On October 8, 1977, Gerald Gordon, 42, was shot in the parking lot of Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue in Richmond Heights, a suburb of Saint Louis, Missouri. A hidden shooter in tall grass nearby opened fire with a high-powered hunting rifle as worshippers were leaving a bar mitzvah; two other men were wounded. Gordon was taken to a St. Louis County hospital and died in the operating room about two hours after the shooting.

The case lay cold for years until a mid-1990s confession by Joseph Paul Franklin, who said he selected the synagogue from a phone book and planned the ambush. In February 1997 a St. Louis County jury convicted Franklin of capital murder in Gordon’s death and imposed a death sentence.