Ohio Judge: Condemned Killer in Missouri a Monster
CINCINNATI - A white supremacist serial killer who received a stay of execution in Missouri haunts the dreams of an Ohio judge who helped connect him to the 1980 shooting deaths of two teenage cousins in Cincinnati.
Hamilton County Municipal Judge Melissa Powers was an assistant county prosecutor when her then-boss asked her to help get Joseph Paul Franklin to confess to shooting 14-year-old Darrell Lane and 13-year-old Dante Evans Brown.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reports Powers appealed to Franklin's ego in a letter followed by phone calls and a Missouri death-row interview. The man Powers calls a monster confessed and was sentenced to two life terms in Ohio in 1998.
A federal judge delayed Powers' Wednesday execution for a 1977 slaying, one of 20 killings he committed.