Father’s plea ends Taylor County case of adopted girl parents kept in chicken coop
The infamous case of two Taylor County parents who locked their adopted daughter away in a chicken coop finally has ended with the father pleading guilty.
Samuel Franklin’s plea came nearly seven years after a Superior Court jury found his wife Diana Franklin guilty of confining their daughter in various outbuildings on the family’s property outside Butler, denying the girl food and comfort, and on one occasion putting a gun to her head and threatening to shoot.
The story made headlines here and abroad, drawing international media attention.
The wife, then 48, went to prison in 2015 after she was convicted of 19 counts of first-degree cruelty to children, eight of false imprisonment and one of aggravated assault. Her husband’s charges still were pending.
Samuel Franklin finally pleaded guilty this month to one count each of child molestation, false imprisonment and first-degree cruelty to children, said Assistant District Attorney George Lipscomb, the prosecutor on the case.
Superior Court Judge Ben Land sentenced Samuel Franklin to 20 years in prison with eight to serve and the rest on probation, Lipscomb said. Accused of withholding food, locking the girl in a closet and watching her shower, he will have to register as a sex offender, the prosecutor said.
Lipscomb said the case hit delays after the mother’s trial partly because of COVID-19 restrictions on the courts, and because of attorney turnover, as a newly elected district attorney in 2020 fired the prosecutor handling the case.
Another holdup was the question of whether Diana Franklin’s incriminating journal entries could be used as evidence against her husband, the prosecutor said. The judge was prepared to allow that, he said.
The trial evidence
During the wife’s trial, prosecutors used passages from her journals to corroborate the testimony of the daughter, who was in Franklin’s custody from age 10 in 2007 to 15 in 2012, when social workers removed her from the 73-acre property.
The Franklins moved there in 2009, sharing a two-bedroom home with their three sons, but housed the girl elsewhere.
They locked her away without food or water, and sometimes without clothing, in buildings that had no plumbing or power. Among those structures was a chicken coop, an outhouse, a cinderblock garage, and a shipping container.
The mother in journals referred to the outhouse as the daughter’s “new jail” that was “perfect for her” and even drew a smiling face next to the sentence.
“Today (the child) was let out of solitary confinement,” Franklin wrote in one excerpt. In another, after the girl was locked up for stealing saltine crackers, the mother wrote that “she gets three crackers a day.”
The daughter testified that when she once threatened to commit suicide, Franklin pointed a gun at her and said, “I’ll do it for you.”
The daughter said also that she was forced to strip before being beaten with a belt buckle, that she was shocked with electronic collars designed for training dogs, and that she was tied by the neck to a tree when the mother told her she was gulping food like a dog.
Lipscomb said the girl’s own journal entries were particularly heartbreaking: In one series she counted down to an approaching birthday, hoping the Franklins would allow her to celebrate, because they had not let her do that before.
When the birthday finally arrived, they let her come into the house to watch TV with the family, who gave her some cookies to eat before sending her back to an outbuilding for the night, she wrote.
Attorneys at Diana Franklin’s trial said social workers investigating a complaint finally took the girl from her parents’ custody on May 25, 2012, exactly five years after her adoption. Being a victim of child abuse, she was never identified by name in news reports.
She was 18 when the case went to trial. She’s now 25 and married, and has a child of her own, Lipscomb said.
This story was originally published May 13, 2022 at 3:29 PM.