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Eileen testified that she climbed back to help but was too frightened to do anything. She then recalls her father and Susan at the bottom of a wooded hill and her father raising a rock above his head. "I think I screamed. I did something that made Susie look up at me. She met my eyes." That look, she testified, was replicated by her own six-year-old daughter one day in January 1989, when she looked up from her coloring and asked, "Isn't that right, Mommy?" It triggered Franklin-Lipsker's first memory. She remembers seeing a smashed ring on Susan's bloodied finger and then being grabbed from behind by her father, who knocked her down and told her that this was her fault. It was her idea to invite Susan into the van, he said; if she told about this, no one would believe her -- and he would kill her.
| Franklin-Lipsker's story has some corroboration. The prosecution's other witnesses testified that a mattress was found over Susan's body and that the girl died of a skull fracture, possibly from a rock. The defense intends to point out discrepancies in what Eileen told various family members and her marriage counselor. Also, she could have learned circumstances of the murder from Susan Nason's older sister Shirley, who was present when the police visited the Nason family after the body had been found. A curious fact that can be used to different effect by both sides is that Eileen's older sister Janice went to San Mateo County authorities five years ago with her own suspicions about their father's involvement in the Nason murder. Police said they did not have enough to go on, and no investigation was pursued.
The defense is also expected to show that Franklin-Lipsker hopes to profit from her story. She has been deluged with book and movie deals by literary agents and entertainment lawyers, and it may not help that she told her story to NBC News in January.
Judge James Browning Jr., who as a U.S. attorney in 1976 prosecuted Patty Hearst for a Symbionese Liberation Army bank holdup, is expected to turn the case over to a jury. Franklin-Lipsker explained to NBC why she is putting her family through such a wrenching ordeal. "There was nothing I could do at the time to protect Susan," she said. "I was the only other person there. And I just feel that I owe it to her to tell the truth." Whatever the outcome, it is hard to imagine the Franklins being like other families again. If they ever were.