Killer admits to murdering Tennessee Black man, shooting Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt

A White serial killer who targeted Blacks, Jews and interracial couples and who admits to attacks on Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt years ago, recently pleaded guilty to the 1978 murder of a Black man in Chattanooga, TN.

Joseph Paul Franklin, 47, admitted that he shot William Tatum outside a Chattanooga restaurant because Tatum was with a White woman. Under a plea bargain, Franklin was sentenced to two concurrent life terms--one for the murder, another for an unrelated 1977 armed robbery in Chattanooga.

"He has undergone some sort of bizarre religious conversion," Assistant District Attorney General Joseph Rehyansky said after the hearing. "At some point in the last years he decided pleading guilty was the fight thing to do."

Franklin also faces execution in Missouri for a murder there.

Franklin shot and injured attorney and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan in 1980 when Jordan was the head of the National Urban League. He was acquitted of shooting Jordan, but he says the jury made a mistake.

Franklin admits that he shot Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1978 but was never prosecuted. Flynt survived his shooting but was paralyzed.

Franklin's first known attack was the 1977 bombing of a synagogue in Chattanooga. From then until September 1989, he is believed to have killed 17 people; three interracial couples, seven Black men and boys, three female hitchhikers and a Jewish man.