George Franklin

Summary

Crimes of the Times: George Franklin

LA Times Studios | Host: Christopher Goffard

Date: February 18, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of "Crimes of the Times," hosted by Christopher Goffard, revisits the landmark prosecution of George Franklin, the first American charged and convicted of murder based solely on a “repressed memory” recovered by his daughter, Eileen Franklin Lipsker, after 20 years. The episode unpacks the case's dramatic twists, the debate over the reliability of recovered memories, and its lasting impact on psychology, the criminal justice system, and popular culture.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Disappearance and Murder of Susan Nason

• In 1969, 8-year-old Susan Nason was abducted and murdered in Foster City, CA. The case became cold after three months when her remains were discovered with her skull crushed ([00:00]–[01:53]).
• The police followed hundreds of leads without making an arrest, and the case faded into obscurity.

2. Eileen Franklin’s Recovered Memory

• Two decades later, Eileen Franklin Lipsker, Susan’s childhood friend and George Franklin’s daughter, told authorities she had suddenly recalled witnessing her father murder Susan ([01:53]–[02:39]).
• Eileen claimed her memory was triggered by seeing her own daughter, which brought back vivid memories of the crime. She described details, including the method of the killing and a smashed ring on Susan’s hand.

3. Legal and Psychological Precedents

• This became the first U.S. murder case where repressed memory testimony was admitted as primary evidence ([01:53], [04:59]).
• The prosecution’s sole evidence was Eileen’s memory, with no physical proof tying George Franklin directly to the crime ([05:15]).
• Defense attorney Doug Horngrad grappled with the challenge of discrediting a two-decade-old memory with little documentary evidence ([03:32]).

4. Characterization and Courtroom Dynamics

• Eileen was described as persuasive and charismatic, able to “move through her emotions very easily,” holding her ground under cross examination ([05:36]).
• Her account frequently shifted: times and presence of her sister Janice varied, leading to inconsistency in testimony ([06:37]).
• The jury saw inconsistencies as evidence of trauma rather than falsehood, reasoning that abuse could account for memory gaps ([07:11]).

5. The Role of Repressed Memory in Conviction

• “If she remembers everything, then it happened. If she doesn't remember anything because she was traumatized, it happened.” – Doug Horngrad ([08:42])
• The prosecution employed “child abuse accommodation syndrome” to explain away Eileen’s changing story.
• Dr. Lenore Terr testified for the prosecution, claiming the recovered memory was authentic, despite a lack of scientific consensus ([09:13]–[09:29]).
• Critics, including defense and observer Harry MacLean, saw these psychological arguments as “voodoo psychology” and lacking empirical basis ([09:08], [10:06]).

6. Exclusion of Exculpatory Evidence

• The defense presented evidence that case details—such as the smashed ring—were widely reported in the media and accessible to Eileen as a child ([12:51]–[14:16]).
• The judge, Thomas Smith, repeatedly refused to allow news coverage into evidence, depriving the jury of context to question Eileen's unique knowledge ([14:16]–[15:53]).

7. The Jury, Verdict, and Public Sentiment

• Jurors convicted Franklin on the repressed memory testimony, despite “no physical evidence ever link[ing] Franklin to the scene” ([16:43]).
• Jurors rationalized, believing “if he didn't kill Susan Nason, he did enough other stuff,” reflecting sentiment rather than conclusive evidence ([17:15]–[17:26]).
• The judge expressed open disdain for Franklin, wishing he could impose the death penalty ([17:34]).

8. The Cultural Climate and Epidemic of “Recovered Memories”

• The case unfolded as “recovered memory” became a societal trend, amplified by popular media and therapists promoting the theory in self-help books like "The Courage to Heal" ([19:26]).
• Prosecutions for decades-old abuses surged, often without corroborating evidence ([19:47]).

