JOSEPH Paul Franklin will be executed on Wednesday.

The 63-year-old white supremacist, known as "The Racist Killer", went on a killing spree between 1977 and 1980. Franklin was convicted of eight murders and is thought to have killed a total of 20 people, most of whom he stalked and shot with a sniper rifle.

Just days before his execution date, Franklin spoke to CNN reporter Kyung Lah. Franklin told her he'll be going to heaven.

"Well I'm hoping to get a stay (of execution). It might not happen, but if it does, I'm willing to accept the will of the Lord," Franklin said.

"It's not a burning hell because I'm serving the Lord though. It'll be the kingdom of heaven for me because I've repented."

Franklin has no shortage of crimes for which to repent, but he was sentenced to death for one in particular, the murder of Gerald Gordon. Franklin shot Gordon dead in front of his wife and three children outside a synagogue.

"I felt like I was at war. The survival of the white race was at stake," Franklin told CNN. "I considered it my mission, my three-year mission. Same length of time Jesus was on his mission, from the time he was 30 to 33."

He targeted Jews, black people and interracial couples.

"I figured once I started doing it and showed them how, other white supremacists would do the same thing."

Franklin says his hatred for other races sprung from an abusive childhood, which led him to join white supremacy groups and read Adolf Hitler's manifesto, Mein Kampf.

"I had this real strange feeling in my mind," Franklin said. "I've never felt that way about any other book that I read. It was something weird about that book."

Franklin was born with the name James Clayton Vaughn. At the age of 26, he adopted the names Joseph Paul, in honour of Nazi propaganda minister Paul Joseph Goebbels, and Franklin, in a reference to Benjamin Franklin, one of America's "Founding Fathers".

The killer claims his development was slowed by a poor diet.

"I've always been at least 10 years or more behind other people in their maturity," he said.

Even at this late stage, there is a slim chance that Franklin's execution could be delayed. Missouri's governor Jay Nixon just denied his request for clemency, but one of Franklin's victims, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, has filed a last ditch legal motion with the American Civil Liberties Union.

"The government has no business at all being in the business of killing people," Flynt said. He's fighting for the principle, not the man.

Franklin tried to kill Flynt after seeing photos of an interracial couple in Hustler.

"It just made me sick," Franklin said. "I think whites marry with whites, blacks with blacks, Indians with Indians. Orientals with Orientals. I threw the magazine down and thought, I'm gonna kill that guy."

He managed to shoot Flynt twice, paralysing him from the waist down, but the publisher survived. Now Franklin talks about him like an old friend.

"My old pal Larry! Tell him I appreciate that. Thanks," Franklin said when Lah brought up his unlikely ally.

Franklin says he's no longer violent or a racist. He claims to regret his crimes. Faced with execution at the hands of the state, his attitude seems to be one of mild disapproval.

"It's just not a system that operates according to the Bible," he said. "The scriptures tell us when someone repents, God forgives them. Everything is forgotten, once forgiven. But the state doesn't think that way."

Franklin may have repented, but he remains a hero to America's white supremacist groups. That doesn't seem to bother him at all.

"I'd rather people like me than not like me, like most people," he said. "I'd rather be loved than hated."

Franklin's execution is scheduled for 12:01am Wednesday, local time.

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