The memory that convicted a father

Susan Nason and Eileen Franklin had been best friends since they were little girls in the same Foster City, California neighborhood. They walked to school together and played together after school. On September 22, 1969, “Susie” — as she is referred to by Eileen — stopped by a friend’s house to return a pair of gym shoes. This would be the last ordinary errand of her brief life — she vanished on the walk home. She was only 8 years old, just days shy of her 9th birthday.

Her remains were found several weeks later near the Crystal Springs Reservoir off Highway 92. Susan’s mother identified the body.

The case went cold. No arrests. Twenty years of nothing.

Then, in January of 1989, Eileen Franklin was at home with her young daughter when the child turned toward her — and, in that moment, something about the way she moved stopped Eileen in her tracks. She said a memory came flooding back that she hadn’t known was missing. She was a little girl again. She was in her father’s Volkswagen van. Susan was there. And what happened next, she said, she’d buried so completely she hadn’t known it was gone.

First, Eileen’s husband called the police anonymously. Then, Eileen called them herself. Over the course of six different conversations with detectives, her memories grew more detailed and specific: the clothes Susan was wearing, the location she was at, the crushed silver ring on Susan’s tiny finger. Detectives agreed that those details matched information in the case that had never been released to the general public. Based on this, they arrested Eileen’s father.

George Franklin, a retired Foster City firefighter and father of five, went to trial for murder in 1990. There was no actual physical evidence tying him to the crime. No DNA. No forensics. No corroborating witnesses. The whole prosecution rested on one thing: his daughter’s memory of something she said she’d watched and then forgotten for 20 years. The jury deliberated for less than a day. They convicted him. George Franklin was sentenced to life.

This was the first time in American history that a criminal conviction was built completely on a recovered repressed memory.

Just two years later, actress Shelley Long — Diane from Cheers — played Eileen Franklin in the 1992 network TV movie called Fatal Memories based on the famous case.

What the Jury Never Knew

Here’s what was true about the Franklin family before any of this happened or went to trial. Eileen was the middle of five children and, by her own account, her father’s favorite — he told her she was beautiful when the neighborhood kids called her ugly. Her older sister Janice said George had molested her throughout childhood. George’s own son recorded a cassette tape calling his father “an abusive alcoholic father,” which Buried, the 2021 documentary about the case plays in full.

But in the courtroom, memory scientist Elizabeth Loftus testified on behalf of the defense that repressed memories have no reliable scientific foundation and that very specific and detailed false memories can be built without the person ever even suspecting it. She argued that memory isn’t a recording; it’s a reconstruction and can quietly change and evolve over time. The jury still sided with Eileen.

What they didn’t know was that buried in the case file was a detective’s handwritten note from a 1989 interview with Eileen. It read: “Wit/S hypnotized to lose weight.”

California law bars testimony from witnesses who’ve been hypnotized. Eileen had sworn under oath that her memories came back on their own — spontaneously, while looking at her daughter. The defense was blocked from sharing with the jury those 1969 newspaper clippings that could’ve proved that every single detail that Eileen claimed to have witnessed firsthand had already been reported publicly at the time of Susan’s death.

In 1995, a federal judge threw out the conviction. The trial judge had allowed prosecutors to treat George’s silence during a prison visit with Eileen as a confession. When she urged her father to tell the truth, he remained silent and instead, pointed to a sign on the wall warning that conversations were being monitored. His silence was not a confession but a man choosing to assert his Fifth Amendment rights.

With a retrial scheduled, Eileen’s sister Janice came forward. She told prosecutors both sisters had been hypnotized before the trial — and that they’d agreed between themselves to lie about it in court, because they knew hypnotic testimony would be thrown out. The retrial collapsed. In July 1996, all charges were dropped and George Franklin walked out of prison exonerated after more than six years inside.

In the end, George Franklin sued his daughter, the prosecutors, and the psychologists who’d testified against him. Every case was dismissed. He received nothing.

There was one more thing. While George was still incarcerated, Eileen accused him of two more murders — Bay Area women who were killed in 1976. DNA from those scenes ruled him out completely. Eventually, that particular DNA was matched to a convicted rapist named Rodney Halbower, who was convicted of those murders in 2018. The other memories had pointed at the wrong man.

Eileen Franklin has assumed a new identity and now lives in a different state with a different name. She’s been widowed twice. She declined to appear in Buried, the four-part Showtime docuseries streaming on Paramount+, which goes back through every piece of evidence and every inconsistency in the story. The director said something that’s hard to unhear: George Franklin may still have been responsible for Susan’s death — even if the memories that convicted him were false.

Susan Nason was just 8 years old, only days from her 9th birthday. San Mateo County detectives still accept tips. Nobody has ever been charged with her murder.