9. Scientific Backlash and the Birth of the Memory Wars

• Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, now a towering figure in memory research, became involved in Franklin’s defense and was alarmed by the legal embrace of repressed memory ([22:41]–[23:43]).
• Loftus’ landmark “Lost in the Mall” study, which demonstrated the ability to implant vivid false memories, was directly inspired by the Franklin case ([24:53]).
• The case catalyzed a scientific revolution, leading to greater skepticism about recovered memory evidence in court ([26:01], [27:07]).

10. Conviction Overturned and the Collapse of the Case

• A federal judge overturned Franklin’s conviction in 1995, citing exclusion of exculpatory evidence as a violation of due process ([27:46]–[28:03]).
• Eileen’s sister Janice recanted her trial testimony, admitting under oath that she and Eileen lied, and that Eileen had indeed undergone hypnosis, contrary to her initial claim ([28:44]–[29:15]).
• Eileen later claimed to recall her father committing a second murder, but Franklin had an airtight alibi, and DNA evidence exonerated him ([29:15]–[29:43]).
• George Franklin was released after over six years in prison; the prosecution chose not to retry him ([29:49]).

11. Aftermath & Legacy

• Eileen Franklin gained national attention, with TV appearances and a book deal. The judge and prosecutors never recanted their positions ([27:12]).
• The case's legacy: prosecutors rarely, if ever, pursue charges based solely on uncorroborated recovered memories today ([29:49]–[31:06]).
• “No prosecutor worth their salt is going to bring a case like this.” – Doug Horngrad ([29:49]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This was the first murder case in which a repressed memory had been allowed into evidence.” – Harry MacLean ([01:53], [04:59])
• “Can you come up with an alibi for 20 years ago?” – Doug Horngrad ([03:32])
• “If she remembers everything, then it happened. If she doesn't remember anything because she was traumatized, it happened.” – Doug Horngrad ([08:42])
• “There were no studies establishing that. There were no colleagues who signed off on her about that.” – Doug Horngrad, on the prosecution’s psychological evidence ([10:06])
• “No physical evidence ever linked Franklin to the scene, but the jury convicted him of first degree murder.” – Christopher Goffard ([16:43])
• “It was everything...here something really, really big had to happen if Eileen Franklin had a whole richly detailed memory of something that didn’t happen.” – Elizabeth Loftus, on her motivation to study false memory ([23:43])
• “We lied. My sister and I lied during trial. She was, in fact, hypnotized…we all lied. She was, in fact, hypnotized about this memory. And I lied at trial, and I’m not going to do it a second time.” – Janice Franklin (voicemail quoted by Doug Horngrad) ([28:44])
• "No prosecutor worth their salt is going to bring a case like this." – Doug Horngrad ([29:49])
• “Without corroboration, impossible. No, no. Franklin changed that.” – Doug Horngrad, on whether such a prosecution could happen now ([31:06])

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Timeline of Key Segments

• [00:00–01:53] — The crime and 20-year cold case
• [01:53–02:39] — Eileen Franklin’s memory resurfaces
• [03:32–05:15] — Defense challenges and lack of corroboration
• [05:36–07:11] — Eileen on the stand; narrative inconsistencies
• [09:13–10:39] — Psychological testimony and critique
• [12:51–15:53] — Media coverage, exculpatory evidence excluded
• [16:43–17:34] — Verdict and rationale; judge’s open bias
• [18:46–20:09] — The “memory wars” and the recovered memory movement
• [22:41–24:53] — Elizabeth Loftus, false memory experiments
• [27:46–29:49] — Conviction overturned, witness recantation, case falls apart
• [29:49–31:06] — Aftermath: legal standards radically changed

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Conclusion

“Crimes of the Times: George Franklin” masterfully dissects a pivotal miscarriage of justice driven by murky memory and social panic, ultimately inspiring scientific revolutions in our understanding of human memory and altering criminal prosecution standards. The story is a cautionary tale about belief, science, and the dangers of relying on memory alone in the prosecution of crime.

