In his book The Franklin Cover-Up, John DeCamp lists 15 suspicious deaths connected to the Franklin pedophile ring. Most of the people mentioned have a pretty obvious connection to the case, but one person who didn't was school administrator Harmon Tucker. All DeCamp said was (p.251):

Eventually I decided to look this up to see if more information was available. Imagine my surprise when I found that Lorenzo Harmon Tucker, the supervisor of vocational education in Council Bluffs IA, was found dead just outside of Valdosta GA. This city near the Florida/Georgia border has a curious history. It's where Florida state investigator Ray Lemme was found dead in what the Valdosta police ruled a "suicide" weeks after announcing that he had traced corruption involving Yang Enterprises and Tom Feeney "all the way to the top", presumably meaning Gov. Jeb Bush or even higher. Lemme's investigation is also said to have led him to an elite pedophile ring operating in Valdosta, connected with local GOP powerbrokers and the murder of Jessica Lunsford down in Florida.

I was very much intrigued to see that Tucker wound up dead outside of the same city where all of this intrigue happened. Even more so given that this is allegedly where Omaha World-Herald publisher Harold Andersen and Omaha FBI chief Nick O'Hara (two Franklin perps) had a hunting ranch in that area. So I dug up as much as I could, pulling news archives and requesting the Georgia Bureau of Investigation file on the case. What I found, especially with Tucker's confessed killer Walter Gerald Ellis, is super bizarre and indicative of the Programmed to Kill pattern. Drawing from all my sources on this page, I'll summarize:

• Walter Gerald Ellis grew up in Illinois with his brother Roy Dean Ellis. Their father had left the family when Roy was 2 years old and Walter was 1 year old. Ellis had some early scrapes with the law in Decatur IL: at age 16, the state moved to declare him a delinquent and have him removed from his mother's custody, then later that year he pleaded guilty to illegally transporting liquor.

• During the Vietnam War, Ellis served in the Navy on a boat which "shelled enemy positions". In his interrogation over Tucker's murder, he brought up how he would load the guns on the destroyer and seemed to be affected by "all of the people that were killed in Vietnam", "the body counts", and "not being able to see the faces of the people they killed". His brother Roy told the Omaha World-Herald that Walter's emotional problems really came to the forefront after his return from Vietnam.

• After his return from Vietnam, Ellis drifted around the country doing various jobs. According to Roy, he "was on drugs a bit" and had many girlfriends along the way. In 1974 he was convicted for armed robbery in Sangamon County IL and sentenced 4 to 12 years in the Sheridan Correctional Center near Chicago, earning parole 4 years later.

• In 1986, while working as a hotel cook in St. Petersburg FL and the surrounding area, Ellis met and married a woman who would become Joy Ellis. He was using his brother's name Roy Dean Ellis during this time, and that was who Joy knew him as. Around New Year's Day in 1988, he and Joy split up, with him driving her and their 1-year-old child back to her parents' home in Middle Grove NY. Ellis told interrogators that he did so to prevent Joy from finding out his real identity, and that he'd told her he was ill and she shouldn't look for him. Joy refused to tell the press why they had split, simply stating "All things can be made right".

• Sometime around January 1988 Ellis relocated to Nevada. On February 7, 1988 is the first murder that Ellis was suspected of (and authorities believed he was in the state when it happened): the murder of Idaho farmer Terry Jarolimek. Jarolimek was on his way to help out his in-laws in California when he was somehow intercepted. With his car parked on the shoulder, he appears to have been marched down to a nearby gully and shot execution style with a .22 caliber. Given that he had valuables on him which were not stolen, the Elko County sheriff expressed a belief that the murder was not a robbery. One press report divulged that Jarolimek "did owe a substantial amount of money to lenders" at the time of his death.

• Ellis continued working as a cook at various Nevada casinos/hotels for some time. In March he worked at Whiskey Pete's and then in April and May he worked at the Comstock Hotel in Reno as well as the Red Garter Inn near Wendover. Supposedly another execution-style killing with a .22 caliber occurred in Wendover NV that time, but I haven't been able to find it yet.

• At the end of May, Ellis left for Spokane WA, arriving around June 6. On the night of June 6, Kevin Kent is beaten to death in his car parked at the auto repair shop where he was set to begin his first day of work the following morning. Nothing was stolen from him. The murder occurred near a rail line where transients (a description which would include Ellis himself) were known to gather. Kevin had left Seattle, with his fiancee planning to follow, after their house had been robbed by cocaine addicts, they joined the neighborhood watch, and subsequently got threats on their answering machine.

• After working as a cook in Spokane for a while, Ellis relocated again, this time to the Midwest. He stole a car in the Spokane area on October 11, arrived in Billings MT two days later where he abandoned the car, and then took a Greyhound bus to Omaha NE. In Omaha, Ellis came into contact with a woman named Susan Patterson Gilchrist, and wrote several bad checks on her account. (This is reminiscent of how Franklin perps like Alan Baer allowed victims like Alisha Owen and Troy Boner to write checks on their behalf before ultimately pulling their support.) By the time of Tucker's murder in November, Susan had moved to, of all places, Billings MT where Ellis had dropped the car off before arriving in Omaha.

