On this day, March 4, 1981, avowed racist Joseph Paul Franklin was convicted of killing two black men who were jogging with two white women in Salt Lake City.
Franklin since has confessed to the 1978 assassination attempt that paralyzed Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and other killings.
In 1982, Franklin was acquitted of shooting Vernon E. Jordan Jr., the head of the National Urban League and later a powerful D.C. lawyer. Franklin later confessed to Jordan’s shooting.
In all, Franklin has been charged with or confessed to 20 murders. He made several confessions on the condition that he speak to “an attractive white female investigator.”
Franklin, 62, is on death row in Missouri for the fatal shooting in 1977 of Gerald Gordon in the parking lot of a synagogue.
— Scott McCabe
