with the jury about a complicated statute.
This loss made everybody nervous.
After this acquittal, the local prosecutor in Fort Wayne said he wasn't going to pursue filing his own charges.
He could have.
He could have filed charges against Franklin for shooting Vernon Jordan.
Just regular, straightforward, shooting him with a gun.
That's illegal.
And remember, it wouldn't be double jeopardy for the local prosecutor to do that.
It's dual sovereignty.
He could have filed those state charges for the shooting, but he said he didn't have the evidence.
And we know that's not true.
Those jurors said they believed based on the evidence that Franklin was the shooter.
But now no one wanted to take that risk.
So Joseph Paul Franklin went back to Marion.
He still had four life sentences to serve, even if he had scored a rare victory against the DOJ.
And during those few months away from Marion, he was telling people he didn't want to go back.
While he was being held at a jail in Chicago ahead of that trial in Indiana, he called a local newspaper and told a reporter that the government had been behind the stabbing at Marion, saying, I think the communists and the Jews who run the government are trying to get rid of me.
Upon his return to Marion, he started using his phone privileges to call newspapers in Oklahoma City, asking reporters down there if they had any idea when the prosecutor planned to extradite him.
He had, after all, been indicted there for a double murder he committed in 1979.
Three months after being acquitted in Indiana, he called newspapers in Cincinnati to complain that he was being poisoned at Marion and begged them to help him get extradited to Oklahoma.
I'm not sure why he called those reporters in Cincinnati to talk about Oklahoma City, because he didn't ask the reporters in Cincinnati about the status of the possible charges against him there.
He didn't like to talk about those murders.
Those victims had been children.
But for months, at the end of 1982, Franklin was demanding to be taken to Oklahoma.
He said he was going to write to Congress about it.
But after the failure at Fort Wayne, nobody wanted to touch it.
And Oklahoma City dropped their murder case in January of 1983, citing a lack of evidence.
There's no new story about Indianapolis dropping their cases.
They just never brought it up again.
Cincinnati stopped asking to talk to him.
Pennsylvania wasn't interested anymore.
A handful of bank robbery indictments just faded away.
And Franklin was stuck at Marion, obsessed with the idea that he was going to be murdered.
In April, his appeal in Utah was dismissed.
He still maintained his innocence there, but the courts disagreed.
In October of 1983, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear his appeal.
Later that month, two prison guards at Marion were murdered by inmates in separate incidents.
And the place exploded with violence.
Eight inmates were murdered.
There was a rash of escape attempts.
Guards beat men mercilessly and at random.
And then the entire prison went into permanent lockdown.
For several years, everyone at Marion was confined to a tiny concrete cell for 23 hours a day.
Marion had been unbearable before, but by the end of 1983, it was hell.
Within days of that lockdown, Franklin wrote a letter.
He sent it to the only person he could think of, the public defender who'd represented him in the Vernon Jordan case, because he needed a lawyer's help to make a deal.
He wanted to speak to detectives in Wisconsin.
If they could arrange for a transfer to a state prison in Wisconsin, he would confess to an unsolved double homicide.
In the first few months of 1984, he started confessing.
He confessed to two murders in Madison in 1977, a third Wisconsin murder he did in 1980, a pair of murders in West Virginia, and a Synecock bombing in Tennessee.
He was willing to do anything to get out of Marion.
But he really had a Zion, Wisconsin.
He was quite sure there wouldn't be as many black people there.
But something else was happening in 1984.
A small group of neo-Nazi terrorists calling themselves the Order were trying to kick off a race war.
The group had taken their name from the plot of the Turner Diaries, the novel by William Luther Pierce.
By the time Franklin found himself back in a courtroom that year, he wanted more than a transfer out of Marion.
He wanted his old mentor to be proud of him.
And as members of the Order shot, bombed, and robbed their way through 1984, William Luther Pierce sat down to write the first chapter of his second novel, the one he dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin.
Doubt the Case00:03:11
This is a production of Cool's Home Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show was edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.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.
I'm Clayton Eckerd.
In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.
But here's the thing.
Bachelor fans hated him.
If I could press a button and rewind it, all I would.
That's when his life took a disturbing turn.
A one-night stand would end in a courtroom.
The media is here.
This case has gone viral.
The dating contract.
Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.
This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
I'm Stephanie Young.
Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall.
In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world.
The Sixth Bureau podcast 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.
I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023.
But what if we didn't get the whole story?
The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed.
What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?
Oh my god, I think she might be innocent.
Listen to Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby 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.
MindGames, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming.
Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both?
Listen to MindGames on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.