Credibility Under Attack in Repressed Memory Case

SAN FRANCISCO —  A woman whose “repressed memory” of her father killing a child persuaded a jury to convict him of murder has told authorities that she also has memories of him murdering two other people, according to court documents filed Tuesday.

Authorities could find no evidence to support her other claims, said Dennis Riordan, an attorney for George Thomas Franklin Sr. Riordan belittled the claims as “mental movies” in a written motion that portrayed Franklin’s daughter as a liar who used the case against her father to make money.

The defense motion seeks to disqualify the San Mateo County district attorney’s office from retrying Franklin for murder. His attorneys argue that prosecutors became friends with Franklin’s daughter and may be called to testify about her other memories of murders and her desire for fame and money.

Franklin was convicted in 1990 of killing a childhood friend of his daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, after she testified that she had a sudden memory of him smashing the girl’s head with a rock. Appellate judges overturned the conviction on grounds unrelated to the controversy over repressed memories. Franklin is in jail awaiting a second trial.

The defense motion called the allegations of additional murders “irrefutable evidence that Eileen Franklin’s ‘memory’ is an unstable machine that generates wildly contradictory images.”

Before Franklin’s trial, the daughter told investigators she remembered another murder that occurred when she was 15. She described a young woman entering the front seat of her father’s car and her father later chasing the woman through the woods and strangling her with a belt.

Defense lawyers said authorities eliminated virtually all unsolved murders in San Mateo County except one, that of a woman who was raped and killed in 1976. Shown photographs of the murder scene, Franklin-Lipsker said she was “sure” it was the one. But semen samples ruled out her father, and Franklin’s lawyer did not raise the episode at trial.

Franklin-Lipsker later said her memory had improved and she could recall that her father had an accomplice, her godfather. But an investigation failed to link him to the crime either, the motion said.

She also told authorities of another memory of a murder involving the two. “The prosecution has been unable to identify any missing person that might correspond to this recollected murder of Eileen’s,” the motion said.

The defense contends that San Mateo County prosecutors Elaine Tipton and Martin Murray have conflicts of interest that tainted their office’s decision to retry Franklin for murder.

Both were portrayed affectionately by Franklin-Lipsker in her book about the case, the motion said. Tipton invited Franklin-Lipsker to her wedding and the two went to the hairdresser and Mass together, according to the motion.

The defense also said prosecution investigator Robert Morse was a paid bodyguard for Franklin-Lipsker during her book tour.

San Mateo County Dist. Atty. James P. Fox said Tipton, Murray and Morse remain on the case. Fox refused to discuss the claims of prior murders, saying only: “I don’t believe there is any merit to the motion at all.”