Transcript

[Christopher Goffard]

This is an LA Times Studios podcast. For 20 years, the murder of 8 year old Susan Nason had been a cold case. The fourth grader from Foster City, California had been abducted near her home in September 1969. It was a small bedroom community of San Francisco, a quiet place unaccustomed to serious crime. Susan had walked home from school after the 3pm bell and and checked in with her mother who was sewing a dress for her daughter's ninth birthday that weekend. Susan then went down the block to return a pair of shoes to a friend, but never returned home. Soon missing child posters were circulating with the girl's photo. She was described as 4 foot 5, 60 pounds, heavy with freckles across nose and wearing white bobby socks. Her mother went on TV and pleaded with Susan's abductor, please bring her back. Three months after her disappearance, Susan Mason's remains were found in a wooded area a few miles from town. Her skull had been crushed. Police chased hundreds of leads, but they went nowhere. No one was arrested and the case seemed unlikely ever to be solved. Twenty years later, the D.A. s office got a phone call. A woman named Eileen Franklin Lipsker had an extraordinary story. She had been Susan Nason's best friend in elementary school. Eileen said she knew who had killed her best friend and that she had actually been there to witness it. The killer, she said, was her own father, George Franklin. The memories had been buried in her mind for two decades, but recently came back to her in a flash.

[Harry MacLean]

This was the first murder case in which a repressed memory had been allowed into evidence.

[Christopher Goffard]

From LA Times Studios, this is Crimes of the Times. I'm Christopher Goffard. In 1989, defense attorney Doug Horngrad showed up at the San Mateo jail to meet his new client, a retired firefighter named George Franklin.

[Doug Horngrad]

He told me that when he got arrested, the cops told him it was from a murder of Susan Nason. He knew the case and you know, said things to me that suggested to me that he might be unjustly accused of this crime.

[Christopher Goffard]

The whole case hinged on the so called recovered memory of Eileen Franklin Lipskerman. Detectives and prosecutors had embraced her story and the theory of human memory that underpinned it. Some therapists enthusiastically advocated the idea that memories of huge dramatic events could be totally buried as the brain's defense against trauma, only to resurface fully blown years later. Critics called the idea quackery, the invention of misguided therapists. So when 51 year old George Franklin went on trial in 1990, it was not just his freedom at stake, but a whole theory about the dynamics of the mind and how the criminal courts should treat this theory. Franklin was not able to furnish an alibi.

[Doug Horngrad]

Really? Can you come up with an alibi for 20 years ago? And can you, can you reconstruct evidence so that compounds the difficulty of defending a case like this where, you know, the narrative is kind of magical? Well, I had this memory. I forgot it, but I remember it in this detail. And in order to pierce that, you have to introduce some reality. And that's hard to do when you're trying to defend activity from two decades ago. The Roman crowd was reacting. The media was giving it end of the world treatment.

[Christopher Goffard]

Taking the stand as the government star witness against her father, Eileen Franklin Lipsker claimed that for decades she had forgotten what happened to Susan, her neighbor and classmate at Foster City Elementary. She said she was in her family room one day watching her own daughter play, and her daughter's resemblance to Susan uncorked her memory. Now, Eileen recalled being in her father's Volkswagen van when he picked up Susan in their suburban neighborhood and drove to an isolated area. She recalled her father molesting Susan, then lifting a rock and crushing the girl's skull. She recalled seeing her friend try to ward off the blow and a ring on Susan's hand being smashed.

[Harry MacLean]

This was the first murder case in which a repressed memory had been allowed into evidence.

[Christopher Goffard]

This is the writer Harry Maclean. His book on the case is called Once Upon a time A True Story of Memory, Murder, and the Law.

[Harry MacLean]

It was the sole evidence that the defendant committed the crime.

[Christopher Goffard]

The defense argued that Eileen had undergone hypnosis to aid her memory, which would have made her testimony inadmissible in the California courts. But Eileen denied it, and so did her therapist and her sister Janice backed her up.