• Somehow, in late October, Ellis ends up driving down to Georgia with the victim Lorenzo Harmon Tucker, an Omaha resident who was the supervisor of vocational education for Council Bluffs IA. Ellis told interrogators that he and Tucker had met at a fast food restaurant and became friends, then on October 28 Tucker met Ellis at a McDonald's in Omaha and offered to drive him to Florida, stating that he (Tucker) was going there for business anyway and would be back Tuesday. Tucker's family had no awareness of those plans if they existed, and his daughter said that Tucker, who had a heart condition, would rarely go to fast food restaurants. On October 28 Tucker is at an education workshop in Iowa, last seen by his colleague between 12:30 PM and 1 PM. His office secretary noticed that he had cleaned off his normally-cluttered desk. At about 2:20 PM that day Tucker is caught on camera at a bank withdrawing $400 with another man (believed to be Ellis) standing behind him; Tucker's signature was described as "quite shakey". From that point on, Tucker vanishes from public view until his death, prompting his wife to file a missing person's report the next day. Ellis claims they drove together over the next 2 days, leaving from Omaha to Terre Haute IN before heading south.

• According to Ellis, Tucker was aggressively making sexual advances on him during their drive southeast. Supposedly, Tucker asked Ellis "how he felt about men" and "if he sucked dick", "continued to talk about boys and men and how he wanted to be fucked in the ass" after Ellis hit him, and discussed "rape in the prisons". He also, according to Ellis, mentioned "things he had done to boys in the past", an insinuation that Tucker was a pedophile and perhaps an explanation of how his name got tied to Franklin. All of this alleged conduct by Tucker, especially the part about doing things to boys, apparently made Ellis so mad that he threatened to kill Tucker if he didn't stop.

• What's interesting is that, as strange as Ellis's claims about Tucker's behavior are, there is corroboration for Tucker's sexual deviancy. In 1966, when Tucker was a guidance counselor at Daytona Beach Junior College in Florida, he was arrested for masturbating in a public bathroom that was in an area "frequented by homosexuals". He failed to show up in court and the Florida Department of Education subsequently questioned his eligibility to hold a teacher's certificate. When police searched Tucker's car after Ellis was arrested, they found a bag in the spare tire compartment with 10 gay porn books. Back when Tucker was vice principal of a Council Bluffs school, a former student recalled on Franklin Files getting called into Tucker's office one day and accused of what was clearly a made-up charge; perhaps Tucker was deliberately trying to force a student into a position of weakness while in his office.

• Ellis claims that the situation with Tucker came to a head when Tucker groped his genitals as he was driving the car. He stopped the car in a wooded area near Valdosta and they both got out. In Ellis's interrogation, he implied that Tucker willingly got out, even taking a towel with him which he laid on the ground, knelt down on, and stated "this is fun". In Ellis's guilty plea, he stated that he forced Tucker out of the car at gunpoint, marched him through the woods, and ordered him to kneel down. Either way, it ended with Tucker getting shot execution-style in the back of the head with Ellis's .22 caliber gun. The murder is believed to have taken place on October 30.

• On the night of October 29, another curious drama unfolded in Valdosta. Police chief Charlie Spray heard a report on October 30 from his brother Roy Spray stating that his car, which was in his daughter's possession, was missing. Apparently Roy's daughter / Charlie's niece let her friend Harley Whilden drive her home on the night of the 29th after a party, and then he drove off with the car. The police found Whilden, who had mud on his body and a cut above his eye, and he told them where the car was. It was out of gas, dirty and with frame damage underneath, and there was blood on multiple places. As Chief Spray interrogated Whilden, he seemed very nervous until they told him that the only charge he'd face was auto theft, raising the question of what he was worried about. Spray's brother and niece ultimately opted not to prosecute Whilden for that either. According to Whilden, he had been driving all night/morning in the CCC Road area.

• Spray is someone I have documented on the Valdosta Police Department page as having a very corrupt history. He was a Valdosta cop accused of stealing police funds in 1982, but the charges were dropped and instead he rose to captain of detectives then chief. In 1994, Valdosta police destroyed crucial forensic evidence in the murder of a woman and her 2-year-old son in which one of their own officers Maurice Cassotta was implicated, prompting a corruption scandal that led Spray to resign. At that time Spray was indicted on charges of stealing government equipment used to fight drug trafficking and was sentenced to prison for 1 year. Spray, a Freemason, is also rumored to have taken bribes to allow brothels to operate and gotten away with molesting two underage girls.

