Raymond Turner, a Black night manager and civil rights activist in Virginia, was murdered by Nazi serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin in 1979, yet his case vanished into obscurity—misreported as "Raymond Taylor," buried in police records, and ignored by media despite his father’s landmark fight for school integration. Franklin confessed but faced no prosecution due to death-row status and bureaucratic indifference, leaving Turner’s family uninformed while his killer’s other racially motivated killings went unpunished. This erasure reflects systemic racism: a man silenced twice—first by violence, then by history’s refusal to remember. [Automatically generated summary]
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?
Evidence has been made sufficient.
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.
I'm Clayton Eckard.
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.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today.
The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there.
No matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children.
I dread the conversation with my son.
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty 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.
Coolzone Media.
I have something a little different to offer you today.
It's not a weird little guy.
It's not the end of the long meandering story I've been trying to find the end of for weeks.
I'll get there when I get there.
This isn't quite a typical episode of Weird Little Guys, but I hope you'll stick around for this story anyway.
Because today, I want to give a man his name back.
I've been doing a lot of navel-gazing in this series over the last month or so as I've been writing about Nazi serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin.
I mean, I've been really agonizing over my participation in what I feel is the very exploitative genre of true crime.
I'm trying to tell a story that is, in most respects, firmly within that territory.
I'm telling it my own way, winding it in and out of the traditional beats of a crime story to weave in my side characters and the broader historical context of the white power movement this man is operating within.
And obviously, the show is about the weird little guy at the center of it.
I don't typically spend a great deal of time writing in detail about the targets of the men I write about.
Mostly because that just feels very invasive to me.
I'm not going to call up the widow of a murder victim to try to get a pull quote for my podcast.
I'm not going to tell you his children's names.
That's, I don't know.
It feels gross to me.
It's not the kind of research I do.
But I realized when I sat down to write this week, I spent all of February, all of Black History Month of all months, writing around the lives and deaths of Black men.
Writing about this white man's quest to snuff out Black lives.
And as I'm combing through my sources, I see other people doing that too.
In an episode two weeks ago, I listed the names of Joseph Paul Franklin's victims.
The 22 people that it is generally agreed upon that he murdered.
The people he credibly confessed to or was convicted of murdering between 1977 and 1980.
And one of those names had a sort of verbal asterisk Next to it.
Because the vast majority of sources will tell you that in August of 1979, Joseph Paul Franklin shot and killed a man named Raymond Taylor in Falls Church, Virginia.
When I was putting my notes together, trying to find a little piece of information about each victim, some fact about their lives that wasn't about their deaths, something I could tell you, some tiny snippet of who they were as a living human being, I couldn't find Raymond Taylor.
There was no Raymond Taylor in Falls Church, Virginia.
Not one who died in August of 1979, anyway.
There's just no such guy.
But all the books and articles and documentaries, televised interviews filmed in prison waiting rooms, they all mention this man, this Raymond Taylor.
They just sort of mention him in passing as they're rushing past his existence to get to some more titillating part of the story that's being told about the racist who killed him.
Even the Crime Classification Manual, a law enforcement text written by and for the people who solve murders, lists this man as Raymond Taylor.
And if the guy who invented the term serial killer says it, why can't I just leave it at that?
But I needed to be able to say something about who this man was.
And here I am stuck at step one.
I can't even find a Raymond Taylor in Falls Church, Virginia to learn anything about.
And that made me feel really uneasy.
Then this past week, I was flipping through another book about Joseph Paul Franklin.
I'm still writing this story.
And as far as books go, I've mostly been using Mel Aiton's 2011 biography.
But there are a handful of other books out there.
And in Carol Townsend's 2016 book, one centered around the investigation into the Larry Flint shooting, the author mentions this killing.
And she refers to the man killed in Falls Church in 1979 as William Taylor.
And that was the last straw, right?
All these sources are calling him Raymond Taylor, and I don't think that's correct.
But now, here he is again, and he gets half a sentence and an entirely new, different, wrong name.
I hate an inconsistency in the story.
I will waste days of my own time tracking something down just to sort it out for myself.
But this, this was a real human being.
This was a man who lived and he died and it was not that long ago.
There's no reason we shouldn't be able to find out what his name was.
I couldn't help but notice that the very next victim on my timeline is named Taylor.
