Ohio judge: killer to die in Missouri 'a monster'

CINCINNATI (AP) — A white supremacist serial killer scheduled for execution in Missouri still 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 monste"r confessed and was sentenced to two life terms in Ohio in 1998.

He is scheduled to die later today in Missouri for a 1977 slaying that was one of 20 killings he committed, targeting blacks.