Blood in the Rocket City: The 1998 Franklin Family Massacre

Blood in the Rocket City: The 1998 Franklin Family Massacre

On March 10, 1998, seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Brendan Franklin attacked his own family inside their home at 1305 Camelot Drive in Huntsville, Alabama, killing his parents Gerald and Cynthia Franklin and critically wounding three of his four younger siblings with a sledgehammer, hatchet, butcher knife, and a mechanic’s rat-tail file. The Huntsville Police investigation led by detective Mac McCutcheon, the journals and Satanic writings recovered from Jeffrey’s bedroom, the prescription psychiatric medications he had been taking, and Alabama’s pursuit of the juvenile death penalty turned one afternoon into one of the most studied family-violence cases of the late twentieth century.

You always hear about cases like this happening in the bad part of town, and this one happened in the part of town where every dad worked for NASA. Camelot was a subdivision in the safest stretch of Rocket City, Alabama, and it sat at the center of the wildest convergence of late-nineties American chaos you can think of: pediatric Prozac, the Satanic Panic, a cop who was also a Baptist preacher, and a global human rights fight that helped reshape American law four years later. This is the story of an honors-track American family, the seventeen-year-old who came home from school first, and the quiet that settled over a brick house on Camelot Drive that nobody on the cul-de-sac has ever fully shaken.

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