Franklin shot and killed a man named Jesse Taylor alongside his wife, Marion Brissette, in Oklahoma City two months after the shooting in Falls Church.
So I think maybe what happened here is someone mixed up the names between those two murders once, and that error just got replicated so many times that it became the official version of the story.
And if that is what happened, then the mistake must have an origin point.
You can track this back to where it happened.
And I think the first time this victim is referred to as Raymond Taylor was in March of 1997.
In this ongoing series about Joseph Paul Franklin, we aren't up to that point in his timeline.
Like I said, all in due time, we'll get there.
But in January of 1997, Joseph Paul Franklin was sentenced to death.
He was finally officially on death row, which was something that he wanted at the time.
So in February of 1997, he's sitting in jail in Missouri, and he's in a confessing kind of mood.
He's saying that he's not going to appeal the death sentence, the death sentence that he asked for, and it seems like he believes he'll be put to death quickly.
He was very wrong about that, of course, but I think that's where his head was.
He's a dead man walking, and it's time to sort of wrap things up.
So not long after receiving that death sentence, it's February of 1997, he's sitting in jail in Missouri, and he gives an interview to Janet Tamaro for Inside Edition.
And when they finished taping the episode, she left the prison and called the police in Falls Church, Virginia.
I couldn't actually find a copy of that March 3rd, 1997 episode of Inside Edition.
So I don't know exactly what he said to her.
But based on the articles published about the episode before it aired, he gave the reporter specific, detailed information about a still unsolved murder that he claimed to have committed in Falls Church, Virginia in August of 1979.
The information was so specific that the Falls Church Police Department's public information officer put out a statement before the episode even aired, confirming that they had spoken with the journalist, and they believed Franklin was a strong suspect.
They were planning to send detectives down later that week to interview him.
One of those detectives is quoted in an article calling Franklin a bona fide suspect.
And it makes sense that they would want to get out ahead of this.
Falls Church doesn't have a lot of murders.
It's not a big place.
It's one of Virginia's independent cities, so it's technically mostly surrounded by Fairfax County, but it isn't part of the county.
It's just a little city.
And in 1980, it had a population of under 10,000 people.
And according to the Uniform Crime Report data the city submitted to the FBI that year, they'd had a single murder in 1980.
So it was going to be explosive news that a serial killer on death row was confessing to having killed in their small town.
I decided he would be a good target because of where he was sitting at and there wasn't anyone else around him.
And it run at the crosshairs.
And then I just slowly squeeze the trigger.
And it might, you know, I presume I dropped him around the first shot.
I found that clip of the interview with Janet Tomorrow embedded in a documentary that was produced later.
But I couldn't find actual audio of any portion of the Inside Edition episode that contains this victim's name.
It seems unlikely to me that he would have told her the name of the man that he shot through the window of a Burger King in 1979, because I don't think he could have known it.
He knows what he did, where, and when, but he didn't know who he shot.
According to accounts published in a handful of newspapers the week before the episode aired, the show named the victim as 28-year-old Raymond Taylor.
And it wasn't just Inside Edition calling him that.
A handful of newspapers in Virginia ran an Associated Press wire story about that episode before it aired, quoting Falls Church police officials and referring to the victim as Raymond Taylor.
I even dug up old issues of the False Church News Press, a tiny local weekly paper.
And it's the same there.
I don't know what the Falls Church Police Department's cold case backlog would have looked like in 1997.
But it couldn't have been deep.
They only have one or two, sometimes no, murders in a year.
So it wouldn't have been hard to figure out which murder Franklin was talking about when he described what he did in 1979.
Because there was only one murder in Falls Church in 1979.
The 28-year-old night manager of the Falls Church Burger King, who was murdered a few minutes before 10 p.m. on August 18th, 1979, was Raymond Turner.
A week after the episode of Inside Edition aired, two detectives from the Falls Church Police Department traveled to Missouri to interview Joseph Paul Franklin about this confession.
But all of the reporting that exists, everything I could find about this trip to Missouri, was published before it happened.
All of the articles talk about this in the future tense.
They're going to go do this.
Before the episode even aired, they're putting out these statements about how they're on it.
They're on this case.
They're going to go talk to him.
They're going to get this resolved.
Found Pictures, Missing Context00:11:18
But I can't find any reporting about it ever again.
According to Mel Ayton's biography of Franklin, those detectives did go down to Missouri and they talked to him.
They videotaped the conversation.
He confessed again.
