[theme music playing]
MAN: The thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite -- it's like a wolf that's...
feeling the hunger.
REPORTER: He was a sniper, carrying his rifle
and scope in guitar cases -- in St. Louis,
he staked out a synagogue and gunned down Gerald Gordon.
In Madison, Wisconsin,
a young interracial couple -- in Salt Lake City,
Franklin killed two young black men who were jogging with
white female friends -- even civil rights leader,
Vernon Jordan, and Larry Flynt, infamous pornographer,
founder, and publisher of Hustler magazine,
shot with Franklin's sniper rifle, but survived.
So you hunted him down?
Yeah, I was -- I was hunting him down.
Yeah, I ain't gonna deny that.
[chuckles]
REPORTER: The single unwavering drive
in Joseph Paul Franklin -- murder.
You know, just go out and kill somebody at random?
I would never do that.
REPORTER: 14-year-old Darrell Lane and his 13-year-old cousin,
Dante Evans, were killed
at random as they walked along Reading Road to
a corner grocery store, June 8th, 1980.
Franklin admits he was in the Cincinnati area
the day before the murders,
but he won't admit to the murders.
Police still work on the case to this day, and they still
think Franklin did it, but there isn't
enough evidence to prove it.
He hates men. He would never talk to you.
He said, "But if you have a pretty assistant prosecutor,"
and I brought in Missy Powers.
I think men took the approach,
if you send in a pretty face, they're gonna confess,
but I was hoping that some --
you needed more than just that.
REPORTER: Franklin agreed to meet with Powers,
but there were ground rules -- no video, only a tape recorder,
and no meeting on Hitler's birthday.
SAHNI: Melissa Powers is brought in to talk with Franklin in
the hopes that maybe they will catch him off guard.
For narcissistic offenders and psychopathic individuals,
the idea of having an attractive young woman come
in to talk to him would have given him the sense that he was
in a position of power and authority, and maybe
a willingness, hopefully, to actually talk
and share more about the crimes he had done.
So here we have Franklin, who's been silent for 17 years
about these crimes, and within minutes
of talking to this female prosecutor,
he starts to just unload everything, saying, "I did it.
I wanted to get rid of all the ugly people in the world."
The clear connection between racism
and psychopathy is inherent grandiosity and narcissism.
He really seems to think he has a special purpose.
This is his way of saying,
"I am white and therefore better than you."
But it also has a little bit of attention-seeking behavior.
It invites people to want to know more.
SAHNI: Franklin's desire to talk about what he wanted to
talk about not only was his narcissism at play,
but his need to maintain control of the interview.
Franklin decided that he needed to pump up
his notoriety.
Crimes are no good for a narcissist
if you don't get credit for them.
"Look at how many of these crimes I've committed
and never got caught for and how many people I killed."
And he says it with pride.
The fact that he uses the word prolific,
he's putting himself in a position of authority.
He's not bothered by what he's done.
He's getting a high off of it.
FOX: Very few things are as dangerous
as a psychopath that feels rejected.
It infuriates them.
The only way he has to respond is taking all
the anger and frustration that he's feeling and essentially
kill more people specifically so he would get more publicity.
He wanted the coverage and the grandiosity of being able to
be the person on the news,
even though it was for a horrible thing.
But he was known, and people were talking about him.
He's talking about these two child victims as adults.
He's depersonalizing them by talking about them as dudes,
and the fact that he's referring to it as a lucky shot,
it's also dehumanizing them.
He's talking about them like they're target practice.
It's not that they're someone's children,
somebody's brother.
It is a lack of caring about human life and compassion,
but the predatory component is also thrill-seeking.
FOX: Larry Flynt published in Hustler magazine
a man and a woman that were interracial together.
So because Larry Flynt did something that Franklin
essentially disagreed with,
he thought he should die for it -- in his mind, he failed.
He called it a tragedy, but not because Larry Flynt was wounded
and paralyzed forever, but because he didn't kill him.
FOX: In his mind, these girls did something wrong.
