Details a racist serial killer provided to authorities about the 1980 slayings of two black teenagers in Cincinnati are backed up by autopsies of the youths, a medical examiner said.
The type of weapon Joseph Paul Franklin allegedly used in the crime, the number of shots fired and the angles at which bullets entered the victims' bodies were among the examples of the consistencies cited by Charles Hirsch in a hearing Wednesday.The self-avowed racist also was earlier convicted of killing two young men in Utah during a spate of racially motivated killings in several states from 1977 to 1980.
Hirsch, now New York's chief medical examiner, was an assistant Hamilton County coroner in Cincinnati when Dante Evans Brown, 13, and Darrell Lane, 14, were shot to death on June 8, 1980, as they walked near a railroad trestle in Cincinnati.
Hirsch and a Hamilton County coroner's firearms examiner gave videotaped testimony Wednesday because they will be unable to attend Franklin's murder trial, set to begin Oct. 19.
Franklin, 48, was brought from his Hamilton County jail cell to witness the testimony.
Franklin told authorities that he used a .44-caliber rifle to shoot the teens, and Hirsch said he removed .44-caliber bullets from the body of one of the teens.
Franklin said he "put the gun on the biggest dude first." Lane, who was more than an inch taller than Brown, was shot first.
Franklin said "the smallest guy . . . bolted toward the street."
Hirsch said Brown was shot in the back, probably as he was running from his fallen friend.
Franklin said he fired the shots from a railroad overpass while he was facing south. The angles of the teenagers' wounds showed the bullets were fired from well above the youths, who were walking north toward the trestle, Hirsch said.
Franklin said he "fired three shots, maybe four." Authorities said four .44-caliber bullet casings were found near the railroad trestle.
Franklin also said he shot both victims twice "just to make sure."
Franklin has admitted to a series of racially motivated killings around the nation
He is awaiting execution in Missouri for the 1977 sniper murder of a Jewish man outside a synagogue. He also received life sentences for killing an interracial couple in Madison, Wis., in 1977, and two black men in Salt Lake City in 1980.
Franklin has said he shot and wounded Vernon Jordan, then national president of the Urban League, in Indiana in 1980 and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt in Georgia in 1978.
He was acquitted of wounding Jordan. Georgia prosecutors decided not to try Franklin for the shooting that left Flynt paralyzed.