And he provided credible, detailed, accurate information about this crime.
It was ultimately decided that there was no point trying to prosecute him, though.
It's not that they thought it wasn't a real confession.
I think they believed him.
There was just no point.
He was already on death row.
But then they chose not to communicate this to the public in any way.
They made this big public announcement about how they're going to go talk to him.
And then it doesn't look like they followed up.
There are obviously real limitations on the amount of local news from 30 years ago that I can find sitting here in my office on my computer.
But I found the articles that were written before they talked to him, and some of those were picked up on the wire.
I found articles in local publications, but none of these publications, none of the publications that ran stories about this confession at the beginning of March of 1997, had a story about it later.
I searched the local papers archived at the Library of Virginia.
I even searched the archives at the Fairfax County Library.
It seems like it just never came up again.
In the January 1998 issue of the Falls Church News Press, there is a vague reference to the story.
Buried 12 pages into their list of top stories of 1997, it says police, quote, questioned a man in St. Louis, suspected in the unsolved 1979 murder at the Burger King here.
That's it.
Neither man is named.
The man in St. Louis isn't described as a convicted serial killer on death row.
There's no next sentence.
It doesn't say what happened after that.
It doesn't say who died.
A decade later, there's an issue of that same paper with a little inset box labeled back in the day, and it's showing headlines from 10 years earlier.
There's a little snippet of that original article about Franklin's confession, but the blurb doesn't include the victim's name.
Not even the incorrect name they gave him in 1997.
He's just gone.
Erased from the story of his own unsolved murder.
His name was Raymond Turner.
Not Raymond Taylor.
Raymond Elton Turner.
Born March 27th, 1951, to parents Dorothy Elizabeth Foulkes Turner and Charles Robert Turner Sr.
He was 28 years old when he died on August 18th, 1979.
He had two daughters and two brothers and one half-sister, and he grew up in Middleburg, Virginia.
He was working as the night relief manager at the Burger King in Falls Church, Virginia on the night that he died.
He was taking his break, sitting at a table in the restaurant, eating his dinner at 9.50 p.m. when Joseph Paul Franklin pulled up outside.
He saw a young black man sitting alone at a table, eating a burger in an empty restaurant, and he fired at him through the window.
There are two or three sentences in one local newspaper the Monday after he died, but there's not a lot of information there.
But I did find a copy of his death certificate.
In that interview Franklin gave Inside Edition, he boasts that he dropped him right on the first shot.
And he's right.
According to the medical examiner, the cause of death was a perforating gunshot wound to the thorax, causing instant death.
And that's it.
That's all any of my sources and all of my research could tell me about Raymond Turner.
I have a death certificate, a picture of a tombstone, and an obituary that isn't even 70 words long.
I know he was in a car accident in 1972.
I can't find any evidence that he actually got divorced, but his wife isn't listed in the obituary.
The woman he married in 1972 remarried a year after he died, and when she applied for a marriage license, she checked the box on the form for previously divorced, but she listed the date of the divorce as the day that her first husband died.
I don't know if she checked the wrong box or if that means they were in the process of divorcing when he died.
Normally, that would be the point where I call it off.
This isn't the man I'm writing about.
I don't need a whole biography of every victim.
It's not my fault the newspaper didn't bother saying anything about his life when he died.
And at least we have something, right?
I satisfied my own need for order.
I found the right answer to the mistake in the source material.
I know his name.
But it's not enough this time.
The fact that his name could be taken from him at all means something.
The fact that his unsolved murder wasn't in the newspaper every year on the anniversary of his death.
The fact that there was no follow-up about the decision not to prosecute his killer.
In 2015, the Burger King on West Broad Street in Falls Church, where he died, was closed for good.
It was demolished.
There were a bunch of local news articles that year about this decision: articles about planning commission meetings and development proposals, the ultimate decision to build an assisted living facility on that site, the decision to allow the fire department to conduct training exercises before it was demolished.
There was even a letter to the editor in the Falls Church news press from a longtime resident who worked there as a teenager the summer that it opened in 1967.
People had a lot to say about this old Burger King.
But there were no articles about the time a serial killer murdered the manager there.
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.
He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground.
He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator.
Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years.
I'm like, Lord, this can't be real.
I thought it was a mistaken identity.
The best lie is partial truth.
For 22 years, only two people knew the truth until a confession changed everything.
I was a monster.
Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today.
Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight.
I hate fame.
I hate the word celebrity.
I hate those words.
You make me uncomfortable.
But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are.
The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there.
I'm in Australia when Bo is born.
My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job.
I dread the conversation with my son.
What do you think you'd say?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty 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.
I can't tell you anything else about Raymond Turner, but I can try to find the context that helps explain why that might be.
Because I did find one other thing.
Raymond Turner's Legacy00:13:51
I found a few pictures of him.
Not from his obituary or from an article published after his death or about his murder.
No, I found pictures from his high school yearbook.
I had to subscribe to some horrible website to get it, but I have a scanned copy of the 1969 Loudoun County High School Yearbook.
There are a bunch of pictures of him in there.
He was on the basketball team.
He was a member of the school's varsity athletes Letterman's fundraising group.
There are two pictures of him posing in his electronics class.
He even had a nickname.
They called him Eyes Turner, I assume because of his glasses.
And it's an interesting high school yearbook because the 1968-1969 school year was the first year that schools in Loudoun County, Virginia were officially racially integrated.
Now you might be asking, Molly, how is that possible?
Didn't Brownverse Board of Education get decided in 1954?
Weren't public schools required to integrate after that?
Didn't they send U.S. Marshals and the National Guard to schools in Arkansas to make sure that happened?
How could this school have remained racially segregated for almost 15 years after the Supreme Court told everybody to knock that shit off?
Even if you are already familiar with the history of Virginia's strategy of massive resistance to school desegregation, you might be surprised to learn that Loudoun County was one of the last school districts in the country to comply with Brownberg's Board of Education.
Not just one of the last in Virginia, but one of the last in the country.
After the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional, everyone was supposed to integrate.
But the ruling didn't really provide much guidance on how that was supposed to be accomplished.
So a year later, in 1955, the Supreme Court issued another opinion, one that's generally referred to as Brown 2.
And it was a sort of follow-up to the original opinion about how to implement it.
And I would argue it did not help.
Justice Felix Frankfurter, a man with a very silly name who would later refuse to hire a young female law clerk because he felt that this Ruth Bader Ginsburg woman wasn't the right gender for the job, he wrote in this opinion that school districts must comply with the court's ruling and desegregate their schools, quote, with all deliberate speed.
And it's not defined.
What is deliberate speed?
It kind of sounds like, you know, don't rush.
Start working on it, but don't hurt yourself.
We can take a gradual approach to constitutional rights on this one.
All deliberate speed.
It's sort of up to you to decide what that means.
There's no deadline, no set of benchmarks, no accomplish X goal by 1956, another goal by 57, finish the process within four years, something like that.
None of that.
Just work on it at the speed of your choosing, which some school districts interpreted as permission to stall.
In Virginia, school integration was thwarted at every level.
And most powerfully, at the state level.
If a school district made any attempt to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, the governor would simply close down the schools.
All of them.
Every school in the district.
For years.
There were school districts in Virginia that had no operational public schools for the entirety of the late 1950s.
State laws were passed that allowed the state funding that would have gone to public schools to be funneled into tuition grant programs that allowed white students to attend whites-only private schools at no cost to them.
Many schools adopted a policy of freedom of choice plans, which allowed students and their families to choose which public school they attended.
And wouldn't you know it, everyone just happened to choose to continue to attend segregated schools.
In Prince Edward County, the local government just stopped funding the school district altogether.
They thought they could get around the court's orders by providing private school vouchers to all students to use at the private school of their choice.
But there were no private schools in the area that accepted black students.
In 1964, the Supreme Court ruled that Prince Edward County had in fact violated the 14th Amendment by refusing to fund their public schools.
And when the county was forced to reopen the public schools in 1964, no white students showed up.
Legally, they were complying.
In practice, their schools were still fully segregated.
All of the white students in Prince Edward County were still attending the whites-only private school, what were called segregation academies in the South.
That school in Prince Edward County didn't admit its first black student until 1986.
Raymond Turner was born in Loudoun County in 1951.
So that decision in Brown v. Board in 1954 came before he was even old enough to go to school.
But he would eventually be one of the first black students to attend a fully integrated high school in the county.
So here's where I feel like someone really dropped the ball.
Why were there no news stories about Raymond Turner's murder that include his father?
It just seems like incredibly rich context here that Raymond Turner's father, Charles or Jack Turner, was on the forefront of the fight for integration in Loudoun County.
