George Franklin Trial: 1990-91

This, at least, was the story that Franklin-Lipsker began to tell her friends and family, and eventually the police. After taking a statement from her, the police arrested her father, George Franklin, on November 29, 1989, for the murder. At his home they found a number of pornographic magazines and pictures, including those of young children.

Twenty years earlier, in September 1969, young Susan Nason disappeared from her town of Foster City, California. Her body was discovered outdoors a few months later, showing signs of a violent death, including a crushed skull and a smashed ring that seemed to indicate she was warding off a blow. A bloodstained rock was found nearby. The press reported these and other facts, but police never made an arrest for her murder. Franklin and others were questioned at the time, and Franklin went to visit Susan's graveside on the first anniversary of her death.

Ten years later, Franklin's wife asked him if he had murdered Susan. During their divorce proceedings Franklin-Lipsker's mother said that Franklin had abused his own children, including Eileen, both verbally and physically.

Now, 20 years after Susan's death, Franklin-Lipsker claimed that she remembered being with her father and Susan on the day of the murder. She said that she had watched her father rape and kill Susan, and that he had threatened her, too.

"He said that if I told anyone," she testified, "he would have to kill me. I believed him." Because of the shock of what she had witnessed and her total belief in her father, according to several psychiatrists who were questioned, she had repressed her memories of that day for years. Not until she saw her own daughter in a pose similar to Susan's two decades later, she said, did they resurface.