Weird Little Guys - One Man Race War: Joseph Paul Franklin, Pt. 6
Aired: 2026-03-12
Duration: 59:01


=== Rewinding The Bachelor Nightmares (01:51) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  I'm Clayton Eckard.
[00:00:06]  In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.
[00:00:10]  But here's the thing.
[00:00:11]  Bachelor fans hated him.
[00:00:13]  If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would.
[00:00:15]  That's when his life took a disturbing turn.
[00:00:18]  A one-night stand would end in a courtroom.
[00:00:22]  The media is here.
[00:00:23]  This case has gone viral.
[00:00:25]  The dating contract.
[00:00:27]  Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.
[00:00:30]  This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
[00:00:32]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:00:33]  Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:40]  Next Monday, our 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards are happening live at South by Southwest.
[00:00:45]  It's the biggest night in podcasting.
[00:00:48]  We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry.
[00:00:54]  And the winner is creativity, knowledge and passion will all be on full display.
[00:01:00]  Thank you so much, iHeartRadio.
[00:01:02]  Thank you to all the other nominees.
[00:01:03]  You guys are awesome.
[00:01:04]  Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, free at Veeps.com or the Veeps app.
[00:01:11]  Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
[00:01:14]  My latest episode is with Hilary Duff, singer, actress, and multi-platinum artist.
[00:01:20]  You desire in family like this picture, and that's not reality.
[00:01:25]  My sister and I don't speak.
[00:01:27]  It's definitely a very painful part of my life.
[00:01:31]  And I hope it's not forever, but it's for right now.
[00:01:34]  Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:41]  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.

=== A Fake Confession Exposed (03:37) ===

[00:01:52]  But what if we didn't get the whole story?
[00:01:54]  Evidence been made sufficient.
[00:01:55]  The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed.
[00:01:58]  What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?
[00:02:01]  Oh my God, I think she might be innocent.
[00:02:03]  Listen to Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:13]  Cool Zone Media.
[00:02:19]  In July of 1984, a court-appointed defense attorney in Tennessee was fighting an uphill battle.
[00:02:27]  He didn't have a very sympathetic looking client.
[00:02:30]  Joseph Paul Franklin was led into the courtroom shackled at the wrists and ankles.
[00:02:35]  He'd once escaped through the window of a police station during an interrogation.
[00:02:40]  During one of his trials, he'd gotten as far as hot wiring an elevator during a recess.
[00:02:45]  And he'd once been tackled by U.S. Marshals after trying to attack a prosecutor in a courtroom.
[00:02:51]  Things were off to a rocky start.
[00:02:54]  The defense acknowledged that the jury would hear evidence about the defendant's past, his membership in the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
[00:03:04]  They would hear in his own words his views about race mixing, communism, and the Jews.
[00:03:12]  But they should just try to focus on the evidence.
[00:03:16]  Then the prosecution played the tape.
[00:03:19]  The defendant had already confessed.
[00:03:22]  For over an hour, the jury heard Franklin explain why and how he'd bombed the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Chattanooga in 1977.
[00:03:32]  I was trying to kill as many Jews as I could, he'd told the detective who interviewed him in prison.
[00:03:40]  That detective, surprised at this willingness to confess, asked him, don't you understand you're confessing to a serious crime?
[00:03:49]  And in that taped confession, Franklin replied, quote, I don't really think it is serious.
[00:03:56]  I don't even consider it a crime.
[00:03:59]  I think it was good.
[00:04:02]  The defense was simple.
[00:04:04]  The only option they really had.
[00:04:08]  The confession was fake, they argued.
[00:04:12]  This was a man who was willing to say anything to get transferred to a different prison.
[00:04:16]  He just made it up.
[00:04:19]  The trial lasted three days.
[00:04:22]  There was evidence, sure.
[00:04:25]  He'd purchased the explosives using his real name.
[00:04:28]  His fingerprints were on the forms.
[00:04:31]  But we'll never know how convinced that jury might have been either way.
[00:04:36]  Any doubts they may have had about the truth of that recorded confession were blown away just before they were sent out to deliberate.
[00:04:46]  For three days, his attorneys had done their best to provide him with a zealous defense.
[00:04:52]  But when the trial was completely finished, closing arguments were made, the jury was moments away from leaving the courtroom.
[00:05:00]  The defendant stood up.
[00:05:03]  He wanted to make a statement.
[00:05:06]  His attorneys objected.
[00:05:09]  But the judge allowed it.
[00:05:12]  And he confessed again.
[00:05:16]  He didn't just confess, he boasted.
[00:05:20]  I want to make your job a little easier here, as far as deliberations go.
[00:05:25]  He said, you know, I admit to you, I bombed the synagogue.

