Man Convicted After Daughter Recalls Murder

A retired firefighter was convicted on Friday of murder after his daughter testified that she witnessed the killing of her girlfriend 21 years ago but had repressed it until after she became a parent.

Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, now 30, told a bizarre and shocking tale in the San Mateo County Courthouse of how as a girl of 8, she watched in horror as her father, George Franklin, crashed a rock into the skull of Susan Nason, her best childhood friend in September, 1969.

For reasons that she could not explain, she forgot what she witnessed, and only began recollecting the murder one afternoon in early 1989, as she looked after her own young daughter in her Canoga Park home.

When the jury foreman read the verdict of guilty of first-degree murder, Franklin-Lipsker, who was sitting in the front row of the courtroom, turned and embraced Margaret Nason, the mother of the victim. Both women wept.

“There can’t be a true victory for me because it is my father,” Franklin-Lipsker said after she composed herself. “I’m relieved it’s over. I know I did the right thing to come forward.”

“It does lay it to rest, 21 years later,” Nason said. She and her husband, Don, had attended virtually all of the 3 1/2-week trial. The Nasons live in the same suburban Foster City home as they did when Susan, the younger of their two daughters, was abducted on Sept. 22, 1969.

“I wanted to be there. I wanted to hear the conclusion to what happened to my daughter,” Margaret Nason said.

Jurors left the courthouse without speaking about the case. They reached the verdict after a day and a half of deliberation.

“They saw through the smoke and did their job,” said Bob Morse, a district attorney’s inspector who investigated the case. “They’re heroes.”

Franklin, 51, a burly, craggy-faced and silver-haired man, showed no emotion when the verdict was read. Superior Court Judge Thomas Smith set Jan. 29 for sentencing. Frankin faces a penalty of life in prison with the possibility of parole. The capital punishment law in effect at the time of the crime was later ruled unconstitutional.

His lawyer, Douglas Horngrad, did not comment. But his face fell into his hands when the verdict was read. He had spent long hours cross-examining the often-combative Franklin-Lipsker in an effort to point up voids and inconsistencies in her memory.

“I’m convinced that the verdict will stand,” said San Mateo County Deputy Dist. Atty. Elaine Tipton, who prosecuted the difficult case.

She attributed the verdict to the “compelling nature of the evidence” that corroborated Franklin-Lipsker’s testimony, including the crushed ring that Susan Nason had been wearing at the time of her murder and that the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department kept for more than 20 years.

Franklin-Lipsker had testified that she was riding in her father’s van when he picked up her schoolmate Susan from the street near their homes. They drove to an isolated spot on the road to the coast west of Foster City. There, her father molested Nason on a mattress in the back of the van, then took a rock and smashed her skull. When she tried to go to her friend, her father stopped her and threatened to kill her if she ever told what had happened.

As they drove home that evening, she testified, she told her father that they should not leave “Susie” because she would become cold and frightened.

Franklin, who retired on disability from the San Mateo Fire Department in 1981, had been living in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael and dabbling in real estate when he was arrested Nov. 28, 1989.

Other members of the Franklin family revealed that they had suspected him of committing the crime. A sister even called authorities a few years ago. But there was nothing to connect him to the murder until the eyewitness, Franklin-Lipsker, came forward. As it was, her memory often was hazy and shifting. She testified that details continued to come back even as the trial opened.

Franklin-Lipsker, who recently moved to Switzerland, acknowledged that she sold her “life rights” in lucrative book and film deals. In addition to a book based on her authorized version of the story, another author plans to write a book about the strange case.

The murder of Susan Nason was the first ever investigated by the Foster City Police Department. The city had been created only a few years earlier when a developer began building on what had been a dairy farm and mud flats on San Francisco Bay, between San Francisco and San Jose.

With its motto, “Growing Beautifully,” low-priced houses and promises of safe streets, the so-called instant suburb quickly drew many young families in the mid-1960s. Among the first to move in were the Nasons and the Franklins. They lived only a few doors apart.

George and Leah Franklin had married in 1957 and had five children by 1963. Eileen, the middle child, and Susan Nason had just started the third grade in September, 1969, at Foster City Elementary School a short walk away.

Nason disappeared at roughly the same time as one of California’s most sensational murders--that of actress Sharon Tate by Charles Manson and his followers. But in the San Mateo Times, the disappearance of Susan Nason was the headline news, and remained so until after her body was found on Dec. 2, 1969.

Tipton, trying to explain how Franklin evaded capture for so long, said the “mind set” of investigators at the time was that child molesters are strangers. In fact, she noted, most child molesters and killers know their victims.

Bill Hensel, who had been the lead detective on the case in 1969, retired from police work nearly 20 years ago, but said in an interview after Franklin’s arrest that he often thought about the crime. For years after he left police work, he would write to the state Department of Justice with any ideas he had for investigators to follow.

“Any time a kid is snatched, I always think of Susan,” he said. And he often thought, “What could I have missed?”

Hensel was a firefighter before he went into police work, and said he wonders whether he would have suspected fellow firefighter Franklin, if for some reason his name had come up. “Firefighters save people,” he said. They’re “heroes” trained to save lives, he said.

In retrospect, Hensel said, he should have interviewed each child who lived in the neighborhood separately. Perhaps that would have given young Franklin the courage to reveal what she knew. “I think the girl would have broke down,” he said.

“It will go to sleep now,” Hensel said. “. . . There will be rest.”