Author event recalls Joseph Paul Franklin’s killing spree

Barnes & Noble at Hamilton Place will be the site of what community relations manager Kelly Flemings calls a “true crime double-header” on Saturday, Aug. 20. Visiting will be two authors whose latest books detail killing sprees – one with roots in Chattanooga.

* “Blood in the Soil”: Carole Townsend’s fourth book, subtitled “A True Tale of Racism, Sex and Murder in the South,” is the first to detail the investigation into the 1978 shooting of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and his attorney in Gwinnett County, Ga., by Joseph Paul Franklin.

Though he was not convicted in that case, authorities eventually linked Franklin, a drifter, to a series of racially motivated sniper shootings and other crimes that occurred in eight states between August 1977 and August 1980.

Twice, he happened upon Chattanooga. The first time, on July 29, 1977, he bombed Beth Sholom Synagogue on Pisgah Avenue. No one was inside, but the explosion shattered the building, leaving virtually nothing but the Torah intact.

Exactly one year later, Franklin returned. This time, he targeted an interracial couple as they exited a Pizza Hut restaurant on Highway 58. The blast from Franklin’s 12-gauge shotgun killed William Bryant Tatum, a 20-year-old black man, and wounded Tatum’s 18-year-old white girlfriend, Nancy Diane Hilton.

Franklin eventually confessed to the Chattanooga bombing and shooting while incarcerated for other crimes. He was executed by lethal injection in a Missouri prison in November 2013.

Townsend’s book is written mostly as a police procedural with chapters told almost entirely by various investigators involved in the Franklin cases.

* “The LaSalle Street Murders”: This book from Carol “Schultz” Sissom details how a single mother became a private eye and solved a 20-year-old triple homicide in Indiana.