(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Missouri Department of Corrections officials have executed Joseph Paul Franklin who was convicted of killing 14 black men and boys during a racist cross-country serial killing spree in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Franklin also admitted to the shooting and wounding of Vernon Jordan, then president of the National Urban League, on May 29, 1980.

The Department of Corrections executed Franklin in the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, after a federal appeals court turned down his request for a last-minute stay of execution. He was scheduled to be put to death at 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 20. But a court hearing delayed his execution. Franklin was pronounced dead at 6:17 a.m. 

A spokesperson for the Death Penalty Information Center told The NorthStar News & Analysis that Franklin's execution was the 35th this year in the United States and the first this year in Missouri.

His shooting of Jordan brought Franklin notoriety, largely because of Jordan's prominence and the all-White jury's verdict. A federal jury acquitted Franklin, 63, of shooting  Jordan outside a Marriott Hotel in Fort Wayne, Ind.

In 1996, Franklin said in a newspaper interview the jury was wrong. Franklin, an acknowledged white racist, said he parked his car near Jordan's room. When he saw a black man get out of the passenger side of a car, Franklin fired his hunting rifle, loaded with 30.06 bullets. The bullet hit Jordan in the back near his spine. A physician said the bullet left a hole so big that he could put his fist in it.

Franklin recruited for United Klans of America, and he was an avowed Nazi. He reportedly changed his first name to Joseph to honor Joseph Goebbels, Third Reich minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany. He was born James Clayton Vaughn, Jr. on April 13, 1950, in Mobile, Ala.  

For two decades, Franklin traveled the country, killing Black men. He targeted interracial couples. Jordan was with Martha Coleman, a white woman, when he was shot. All but a couple of the black men who were murdered were with white women. In many of cases, Franklin either murdered or wounded the women. He also murdered a white prostitute, Mercedes Masters, when he learned she serviced black-male clients.

During his spree of violence, Franklin also bombed a Jewish Synagogue.

In addition, Franklin wounded and left paralyzed in 1978, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.

Franklin confessed to 17 murders, but he is believed to have murdered as many as 21 people.

The Black men and boys he murdered were:

Ted Fields, 20, and David Martin, 18, on Aug. 20, 1980, after they finished jogging in Salt Lake City's Liberty Park

Cousins Darrell Lane, 14, and Dante Evans Brown, 13, as they walked to a store in Cincinnati, also in 1980

Alphonse Manning, Jr., 23, in a mall parking lot in Madison, Wis., Aug. 7,1977

Johnny Brookshire, 22, in Atlanta, February 1978

Bryant Tatum at a Pizza Hut restaurant near Chattanooga, Tenn., July 29, 1978

Harold McGiver, 29 as he left his job at a Taco Bell in Doraville, Ga., Aug. 18, 1979

Raymond Taylor at a Burger King in Falls Church, Va., Aug. 8, 1979

Jesse Taylor, 42, in Oklahoma City, Okla., Oct. 21, 1979

Leo Thomas Watkins, 19, at an Indianapolis, Ind., shopping mall, Jan. 14, 1980

Lawrence Reese, 22, at a fast-food restaurant, Jan. 8, 1980

Arthur Smothers,22, in Johnstown, Pa., June 15, 1980

Myron Brooks, 32,  in Indianapolis, April 23, 1980

Franklin once said he traveled the country killing enemies of the White race. He supported his criminal activity by robbing banks.

He murdered individuals in Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Utah and Oklahoma, according to research by the Department of Psychology at Radford University.

Missouri officials executed him for killing Gerald Gordon, a white man, outside of a St. Louis-area synagogue. Prosecutors had convicted him of the other murders, but Missouri was the only state that had the death penalty.

Franklin later said he regretted his serial killing, but a newspaper reporter noted that he continued to refer to Blacks as 'niggers.'