Dark Soul of the South; The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin
Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, Inc., 2011. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xii, 323, [1] pages. Illustrations. Joseph Paul Franklin Timeline. Notes. Selected Bibliography. Index. Mel Ayton has a B.A. Honours degree in Politics and History and a master's degree from Durham University. He is a former Fulbright Teacher and college lecturer. For his M.A. (Dunelm), post-graduate degree, Ayton specialized in the teaching of American history in US schools and colleges. Throughout his teaching career he has taught in schools and colleges. In 1988 he was selected as a Fulbright Teacher and taught in Michigan. In 2003 Mel Ayton was the historical adviser for the BBC’s television documentary, The Kennedy Dynasty, which was broadcast in the UK and the US in November 2003. He also worked as a historical consultant for NBC News, National Geographic Channel and the Discovery Channel and appeared in their documentaries - CIA Secret Experiments, 2008, CIA - Mind Control, 2006, and Conspiracy Test: The Robert Kennedy Assassination, 2008. Ayton has appeared in television programs produced by the BBC’s Newsnight and the UK’s Channel 4 News and has also appeared as a guest on numerous US radio talk shows including: The Peter Boyles Show, The Dennis Miller Show, The Michael Medved Show, The Lars Larson Show, The Janet Mefferd Show, The Brian Thomas Show, The Schilling Show, and The Steve Cochran Show. Ayton is the author of numerous articles for various publications, including History Ireland, Crime Magazine, Max Holland’s Washington Decoded, George Mason University's History News Network, The Los Angeles Times and TIME magazine. Joseph Paul Franklin (born James Clayton Vaughn Jr.; April 13, 1950 – November 20, 2013) was an American white supremacist and serial killer who engaged in a murder spree spanning the late 1970s and early 1980s. Franklin was convicted of several murders and received six life sentences, as well as two death sentences. He also confessed to the attempted murders of magazine publisher and pornographer Larry Flynt in 1978 and civil rights activist Vernon Jordan in 1980. Both survived their injuries, but Flynt was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Franklin was not convicted in either of those highly publicized cases, and he made his confessions years after the crimes had occurred. Because he repeatedly changed his accounts of some crimes, and was not charged in some of the cases in which he was suspected, officials cannot determine the full extent of Franklin's crimes. His claims of racial motivation were offset by a defense expert witness who testified in 1997 that Franklin had paranoid schizophrenia and was not fit to stand trial. Franklin was on Missouri's death row for 15 years awaiting execution for the 1977 murder of Gerald Gordon. He was executed by lethal injection on November 20, 2013. Believing himself to be on a "God-given mission," Joseph Paul Franklin was the only racially motivated serial killer ever pursued by the Justice Department. Mel Ayton examines his murderous life, from his poverty-stricken youth in a backward Alabama suburb to his indoctrination by militant Nazis and southern racists to his eventual capture by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ayton's exhaustive report uncovers the truth behind Franklin's three-year undertaking to murder Jews and African Americans. White supremacist Franklin was, by his own admission, an outlaw, a racist, and weird. As a neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klansman, he violently enforced his views by embarking on a "lone hunter" mission to kill. He saw African Americans and Jews as subhuman and knew no moral obstacle to racial violence, invoking the Bible to support his criminal acts. As Franklin's 1977-80 killing spree was contemporaneous with other racially charged incidents that other Klansmen and neo-Nazis wrought throughout the United States, his story also exposes how hate organizations have made killers out of disaffected and bitter young men. In this first full-length book about Franklin, Ayton reveals a shocking and unsavory side of American society. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Joseph Paul Franklin, James Clayton Vaughn, Racism, Murder, Hate Crime, Nazi, Bombings, Capital Punishment, Death Penalty, FBI, Theodore Fields, Anti-Semitism, Jews, Larry Flynt, Vernon Jordan, Ku Klux Klan, David Martin, Melissa Powers, Nancy Santom
ISBN: 9781597975438
[Book #81729]
Price: $50.00