Uncovering a serial killer in Los Angeles
Insights into race and crime, universal grief and ultimate justice
When journalist Christine Pelisek moved from Ottawa to Los Angeles in the 1990s, she was stunned to learn violent murders there were as common as palm trees. At one point L.A. had six serial killers — six! — operating simultaneously.
What especially struck Pelisek, crime reporter for the alternative newspaper LA Weekly, was the inequity in community response. When a beautiful young blond student disappeared, the media went crazy.
But when 38 Black women and teen girls — many struggling with drug addictions — turned up dead in the South Central area, their bodies dumped like garbage in squalid alleys, the community barely took notice.
As one homicide cop told Pelisek, “The obvious difficulty in working these cases is no one cares.”
Pelisek did. As she recounts in her true-crime memoir The Grim Sleeper: The Lost Women of South Central, in 2006, she started to doggedly pursue links among victims, interview grieving family members and prod detectives to reopen cold cases. In 2008, she broke the story that a ruthless serial killer was still at large. She and her editor nicknamed him the Grim Sleeper, based on an apparent hiatus in his decades-long rampage. Her work lit a fire under city council and police. In 2010, advanced DNA testing led to the arrest of a 58-year-old local husband and father. He was convicted in 2016 of 10 murders, although he may have committed dozens more.
With insights into race and crime, universal grief and ultimate justice, The Grim Sleeper succeeds in being both disturbing and satisfying. The book’s main focus is neither the murderer nor Pelisek’s involvement. It’s the victims. Each gets a chapter to herself, a family context, a photo. “This is their story,” Pelisek insists. Some readers may accuse Pelisek — white, Canadian, professional (now with People magazine) — of appropriating stories that weren’t hers to tell.
The victims’ families, however, fully supported her involvement and credit her with being their voice in a system that dismissed them. Journalist Marcia Kaye (marciakaye.com) is a frequent contributor to the Star’s Books pages.