Hinds Rape Suspect Was Not In Jail When Four Women Went Missing

  In July 1999 the body of a woman investigators call Jane Doe #1 was found near an oil well on Ricky Franklin’s property in Bolton.
  That same month, 41 year old Mable Conic disappeared.
  She was last seen near her home on Botnick Court and Mill Street in Jackson.
  People who knew Conic say she was a drug addict and a prostitute.
  Friday one man said, “She was playing a dangerous game.”
  A dangerous game that may of cost Conic her life.
  On Halloween 1999 the skeletal remains of Coinc and two other women Shannon McKinney and Jane Doe # 2 were discovered deep in the woods behind Franklin’s home. 
  Around the time the three women went missing, Franklin was not in jail. In fact, in the years before he had only been arrested for a string of misdemeanors.
  In March 2004 Franklin pled guilty to assaulting a man with brass knuckles.
  He spent a year in state prison on that conviction.
  Former Hinds county district attorney Faye Peterson says by that time, the FBI had already teamed up with the Hinds county sheriff’s department to investigate the unsolved murders linked to Franklin.
  “They were able to find certain details that were similar as far as the locations where the victims were picked up and last seen, information about a particular vehicle… and they said know what this is the same guy,” Peterson said.
  From 2006 through 2008, Franklin was held at the Raymond Detention Center awaiting trial for Mabel Conic’s murder.
  But Judge William Barnett ordered him released in 2008 because prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to take him to trial.