=== Franklin's Nazi Roots Revealed (10:56) ===

[00:05:29]  You know, I did it.
[00:05:31]  And I'll tell anybody around.
[00:05:33]  It was a synagogue of Satan.
[00:05:37]  In that courtroom in Tennessee, in the summer of 1984, a man who had tried and failed to ignite a race war carried his Bible to the lectern and delivered a bizarre 10-minute speech littered with quotations from the book of Revelation.
[00:05:54]  He told the jury they'd been fed nothing but lies and slander about him.
[00:05:59]  And the prosecutor was just jealous because he was a real man, a white man who knew the truth about the Jewish control of the media and the government.
[00:06:08]  That this was a nation founded by white men, but it had been taken over.
[00:06:13]  And he was just trying to take it back.
[00:06:16]  The jury, of course, convicted him.
[00:06:21]  He was performing.
[00:06:24]  Not for the jury, but for the men on the outside, still trying to fight that same imaginary war.
[00:06:32]  Later that month, after a gang of Nazis robbed an armored car, they tried to put some of that stolen money on his books in prison.
[00:06:43]  I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
[00:06:48]  I have a confession to make.
[00:07:08]  I'm really only barely interested in Joseph Paul Franklin.
[00:07:14]  Truthfully, at this point, I'm downright sick of him.
[00:07:18]  But if you're a regular listener, you know by now that even though I've been writing about Joseph Paul Franklin for weeks now, it was never really about him.
[00:07:29]  I mean, this is the sixth episode with his name in the title.
[00:07:32]  It's kind of about him.
[00:07:35]  But only as an entry point.
[00:07:38]  Every episode about him so far has a sort of central kernel that is a snippet of his story.
[00:07:47]  But mostly it's about the world that existed around that moment in his life.
[00:07:53]  the world he was doing those things in, the political landscape in the United States, the state of the white power movement he grew out of.
[00:08:01]  In the nearly three months and more than 50,000 words I've committed to telling a story that is, allegedly, about Joseph Paul Franklin, he's kind of just a supporting character.
[00:08:13]  And you're all just along for the ride while I try to piece together my grand unified theory of right-wing violence.
[00:08:21]  And Joseph Paul Franklin has turned out to be a pretty useful vehicle on that journey.
[00:08:26]  Despite his reputation as the quintessential lone wolf terrorist, following him through history has introduced us to quite a few characters in the weird little guy's extended universe.
[00:08:40]  Ones we've met before, and some you'll see again one day in an episode of their own.
[00:08:46]  So as we wind our way towards the end, let's piece together the story so far and lay out the full timeline of the weird little guy at the center of this.
[00:09:00]  In the first episode, a teenage Joseph Paul Franklin abandoned his young wife in Alabama to join the National Socialist White People's Party in Northern Virginia in the late 1960s.
[00:09:11]  Formerly the American Nazi Party, the group was struggling to rebrand and regroup after the assassination of its founder, George Lincoln Rockwell.
[00:09:21]  In 1969, Franklin attended the group's first annual all-member conference in Virginia.
[00:09:28]  He carpooled up from Alabama with two other young members from the South.
[00:09:32]  Don Black, the future founder of the Nazi Forum Stormfront, and David Duke, who hadn't yet become an infamous Klan leader and was still just a college student testing the waters of political activism.
[00:09:47]  At that conference, Franklin heard speeches from the party's leadership, including William Luther Pierce.
[00:09:55]  He also met a teenage boy from Ohio who'd moved into the party barracks to be mentored by Pierce.
[00:10:02]  Franklin made quite an impression on that young man.
[00:10:06]  When James Mason sat down to write Siege more than a decade later, he wrote fondly of the time they broke into the headquarters of an anti-war group and unleashed clouds of tear gas on the hippies and communists inside.
[00:10:20]  It must have been a formative experience for Mason, one of his first real rushes with political violence.
[00:10:27]  It comes up several times in his essays on the proper way to use terrorism to bring about the white revolution.
[00:10:35]  In the second episode, we explored a blank space.
[00:10:40]  The sources I have about Franklin's life are pretty bare when it comes to where he was and what he was doing in all of 1977, in the months leading up to his first murder.
[00:10:53]  So instead of looking for him, we looked at what he was probably reading that year.
[00:11:00]  And in 1977, the Nazi newsletters written by men he'd met in the movement were full of praise for murderers.
[00:11:10]  There were at least three high-profile attacks that year.
[00:11:14]  Racially motivated homicides committed by members of groups that Franklin had some kind of connection to.
[00:11:22]  And like Franklin, all three of those men went unclaimed by the hate groups that had fueled their violent fantasies.
[00:11:30]  After Frederick Cowan killed six people and himself in a New York suburb, the leadership of the National States Rights Party lied about his membership in their organization, claiming they didn't know the man.
[00:11:43]  And the National States Rights Party had no comment at all a few months later about Ray Schultz, a member who took his own life after being arrested for using cyanide to murder a Jewish man in Chicago.
[00:11:54]  Police found a bomb-making workshop and a dungeon in Schultz's basement.
[00:12:01]  But there was no real public speculation that I could find about whether the hit list of Jews that police found at his house had anything to do with the nearly two decades he'd spent as an active member of several neo-Nazi organizations.
[00:12:16]  He'd been very involved in both the American Nazi Party and the National States Rights Party.
[00:12:25]  And really, theirs is such a small world.
[00:12:29]  I only came across Schultz in the context of this murder in 1977, but for those of you updating your red string boards at home, this lone wolf killer had some interesting roommates over the years.
[00:12:43]  At various points in the 1960s, he shared an apartment with some guys you might remember from past episodes.
[00:12:51]  In 1963, he lived with Christopher Vidnevich.
[00:12:56]  Vidnevich was the American Nazi Party member who got into a shootout in Maine with a one-eyed mafia hitman while both men were pushing competing conspiracy theories about the assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell.
[00:13:09]  That strange saga was in the Frank Smith episodes a few months ago.
[00:13:14]  Schultz later shared an apartment with Matthias Kahl.
[00:13:19]  This was years before Kahl took over leadership of the Nazi Party.
[00:13:23]  And during Schultz's brief stint living outside of Washington, D.C., he lived with Dan Burros, the American Nazi Party member who shot himself after the FBI leaked information about his Jewish upbringing to the New York Times.
[00:13:37]  So he's not just a casual member of these organizations, right?
[00:13:42]  He's sharing living space with prominent members we've encountered before.
[00:13:49]  But surely, his decision to start poisoning Jews was one he made entirely on his own.
[00:13:56]  Back to those murders in 1977, though.
[00:14:00]  When Kenneth Wilson opened fire on a picnic at a black church in North Carolina while dressed in a Nazi uniform, the leadership of the National Socialist Party said that the young man had filled out an application, but he wasn't a member of their organization.
[00:14:16]  And in all three cases, the newsletter written by James Mason was filled with praise for these murderers, all of whom took their own lives rather than be arrested.
[00:14:32]  At the end of the summer of 1977, Joseph Paul Franklin committed his first murder.
[00:14:39]  By his own account, he'd driven to Wisconsin to murder a particular judge.
[00:14:45]  And after spending a week reading every Nazi newsletter I could find from 1977, I noticed that he chose that target right around the time he might have read a scathing article about that judge, written by William Luther Pierce.
[00:15:03]  The third episode backtracked a little bit, covering what we know about Franklin's activities in the 1970s, in the years before the murder started.
[00:15:13]  He spent a few years in the National Socialist White People's Party before switching over to the National States Rights Party.
[00:15:19]  That name might lead you to believe this was some kind of quaint southern lost cause Confederate nostalgia racism association, but it was in fact just a neo-Nazi group without the baggage of the swastika branding.
[00:15:35]  Franklin moved down to Atlanta to work for the party and more specifically to work on the state election campaign being run by the group's chairman, J.B. Stoner.
[00:15:45]  By 1976, he'd officially legally changed his name from James Vaughan to Joseph Paul Franklin, hoping to hide his criminal record from the Rhodesian Army recruiter so he could join as a mercenary in the Rhodesian bush war.
[00:16:00]  Before he could actually get his hands on a passport with his new name on it, though, he'd already been arrested again.
[00:16:07]  This time for his first documented attack on an interracial couple.
[00:16:13]  So he never made it to Rhodesia.
[00:16:16]  But he was getting closer to starting his own race war here at home.

