Serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin wasn't born into a Mormon family — instead, The Salt Lake Tribune says that he converted to Mormonism in 1974. The then 24-year-old would later say that he was attracted to the faith because of their stance on things like caffeine and alcohol, but after going to Utah the following year, he just couldn't get on board with some of the things that he saw. Franklin's birth name was James Clayton Vaughn, Jr., and according to his FBI profile, he changed it in homage to both Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin ... a sign of how his story was going to go.
After a non-lethal attack on an interracial couple in 1976, Franklin moved on to bombing, shootings, and bank robberies. Most of his killings were random — a couple in a parking lot, two cousins in Cincinnati, teenagers in Salt Lake City — and other targets included Hustler's Larry Flint, and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. By the time he was arrested in Sept. 1980, he had been connected to the deaths of more than 20 people.
He later claimed that a childhood of abuse had left him "out of my gourd" at the time of the killings, and he was quoted as saying, "Luckily, I got locked up. I'm glad I got caught." He apologized for the murders, but it was way too little, way too late: His interstate crime spree led to multiple convictions in multiple states, and in 2013, Missouri executed him for the killing of a man in St. Louis.
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