“I’m overwhelmed,” Eileen told reporters after the verdict in November 1990. “I’m extremely relieved that it’s over. I know I’ve done the right thing.”
But no, she wasn’t happy about the result, she said. “There can’t be a true victory for me because my father’s still going to prison.”
Margaret Nason, Susan’s mother, said, “It does lay it to rest, 21 years later.” She and her husband Don Nason still lived in the same Foster City home where they had once been raising Susan and her older sister.
Speaking as to why detectives had never taken a good look at George back in 1969, San Mateo County Deputy District Attorney Elaine Tipton, the lead prosecutor, said, “Twenty-one years ago, it was assumed that persons who molested children were strangers, outsiders and phantoms. They appeared and then they went away.” At the time, she explained, authorities weren’t inclined to suspect a familiar face from the neighborhood.
“I’m convinced the verdict will stand,” she said.
In January 1992, San Mateo Municipal Court Judge Thomas M. Smith gave George a life sentence with the possibility of parole, calling him a “depraved and wicked man.”
While she had sounded conflicted about her father’s ultimate fate, Eileen had written in a letter to the probation department, which provided the sentencing recommendation: “George Franklin should spend the last moments of his life imprisoned, which is far better than how Susan Nason spent hers.”
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