Man Sentenced to Life Term for 1969 Murder of Girl : Crime: Called ‘depraved and wicked,’ he was convicted on daughter’s testimony. She had repressed memory of an 8-year-old friend’s slaying for 20 years.

REDWOOD CITY —  A father of five was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday for murdering a girl in 1969 in a crime that went unpunished until his daughter came forth with long-repressed memories of witnessing the childhood horror.

Superior Court Judge Thomas M. Smith called George T. Franklin a “depraved and wicked man,” and imposed the maximum possible sentence for the murder of 8-year-old Susan Nason--life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Although Franklin professed his innocence, a probation report portrayed him as a bizarre and brutal man who terrorized and molested children, including his own. Police said he is being investigated for other crimes.

In statements to the probation officer who wrote the sentencing report, Franklin’s family members told of repeated beatings and abuse, including an instance in which he held a gun to the head of his former wife and other occasions when he sexually attacked his children.

Franklin was convicted on Nov. 30 by a jury that deliberated for eight hours. The case turned on the testimony of his daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, 30, who told how he abducted Nason, her best childhood friend, from a street near their homes in the San Francisco suburb of Foster City in September, 1969.

Franklin-Lipsker recalled watching as he raped Nason in the back of the family van, bludgeoned her with a rock and left her in a gully. Franklin-Lipsker said her father silenced her by threatening to kill her if she told what had happened.

Franklin-Lipsker testified that she repressed the memory until her daughter reached approximately the age she and Nason had been. She was living in Canoga Park when the memories returned and since has moved to Switzerland.

“George Franklin should spend the last moments of his life imprisoned, which is far better than how Susan Nason spent hers,” Franklin-Lipsker said in a letter to the probation department.

Smith denied defense attorney Douglas Horngrad’s request for a new trial. Horngrad said a new witness who came forward at the end of the trial might have cast doubt on Franklin-Lipsker’s testimony if he had had a chance to testify.

Franklin, 51, avoided the death penalty because the capital punishment statute in effect at the time of the murder was deemed unconstitutional in 1972. He will be eligible for parole in seven years, though given the nature of the crime, authorities doubt he will be freed.

In a statement to prison authorities who might consider paroling Franklin, Assistant Dist. Atty. Elaine Tipton said Franklin is the “worst specimen of pedophile and child murderer.”

Throughout his life, Tipton said, Franklin was able to “deceive the world at large” into seeing him as a family man and firefighter for the city of San Mateo, and in more recent years as a real estate investor.

“In reality,” Tipton wrote, “Franklin has engaged in at least 20 years of brutality, exploitation, violation and perversion, most of it against children in his inner circle.”

Franklin, raised in rural Virginia, moved to the San Francisco area at 16 in 1956, married in 1957, and quickly had five children. He was a firefighter for the city of San Mateo south of San Francisco, and was divorced in 1975.

He retired on disability from the fire department in 1981, and worked in real estate during the 1980s in California and in Hawaii. He was living in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael when he was arrested in 1989.

The probation report said Franklin often answered the lonely hearts advertisements run by women who referred to their children.

He told one such woman that he belonged to a group that advocated child molestation, and tried to persuade her to let him have sex with her 8-year-old daughter, the report said. With other women, the report said, he expressed interest in bestiality and incest.

Margaret Nason, who with her husband and surviving daughter attended much of the trial, hurried from the courtroom in tears after the sentencing.

“He took so much away,” she had said in a letter to the probation officer, pleading that Franklin never be freed.

“The terribleness, the awfulness, of that last bit of time that Susie was alive is incomprehensible,” she wrote. “It had to be sheer terror as Franklin inflicted his terrible acts on her. How alone she much have felt. . . .

“In my mind, I tell her to run. ‘Run, Susie, run.’ But she can’t and I feel the blows of the rock as Franklin brings it down on her head. To me this is evil, not human.”