=== The Horrendous Lie Unfolds (03:24) ===

[00:16:26]  I'm Clayton Eckard, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.
[00:16:32]  Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan.
[00:16:35]  He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected.
[00:16:39]  The internet turned on him.
[00:16:40]  If I could press a button and rewind it, all I would.
[00:16:43]  But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines?
[00:16:48]  It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal.
[00:16:56]  The media is here.
[00:16:57]  This case has gone viral.
[00:16:58]  The dating contract.
[00:17:00]  Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.
[00:17:03]  Green search warrants.
[00:17:04]  This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
[00:17:08]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:17:09]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:17:11]  This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.
[00:17:18]  I have done nothing except get breaked by the wrestler.
[00:17:23]  Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:17:33]  In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.
[00:17:38]  The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.
[00:17:47]  Everyone thought they knew how it ended.
[00:17:49]  A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Lettby.
[00:17:54]  Lucy Lettby has been found guilty.
[00:17:56]  But what if we didn't get the whole story?
[00:17:59]  The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses.
[00:18:02]  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.
[00:18:15]  No voicing of any skepticism or doubt.
[00:18:19]  It'll cause so much harm at every single level at the British establishment that this is wrong.
[00:18:24]  Listen to Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:18:33]  Next Monday, our 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards are happening live at South by Southwest.
[00:18:38]  This is the biggest night in podcasting.
[00:18:40]  We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry.
[00:18:47]  And the winner is.
[00:18:49]  Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display.
[00:18:52]  Thank you so much, iHeartRadio.
[00:18:54]  Thank you to all the other nominees.
[00:18:56]  You guys are awesome.
[00:18:57]  Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, free at Veeps.com or the Veeps app.
[00:19:05]  I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guild Season 2 podcast.
[00:19:10]  This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.
[00:19:15]  Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime.
[00:19:21]  He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground.
[00:19:25]  He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator.
[00:19:29]  Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years.
[00:19:34]  I'm like, Lord, this can't be real.
[00:19:36]  I thought it was a mistaken identity.
[00:19:39]  The best lie is partial truth.
[00:19:42]  For 22 years, only two people knew the truth until a confession changed everything.