He wanted to kill that day, and no matter what
they said, he was going to do it.
But the M.O. is different, which shows that he's really
escalating in what he needed to achieve
the same level of power and control, to get the same level
of gratification from these crimes.
Sniping isn't a very intimate experience.
There's a distance.
You don't really get to see the expression
on the face as the people are dying,
but killing somebody point blank,
especially if they're begging for their lives,
that's really when he feels the most power
over somebody else's life and really has that grandiosity
that he's so desiring
He's really going through basic problem solving
strategies without any consideration
for human emotions, for the fear these women must
have felt.
You see this total depersonalization of
the victims, and when Franklin
recounts what he did to these victims and how
he terrorized them emotionally in those moments leading up to
their death, he's callous about it.
FOX: He had self-monikered himself as a serial killer,
basically saying, "Well, you know,
"I just wasted them before I really told them the thing that
would have very much scared them."
But he's just writing this off as a loss.
He got the kill, but that really wasn't what he
was after -- he wanted the response.
And he was almost disappointed when they didn't show
that fear.
DERIGHT: Franklin really seems to like to
stay in control of his victims,
like many psychopaths, because it feeds into the idea
that they are important and that they are superior.
In this situation, when he encountered resistance of
any kind, he just shot them to death.
SAHNI: He's saying, "It didn't upset me,
it didn't traumatize me," because he was just
doing his job.
He was doing that unsavory task that needed to get done,
even if it's not pleasant.
That's consistent with a psychopathic individual
who doesn't have normal connections to other
human beings.
This is a very predatory individual who gets
his sense of self-confidence
and station in life from deciding who lives and who dies.
But there's a little bit of euphoria you hear in his voice.
There's a chuckle.
He is glib about how he's describing the crime, and that
arousal does speak to some energy or adrenaline
that he was experiencing both at the time of the crime,
as well as now, recounting it for this interviewer.
REPORTER: Why did you decide to confess?
Well, I had a dream that told me to confess to this.
DERIGHT: It's a few weeks away from Franklin's execution,
and he's doing this media tour,
accepting all kinds of interviews from reporters,
both locally and nationally.
He really wants to make sure that he is
well-known to the world about what he did.
Franklin gets his pleasure from notoriety --
not the actual act of killing,
but being known as someone who does that.
He's not saying, "I regret what I did.
"I regret the harm that I put
on these victims and their families."
It's all about him.
REPORTER: Joseph, uh, you've been on death row now for what,
16 years? -Yeah, about 16 years.
REPORTER: And now the execution date is growing very near.
What are your -- what are your feelings with that?
Well, I'm hoping to get a stay of execution.
I would love to be out on the streets right now.
It's not uncommon for psychopaths to sort of
shift their identity
and play off of what works in the moment.
And at that moment, the thing that was
going to work best for him was, "I'm repenting.
"I see the light.
I believe in God, and I'm asking God for forgiveness."
Whether he believes any of that is completely disputable.
He wants clemency, and he's trying to do anything he can
to still play the fiddle and see what makes people dance.
I guarantee you, if you asked him two
days later, and he didn't get what he wanted,
he would take it all back.
[Franklin laughing]
KARAS: Wow.
While there's no doubt that early childhood trauma,
emotional neglect, abuse are not optimal ways
for a child to be raised,
Franklin is attributing a lot of his formation of hatred
and racist attitudes and being a dysfunctional, anti-social
human being and psychopathic,
he's blaming all of it on that.
Franklin is doing nothing other than shifting
the blame and minimizing the seriousness of what
he's done,
and ultimately, that lack of willingness to take true
responsibility for his own
attitudes and choices and behaviors,
speaks to the skin surface level of remorse and regret
he had, even up until his dying days.
FRANKLIN: Most people out there, I mean,
they're heading toward a burning hell,
and they don't know it.
Do you think something lies for you
on the other side after November 20th?
Yeah, but it isn't a burning hell, though, because I'm --
I'm a servant of the Lord, though.