Racist Serial Killer Joseph Paul Franklin Executed In Missouri

Racist Serial Killer Joseph Paul Franklin Executed In Missouri

Joseph Paul Franklin was put to death this morning….

According to USA Today:

White supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin has been put to death in Missouri. It was the state’s first execution in nearly three years. The 63-year-old Franklin targeted blacks and Jews in a cross-country killing spree from 1977 to 1980. He was executed Wednesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre for killing Gerald Gordon in a sniper shooting outside 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. 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 U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal appeals court decision overturning stays granted Tuesday. Franklin’s attorney, Jennifer Herndon, said at the time that his mental illness was likely keeping him from comprehending the developments.

Franklin was convicted in eight murders altogether, but the Missouri case was the only one resulting in a death sentence. He is suspected in as many as 20 killings targeting blacks and Jews across the country from 1977 to 1980.

Franklin has 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 was in his mid-20s when he began drifting across the country. He bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tenn., in July 1977. No one was hurt, but soon, the killings began. In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday, Franklin insisted he no longer hates blacks or Jews. While he was held at St. Louis County Jail, he said he interacted with blacks at the jail, “and I saw they were people just like us.”

Good riddance, buddy.

CNN