=== Twenty Years Of Silence Broken (15:28) ===

[00:19:50]  I was a monster.
[00:19:53]  Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:20:13]  So four episodes into this series, we still hadn't made it out of 1977.
[00:20:21]  Those Nazi newsletters were full of praise for the men who were murdering for the movement that year.
[00:20:26]  But turning to the regular newspaper, there were signs of mounting legal pressure on J.B. Stoner, the chairman of the National States Rights Party.
[00:20:37]  There was going to be a congressional inquiry into the possibility that there had been a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
[00:20:46]  One that involved J.B. Stoner.
[00:20:50]  Now, no such conspiracy was ever proven, of course.
[00:20:55]  But J.B. Stoner had worked briefly on the legal defense team for the convicted assassin, James Earl Ray.
[00:21:02]  And for nearly a decade after the assassination, James Earl Ray's brother Jerry Ray was Stoner's personal assistant and bodyguard.
[00:21:11]  And in an odd coincidence, Franklin's crime spree begins with a bank robbery outside of Atlanta, not far from where he lived when he worked for Stoner.
[00:21:22]  And that robbery took place the week that James Earl Ray briefly escaped from prison, shortly before Stoner was called to testify before Congress.
[00:21:34]  After his first bank robbery, he tried his hand at bombing.
[00:21:38]  After two failed attempts to kill Jewish people with bombs, one placed at an APAC lobbyist's home in Maryland and one at a synagogue in Chattanooga, Franklin started shooting people instead.
[00:21:51]  First, he drove to Wisconsin to try to find that judge.
[00:21:55]  Instead of assassinating a judge he mistakenly believed to be Jewish, he got distracted by a pair of teenage girls trying to hitchhike to the mall.
[00:22:04]  He was in that mall parking lot where he murdered an interracial couple.
[00:22:10]  His second murder, the one he would eventually receive the death penalty for, came two months later in St. Louis.
[00:22:18]  It was, perhaps, another remarkable coincidence that he was in St. Louis on October 8th, 1977.
[00:22:25]  When he shot and killed Gerald Gordon outside of the Brith Shalom Synagogue that afternoon, there was a Nazi rally going on a few miles away.
[00:22:34]  The National Socialist Party of America had been hyping up their showdown inflorescent in their newsletters for months.
[00:22:42]  Franklin himself wasn't ever a card-carrying member of that particular group, which had splintered from the National Socialist White People's Party during his time as a member there.
[00:22:51]  But many years later, a once prominent member of the National Socialist Party would write Franklin in prison, developing a deep friendship and then an obsession so all-consuming that after Franklin was executed, that man murdered several people on Franklin's birthday.
[00:23:13]  I skipped over a pretty big chunk of the timeline between parts four and five.
[00:23:18]  I've been sort of jumping around, so let's fill that in here.
[00:23:23]  In February of 1978, he made one of his many return trips to Atlanta.
[00:23:28]  Throughout this three-year crime spree, he keeps popping back to the Atlanta area, and it's not clear why.
[00:23:37]  And while he was there, he shot an interracial couple, killing Johnny Brookshire and paralyzing Joy Williams.
[00:23:44]  I struggled to find much information about this couple.
[00:23:48]  Initial reporting in local papers said that Joy Williams had been eight months pregnant at the time.
[00:23:54]  When Franklin confessed to this attack in 1999, Homicide detectives in Atlanta couldn't find her.
[00:24:02]  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article asking anyone who might know how to get in touch with her to contact the police so they could interview her about the shooting.
[00:24:11]  And as far as I can tell, that's as far as it ever went.
[00:24:15]  A month later, he shot Larry Flint outside of a courthouse in Gwinnett County.
[00:24:20]  He robbed a few banks that summer before shooting another interracial couple in the parking lot of a pizza hut in Chattanooga.
[00:24:27]  William Bryant Tatum, a basketball player at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, was killed, and his girlfriend Nancy Hilton was injured.
[00:24:35]  Franklin received a life sentence for this murder in 1998.
[00:24:40]  And then he slowed down on the crime for a little while.
[00:24:44]  Towards the end of 1978, he moved back to Alabama.
[00:24:48]  He was 28 years old when he met a 16-year-old girl at an ice cream parlor and struck up a sexual relationship with her.
[00:24:57]  When they married in January of 1979, she believed he was a plumber named James Cooper.
[00:25:05]  She thought he was away on contracting jobs when he would disappear for weeks at a time and return with huge wads of cash.
[00:25:13]  In March of 1979, he shot and killed Johnny Noyes Jr., who was washing his car in Jackson, Mississippi.
[00:25:21]  Franklin confessed to this murder in 1996, but authorities saw no need to pursue the case, given the number of life sentences Franklin was serving at that point.
[00:25:30]  And while I am inclined to believe all of Franklin's confessions were genuine, given the level of detail they contained and the number of them that were successfully corroborated with actual evidence, it is worth noting that he wasn't the first person to confess to this murder.
[00:25:48]  If you're a big true crime fan, you've certainly heard of Henry Lee Lucas.
[00:25:53]  He was a serial killer who, after his arrest in the 80s, got a reputation for confessing to anything.
[00:26:01]  Over the years, he falsely confessed to more than 100 murders.
[00:26:06]  Cops from all over the country would fly out to see him, just trying to close old cases, because he would confess to anything you asked him about, as long as he got a little bit of time out of his cell and some fast food for lunch while they talked.
[00:26:20]  Lucas's confession to this murder was never going to hold up, but a pre-existing false confession would have made a successful prosecution more difficult, although newspaper articles don't mention it as a factor in the decision not to prosecute.
[00:26:39]  In the summer of 1979, he robbed a few more banks.
[00:26:44]  In the transcript of one of his early confessions, it kind of sounds like the detective who was talking to him didn't think he was telling the truth when he said he'd once robbed two banks in one day in Nashville.
[00:26:59]  But again, even these incredible details of his confession can be corroborated.
[00:27:05]  Police in Nashville confirmed that there had been an incident in April of 1979.
[00:27:11]  A man robbed a branch of the Nashville City Bank, making off with about $6,000.
[00:27:16]  And as the man's exiting the building, he opens up the bag to see what he'd gotten, only to have the dye pack explode in his face.
[00:27:25]  So at this point, he's covered in red dye and suffering from the effects of the tear gas released by the dye bomb.
[00:27:32]  So he drops the bag and he goes directly into another bank a few blocks over and made off with $7,000.
