A childhood memory sent his father to prison for murder. Was it real?

The memory of the murder, buried in his mind for 20 years, came back to him in a flash.

Eileen Franklin-Lipsker suddenly knew who had killed her childhood best friend, 8-year-old Susan Nason, who had been abducted in September 1969 and found with her head crushed. She knew exactly how it had happened and who had done it. She was there.

The killer was my father, she said.

Investigators and prosecutors accepted his story, which became the basis for the 1990 murder trial of George Franklin, a 51-year-old retired firefighter. At stake was not just Franklin’s freedom, but the validity of a much-hyped theory about the dynamics of the mind. Was “repressed memory,” touted by advocates as a defense against trauma, a real phenomenon or the invention of ill-informed therapists?

The government’s star witness against her father, Franklin-Lipsker said she had forgotten for decades what happened to Susan, her neighbor and third-grade classmate at Foster City Elementary School. It all came flooding back to her while she was playing with her own daughter.

She remembers being in her father’s Volkswagen van when he picked Susan up from their suburban neighborhood and drove to a secluded area. She remembers her father assaulting Susan, then lifting a rock and crushing the girl’s skull. She remembers a ring on her friend’s finger being broken as the victim tried to ward off the blow.

Police had San Mateo County prosecutors found a ring at the crime scene, which corroborates Franklin-Lipsker’s story. How could she have known if it wasn’t there?

Defense attorney Douglas Horngrad had an answer, and he tried desperately to present it to the jury. The San Mateo Times and other newspapers had covered the case extensively in 1969, as had television networks, and Horngrad had compiled a collection of clippings and videos showing that police had publicly discussed the ring and other details. Judge Thomas Smith, himself a former prosecutor, refused to let the jury see the coverage.

“He knew that if he let these items in, it would jeopardize the prosecution, and he didn’t want to do that,” Horngrad told The Times in a recent interview.

The defendant, with his impassive face, rough features and seemingly devoid of emotion, was difficult to understand. He could not provide an alibi. And testimony from Franklin-Lipsker and his sister portrayed him as a violent and sexually abusive alcoholic.

Franklin-Lipsker’s story evolved. In one account, her sister Janice was in the van; in another, she was not. The murder happened in the morning, then in the late afternoon. But those inconsistencies didn’t stop jurors from disbelieving her, said Harry MacLean, who chronicled the case in the book Once Upon a Time: A True Story of Memory, Murder and the Law.

“The problem was that the jury took that as evidence of the damage she had suffered from having George Franklin as a father,” MacLean said. “It made her more sympathetic.”

No physical evidence ever linked Franklin to the scene, but the jury convicted him of first-degree murder.

“George Franklin was an offensive human being,” MacLean said, adding that jurors he interviewed were able to rationalize the verdict by saying, “If he didn’t kill Susan Nason, he did enough other things that he should pay.”

Calling him a “depraved and wicked man,” the judge sentenced Franklin to life in prison and said he regretted not being able to send him to death row.

“At 30,000 feet, this case is very timely. The explosion of child sexual abuse has had a huge impact on the culture,” MacLean said.

When Franklin was charged, McMartin’s preschool sexual assault case – which alleged widespread satanic ritual abuse – was still winding through the Los Angeles courts, on its way to zero convictions.

The Franklin case was “the first of the persecutions for recovered memory,” said Richard Ofshe, professor emeritus of social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of “Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria.”

“This is all medieval voodoo,” Ofshe said. “It’s just mythology. There was a time when this stuff was very popular. It was the most important psychiatric quackery of our time.”

Some therapists have put forward the idea that a person’s emotional disturbances can easily be attributed to forgotten trauma.

“These charlatans were telling them, ‘The reason your life is in disarray is because you have suffered trauma that you have repressed, and we have to get to the root of it,’” Ofshe said.

At the time, a very popular book was “The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse” by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. Among its controversial passages: “If you can’t remember a specific instance (of abuse) but still feel like something abusive happened to you, it probably was.”

The Franklin case proved pivotal in the career of Elizabeth Loftus, a memory specialist who would become one of the most frequently cited and influential researchers in psychology.

Loftus viewed the so-called recovered memories as concoctions “woven not from concrete facts but from the vaporous breezes of wishes, dreams, fears, desires.”

She had testified as an expert witness for Franklin’s defense team and said she found the courtroom “awash with credulity” about the “mythical powers of repression.”

At the time, her research showed that the details of actual memories could be altered, but not that “you could implant a full, rich, detailed memory” of the kind Franklin-Lipsker appeared to possess, she told the Times in a recent interview.

Fueled by the Franklin case, Loftus designed a false-memory experiment: The researchers reminded participants of three real events from their childhood—the stories had been obtained from older relatives—and added a false fourth story, telling each subject that he had gotten lost in a mall as a child and been rescued by an elderly woman.

In total, 25 percent of the study participants developed partial or complete “memories” of the fabricated event. Loftus and other researchers have since successfully implanted false memories of near-drownings, dog attacks and other events that never happened in the subjects.

“There is now a fairly extensive literature on the possibilities of preserving memories,” Loftus said. “That is, I would say, one of the benefits that comes directly from the Franklin case.”

Eileen Franklin-Lipsker has a book deal. She has appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Donahue.” Shelley Long, of “Cheers” fame, played her in a TV movie.

But in 1995, a federal judge overturned his father’s conviction, citing flaws in the case, including that news footage had been withheld from jurors.

The case collapsed as prosecutors prepared to retry her. Franklin-Lipsker’s mother, who had been a witness in court, eventually came to doubt her daughter’s story. Janice Franklin said she and her sister had both been hypnotized to enhance their supposed memories and that both lied in court when they denied it. Janice said her sister knew that testimony elicited through hypnosis was inadmissible under the law.

To undermine Franklin-Lipsker’s credibility, the main witness told police that she remembered her father committing another murder, in 1976. This time, George Franklin had a solid alibi — he was at a union meeting — and DNA evidence excluded him. (Another man was later convicted in the case.)

Prosecutors decided not to risk trying Franklin a second time in the Susan Nason murder case. After more than six years in prison, he was released.

Cases of recovered memory “multiplied like beanstalks,” but “once the reversal happened, everyone reanalyzed it,” Franklin’s attorney said.

“I think it’s pretty well accepted in the criminal justice system that you cannot and should not charge someone with a crime based on a ‘repressed memory’ unless there is corroboration,” Horngrad said. “No prosecutor worth their salt is going to bring a case like this.”