[Harry MacLean]

Well, Eileen is very charismatic. She has thick, flaming red hair, which she got from her father. She's very articulate. She knows the drama to bring to whatever she's saying, so she can move through her emotions very easily and match it up with the face, with the expression in the drama. Now, we had seen her during the preliminary hearings, so we knew what she could do and how she could interact with her cross examiner. And she was not intimidated by Doug Horngrad, who's a very experienced and able cross criminal defense lawyer. But there was no give with her. She stuck right in there and slugged it out with him. It was a fascinating day and a half to watch the two of them go toe to toe over all the facts of her recollection of the day of the murder and the murder itself.

[Christopher Goffard]

Eileen Franklin Lipsker's story of the day of Susan Nason's death shifted and changed. In one account, her sister Janice had been in the van. In another, she was not. The murder was in the morning, then in the late afternoon. During testimony, Eileen and Janice painted their father as a violent, sexually abusive alcoholic. So when Eileen was caught at an inconsistency, it could be interpreted as evidence of her emotional damage. That is, in fact, how jurors saw it.

[Harry MacLean]

Eileen was allowed to testify to a couple incidents of her father sexually abusing her. If it were true, the violence and the sexual abuse that they testified to, there was just a different version of that. When he supposedly killed Susan Nason, he sexually abused her and then committed violence on her with a rock. Killed her with a rock. Usually cross examination is you point out inconsistencies or contradictions, or it's in this version and that version. And the fact was that every time Eileen told the story, whether it was to the prosecutors and they made notes, or whether it was in a preliminary hearing or whether it was to a reporter, she told a different story. But what happened here was that, and I learned this from the jury, the inconsistencies corroborated Eileen's testimony that her father was a violent man and who had traumatized and beaten and sexually abused his children. And that explained why she was unable to be totally consistent because she had been subject to this violent behavior, sexual behavior, by her father. So in fact, it had the reverse effect of almost confirming that her father was a monster.

[Christopher Goffard]

I asked defense attorney Doug Horngrad about this.

[Doug Horngrad]

You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't, right? Well, I mean, if she remembers everything, then it happened. If she doesn't remember anything because she was traumatized, it happened.

[Christopher Goffard]

A prosecution witness talked about something called child abuse accommodation syndrome, which had the same convenient elasticity. If Eileen didn't talk about her trauma for years, it fit the syndrome. And if she did, it would also fit.

[Doug Horngrad]

So either way, it's true. I mean, it was voodoo psychology.

[Christopher Goffard]

The psychological underpinning of the case, of the theory that traumatic memories were repressed and then reemerged came from Dr. Lenore Terr, who testified at length for the prosecution in tones of unshakable confidence.

[Harry MacLean]

So she looked solely at this incident of Eileen looking at her daughter in recovering the memory and said, aha. See, that's type A. And that means that this is a valid repressed memory. There was no basis that I could ever find for that theory. But she was a very persuasive, very kind of collegial. The jury loved her and the way she presented it, it did kind of make sense, I have to say. But I think everybody who watched it was skeptical of it. Absolutely.

[Doug Horngrad]

That was all the world according to Lenortaire. There was no authority for any of that. There were no studies establishing that. There were no colleagues who signed off on her about that or sign off with her about that. But it had this sort of, you know, shiny lizard kind of allure. Right? It was, it was a unique case. That's why it got such media coverage and captured public imagination the way it did. So of course it seduced an ambitious prosecutor or two.

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[Christopher Goffard]

Police had found a smashed ring on 8 year old Susan Nason's hand when her body was discovered in 1969. San Mateo prosecutors insisted that the ring corroborated Eileen Franklin Lipsker's story. How, they asked, could she possibly know that detail if she had not been an eyewitness? Defense attorney Doug Horngrad had an answer and he tried desperately to get it in front of the jury. The San Mateo Times and other newspapers had covered the case heavily in 1969. So did the TV stations. Horngrad had compiled a package of news clippings and video proving that police had publicly discussed the ring and and other details.