[00:27:40]  A report in Franklin's FBI file says that at the time of that robbery, the FBI got involved to assist the Nashville police.
[00:27:48]  And the robber eluded them, but they did find the hotel room where he'd been staying under one of his pseudonyms.
[00:27:56]  After the botched robbery, he left town in a hurry.
[00:27:59]  So he left behind some of his belongings.
[00:28:02]  And in that hotel room, the FBI found bomb-making supplies and a book on explosives.
[00:28:09]  They were able to lift fingerprints from those items, and later on, those prints were matched to Franklin.
[00:28:16]  He was telling the truth.
[00:28:20]  In July, he murdered Harold MacIver in a Taco Bell parking lot in Doraville, a city outside of Atlanta.
[00:28:27]  In August, he murdered Raymond Turner at a burger gang in Falls Church, Virginia.
[00:28:32]  A week after that murder, he made a phone call home to his teenage wife and learned she'd given birth to a daughter.
[00:28:41]  Franklin confessed to both of those murders in the 90s, but was never prosecuted.
[00:28:47]  A grand jury in Georgia did indict him for MacIver's murder, but the case was never tried.
[00:28:54]  In October, he shot and killed Jesse Taylor and Marion Brissette in Oklahoma City.
[00:29:01]  The couple had taken their three children to a hula hoop competition that afternoon, and they stopped at the grocery store on their way home.
[00:29:09]  The children were in the car, watching as their parents were murdered.
[00:29:15]  Charges were filed in that case shortly after Franklin's arrest in 1980, but the prosecutor quietly dropped the case in 1983, saying there were issues with the evidence and they just couldn't justify the cost of a trial.
[00:29:31]  After the murders in Oklahoma City, Franklin again returned to the Atlanta area.
[00:29:37]  He picked up a 15-year-old hitchhiker and developed a sexual relationship with the girl.
[00:29:44]  Mercedes Masters was 15 years old.
[00:29:50]  She was 15.
[00:29:52]  She'd run away from home before.
[00:29:56]  Her mother said she'd only been missing for a few days before her body was found.
[00:30:00]  But an unnamed friend quoted in the newspaper said she'd actually been away from home for weeks.
[00:30:08]  In most sources about Franklin's crimes, Mercedes Masters is not described as a child, but as a prostitute.
[00:30:19]  There isn't much about her in any of those sources.
[00:30:22]  She's just Mercedes-Lynn Masters, 15, prostitute.
[00:30:28]  It is possible that she was engaging in survival sex work while she was living on the streets as a runaway.
[00:30:34]  The coroner said she'd been dead for a day or two before her body was discovered outside of an abandoned house on Christmas Day.
[00:30:43]  When Franklin confessed to murdering Mercedes in 1998, he said he'd killed her after she told him some of her customers were black.
[00:30:52]  And this does align with statements provided to the police by other sex workers.
[00:30:58]  A woman Franklin picked up in Utah a few months later survived her encounter with him.
[00:31:03]  And she told police that he'd been very insistent in questioning her about whether she ever slept with black men, if any of her customers were black.
[00:31:12]  And he spoke at length about his hatred of black people and the white women who associated with them, saying that they were the worst of all.
[00:31:20]  He told her he'd killed before and that he enjoyed killing black people and race mixers and he said he was in the Klan and he asked her for a list of black pimps so he could kill them.
[00:31:33]  Melissa Powers, a prosecutor in Ohio who interviewed Franklin extensively when he was confessing to crimes in the 90s, has said that she believed he almost certainly killed other sex workers, that there were more female victims that he'd never confessed to.
[00:31:49]  When Franklin was arrested, one of the items he had on him was a scrapbook containing Polaroid photos of the sex workers he'd spent time with over the years.
[00:31:59]  Pages and pages of nude photos, photos of naked women holding the guns he'd used in his murders.
[00:32:09]  Powers said she did everything in her power to get hold of that scrapbook, but it's unclear what became of it.
[00:32:17]  She seems to imply that it was lost or destroyed or withheld intentionally by some other law enforcement agency, but she doesn't offer a theory as to why.
[00:32:30]  And the book definitely existed.
[00:32:32]  Franklin told Powers he was surprised it wasn't produced as evidence in any of his trials.
[00:32:38]  And that sex worker who'd spent the night with Franklin in Utah was at some point asked by police to look at some of the photographs in it.
[00:32:46]  But it disappeared not long after his arrest in 1980.
[00:32:51]  Two weeks after murdering Mercedes Masters in Atlanta, Franklin was in Indianapolis.
[00:32:58]  There he shot and killed Leo Thomas Watkins and Lawrence Reese in separate attacks two nights apart.
[00:33:04]  These murders were remarkably similar to the murder of Raymond Turner in Virginia a few months earlier.
[00:33:10]  All three victims were young black men shot around 10 o'clock at night while they were inside of a business near a large plate glass window.
[00:33:21]  In all three cases, Franklin fired a single shot through the window from outside in the dark.
[00:33:28]  He was later indicted in these cases, but never tried.
[00:33:34]  Later that same month, January of 1980, he was arrested in New Orleans for illegally carrying a concealed firearm.
[00:33:41]  He spent a week in jail under a fake name.
[00:33:45]  He got a speeding ticket in Iowa in March and one in Florida in April, and I have no idea what he was doing in any of those places.
[00:33:55]  In May, he picked up a hitchhiker in Wisconsin.
[00:33:58]  20-year-old Rebecca Bergstrom had just returned home to Wisconsin from a trip to Jamaica, and she was hitchhiking to her uncle's house in Toma.
[00:34:07]  Her body was found in Mill Bluff State Park.
[00:34:10]  She'd been shot at close range with a handgun, twice in the back and once in the head.
[00:34:17]  When Franklin confessed to this murder in 1984, he said he'd done it because while they were chatting in the car, she said she'd gone out with a Jamaican man while she was on vacation.
[00:34:28]  He was never tried for her murder, but the case was closed after his confession.
[00:34:35]  A few weeks later, he shot but did not kill Vernon Jordan in a hotel parking lot in Indiana.
[00:34:41]  Just one week after that, on June 8th, 1980, Franklin shot and killed Dante Evans Brown and Daryl Lane in Cincinnati.
[00:34:51]  They were 13 and 14 years old.
[00:34:56]  He would later deny that he knew they were children, but both boys had recently graduated from middle school and they were having a sleepover at their grandma's house.
[00:35:06]  They'd snuck out to go to the corner store to buy candy.
[00:35:11]  First responders arrived on the scene of the shooting quickly.
[00:35:14]  Engine company number nine was dispatched from the firehouse that was just a few blocks away.