Yes, the murder was random.
Raymond Turner wasn't selected as a target because of his father's civil rights activism, but I just don't think you can responsibly talk about the racially motivated murder of this young man without placing it in the context of the systemic racism of the world he lived in in Northern Virginia in the 60s and 70s.
Raymond Turner was able to be one of the first black students to attend Loudoun County High School because of his father, because of the fight put up by the Countywide League and the NAACP, organizations his father had been active in for decades.
There is a small treasure trove of old records related to the fight for civil rights in Loudoun County that are preserved by the Edwin Washington Project.
Their archive isn't fully digitized online, but from what I have been able to access, Jack Turner was deeply involved in this work as early as the 1930s, when he was a young unmarried man in his 20s with no children.
In the 1930s, Black residents in Loudoun County raised $3,000 of their own money to buy a plot of land.
And then they transferred that land to the county for the nominal price of $1.
They essentially gave this $3,000 parcel of land to the county.
And they bought it themselves to help convince the county to build a school for black children because there wasn't one before that.
And Jack Turner's name is on the petition to the county asking them to construct Frederick Douglas high school, which was built in 1941 and in 1962 when the school district was slow walking the process of integration, trying to skirt court orders by pretending to consider applications from black students wishing to attend the white school, only to reject them for failing to meet arbitrary academic qualifications.
Jack Turner was one of the local black leaders who turned up again and again at school board meetings as a member of the Douglas HIGH School Parent Teacher Association.
He was a member of the official delegation sent to the school board to urge them to form an interracial committee to work on the problem.
And it was the Loudoun County NA CP that helped bring about the lawsuit against the so-called Pupil Placement Board in 1962, that body that was preventing black students from attending the allegedly integrated schools.
And in 1966 it was the NA CP again that contacted the Justice Department, which ultimately forced the courts to intervene and finally abolish these loopholes and workarounds the county was using to keep their schools segregated.
Jack Turner didn't just send his son to an integrated high school.
He made an integrated high school to send his son to.
He had spent the last 30 years fighting for his son to have a school to attend at all starting years.
Before his children were even born.
And as school segregation in Loudoun County was finally about to end, Jack Turner ran for office.
In 1967, Jack Turner was elected to a seat on the Middleburg town council.
Middleburg is a tiny little town in Loudoun County.
That same year another man, Besham Sims, was elected to the town council in nearby Purcellville.
They were the first black men to ever hold elected office in Loudoun county and this was just five years after John Wilmer Porter was elected to office in the town of Dumfreys in 1962, becoming the first black person to hold office in Virginia since the adoption of the 1902 state constitution.
Not to derail us entirely, but I really cannot emphasize enough how systematically, thoroughly, and intentionally racist the system of government adopted by the Commonwealth of Virginia was.
Reconstruction didn't just fail, they killed it.
At the 1901 State Constitutional Convention, one delegate said in public out loud with his whole chest that quote, The great underlying principle of this convention movement, the one object and cause which assembled this body, was the elimination of the Negro from the politics of the state.
Another delegate said, quote, there is but one spot in Virginia where the Negro can make himself useful and not come into conflict with the superior race.
That spot is in the cornfield and on the tobacco ground as an agricultural laborer.
These are statements made by delegates to the state constitutional convention.
This isn't from one of my Nazi newsletters.
I read a lot of Nazi newsletters and they do say things like this.
These were public statements made by respectable men, men who rewrote my state constitution.
So just keep that in mind.
Virginia rewrote its state constitution to keep black Virginians from holding office, to keep them from voting, to keep them from owning property, to keep them from attaining wealth or power, to put them back into conditions as close to slavery as they could manage.
And it did the job.
No black person held office in Virginia for two generations.
So Jack Turner wasn't the first, but he was damn close.
It was a big deal.
And he appeared to have remained on the Middleburg Town Council until his death in 1991.
I found some county records that show he won re-election in 1990.
Jack Turner was also a founding member of the board that operated the Marshall Street Community Center.
He was a deacon at the Shiloh Baptist Church.
He was a member of the board that administered the local Black Cemetery.
He was on a local black men's baseball team and his wife Dorothy played on the women's team.
He was a member of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, a fraternal organization.
And he was the secretary of his local lodge.
By all accounts, it would appear that this was a man who spent decades trying to make his little corner of the world a place where black people had equal rights, equal access, equal pay, and equal protection.