[Doug Horngrad]

So the prosecutor argued that the witness, Eileen, had witnessed these events because she was able to provide all these details about the crime scene. And all of the details about the crime scene had been in the public domain, either through television or newspaper. And yet she knew these details. Well, there was a crushed ring on her finger. I mean, unless she had a telescope, a microscope, or walked right up to the crime scene or unless she read it in the newspaper or saw it on television, that's how she, she derived that fact. So all the facts she testified to about the crime scene forensically were all in the public domain.

[Christopher Goffard]

But Judge Thomas Smith, a former prosecutor himself, refused to let the jury see the news coverage.

[Doug Horngrad]

The trial judge would not permit us to introduce evidence that all that coverage was in the public, all those facts were in the public domain. Oh, I don't want this to be a fight about newspaper articles, said the judge, rather than he excluded the newspaper articles. And the prosecutor then had the gumption to argue in closing, how could she know all these details unless she was there?

[Christopher Goffard]

Here's Harry MacLean again.

[Harry MacLean]

In her story, she has a fair amount of facts. And the prosecution said these are facts she couldn't have known unless she witnessed it. So Horngrad logically goes out and gets all the newspapers that cover got massive coverage in California and finds all of these facts are in one newspaper or another. And the evidence showed that the newspapers did come to the house. She was eight years old and at the time. But newspapers were there, pictures were front page, stories were front page. It was a pretty convincing rebuttal to the prosecution's main theory when he decided it wasn't coming in horngrad would say, your honor, if I might try again. And he always let him try it again. And the judge says, well, I'm not going to get in a war of the newspapers here. I'm not going to let it in. So he just said, I'm not going to let any of it in.

[Christopher Goffard]

The defendant's appearance did not help him. George franklin was stone faced and craggy featured. He seemed emotionless. He was hard to sympathize with.

[Harry MacLean]

He sat there kind of as an immobile statue. He's kind of a hard looking man. He was an alcoholic for probably 30 years. There was no warmth to him at all. He even when he talked to his lawyer, the only thing I ever saw was once a little bit of a smile to horngrad. But he sat there almost stock still. You know, he's traumatized by this, and he's looking up his daughter and daughter's testifying against him. But there was no reaction to any of the testimony. You never got a feeling of a human being sitting there.

[Christopher Goffard]

No physical evidence ever linked Franklin to the scene, but the jury convicted him of first degree murder.

[Harry MacLean]

When the verdict came down, there was kind of a shock, like, my God, they convicted this guy of murder on nothing but this repressed memory, which was never told the same way twice in which they could never corroborate. Nothing, nothing ever pointed to George Franklin except this repressed memory. And that was sufficient to find him guilty of first degree murder.

[Christopher Goffard]

When Harry maclean interviewed jurors, they were able to rationalize the verdict by saying, if he didn't kill Susan Nason, he did enough other stuff that he needs to pay.

[Harry MacLean]

Well, maybe proof falls short on this one, but it was pretty convincing on the other one, so we'll get him for that one.

[Christopher Goffard]

The judge made no secret of his own loathing for the defendant. He called Franklin a depraved and wicked man and sentenced him to life in prison. Judge Thomas smith said he regretted that he could not send Franklin to death row. In some ways, the case was a function of its time. When Franklin was charged, the mcmartin preschool molestation case, which alleged satanic ritual abuse on a massive scale, was still slogging through the Los Angeles courts. As I explored in the last episode, that case hinged on a controversial interviewing technique that wound up planting ghastly images in the minds of children. As even the top prosecutor would later acknowledge, it hinged on the faith that kids just could not make up such hideous stories. The Franklin case was also built on an unproven psychological theory that was presented to jurors as if it had the weight of of settled science. Some therapists promoted the notion that a person's emotional troubles were conveniently traceable to an unremembered trauma. It was a faddish idea saturating the talk shows.