=== Closing In On The Killer (16:52) ===

[00:35:19]  And both boys were still alive when paramedics reached them.
[00:35:24]  Frederick Wellman had been a fireman for six years, but he'd only just completed his medical training a few weeks earlier.
[00:35:31]  So this was one of his first serious medical calls.
[00:35:34]  He got right to work, putting the back valve mask over the face of one of the bleeding boys.
[00:35:40]  It was dark.
[00:35:42]  There was a lot going on.
[00:35:44]  And when he pulled the mask away just for a second, just to adjust the seal, he looked down and he realized that the boy dying in his arms was his stepson, 14-year-old Daryl Lane.
[00:35:58]  He'd been separated from Daryl's mother for a few years, but they had a good relationship.
[00:36:04]  He'd raised the boy.
[00:36:06]  And Daryl would often stop by the firehouse on his way to visit his grandmother.
[00:36:11]  Wellman told the Cincinnati Post that he tried talking to the boy, quote, to tell him to come back.
[00:36:18]  I couldn't try any harder.
[00:36:21]  Daryl died at the scene.
[00:36:24]  Four days later, during Daryl's wake, his cousin Dante died of his injuries in the hospital.
[00:36:35]  I'm Clayton Eckard, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.
[00:36:41]  Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan.
[00:36:44]  He became the first bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected.
[00:36:48]  The internet turned on him.
[00:36:49]  If I could press a button and rewind it, all I would.
[00:36:52]  But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines?
[00:36:58]  It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal.
[00:37:05]  The media is here.
[00:37:06]  This case has gone viral.
[00:37:07]  The dating contract.
[00:37:09]  Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.
[00:37:14]  This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
[00:37:17]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:37:18]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:37:21]  This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.
[00:37:28]  I have done nothing except get breaked by the bachelor.
[00:37:32]  Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:37:42]  In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.
[00:37:48]  The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.
[00:37:56]  Everyone thought they knew how it ended.
[00:37:59]  A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Lettby.
[00:38:03]  Lucy Lettby has been found guilty.
[00:38:06]  But what if we didn't get the whole story?
[00:38:08]  The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses.
[00:38:11]  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.
[00:38:25]  No voicing of any skepticism or doubt.
[00:38:28]  It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment that this is wrong.
[00:38:33]  Listen to Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:38:42]  Next Monday, our 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards are happening live at South by Southwest.
[00:38:48]  It's the biggest night in podcasting.
[00:38:50]  We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry.
[00:38:56]  And the winner is.
[00:38:58]  Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display.
[00:39:02]  Thank you so much, iHeartRadio.
[00:39:04]  Thank you to all the other nominees.
[00:39:05]  You guys are awesome.
[00:39:06]  Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, free at Veeps.com or the Veeps app.
[00:39:14]  I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast.
[00:39:19]  This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.
[00:39:24]  Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime.
[00:39:30]  He pulls the gun, tells me to lie down on the ground.
[00:39:35]  He identified Jermaine Hudson as the perpetrator.
[00:39:38]  Jermaine was sentenced to 99 years.
[00:39:43]  I'm like, Lord, this can't be real.
[00:39:45]  I thought it was a mistaken identity.
[00:39:48]  The best lie is partial truth.
[00:39:51]  For 22 years, only two people knew the truth until a confession changed everything.
[00:40:00]  I was a monster.
[00:40:02]  Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:40:22]  Hamilton County Prosecutor Melissa Powers obtained Franklin's confession for those murders in an interview in 1997, and he was convicted at trial in 1998.
[00:40:32]  Just a week after the murders in Cincinnati, Franklin shot and killed Arthur Smothers and Kathleen McCullough, an interracial couple in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
[00:40:42]  He confessed to these murders in 1997, but was never charged.
[00:40:46]  After murdering the couple, he drove to Burlington, North Carolina, and robbed a bank.
[00:40:51]  The day after the bank robbery, a female hitchhiker he picked up in Virginia rejected his sexual advances and fled from his vehicle.
[00:41:00]  According to a book by Ralph Eccles, with whom Franklin corresponded for years, it was then that he resolved that he would kill the next hitchhiker he picked up, quote, if she turned out to be a race mixer.
[00:41:14]  And according to the account in Eccles' book, he did just that the very next day.
[00:41:19]  He picked up Nancy Santamaro and Vicki Durian in West Virginia.
[00:41:24]  Their bodies were found in Bocahanes County.
[00:41:28]  I don't want to risk getting off into an episode-long tangent here when I'm just trying to get through the timeline, but again, I am inclined to believe this confession.
[00:41:39]  His other confessions are well corroborated when anyone bothers to do the work.
[00:41:44]  He was detailed and consistent.
[00:41:46]  And at this point, he had no reason to give false confessions.
[00:41:50]  And this was one that stayed very consistent over the years.
[00:41:55]  But this is one of the confessions that some people have doubts about.
[00:41:59]  Mostly because another man was falsely convicted of this crime and served many years in prison before being acquitted after an appeals court granted him a new trial in 2000.
[00:42:11]  For my money, though, I think he did it.
[00:42:15]  And I think Melissa Powers is right.
[00:42:18]  I think there were a lot more white women that he tried to have sex with and killed.
[00:42:26]  By August of 1980, he'd made it out to Salt Lake City, Utah, where he shot Theodore Fields and David Martin, two young black men who were jogging in a park with white female friends.
[00:42:38]  In the span of just eight months, he killed 11 people.
[00:42:45]  His arrest a few weeks later was kind of an accident.
[00:42:50]  I mean, they were closing in on him.
[00:42:52]  They probably would have found him eventually at this point.
[00:42:56]  He'd gotten pretty sloppy in Salt Lake City.
[00:42:59]  And after those murders, investigators from cities all over the country, cities where remarkably similar murders had been happening over the last few years, got together to compare notes.
[00:43:11]  Cops from Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, and Johnstown all traveled to Cincinnati.
[00:43:18]  They all had unsolved sniper killings of black men or interracial couples.
[00:43:25]  And none of them had much, but they all had something.
[00:43:28]  An eyewitness description, a license plate, a shell casing, an alias.
[00:43:34]  One of the sex workers he'd spent time with in Salt Lake City was an artist, and the sketch she drew of the man she'd met was critical in tying everything together.
