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On February 27, 1986, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to close their file on a serial killer.

William Bradford Reynolds, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division

at the Department of Justice, said there was no remaining public interest in continuing to

investigate the case. Joseph Paul Franklin had already been convicted in a pair of double

homicides, and with a stack of consecutive life sentences to serve, there was just no chance

he would ever be paroled. In fact, he wrote, further attempts to prosecute Franklin would only

endanger society, given his history of escape attempts.

Reynolds didn't just want the FBI to drop the matter. He wanted it closed entirely.

In his memorandum to the director of the FBI, Reynolds wrote that he'd personally spoken with

local prosecutors in at least three of the

jurisdictions where Franklin was still wanted for murder, and he'd convinced them to abandon

any attempt to prosecute those cases. Best to just close it. And so they did. Jurisdictions all

over the country packed up those case files and put them on a shelf.

Until eight years later, when a convicted killer says he had a prophetic dream

instructing him to keep confessing to murder.

I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird little guys.

I was a little bit lost again this week, trying to make sense of this story that I can't stop writing.

And I know I'm telling it out of order, but I think it's less of a biography of one man and more of a dissection of the world he lived in, the world he killed in.

And I've got my timeline of what our killer was doing, but that's useless to me, unless I've

got a timeline of the world he was doing those things in, which means I'm off again down a 12th degree tangent searching for context that

I won't know until I see it. Context like William Bradford Reynolds. I thought I was done

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