[Harry MacLean]

The whole theory was that if you're traumatized as a child, particularly in this case, you're able to repress the memory. It goes somewhere deep into your subconscious. And if you encounter some stimuli that's similar, say it could be music or it could be a painting, something similar to what happened at the time of the trauma, that will unearth and recover the memory. And the memory will play out. This is what the prosecution experts said will play out like a videotape.

[Christopher Goffard]

At the time, a popular book was the Courage to Heal A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. Among its controversial lines if you are unable to remember any specific instances of abuse but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did.

[Harry MacLean]

It was so credible on the face of it and so dramatic on the face face of it that it set off a whole wave of recovered memories of usually sexual child abuse. Criminal cases were filed, the ones I was aware of. They pled out to something or they were dropped.

[Christopher Goffard]

I talked to Richard Offshee, a professor emeritus of social psychology at UC Berkeley & Co author of the book Making False Memories, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria. He told me the recovered memory trend was Middle Ages, voodoo, mythology, and the major psychiatric quackery of our time.

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[Christopher Goffard]

The George Franklin case turned out to be important far beyond the court system. It led to the rewriting of psychology textbooks. The case proved pivotal in the career of Elizabeth Loftus, a memory scientist who would become one of the most frequently cited and influential researchers in the field of psychology. Loftus regarded so called recovered memories as concoctions spun not from solid facts but from the vaporous breezes of wishes, dreams, fears, desires. She had testified as an expert for Franklin's defense team and said she found the courtroom awash in credulity about the mythic powers of repression. Loftus told me that at the time, her research showed that the specifics of real memories could be altered, but not that incredibly detailed memories like Eileen Franklin Lipsker's might be planted. I asked Dr. Loftus how important the case had been in inspiring her research.

[Elizabeth Loftus]

It was everything. What I had done up to that point is all this misinformation work turning a stop sign into a yield sign, making somebody think they saw broken glass at the accident scene when there wasn't any. But here something really, really big had to happen if Eileen Franklin had a whole richly detailed memory of something that didn't happen. So that's when I wanted to study this. I had to try to figure out how could I study it, what could I do to plant a seed that might grow into one of these big false memories. It had to be something that I could get through the human subjects committee, the review committee, so I had to get permission to do it. So it wasn't going to be, I'm going to make people believe that they watched their father rape and murder an 8 year old. And eventually I got to the idea of Lost in the mall.

[Christopher Goffard]

This false memory experiment is one of the most famous studies in modern psychology. In it, Loftus's researchers reminded participants of three real events from their childhoods. The stories having been obtained from older relatives. And they added a fake fourth story telling subjects they'd gotten lost in a mall as children and and were rescued by an elderly woman. 25% of the participants in the study developed partial or complete memories of the made up event. Loftus and other researchers have since succeeded in implanting subjects with false memories of near drownings, dog attacks and other events that had never happened. Loftus told me that there's now a decent sized literature on how far you can go in planting memories. A benefit, she said, that directly flowed from the Franklin case. In the immediate aftermath of the case, however, there was a flood of recovered memory cases that put her at the center of what came to be called the memory wars.

[Elizabeth Loftus]

What started to happen was these sex abuse claims. So they weren't saying I saw a murder, they were saying, I was sexually abused. I was raped for 10 years. I was raped in satanic rituals. It was usually sexual abuse. And Roseanne Barr came out and the former Miss America came out. All this a year after the Franklin case and then a flood of cases. And people were calling me to help them with the defense of those cases. Why were they calling me? Because I was appearing on television or newspapers or whatever, commenting on the Franklin case and being skeptical. So I was that voice of skepticism. Parents would call me, I need help. You know, lawyers would call me, I need help. I was like a one person switchboard.

[Christopher Goffard]

Hers was often a lonely voice and she became accustomed to vitriolic attacks, though her research has changed the conversation dramatically.

[Elizabeth Loftus]

I think we did a lot of damage to the concept of repressed memory.

[Christopher Goffard]

With her father behind bars, Eileen Franklin Lipsker got a book deal. She appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show. And Donahue. Shelley Long of Cheers played Eileen in a TV movie called Fatal Memories. Defense attorney Doug Horngrad found an appellate attorney to take the case. But the California courts were decidedly unfriendly.

