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HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — Jeffrey Franklin, the man convicted of killing his parents when he was 17, was denied parole on August 17.

Under Alabama law, an inmate with a life sentence can become parole eligible after serving 15 years. In 2013, Franklin wrote a letter to Judge Loyd Little, the man that sentenced him asking to consider moving his parole hearing to an earlier date.

“So, as a life sentence = 15 years, I am doing time from my conviction [a plea of guilty] from June 2001 to June 2016. But, I figured I ought to be doing 15 years from March 1998 until March 2013, because life is 15 years before eligibility for parole…”

Jeffrey Franklin

Judge Little had been retired since 2010. The court system did not move Franklin’s parole and he was denied in September of 2016.

Franklin was sentenced to five life sentences, with the possibility of parole, after the brutal attack on Camelot Drive in South Huntsville.

Franklin was just 17 when he killed his parents and injured three of his siblings with a sledgehammer and a hatchet on March 10, 1998. An attack, people say, that was brought on by devil worship.

Jeffrey Franklin, a Tuten client, pleaded guilty to killing his parents in a crime tied to the occult

He wrote about the murders leading up to them. In those writings, Franklin detailed what he planned on doing to his family, along with several pornographic and violent drawings.

Jeff Bennett, a retired Huntsville Police Department (HPD) investigator, had spent a good portion of his career studying occult-related crimes. He said in an interview with News 19’s Brian Lawson, “In Jeff’s case, he actually was, intended to sacrifice, at least two of his family members. He wrote . . . ‘Hail Satan, shall offer up my mother and sister, to thee lord Satan.’”

A neighbor, who saw Jeffrey leaving the home covered in blood, called the police. He led police on a chase starting at Ditto Landing where they found him, and ending in a family’s yard near his own home.

Franklin was shirtless when police handcuffed him. He had carved an upside-down cross into his torso. Mac McCutcheon, retired HPD investigator, said Franklin had likely been awake for days leading up to the murders.

Robert Tuten represented Franklin leading up to his trial and said that it wasn’t the devil worship that caused this. It was that he had been abusing his Ritalin, snorting large amounts of his controlled medication.

Tuten said, “It pushed him into a total psychosis.”

Franklin has since been moved to Bullock Correctional Facility in Union Springs, Ala. His parole hearing on August 17, 2022, was his second hearing since being incarcerated. He will continue to be eligible for parole.