Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who targeted
blacks and Jews in a cross-country killing spree from 1977 to 1980, was put to
death Wednesday in Missouri, the state's first execution in nearly three years.
Franklin, 63, was executed at the state prison in Bonne
Terre for killing Gerald Gordon in a sniper shooting at a suburban St. Louis
synagogue in 1977. Franklin was convicted of seven other murders across the
country and claimed responsibility for up to 20 overall, but the Missouri case
was the only one that brought a death sentence.
The execution was the first in Missouri using a single drug,
pentobarbital.
Franklin's fate was sealed early Wednesday when the US
Supreme Court upheld a federal appeals court ruling that overturned two stays
granted Tuesday evening by district court judges in Missouri.
Franklin also admitted to shooting and wounding civil rights
leader Vernon Jordan and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who has been
paralyzed from the waist down since the attack in 1978.
Franklin, a paranoid schizophrenic who grew up in Mobile, Alabama,
was in his mid-20s in 1977 when he began drifting across America, robbing up to
16 banks to fund his travels.
He bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tenn., in July that
year. No one was hurt, but the killings began soon after that, many of them sniper
shootings.
Franklin had a particular dislike for interracial couples –
several of his victims were black men and the white women with them.
He arrived in suburban St. Louis and picked out Brith Sholom
Kneseth Israel synagogue from the Yellow Pages. On Oct. 8, 1977, a bar mitzvah
ended and guests were in the parking lot when Franklin opened fire from a
grassy area nearby, killing Gordon, 42.
The killings continued for three more years. Franklin was
finally caught after killing two young black men who were about to go jogging
with two teenage white girls in Salt Lake City in August 1980.
Years later, in federal prison, he admitted to the St. Louis
County killing. He was sentenced to death in 1997.
Franklin, in the days leading up to the execution, said in
several interviews that he was sorry for his crimes and was no longer a racist.
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