[Doug Horngrad]

California Court of Appeal, the California Supreme Court, both courts, you know, like a hot knife through butter, seven nothing, and three nothing. So 10 nothing. And then took it into the Federal System.

[Christopher Goffard]

In 1995, however, a federal judge threw out George Franklin's conviction. Citing flaws in the trial. The judge said jurors should have been allowed to see the news coverage that Franklin's defense attorney tried so desperately to show them.

[Doug Horngrad]

A half dozen different grounds, but most importantly, the ground that the judge would not permit the defense to introduce exculpatory evidence, which is now important decisional case law, at least here in California. He found that that was a complete denial of due process of law. It reversed Franklin's conviction and gave us a shot at a new trial.

[Christopher Goffard]

San Mateo prosecutors were determined to try George Franklin again. As they made preparations, however, the case disintegrated. Eileen Franklin Lipsker's mother had been a government witness, but now she had come to doubt her daughter's story. Here's Horngrad.

[Doug Horngrad]

Eileen's sister Janice called the prosecutor. Janice was a witness for the prosecution, too. And Janice, in a voicemail that the prosecution was required to turn over to us, and they did, said in this voicemail, we lied. My sister and I lied during trial. She was, in fact hypnotized. The therapist who she went to see, who testified he lied to, we all lied. She was, in fact hypnotized about this memory. And I lied at trial, and I'm not going to do it a second time.

[Christopher Goffard]

Janice said her sister knew that hypnotically induced testimony was inadmissible by law. And Eileen further damaged her own credibility when she told police that she recalled her father committing another murder, this one in 1976. But George Franklin could prove he was at a union meeting that day, and DNA evidence excluded him. Another man was subsequently convicted in that case.

[Doug Horngrad]

And while we're on the subject as to murder, too, I've got a stone cold alibi. So how about a dismissal?

[Christopher Goffard]

Prosecutors decided not to risk trying George Franklin a second time in the murder of Susan Nason. After more than six years in prison, he went free. I tried to reach Eileen Franklin Lipsker for comment, but without success. Horngrad told me that recovered memory cases had been, quote, sprouting up like beanstalks. But once the reversal happened, everyone reanalyzed it. He said, I think it's pretty well accepted in the criminal justice system that one cannot and should not charge someone with a crime based on a repressed memory unless there is corroboration. He said, no prosecutor worth their salt is going to bring a case like this. Eileen Franklin Lipsker, at one point went on television and wondered aloud if all of these memories were not real, why were they in her head? What's your final view on.

[Doug Horngrad]

To what degree she believes all this stuff? She lied. She colored her story, she colored her testimony. She omitted facts, tried to manufacture evidence. All that suggests to me that she was not acting in good faith, shall we say?

[Christopher Goffard]

Do you think such a prosecution is possible today?

[Doug Horngrad]

No. Without corroboration, impossible. No, no. Franklin changed that. I'd like to think I hear that. I see that. But I hope not to be proven wrong.

[Christopher Goffard]

From LA Times Studios, this is Crimes of the Times. To read more about these cases, check out crimes of the timeslatimes.com we also have a link to our video episodes in the show Notes. This episode was written and reported by me, your host, Christopher Goffard. Our showrunner and senior producer is Jacqueline Kim. Executive Editor is Deborah Anderloo. Production assistant is Jordan Patterson. Production services provided by JTB Studios. Our camera technicians and operators are Jeff Amlott, Julian McCabe and Jason Newbert, with additional production support from Andrew Gombert, Patrick Stewart and Anne Marie Hauser. Denise Callahan is our Studio manager. Ben Church is our Production Manager. Special thanks to LA Times Studios President Anna Magzanian, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Argenteri and Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times, Terry Tang. Crimes of the Times is executive produced and co created by Darius, Derek Shahn and me, Christopher Gofford SA.