[00:43:44]  And he was still driving the car he'd been seen with in Salt Lake City.
[00:43:50]  So they were close.
[00:43:52]  But the actual arrest, that was his own fault.
[00:44:00]  A month after the murders in Salt Lake City, he was lying low at a motel in Florence, Kentucky.
[00:44:06]  On the evening of September 25th, local police swarmed the motel.
[00:44:12]  Half a dozen cop cars were in the parking lot, lights and sirens.
[00:44:17]  But they weren't there for Franklin.
[00:44:19]  They were looking for a 19-year-old who'd stolen a car, who just happened to be staying in the room next to Franklin's.
[00:44:28]  Now, I feel like if I were in his shoes, I would probably just close the curtains and stay very quiet.
[00:44:37]  I mean, even if I weren't in his exact shoes, if I weren't on the run after committing multiple homicides, even if I were just a regular person in a motel, I feel like that's what I would do in that situation.
[00:44:49]  Right?
[00:44:50]  I mean, that's pretty volatile.
[00:44:52]  You don't know what's going to happen.
[00:44:53]  I would just sit quietly in my motel room and try not to draw attention to myself.
[00:44:58]  Just mind your own business and don't go anywhere.
[00:45:02]  But that is not what he did.
[00:45:05]  Instead, he called the front desk to complain about the noise.
[00:45:10]  The motel clerk was unsurprisingly unable to do much about the police raid in the parking lot.
[00:45:17]  So Franklin called the police over and over again.
[00:45:23]  He called the dispatcher demanding to know why his car was being blocked in by all these cop cars.
[00:45:30]  According to quotes in Mel Aiton's book from a documentary I couldn't find a copy of, a police officer in Florence said Franklin called dispatch four or five times in a row, demanding to know what the cops were doing there.
[00:45:45]  And eventually they got frustrated and they said, look, we're not here for you.
[00:45:50]  We're here about a robbery.
[00:45:52]  But there on the scene, the clerk at the front desk had gone out to speak with the officers about the man who kept calling to complain about the noise and the fact that his car was blocked in.
[00:46:02]  And the officer the clerk spoke to thought that sounded kind of weird.
[00:46:08]  So he went over to have a look at the car.
[00:46:11]  And the first thing he sees is that there's a gun sitting on the front seat in plain view.
[00:46:17]  So now he's curious and he runs the plates.
[00:46:21]  Salt Lake City had put those plates in the system as a vehicle of interest in a double homicide.
[00:46:29]  So they knocked on his door.
[00:46:31]  He opened the door and they saw two shotguns lying on the bed.
[00:46:36]  Once they had him in handcuffs and they turned out his pockets, they found ID cards for multiple fake identities.
[00:46:44]  They had him.
[00:46:46]  Police in Florence, Kentucky put him in an interrogation room and started asking questions.
[00:46:53]  He got very upset when they asked about Salt Lake City.
[00:46:57]  When the detective was called away momentarily to discuss some detail related to the search warrant for the car, Franklin, who had for some reason been uncuffed, jumped out an open window.
[00:47:11]  Those Kentucky cops had completely accidentally arrested a wanton serial killer and then almost immediately let him escape.
[00:47:23]  He spent an entire month on the run before a phlebotomist at a plasma donation center in Florida recognized his tattoos from an FBI wanted poster and called the police.
[00:47:38]  So that brings us back up to where we were in part five.
[00:47:42]  After his arrest, he was tried twice in Utah, once by the state and once in federal court.
[00:47:49]  And he was convicted both times, earning him four life sentences right off the bat.
[00:47:56]  After the DOJ fumbled the case they brought in Indiana for the Vernon Jordan shooting, several localities who had been waiting their turn to try him lost their nerve and quietly backed off.
[00:48:09]  So Franklin was just shipped off to federal prison in Marion, Illinois to begin serving his time.
[00:48:16]  In 1984, desperate to be anywhere that wasn't Marion, Franklin started confessing to more crimes.
[00:48:25]  His goal was to get transferred to a jail in Wisconsin, which he believed would have fewer black inmates.
[00:48:32]  But honestly, at this point, anything would do.
[00:48:35]  He confessed to the murders of Alphonse Manning and Tony Schwenn in Madison, Wisconsin in 1977, the murder of Rebecca Bergstrom in Wisconsin in 1980, the murders of Nancy Santamero and Vicki Durian in West Virginia in 1980, shooting Larry Flint in Georgia in 1978, and the Chattanooga synagogue bombing in 1977.
[00:48:54]  And that was right off the bat, just in the span of a week or two, he's confessing to all of these crimes.
[00:49:02]  And it kind of worked.
[00:49:04]  He did get indicted for the Flint shooting, the synagogue bombing, and the 1977 murders in Madison.
[00:49:11]  West Virginia was never interested, and the Bergstrom murder was just closed.
[00:49:17]  But his confession spree had netted him three indictments.
[00:49:22]  The case in Georgia never did get tried.
[00:49:25]  It seems there was no interest in pursuing it after the prosecutor who brought the indictment lost re-election later that year.
[00:49:32]  And authorities in Madison were going to take their time getting the case nailed down.
[00:49:37]  So it was Chattanooga that got him first.
[00:49:41]  And here, here in the summer of 1984, in a courtroom in Chattanooga, Tennessee, this is the thing I'm actually interested in.
[00:49:56]  I've been telling the story in this circuitous sort of way because it isn't about the murders themselves.
[00:50:05]  Yes, Joseph Paul Franklin murdered at least 22 people over the course of his three-year killing spree.
[00:50:12]  He robbed more than a dozen banks, carried out a handful of bombings.
[00:50:16]  He killed interracial couples, white women who he believed had been intimate with black men, and he shot black men and boys at random.
[00:50:27]  He shot pornographer Larry Flint.
[00:50:30]  He tried to assassinate civil rights activist Vernon Jordan.
[00:50:34]  He was a neo-Nazi, a Klansman, a racist, an anti-Semite, and a murderer.
[00:50:39]  But one thing he wasn't was a lone wolf.
[00:50:44]  Telling the story that exists around the story of those murders brings that into focus.
[00:50:53]  I'm less interested in the caliber of rifle he used or which alias he was using at which motel when he switched the license plates on a car he bought out of a classified ad than I am in the way that these murders function in a larger narrative about white supremacist violence and very specifically the white supremacist violence that was happening in the summer of 1984.
[00:51:19]  You see this trial was taking place just weeks after members of the Order murdered Alan Berg in Colorado.
[00:51:28]  For as much as we love to pretend these crimes were the completely unpredictable acts of an unhinged lunatic disconnected from any larger societal forces, groups, or movement that could potentially spawn another wave of attacks carried out by another man just like him, he sure did know a lot of people.
[00:51:48]  And I have been holding out on you a little bit.
[00:51:52]  There is one man in particular that I've been particularly interested in all this time.
[00:52:00]  It's a man I'm almost always quietly looking for in the background every time I'm researching a story that took place in the last few decades of the 20th century.

