Hatewatch Exclusive: Racist Serial Killer, Facing Death, Recants

As he awaits his November date with the executioner, prolific racist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin wants something he never showed any of his victims.

He wants mercy.

If the courts won’t give it to him, he hopes maybe God will.

“I’ve prayed to the Lord for forgiveness,” Franklin told Hatewatch this week in a series of telephone interviews from the condemned unit at the Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri. “I not only asked the Lord for me, but I’ve prayed for all of my victims, too. I go from name to name and pray for each one of those people and regret that I ever harmed and shot them the way I did.”

Once defiant and unrepentant, the 63-year-old death row inmate, a self-admitted savvy manipulator, is “doing everything I can” to save his own life – and to prepare for the next. He has renounced his racist past and extremist beliefs and he professes a Christian rebirth during the 33 years he has been locked up for roaming the country and gunning down an interracial couple in Wisconsin, two black boys in Ohio, a Jewish man coming out of a synagogue after worship in Missouri and at least three other people from Tennessee to Utah. Authorities suspect there could be as many as 20 murder victim

Using a sniper rifle, Franklin said he also stalked and shot publisher Larry Flynt, putting him in a wheelchair, because Flynt featured interracial sex in Hustler magazine. Two years later, in the spring of 1980, Franklin shot and tore a gaping hole in the back of civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, who somehow survived the attack.

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After being caught, Franklin told a Missouri courtroom that the only thing he was sorry about was that killing Jews was illegal.

He’s sorry about much more now.

Pending execution can have that effect on people.

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