White Supremacist Serial Killer Executed After Opening Fire on Bar Mitzvah Attendees

Joseph Paul Franklin, 63, a white supremacist who murdered people of black and Jewish descent in a country-wide killing spree from 1977 to 1980, was put to death Wednesday in Missouri, CBS News reports. The execution marks the state’s first in nearly three years.

Franklin was executed at the state prison in Bonne Terre for killing Gerald Gordon with a sniper rifle at a St. Louis synagogue in rural Missouri in 1977. In addition to Gordon’s murder, he’s been convicted to seven others across the country and has claimed responsibility for 20 overall. Despite his expansive rap sheet, however, the Gordon case is what triggered the death sentence.

Officials administered pentobarbital to Franklin, the first time the drug has been used for execution in the state of Missouri. Mike O’Connell, of the Department of Corrections, said Franklin was pronounced dead at 6:17 a.m.

Franklin grew up in Mobile, Ala. and has long had issues with paranoid schizophrenia. He was in his mid 20s in 1977 when he began his trek across the United States. During his killing spree, he robbed up to 16 banks in order to fund his excursion.

He bombed synagogues, targeted interracial couples and even opened fire on a group of attendees exiting a bar mitzvah. He sought out Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue from the Yellow Pages and on Oct. 8, 1977, he shot aimlessly into the crowd, killing Gordon at the age of 42.

Three years later, with an increasing number of murders in his pocket, Franklin was caught after killing two young black men who were about to go for a jog with two white teenage girls in Salt Lake City. He was put behind bars in 1980 and sentenced to death in 1997.