BY DAN HORN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Joseph Paul Franklin crouched in the darkness at the edge of the railroad trestle, looking down on the rest of the world.
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He cradled a rifle in his arms and had a revolver tucked in his waistband. Soon enough, he figured, someone worthy of them would cross the street below.
"I was trying to get rid of all the ugly people in the world," Mr. Franklin would explain years later in a statement to prosecutors. "I considered the blacks the ugliest people of all."
So when two children walked around the corner, Mr. Franklin says he didn't notice anything but the color of their skin.
"I just shot randomly," he recalled. "I was just amazed when I read on the news that I hit both of them."
Mr. Franklin's comments are expected to be a key weapon for prosecutors at a court hearing Tuesday and again in October when he faces trial for the shooting deaths of teen-age cousins Darrell Lane and Dante Evans Brown, who lay bleeding on a Bond Hill sidewalk 18 years ago. His statement, along with other court documents obtained by The Cincinnati Enquirer, provides a detailed look at the events that Mr. Franklin says led him to shoot the two boys shortly before midnight on June 8, 1980.
It also describes the life and times of a serial killer who claims responsibility for dozens of racially motivated murders, bombings and bank robberies.
"Well, I did it," Mr. Franklin told prosecutors last April in his taped statement about the Cincinnati case. "The only thing I can say is, I did do it."
He said the Bond Hill shootings were significant because they were the start of one of his most prolific months as a racist serial killer, a career that would eventually link him to 18 murders and lead to prison sentences in several states.
In his April statement to assistant prosecutor Melissa Powers, Mr. Franklin said he became more violent because no one seemed to notice his crimes were part of a grand plan to wipe out Jews, blacks and interracial couples.
"I was just gettin' very upset because the news media, the national media, wasn't covering what I was doing," Mr. Franklin said. "I guess they were afraid they'd start a race war or something. And that's what I was trying to do."
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters said he thinks Mr. Franklin's motives had more to do with a simple, twisted desire to kill.
"He's a coward," Mr. Deters said. "Anybody who would shoot two children with a high-powered rifle is a coward."
Recent psychiatric reports on Mr. Franklin's mental state suggest his racial hatreds and violent tendencies took root during a childhood in Alabama that revolved around an abusive mother, an anti-Semitic grandmother and racist friends.
As a young man, one psychologist wrote, Mr. Franklin read Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and became drawn to the Nazi party.
"(Hitler) saw the problems of what's happening in society: crime and blacks, Commies and Jews causing it all," Mr. Franklin said. "I became obsessed with it and hated blacks and Jews."
Born James Clayton Vaughn Jr. in 1950, Mr. Franklin changed his name to reflect his increasingly bizarre political beliefs. He chose Joseph Paul to honor Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels and Franklin because he admired Ben Franklin's "industriousness."
His interest in such dramatically different men is one of his life's many contradictions. The psychiatric evaluations found that while he despised interracial couples, he sometimes dated black women. And while he could justify murder, he rejected suicide because it violated his belief in the Bible.
"I would never get angry at God," he told one psychologist. But he did get angry at others. He finally snapped in 1977 in the parking lot of a Wisconsin shopping mall. Mr. Franklin became enraged when a black man refused to move his car. After shooting him, Mr. Franklin turned the gun on the man's girlfriend. "I figured I'd get caught, so I shot her while I was at it," he explained.
They were his first murders, he said, and the experience temporarily traumatized him. In one psychiatric report, Mr. Franklin lamented that "it was not like it is on television."
He recovered, though, and soon resumed killing. To support his private race war, Mr. Franklin began robbing banks like another of his heroes, Jesse James. His ex-wife, Anita Carden, recalls his fascination with guns and his frequent trips away from their Alabama home.
At the time, she said, she was only 16 and took his word for it when he told her he was just "going to work." She said he always came home weeks later with plenty of cash, which she now thinks he got from robbing banks.
"It was all crazy back then," said Ms. Carden, who had a daughter with Mr. Franklin. "I didn't see it. He was so good at covering up that he just kept it all hidden."
After divorcing Mr. Franklin in 1979, Ms. Carden said she realized he had misled her from the day they met at a Dairy Deelite ice cream stand in Montgomery, Ala. She said he lied about his age, saying he was 10 years younger, and used a phony name, James Cooper.
When he was arrested for murder in October 1980, she couldn't help thinking about their last conversation. "He told me that one day I'd understand all the stuff he did," she recalled.
But Mr. Franklin's own statements, including those made in recent interviews with The Enquirer and others, suggest he's not sure himself why he did what he did. In one breath he claims he was crusading for racial purity, and in the next he says he simply enjoyed living like a Wild West outlaw.
Regardless of his motives, Mr. Franklin was meticulous when planning his crimes. He attributes the trait to obsessive compulsive disorder, a self-diagnosis he made after reading articles about it in prison.
"I used to . . . visualize every little detail of what I would be doing, you know, beforehand," Mr. Franklin said in his April statement. "Say a cop walks up and says, "What are you doing here?' 'Course I'd shoot him dead right on the spot."
He said he scouted locations for his sniper attacks by seeking out racially mixed neighborhoods where he could find targets but still blend into the crowd. He mapped out his escape route, chose a hiding place and, when it was over, dismantled his weapons so they couldn't be traced.
He told Cincinnati prosecutors that he was upset if his victims survived, as they did when he shot Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and civil rights activist Vernon Jordan. "I just wanted to, you know, just wanted to kill 'em really bad," he said. "If (they) was just wounded, I was a complete failure."
He said he would not make the same mistake in Cincinnati.
Mr. Franklin said the day of the shooting began for him with a drive through Bond Hill in a black Chevy Nova with mag wheels. He said he immediately picked the train trestle over Reading Road as the best vantage point for a sniper attack.
After climbing to the top around 10 p.m., Mr. Franklin said he knelt near some bushes and waited for an interracial couple to shoot. More than an hour later, he was still waiting. "There was hardly anybody around," Mr. Franklin recalled. "So I just decided to go ahead and split, when all of a sudden they walked up."
Dante and Darrell, ages 13 and 14 respectively, were on their way to the grocery store a block away when they stepped into the cross-hairs of Mr. Franklin's rifle. With his bad right eye, Mr. Franklin said, he didn't notice they were children.
"I just put the gun right on the biggest dude first, you know, and . . . fired one shot," he told prosecutors. "The other guy bolted, and it was just like through a miracle that I got him."
Darrell was shot in the chest and abdomen. Dante was struck in the back and leg. Mr. Franklin said he shot both a second time "just to make sure" they were dead.
"Once I saw that they were down, I didn't want to stick around," he said. "I just took off and started running."
For the victims' relatives, Mr. Franklin's statements are painful reminders of the night passersby found the two children sprawled on the sidewalk. Even so, they're pleased he will finally go on trial for his crime.
"At least now we'll know it's been closed," said Edward Trumbo, Dante's grandfather. "They weren't nothing but kids, you know. It was just easy pickings for him."
Mr. Franklin, who already is on death row in Missouri, faces two life sentences because Ohio did not have the death penalty in 1980. All of the psychiatrists who examined him recently concluded he was mentally fit to stand trial.
In the years since the shootings, Mr. Franklin's only break from the prison routine has been occasional meetings with lawyers and reporters. Mostly, he tells them about his "morbid thoughts" and his fear of getting raped or killed in prison.
He said in a recent telephone interview that his favorite pastime is gazing out the narrow windows at the Hamilton County Justice Center, looking down once again on the people below. He said it's better than looking at the world inside.
"Most of these inmates," he said, "they're the scum of the earth."
