Dark Soul of the South: The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin

Believing himself to be on a "God-given mission," Joseph Paul Franklin was the only racially motivated serial killer ever pursued by the Justice Department. Mel Ayton examines his murderous life, from his poverty-stricken youth in a backward Alabama suburb to his indoctrination by militant Nazis and southern racists to his eventual capture by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ayton’s exhaustive report uncovers the truth behind Franklin’s three-year undertaking to murder Jews and African Americans.

White supremacist Franklin was, by his own admission, an outlaw, a racist, and weird. As a neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klansman, he violently enforced his views by embarking on a "lone hunter" mission to kill. He saw African Americans and Jews as subhuman and knew no moral obstacle to racial violence, invoking the Bible to support his criminal acts. As Franklin’s 1977–80 killing spree was contemporaneous with other racially charged incidents that other Klansmen and neo-Nazis wrought throughout the United States, his story also exposes how hate organizations have made killers out of disaffected and bitter young men.

In this first full-length book about Franklin, Ayton reveals a shocking and unsavory side of American society.