He helped build the first black school in the county in 1940.
He helped integrate the schools in the 1960s.
He held public office when that wasn't something black people could do in Virginia.
Equal Rights Advocate00:04:19
And then his son was shot by a Nazi Klansman.
And nobody wrote about it.
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.
He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground.
He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator.
Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years.
I'm like, Lord, this can't be real.
I thought it was a mistaken identity.
The best lie is partial truth.
For 22 years, only two people knew the truth.
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.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today.
Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight.
I hate fame.
I hate the word celebrity.
I hate those words.
They make me uncomfortable.
But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are.
The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there.
I'm in Australia when Beau is born.
My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job.
I dread the conversation with my son.
What do you think you'd say?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, 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 Knott, 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 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.
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.
Understanding Joseph Paul Franklin00:11:11
That context matters to me.
It's a long walk around the block to tell you I don't know very much about Raymond Turner, but I don't think they taught us 20th century history very well in school.
When Raymond Turner died in 1979, he was just a decade out of high school, having been one of the first black students to attend an integrated high school in one of the last school districts in the country to integrate.
Joseph Paul Franklin wasn't just killing at random.
I mean, he was choosing random black people to shoot, but he was doing exactly what the delegates at the 1901 State Constitutional Convention did.
He was trying to create a world that didn't include black people.
And I think when you erase that part of the story, you're doing that work too.
Just a little bit.
In the end, I think I can understand the decision that was made not to prosecute him for this murder.
By 1997, he really was locked up forever.
There was no question about it now.
He had life sentences in multiple jurisdictions, state and federal.
And now he's on death row.
There really wasn't much point in moving him around, transporting him to and from court, letting him grandstand in front of a jury, and footing the bill for it.
That's an unsavory reality.
Sometimes these decisions are just about cost.
Because trials can be very expensive.
And those are costs borne by the locality.
So in this case, it would have been the little town of Falls Church that was on the hook for this money.
And the cost of a murder trial is all over the map.
It's hard to say exactly what this would have cost.
I read an analysis done by the courts in Washington state that looked at murder trials between 1997 and 1999.
And they found costs that ranged from $32,000 to $1.2 million.
Obviously, those higher end numbers are death penalty cases with a lot of appeals attached to them.
A 1993 study funded by the state of North Carolina found average costs of around $17,000 for non-death penalty cases.
And a 2016 RAND Corporation study puts the average cost for non-capital murder trials between $22,000 and $44,000.
So the answer is no one knows.
But we're looking at tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum, potentially into the millions.
Costs to the county include hiring investigators or experts, costs associated with the work done by the prosecutor's office, paying for court-appointed representation for the defendant, courtroom security costs, transportation for the defendant from out of state, moving him to and from court every day, and the cost of keeping him in the local jail.
Although, just to offer you one counterpoint, when the state of Wisconsin put Franklin on trial in 1986, there were people who made this point.
They said, this is a waste of money.
This is going to be very expensive.
And initial estimates for that trial were as high as $200,000.
But in the end, it only cost Dane County $25,000 to convict him of a double homicide after a five-day trial.
But like I said, I do think I can understand why Falls Church decided not to proceed with a trial in 1997.
It was a 20-year-old case.
The killer's already on death row, and he's not even trying to appeal it.
He's gonna die.
Why waste the money?
I guess it depends on what you think the judicial system is for, but I can make peace with that prosecutorial decision.
What I don't understand is why they didn't say anything.
Why not make a statement?
Why was there no article announcing that the case was being formally closed without charges filed?
The only proof that I have that a decision was made at all is a footnote in Mel Ayton's book and the citation for the claim that this decision was made is an internal prison system memo.
Remember he's in a prison in Missouri at this time.
So someone in the Missouri prison system sent a memo saying we're keeping him.
They don't want him.
So in Falls Church, the decision was made to let Joseph Paul Franklin have the last word on this murder.
And he didn't even get the victim's name right.
By the time those detectives flew down to Missouri in 1997, Raymond Turner's parents had both passed away.
His mother died in 1987 and his father in 1991.
One of his brothers died in 1995.
He had a half-sister who still lived in the area and his other brother lived somewhere else.
And I'm not sure if Falls Church police made any effort to talk to them.
His widow still lived nearby.
She hadn't even left the county, though she'd remarried and had a new name.