=== The Turner Diaries Connection (03:59) ===

[00:52:12]  It's been so long now, but this series about Joseph Paul Franklin actually started before the first episode with his name in the title.
[00:52:23]  The first episode of this year was about a book.
[00:52:28]  The Turner Diaries is kind of a character on this show, given how often it comes up.
[00:52:34]  It's a novel so many Nazi terrorists hold dear.
[00:52:38]  When Timothy McVeigh was arrested after the Oklahoma City bombing, he was carrying pages with his favorite passages from this novel.
[00:52:46]  When Robert Matthews formed his Nazi terror cell in 1983, he named the group the Order after the group in the book.
[00:52:54]  And copies of the novel were presented to each member at their oath swearing ceremony.
[00:53:01]  In the world of white supremacist terror, it's a very important book.
[00:53:07]  But it wasn't the only book by that author.
[00:53:11]  William Luther Pierce's second novel was called Hunter.
[00:53:16]  I probably could have just immediately followed that Turner Diaries episode with an episode about Hunter.
[00:53:23]  But I'm glad I didn't.
[00:53:26]  I wasn't ready.
[00:53:28]  I knew going into this, and I said in that episode about the Turner Diaries, that the first edition of Hunter was dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin.
[00:53:39]  But Pierce always fervently denied that he'd based any part of the story on Franklin's crimes.
[00:53:46]  And I knew Pierce was lying.
[00:53:48]  I mean, just on its face, that is obviously a lie.
[00:53:52]  The protagonist of the novel is obsessed with murdering interracial couples, just like Franklin.
[00:53:57]  And you can't pretend that's a coincidence given Franklin's name is on the dedication page.
[00:54:03]  I knew he was lying.
[00:54:06]  But beyond the obvious, I didn't really have anything, nothing concrete.
[00:54:11]  I didn't know how the pieces fit together or even what kind of picture those puzzle pieces were going to form.
[00:54:20]  It's been a long, winding road, but we're finally where I wanted to be two months ago.
[00:54:28]  You have the full timeline of Franklin's crimes and his trials, and you know who he was hanging out with and what he was reading in the 70s.
[00:54:36]  And now that I've spent two months reading Nazi newsletters and decades of newspaper archives and every book I can find that even has Franklin's name in it, thousands of pages of FBI memos and spent days studying ancient forum posts for clues, I think I see something.
[00:54:55]  And I reread Hunter with all of that in mind.
[00:54:59]  This has all been a necessary preamble before I tell you about this very weird self-insert murder fanfic an old Nazi self-published in the hopes of inspiring a whole pack of not-so-lone wolves.
[00:55:16]  I think I know why Joseph Paul Franklin stood up at the end of his trial in Chattanooga and confessed to the jury.
[00:55:24]  And I think I know why William Luther Pierce wrote the first chapter of Hunter in 1984, even though he didn't publish it until 1989.
[00:55:33]  And I think I know why he flew into a rage and ordered the staff at his Nazi compound to take box cutters and cut out that dedication page and every remaining copy in 1998.
[00:55:44]  And I think William Luther Pierce had some idea who was behind those unsolved murders of interracial couples months before they were connected in the news.

=== Why He Ordered Copies Destroyed (02:50) ===

[00:56:11]  Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Stone Media and iHeartRadio.
[00:56:14]  It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
[00:56:17]  Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
[00:56:20]  The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
[00:56:23]  The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
[00:56:25]  You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
[00:56:28]  I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
[00:56:30]  It's nothing personal.
[00:56:32]  You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
[00:56:37]  Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
[00:56:50]  I'm Clayton Eckerd.
[00:56:52]  In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.
[00:56:56]  But here's the thing: Bachelor fans hated him.
[00:56:59]  If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would.
[00:57:01]  That's when his life took a disturbing turn.
[00:57:04]  A one-night stand would end in a courtroom.
[00:57:08]  The media is here.
[00:57:09]  This case has gone viral.
[00:57:11]  The dating contract.
[00:57:13]  Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.
[00:57:16]  This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.
[00:57:18]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:57:19]  Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:57:26]  Next Monday, our 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards are happening live at South by Southwest.
[00:57:32]  This is the biggest night in podcasting.
[00:57:34]  We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry.
[00:57:40]  And the winner is...
[00:57:42]  Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display.
[00:57:46]  Thank you so much, iHeartRadio.
[00:57:48]  Thank you to all the other nominees.
[00:57:49]  You guys are awesome.
[00:57:50]  Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, free at Veeps.com or the Veeps app.
[00:57:57]  Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
[00:58:00]  My latest episode is with Hilary Duff, singer, actress, and multi-platinum artist.
[00:58:06]  You desire in family like this picture, and that's not reality.
[00:58:11]  My sister and I don't speak.
[00:58:13]  It's definitely a very painful part of my life.
[00:58:17]  And I hope it's not forever, but it's for right now.
[00:58:20]  Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:58:27]  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.
[00:58:38]  But what if we didn't get the whole story?
[00:58:40]  Evidence been made sufficient.
[00:58:42]  The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed.
[00:58:44]  What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?
[00:58:47]  Oh my God, I think she might be innocent.
[00:58:50]  Listen to Doubt the Case of Lucy Lettby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:58:58]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:59:00]  Guaranteed human.