Father to Be Retried in Recovered Memory Case

In a case that is likely to be a test of repressed memory testimony, San Mateo County prosecutors announced Thursday that they will retry George Franklin in the 1969 murder of his daughter’s childhood friend.

Franklin, a onetime firefighter, was convicted in 1990 based largely on testimony by his daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, who says that after she became an adult, she recalled witnessing her father crush the skull of her childhood playmate, 8-year-old Susan Nason.

Citing several errors in the trial, U.S. District Judge Lowell Jensen of San Francisco reversed Franklin’s conviction last year. Jensen and other appellate courts that reviewed Franklin’s first trial decreed that important parts of the prosecution case must be omitted in any retrial.

But on Thursday, San Mateo County Dist. Atty. James Fox said there is enough evidence for his deputies to retry Franklin.

“We believe there is sufficient admissible evidence that should permit a jury to return a verdict of guilty,” Fox said.

Douglas Horngrad, Franklin’s lawyer, called it “a travesty of justice that the judicial system will have to endure another trial, and that Mr. Franklin will have to endure another day in custody, based on voodoo psychology.”

Franklin, 56, was the first person in the nation convicted largely on the strength of testimony by someone who said they had recovered a once-repressed memory. Although some psychologists continue to believe that traumatic events can be repressed, the theory has come under increased attack in the years since Franklin’s conviction.

The case spawned a made-for-television movie and two books, including one coauthored by Franklin-Lipsker. In the years since the trial, her husband died and she moved to Washington state.

Franklin’s defense lawyers are likely to challenge the admissibility of the very heart of the case--the testimony of Franklin-Lipsker.

They most likely will call experts in psychology and psychiatry who believe repression and recovery of memories do not exist, or that the memories are so unreliable that they should not be permitted in criminal cases. Prosecutors are likely to counter with experts saying that repression and recovery are reliable.

The case dates to September 1969, when Susan, who was sent on an errand by her mother, was kidnapped near her home in Foster City, a suburb south of San Francisco. Her body was discovered that December under a mattress near a reservoir several miles away.

As a child, Franklin-Lipsker was a close friend of the young girl, and the Franklin family lived a few doors away from the Nasons. Franklin-Lipsker went to San Mateo County authorities in late 1989, telling them that as she sat in a room of her Canoga Park home with her own daughter that year, she began recalling the murder. Her testimony was primarily responsible for her father’s conviction.

Under Jensen’s ruling, Franklin’s defense will be permitted to display newspaper articles, showing that much of what Franklin-Lipsker knows about the crime could have been gleaned from news accounts.

Additionally, prosecutors will be barred from telling jurors about Franklin-Lipsker’s jailhouse visit to Franklin shortly after his arrest. In that visit, Franklin refused to discuss whether he committed the murder, a point that Deputy Dist. Atty. Elaine Tipton told jurors in the first trial was an admission of guilt.

Franklin will be arraigned Jan. 31 in the San Mateo County Courthouse in Redwood City and is expected to remain in jail pending the outcome of the new trial.