Local News
Serial Killer Had Monroe County Ties
White supremacist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin was executed in
late November In Missouri and there’s a Monroe County tie to the case.
He was on death row for the 1977 murder of a man outside a synagogue in St. Louis. He was blamed for 22 killings between 1977 and 1980 in a bid to start a race war. One of those killings happened in Monroe County back in 1980. Franklin confessed to killing a female hitchhiker in Mill Bluff State Park near Camp Douglas. But while he confessed to the murder in 1984 while in custody outside Wisconsin, he was never prosecuted for the crime.
In addition to the killings, Franklin admitted to the attempted assassinations of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1978 and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan in 1980.