Daddy's Little Girl

By MARGARET CARLSON

All happy families are alike, wrote Tolstoy, but unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way. Perhaps none was unhappier last Thursday than the family of Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, who took the stand in municipal court in Redwood City, Calif., to accuse her father, George Franklin Sr., of sexually molesting and then beating to death her best friend, Susan Nason, in her presence more than 20 years ago.

When Franklin-Lipsker, now 29, first made that stunning disclosure last November, it broke open a case that local authorities thought they would never solve. Her story was credible enough for police to arrest Franklin, 50, a retired fireman and real estate agent, for first-degree murder and hold him on $2 million bail. Since then, the Franklin family has split apart. One of Franklin-Lipsker's three sisters distrusts her. Her brother, George Jr., will take the stand against her in their father's defense. Eileen's mother, who divorced George Sr. in 1975, is said to be "100%" supporting Eileen.

The case against the father rests almost entirely on the daughter. Thus, much like a rape victim's, her character and credibility will be on trial when a jury determines what her father did on the afternoon of Sept. 22, 1969, when Susan, 8, did not return home from playing. Two months later, Susan's decomposed body was discovered near Crystal Springs Reservoir. Did little Eileen Franklin actually see her father murder Susan and repress it for two decades? Could her mind be playing tricks on her -- or worse, could she be getting revenge on the father who once doted on her but abandoned her when she was 14 to go live with another woman and her children?

As Franklin-Lipsker took the stand to tell her story under oath for the first time, she looked utterly normal, an attractive California suburbanite reminiscent in her demeanor and tightly pulled-back hair of Maureen Dean sitting primly behind her husband John during the Watergate hearings. Father and daughter avoided looking at each other. But when Eileen sheepishly admitted that she considered undergoing hypnosis for weight loss (hypnosis- induced memories are inadmissible in California criminal trials), George Franklin smiled and tried to catch his daughter's eye, as if he saw for a moment his pudgy little girl, not the accuser who sent him to prison.

Franklin hardly looks the part of the monster, as he sits not 20 feet from his daughter. When he was arrested, he looked like evil incarnate: barrel- chested and menacing, with his long hair brushed up into points. Since then he has lost 40 lbs.; he is now well-coiffed, and has donned steel-rimmed glasses.

When she told her tale, Franklin-Lipsker became otherworldly, retreating into herself, a child of eight again, riding along in her father's Volkswagen van. As she now remembers that day, they stopped and offered a ride to Susan Nason, who lived five houses away. The two girls piled into the back to bounce on the mattress until her father pulled off the road near the reservoir and joined them. Eileen got into the front passenger seat; when she looked back she saw her father holding Susan's hands above her head, "on top of her, her legs spread apart . . . with pelvis against pelvis . . . and Susan saying, 'Stop, no, don't.' "

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.