Recently the city of Huntsville has been in the news. It has surpassed Birmingham as the biggest city in the state. Huntsville has a population of 215,006.
Birmingham, which had long been Alabama’s largest city, has a population of 200,733. Many southerners may find it interesting to know some of Huntsville’s most notorious murder cases have a link directly to the occult.
Retired Huntsville Police Department Investigator
Jeff Bennett doesn’t like calling attention to the 20 years he spent investigating occult-related crime, But It happened.
In the spring of 1998, WHNT News reported about a young man named Jeffery Franklin.
On the 10th of March 1998 Jeffery Franklin, a Huntsville teen and practicing Satanist, made a bloody offering unto to Satan. 17-year-old Jeffrey brutally attacked his family in their home at 13005 Camelot Drive. Armed with a hatchet, a two-pound sledgehammer, a rat-tail file and a butcher’s knife. He attacked his mother, Cynthia, and his father, Gerald. He also attacked his younger siblings – 14-year-old Sara, 8-year-old Timmy and 6-year-old Christopher.
A neighbor noticed a child laying outside the home in a puddle of blood, and called police. Cops arrived, and discovered, a however, distressed even the most seasoned officers. “After 16 years, this is the worst I’ve seen,” said one of the officers.
By that point, Jeffrey had already fled from the scene but cops issued an APB upon discovering Jeffery had fled in a blue Geo Metro.
He would lead police on a car chase throughout the neighbourhoods of southeast Huntsville. During the chase, Jeffrey tried to run officers off the road and succeeded once, on Bailey Cove Road, where he forced a patrol car onto the curb in front of Hope Presbyterian Church.
While being arrested, he laughed and taunted onlookers and spat on a photographer. Despite the freezing temp, Jeffrey was shirtless and had a pitchfork and pentagram scratched into his chest.
Cynthia and Gerald were both pronounced dead at the scene while the younger siblings were rushed to Huntsville Hospital, in critical condition. “The children all had very serious head and face injuries from what looked like an axe and some sort of large, blunt force object,” said hospital spokeswoman Terri Bryson. All three siblings would survive, although with life-altering injuries.
Jeffrey’s other sister, 11-year-old, Stacey, was thankfully not at home at the time of the attack.
Jeffrey had murdered his mother first by stabbing her with a rat-tail file. He then attacked his sister with a hatchet, slashing her throat and clubbing her. Jeffrey then killed his father with a sledgehammer as he entered the house before turning his attention on his younger brothers. They had both been attacked with a hatchet.
According to neighbors and fellow students at Grissom High School
where Jeffrey was a student, he was “involved in devil worship.” According to 17-year-old Jenny Smith:
“He was really smart, a nice person up until two years ago. He just changed into a different person. I don’t know why. His attitude was different. He was always in a bad mood, and he had a really short temper.”
She described an incident during a discussion about God in their government class which had convinced her that he “worshiped the devil.”
In his notebook, police found that he had been planning on killing his parents for a while. He also wrote of satanic rituals and sexual torture and his belief that Satan wanted him to kill his family. He wrote:
“I know dad will be home at this time and I’m going to be, I’ll wait by the front door, behind the little hutch, and I’ll hit him with a hammer. Mom will be out on a walk, when she comes back, I’ll have the radio playing loudly, I’ll call mom in the room and ask her what’s on the agenda for today, then I’ll kill her, and what about the brothers and sisters. Well, I’ll take them, I’ll strangle my little brother in his room and I’ll lure my other little brother into this room and strangle him. Then my sister, I will rape her then I will finish her off.”
Police found Copies of the Satanic Bible and the Necronomicon in Jeffery's room.
Franklin was sentenced to 3 life sentences, and was denied parole in 2016.
Now he is an avid Christian, and says.
"I know God has forgiven me for what, I've done."
.
-SuperSlueth
I am not diminishing the fact that these murders were horrific and the violent acts are inexcusable. But would say that these acts were committed because he was and maybe still is a deeply disturbed individual. Satanism has within its tenets and key mandates strick rules against everything that he did and planned to do. If he was a Satanist, he was terrible at it. He had no understanding of what it truly means to live as a Satanist. We do not murder. We do not rape. We do not harm little children or harm or kill animals except for our food. We are instructed to act with compassion toward all creatures. We fight in defense of ourselves or oth…