And maybe they talked to them at some point.
But I don't think it was before they put out that public statement.
Because if they'd talked to his family before they put out a press release, they would have gotten his name right, wouldn't they?
Did some reporter somewhere ask his family what they thought about this?
Did anyone talk to them at all?
Did anyone tell them this case was solved?
There wouldn't be any formal reckoning.
There wouldn't be a trial.
There'd be no conviction.
There'd be no accountability, but at least they would finally know after 18 years of having absolutely no explanation for this single bullet that came in through the window from the darkness outside.
Did someone tell them?
Maybe someone asked them how they felt.
But no one put it in the newspaper.
No one put it in their book.
The central thesis of this show has always been that there are no monsters.
Not real ones.
Take a closer look at those monsters, peel back the layers, and you'll see that the men behind these unspeakable acts of violence are still just men.
They aren't exceptional.
They aren't supernatural or mysterious or impossible to understand.
They're just some fucking guy.
They're a product of the world they live in, the world we live in.
What Joseph Paul Franklin did was extreme.
But it wasn't something that is separate from our reality that is beyond our comprehension.
We wrote Raymond Turner out of the story of his own death for the same reason Joseph Paul Franklin took him out of this world.
Because Raymond Turner, too, was a man who lived in this world.
And the world we all live in does not particularly care about the safety and happiness of a young black man who was just minding his own business, taking his dinner break on an overnight shift.
Joseph Paul Franklin was just doing with a gun, what so many respectable men have done in quieter, less obvious ways in legislatures and school board meetings and op-ed sections.
On a societal level, in the way we tell these stories, we exceptionalize the extreme manifestation of this because we're ashamed to admit we're okay with just letting it happen up to a point.
Joseph Paul Franklin's crimes are typically referred to in shorthand as serial murders of interracial couples.
But that actually only accounts for less than half of his known victims.
A month before he shot Raymond Turner, he shot and killed Harold MacIver in the parking lot of a Taco Bell in Georgia.
A few months after murdering Raymond Turner in January of 1980, he murdered two men in Indianapolis in attacks that were very similar to the way he killed Turner.
Young black men who were standing inside of a place of business at night, shot through the plate glass window from outside.
In all four of these murders, Harold MacIver, Raymond Turner, Lawrence Reese, Leo Watkins, Franklin was just driving around at night, looking for some sort of macabre makeshift shooting gallery with human targets.
Lawrence Reese was standing near the counter at a church's chicken around closing time.
He didn't work there, but the restaurant staff would give him the leftover chicken at the end of the night in exchange for help cleaning up.
Two nights later, Leo Thomas Watkins was inside of a convenience store, helping his father who'd been hired as an exterminator.
Both men were shot with a rifle through the big front window of the business.
Just like Raymond Turner.
And just like Raymond Turner's murder, Franklin confessed to these.
He did them.
And he was even charged for those two way back in 1981.
But Indianapolis never followed through.
Just like in the Raymond Turner case, the authorities in Indianapolis made a big public announcement that they were going to do something about this.
And then you never heard from him again.
It just wasn't worth it to them.
I'm still trying to find the end of this series about Joseph Paul Franklin.
I'm sick of him, but I'm fascinated by the history around him.
We are getting close to the end.
I meant to write the end this week, but I just couldn't go any further without stopping for just a second.
to give this man his name back.
So now I'm just left with this hot, hollow, gnawing feeling in my chest, thinking about how a young man who grew up in one of the last counties in America with segregated schools, a man whose family was devoted to the struggle for black dignity and equality, and whose life was taken on a whim by a guy who was just driving around looking for a black man to shoot.
A Hollow Gnawing Feeling00:03:43
And I can't let go of the feeling that we let all of these men die twice.
A Nazi with delusions about bringing on the race war pulled the trigger, sure.
But when we entertain this comforting fantasy of the lone wolf, the idea that there are mysterious forces that just lead to terrible things sometimes, and we put our heads in the sand and we pretend that the Joseph Paul Franklins of the world aren't a hideous but inevitable consequences of the quieter evils we try so hard to ignore.
We kill them again and again.
And we ensure that it never stops.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conker.
Our executive producers are Sophie Licherman 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 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 Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, 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.
I'm Clayton Eckard.
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.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose Podcast.
I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today.
The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there.
No matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children.
I dread the conversation with my son.
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty 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.