On August 7, 1977, Toni Schwenn, a 23-year-old White female, was killed in the parking lot of East Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin, along with her companion, Alphonce Manning Jr. The two had been together at the shopping center when a confrontation developed in the parking lot with a stranger who would not be identified publicly as their killer for years.
What initially appeared to investigators to have grown out of a minor traffic incident ultimately proved to be a racially motivated double murder committed by Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who was traveling around the country carrying out attacks against Black people, Jewish people, and people involved in interracial relationships.
According to the detailed confession Franklin later gave Madison detectives, he had driven to Madison intending to kill Dane County Circuit Judge Archie Simonson because of Franklin's anger over a controversial rape case. Franklin stopped at East Towne Mall, where Manning's automobile backed into or across his path as Franklin was preparing to leave the parking area. Franklin became angry and sounded his horn. Manning eventually stopped, got out of the vehicle, and began walking toward Franklin. Franklin had stolen firearms in his automobile as well as explosives in the trunk, and he later told investigators that he feared an encounter would attract the attention of a nearby police officer and expose the other crimes he had committed.
Franklin pulled out a. 357 Magnum and fired at Manning, striking him in the torso. When Manning remained standing, Franklin got out and fired again, bringing him to the ground. Franklin then went to the Toronado in which Schwenn had been riding and fired through a closed window toward Schwenn. The glass shattered, and Schwenn was wounded and ended up outside the automobile. Franklin briefly returned to his own vehicle, then pulled alongside the Toronado, got out again and approached Schwenn. According to his confession, Franklin stood over Schwenn and fired another shot into Schwenn's back before fleeing the mall parking lot. Witnesses had scattered or taken cover among parked cars during the gunfire. Manning remained alive for a short time and called for help but died from his wounds. Schwenn also died as a result of the shooting.
The killings presented investigators with a difficult case. No one immediately knew who the gunman was or why the two victims had been targeted, and the investigation eventually went cold. One early focus was Schwenn's former boyfriend, who was considered a prime suspect after authorities learned that he had been found hours after the murders lying in bed while handling a revolver. He maintained that he had actually been aboard an airplane when the shootings occurred. Years later, when the case was reinvestigated, Madison police investigator Ted Mell tracked down people who had been on the flight and corroborated the former boyfriend's alibi, effectively eliminating him from suspicion.
The breakthrough came in 1984, nearly seven years after the murders. By then Franklin had been captured after a nationwide search and was imprisoned at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, serving multiple life sentences for the murders of two Black men in Utah. Franklin contacted Madison authorities and indicated that he wanted to confess to the East Towne Mall killings. Two Madison detectives traveled to the prison in February 1984 and recorded a lengthy statement in which Franklin described the shootings and his motives in considerable detail. Franklin admitted that racial hatred influenced the attack and supplied information about the crime scene and the victims' wounds that prosecutors later argued had not appeared in newspaper accounts.
Investigators did not rely on the confession alone. Mell located Vicky Johnson, who had been 15 at the time of the murders. Johnson had heard the gunshots and approached the scene, coming within roughly 30 feet of the gunman. Johnson saw the weapon in his hand and later remembered Manning calling for help. Although Johnson had provided her name and address to police in 1977, investigators had never formally interviewed her. When Mell found Johnson seven years later, Johnson identified Franklin as the person seen at the murder scene. Authorities also developed evidence placing Franklin in the area. A bank teller from Columbus, Ohio, identified him as the man who had robbed a bank shortly before the Madison murders, corroborating part of Franklin's account of his movements, while handwriting evidence connected him to a Madison motel where he had registered under an alias. Investigators also traced a firearm fitting Franklin's description of the murder weapon to a sporting-goods store from which such a weapon had disappeared, and ballistics testing determined that it could have produced the markings found on bullets recovered from the victims.
Dane County District Attorney Hal Harlowe ultimately charged Franklin with two counts of first-degree murder. Franklin was transferred from the federal prison in Marion to the Dane County Jail on November 6, 1985. He pleaded not guilty and was permitted to represent himself at trial, with attorney William Olson appointed as standby counsel. The trial began February 10, 1986. By then Franklin had recanted his confession, telling jurors that he had fabricated it because he wanted to be temporarily transferred out of the Marion penitentiary and claiming that he had learned details about the Madison killings from newspapers. Prosecutors countered with the recorded confession, Johnson's eyewitness identification, forensic evidence, the bank-robbery evidence, and testimony showing that Franklin had known details of the killings that investigators believed only the perpetrator would have known. Franklin called no witnesses in his defense.
After the five-day Dane County trial, the jury found Joseph Paul Franklin guilty of both first-degree murders. The jurors deliberated only a short time before returning the guilty verdicts. Circuit Judge William D. Byrne immediately imposed two consecutive life sentences, adding them to the prison terms Franklin was already serving for other killings. The convictions formally resolved a double homicide that had remained without an identified killer for almost seven years before Franklin's confession reopened the investigation.
Franklin remained imprisoned and was subsequently connected to numerous other racially and religiously motivated shootings and killings across the United States. On November 20, 2013, Missouri executed Franklin by lethal injection for the 1977 murder of Gerald Gordon outside a synagogue near St. Louis. His execution was for that Missouri murder rather than the deaths of Schwenn and Manning, but the Dane County convictions remained part of the extensive record of violence that ultimately established Franklin as a serial murderer whose attacks were driven largely by racist and antisemitic ideology.