• On November 1, Bobby Moore, who was hunting in the CCC Road area, discovered Tucker's body and reported it to police. They found out Tucker's identity and notified his family in Omaha but at the time they still had no idea who killed him. The Lowndes County Sheriff's Office and GBI pursued various leads, including Harley Whilden -- they did forensics on the car, but the results are never mentioned -- and a weirdly-behaving man seen on October 31 at the intersection of CCC Road and Naylor Road -- of whom they drew a composite. None of that mattered, however, because they would soon find Ellis and he would confess.

• After killing Tucker, Ellis purportedly drove Tucker's car down to Pensacola FL, stole a license plate from a car in a shopping center (all out in public, presumably), and affixed it to his car, then drove west planning to kill himself in California. Before Ellis could get there he was arrested by Nevada Highway Patrol troopers Rosell Owens and Vinten Hartung while sleeping at a rest area near Las Vegas. While they were by the car after running its plates, Ellis began moving around and "zipping up his pants". After Owens tapped on the window to get Ellis's attention, Ellis looked blankly towards Owens (at his gun, according to Owens) even as Owens ordered him out of the car. Then Ellis reached down towards the floorboard where he had a gun stashed, not responding as Owens repeatedly yelled at him to get out. Surprisingly Ellis was not shot for doing this. Finally Ellis obeyed and unlocked the door, but had to be dragged from the car.

• The Nevada troopers discovered that the car was registered to Tucker, a homicide victim in Georgia, and so began asking Ellis questions. Formerly belligerent to the point of nearly threatening an officer's life, Ellis became a paragon of cooperation who spilled everything. They asked Ellis where he got the car and he said he stole it. Then they asked what happened to the owner (Tucker) and Ellis said he killed him. Transporting Ellis to the Clark County Jail, the troopers tape-recorded a statement from him, during which he told the story that's the basis for much of what I've related so far. Ellis said at the beginning of his taped statement "that he may need a lawyer later" but "he wanted to talk to police now about the murder", which is a new one I don't think I've heard before.

• In the course of his confession, Ellis made unexplained repeated references to serial killer Richard Speck. Why he did so is a mystery; Ellis did grow up in Illinois where the murders attributed to Speck happened, but his own murder(s) bore no resemblance to Speck's. However, this parallels a very curious incident from the RFK assassination: after Sirhan Sirhan was taken to the LAPD station for shooting Bobby, he kept talking about the Boston Strangler, displaying an unexplained fascination with the case. The last name of Albert DeSalvo was also found written in Sirhan's notebooks. It would be revealed that Sirhan's CIA hypnotist was likely William Joseph Bryan, who had hypnotized DeSalvo into confessing was so prone to bragging about his Strangler work that it might have slipped into the subconscious of Sirhan during their own sessions. So did something similar happen with Ellis (especially given his and Speck's shared origin in Illinois), in which he was hypnotized by Speck's former "programmer"?

• Another odd fact that came out in the investigation is that Speck matched the composite of the suspect in the disappearance of a 6-year-old white boy missing near the Nevada/Arizona border. That's not too far from the region near Las Vegas where child auctions were alleged by Rusty Nelson and Paul Bonacci to have been held. I have not been able to find this missing child's name but it should be out there somewhere. Nevada authorities believed even at this time (November 8) that Ellis was a serial killer.

• While Ellis was in jail in Lowndes County GA awaiting trial, various law enforcement possibilities considered the possibility that Ellis was behind a nationwide string of killings. As of November 20, Ellis was suspected of perhaps being involved in the Terry Jarolimek and Kevin Kent murders. There was also talk of him being involved in Arizona and Virginia killings but those were not named. In December, state and federal authorities in Nevada met to "decide whether six unsolved Nevada murders were committed by [Ellis]". Their suspicion came about due to "similarities in murder cases in White Pine, Lincoln, Elko and Mineral counties along with two others under Nevada law enforcement jursidiction". Even after Ellis's life sentence for Tucker's murder in September 1989, authorities were still discussing Tucker as a strong suspect in Jarolimek's murder. But ultimately Ellis was never officially linked to any other killings.

• Postscript: Nevada Highway Patrol trooper Vinten Hartung, instrumental in the Ellis investigation, was found in 2001 to have had sex with teenage boys. Hartung reached out to this 16-year-old boy in an AOL chatroom and they ended up having an in-person sexual relationship. This boy also joined a baseball team which Hartung coached, and Hartung was known to supply alcohol to this boy and others on the team, as well as to the boy when they were alone. All that Hartung was ever prosecuted for was the misdemeanor charge of giving alcohol to minors. Because the boy was 16 they supposedly had a consensual relationship, and prosecutors declined to charge him under an anti-sodomy law (admittedly a discriminatory law, but not exactly unjust to use against an evident predator like Hartung) because they somehow felt unable to prove their case even though the existence of a sexual relationship was not in dispute.

Every so often, I come across true crime cases where I don't know exactly what happened but I get a feeling that the officially-told version of events is a cover for some darker truths. This is absolutely once of those cases.