Unlike the rest of the serial killer books I’ve read/reviewed before written by Jack Rosewood, the true story of Joseph Paul Franklin is quite different. While all of the author’s other serial killers he had covered had received some psychological or sexual satisfaction with victims they’d murdered.

Joseph Paul Franklin was a drifter who roamed the east coast of the United States looking for opportunities to “cleanse the world” of those he felt were inferior, particularly blacks and Jews; and especially interracial couples. His apparent means of support supposedly came from bank robberies and which he supplemented by getting paid for blood donations; unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you want to look at it, led to his subsequent capture by the FBI.

The two most prominent of his victims were magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1978 and Vernon Jordan, Jr., the civil rights activist, in 1980. Luckily both of these individuals survived their injuries, however Flynt was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Somehow Franklin did not receive any conviction in either of these two cases.

Due to his frequent changes of his accounts regarding some of the crimes he had been suspected of being involved with, authorities couldn’t charge him and therefore have no idea of the real numbers of murders he was involved with.

Rosewood once again dwells into this individual’s childhood, which once again had involved being physically abuse; as well his changing his name from James Clayton Vaughn to honor his two favorite historical individuals, Joseph Paul Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin.
For having given his readers another in-depth discussion of an infamous serial killer I’m giving this book 5 STARS.

Please note I had won a mobi.file copy of this book from a giveaway the author had on LibraryThing and above as been my honest opinion. ( )