AT THE FEDERAL PRISON IN Marion, Illinois, where DiFalco visited him, Joseph Paul Franklin lived in a special semi-isolated section called K Unit, which housed, in solitary confinement, celebrity prisoners and those who had committed the kinds of socially condemned crimes that made them vulnerable to attack. Franklin was both. He was sure the government wanted to kill him, that the guards were poisoning his food and mail. He threw away his letters and refused to eat. Then the K Unit was dissolved, and Franklin was moved into a prison unit that offered less protection. His delusions turned to hallucinations.
On a dark winter night in October 1994—he’d been locked up fourteen years—a “Spirit Guide” appeared to Franklin. It helped him, he said, and told him how to feel about what had become of his life. “Most of the time my Spirit Guide comes to me in dreams,” Franklin told a reporter. “Sometimes I see my Guide in a dark corner of my cell, sometimes in the day, sometimes at night.” His Guide told him that even though Missouri had the death penalty, in the case of the Jewish man exiting the St. Louis synagogue, it was time to confess, for it was fundamentally immoral to kill a person exiting a place of worship. Franklin spoke to an FBI agent and was soon whisked off to a Missouri jail. Other death penalty states came knocking once more about cold cases.
Melissa Powers was two years out of high school when cousins Dante Evans Brown, thirteen, and Darrell Lane Brown, fourteen, were murdered in that Cincinnati street under a railroad trestle. “This is one of the most horrible crimes that has ever happened in our community,” Cincinnati prosecutor Joseph Deters said in a 1998 TV interview. “The nature of it was so cold-blooded and senseless.”
Growing up in Cincinnati, Powers had wanted to be a fashion designer and had the genes and the blond hair for modeling, so she posed for fashion snaps and competed in runway competitions to pay for design school. She graduated, met a guy, had a son, separated from the guy, and went to law school while still modeling during her off hours, ending up in the Cincinnati district attorney’s office. Her job was to do research for Deters, write briefs, and occasionally to argue a case—mainly traffic tickets and drunk and disorderlies.
Franklin had been a suspect in the Cincinnati murders of the two young boys after his capture in 1980; Cincinnati police could put him in the city at the time of the crime but had nothing more. To convict Franklin of the cousins’ murders, a confession to a certified law enforcement official would be necessary. But Deters had had no luck—his requests for interviews with Franklin had all been rejected. Word had spread among law enforcement agencies who needed confessions from Franklin that he preferred women investigators and reporters, particularly if they were “attractive.” Powers had heard this, too, and her ambition to solve the Brown murders had only grown as she researched and studied Franklin’s crimes.
In the winter of 1997, Deters called Powers into his office, said he had something to show her, and popped a VHS tape into the player. In the taped interview, given a year earlier, Franklin’s hair was lank and shoulder length, and the camera stayed tight on his face. “I am a natural born killer,” Franklin said in the video. “You know what I’m saying?”
Deters asked Powers if she would be willing to journey to Potosi Correctional Center near Mineral Point, Missouri, where Franklin was then being held on death row.
“We told [Powers] flat out, I’m only asking you to do this because of the way you look,” Deters said.
Powers agreed to try. When she contacted Franklin, she sent a picture of her prosecutor’s photo ID card.
That April, Powers drove to Mineral Point for the meeting. Franklin freely admitted to killing the two young cousins. Why? Powers asked, recording the interview. “I was trying to get rid of all the ugly people in the world,” he said. “I considered the blacks the ugliest people of all.”
In an MSNBC documentary about these events, Powers says she felt that she had spoken to “somebody extremely evil, someone that is very much the devil walking on this earth.” She also told the Cincinnati Enquirer, “He’s evil and he’s a weak person. Killing was his way of feeling powerful and important. This is a person who is alive when he is killing.”
Three days after meeting with Powers and thirteen years after meeting DiFalco, Franklin called the Cincinnati prosecutor’s office, asked to be connected to Powers, and told her that he’d killed two women in West Virginia and wanted to confess to that too. He’d heard that some guy in West Virginia was locked up for it. “The only thing I can say is he was convicted just due to the sheer number of people lying about it,” Franklin told Powers.
He described the women and their clothing, said that he had stopped at a convenience store with them, that he had placed their bodies in a field after he shot them, and that he dumped their belongings—which he remembered as army military duffels—off the highway he took toward Lexington, Kentucky. He now said he’d shot the women inside his car while one sat in the passenger seat and the other in the backseat. He said he thought he had fired three shots—the actual number is five—but was sure he had been driving a Chevy Nova then. He said that his bullets went through their bodies and that the shots had maybe shattered the passenger-side window, which he had rolled down. He said he had killed the “dirty-hippie-type broads” because they admitted that they were “into race mixing.” He asked Powers to contact the authorities in West Virginia and also to return and see him again, if she wanted another sworn confession.
Powers drove back to Potosi the following week.
“Did you get any emotional satisfaction out of killing either one of those girls or both of the girls?” she asked him.
“What do you mean?”
“Was there any—emotional, did you get, I guess, what was your feeling afterwards? Or during?”
“I’m not really sure, you know. It’s not that you get emotional satisfaction. It’s just that you, you know, it’s someone you think should be wasted, you know. So I just went ahead and wasted them. You know?” Franklin said. “To me it was just, you know, something I had to do. It’s a nasty job, but somebody had to do it.”
“Can you see their faces in your mind? Can you see them?” Powers asked.
“Basically yeah, I can see them.”
Newspaper reports exploded the next day with headlines like “Prosecutor Face to Face with Monster,” “Former Model in Peril,” and “High Fashion Prosecutor Gets Her Man.” The MSNBC documentary produced later was dubbed Beauty and the Beast.
This title may speak to a truth about how many understood Franklin at the time, as well as his crimes, and the events that drew Powers into his orbit. Though we in the United States have adopted an eighteenth-century French version of Beauty and the Beast as our own, variations on the story of a young girl forced to marry a hideous animal because of her father’s crimes exist in language traditions and countries all over the world, including Italy, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Romania, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Russia, India, China, and Greece. A 2016 comprehensive that used two thousand “types” of stories from more than two hundred societies found that only fourteen stories could be traced all the way back to a time before languages split into their current branches, somewhere between twenty-five hundred and six thousand years ago. This story is one of them.
There was no animal and no father and no marriage in the real world of course, but the media comparison of Powers and Franklin to this tale tells us something in the language of story truth: people don’t kill other people for no clear reason, we say; only animals do. Fathers rack up the balance. Daughters pay it.