Member-only story
Inspired by Hitler, He Tried to Start a Race War
The racist killer naively named himself after the German-hating Benjamin Franklin.
Criminals and murderers most often in their own minds aren’t really committing a crime at all. They’re either just satisfying their inner urges that seem to them like the right thing to do, and in some cases, they’re even doing something for the greater good of the world — creating a revolution. Some of you may have read about Lonnie Franklin aka The Grim Sleeper, who took it upon himself to cleanse the streets of Los Angeles of drug-addicted prostitutes.
Or a more universally-known figure of Adolf Hitler, the man who shook the world with his attempts at exterminating the Jewish population.
One such self-proclaimed revolutionary was Joseph Paul Franklin — a white supremacist who was convicted for eight counts of murder and suspected of 20+ cases that weren’t proved in court. He happened to have been inspired by none other than Herr Hitler himself — more on that later.
The Birth of James Clayton Vaughn Jr.
Franklin was born as James Clayton Vaughn Jr. on April 13, 1950, in Alabama, to James Clayton Vaughn Sr. and Helen Rau Vaughn.
