Killer's Shadow by John E. Douglas

Author:John E. Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dey Street Books
Published: 2020-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Within days of the trial and verdict in Fort Wayne, Indianapolis prosecutor Stephen Goldsmith said he saw “very little useful purpose to be served” in proceeding with trying Franklin for the January 1980 murders of Leo Watkins and Lawrence Reese. He said that if he went ahead, he would have to call some of the same witnesses who had just testified in the Jordan case. He was concerned about the believability of the prison inmates. He was also influenced by Fort Wayne prosecutor Arnold H. Duemling, who announced that he did not have enough evidence to indict Franklin for the Jordan shooting in state court. So, as it stood, the Jordan shooting remained open, and the person who had shot him might still be at large.

This is often a difficult decision for a prosecutor. Every murder victim’s family I’ve ever dealt with wants justice for its loved one. And that means charging the alleged offender with the specific crime. It is not enough that he has been convicted of a similar crime against others, as I saw firsthand in the Atlanta child murders when prosecutors felt their best case against Wayne Williams was for two of the cluster of close to thirty murders that took place from 1979 through 1981.

On the other hand, the resources of any prosecutor’s office are limited, and if an alleged killer has already been convicted in another court or jurisdiction and has been put away for a long time, the head of the office has to weigh the chances of a conviction against the fallout of an acquittal, whether it is worth his staff’s time and energy, and whether a guilty verdict will add any effective prison time to the inmate’s already lengthy sentence; in other words, if the end result of a successful prosecution is to impose punishment, are you actually achieving any practical results from another trial? The federal government, encouraged to prosecute by President Jimmy Carter himself, had a different reason for pursuing the Jordan case even though a conviction wouldn’t have added appreciably to Franklin’s time in prison. What the feds were after, instead, was a highly publicized warning to anyone who considered trying to assassinate another African American civil rights leader.

“When a notorious public crime is committed and the government believes there is sufficient evidence to prosecute the case, we have an obligation to do so,” prosecutor Rinzel declared.

There was another issue. For many years, crimes against African Americans, particularly anti-civil-rights-oriented crimes, went largely unprosecuted and unpunished. For a man of Franklin’s psyche, it was natural to think that certain crimes were righteous expressions rather than despicable acts. During our study of the assassin personality, we noted that John Wilkes Booth expected to be received as a great hero and savior in the South after he killed Abraham Lincoln. I suspected that something similar was likely going on in Franklin’s mind with regard to Jordan.

For Stephen Goldsmith in Indianapolis, if he felt there was any reasonable possibility of Franklin

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