Attorney General Chris Koster has asked the state supreme court to set an execution date for Joseph Paul Franklin, who killed a man outside a St. Louis synagogue in 1977.
Koster says Franklin carefully planned the murder in Richmond Heights. He confessed to the murder in 1994. By then Franklin was serving six consecutive life sentences at a federal prison in Illinois. Franklin, who joined the neo-Nazi movement and the Ku Klux Klan, also has been convicted of murdering two African-American men in Utah, of killing an interracial couple in Wisconsin, and of bombing a synagogue in Tennessee. He also claims he is the one whose gunshots left Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt paralyzed.
He’s under a Missouri death sentence for murdering Gerald Gordon, and of wounding two other men in a synagogue parking lot after a Bar Mitzvah.