Jury convicts ‘Grim Sleeper’ of 10 murders
Between 1985 and 2007, Franklin killed 9womenand a teen in seedy section of L. A.
LOS ANGELES — More than 30 years after the first victim’s body was found sprawled in a South Los Angeles alley, the man authorities dubbed the Grim Sleeper serial killer was found guilty Thursday of a series of slayings that spanned more than two decades.
The verdict means that Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a former Los Angeles police garage attendant and city garbage collector, officially becomes one of California’s most prolific and enduring serial killers. The mur-
der charges at his trial spanned deaths from 1985 to 2007, with a gap of more than 13 years that earned him his ominous nickname.
After a day and a half of deliberations, jurors found Franklin guilty of 10 counts of murder in the killings of nine women and a 15-yearold girl. Jurors also found Franklin guilty of one count of attempted murder.
The trial lasted nearly three months. The victims were all young and black, with some leading troubled lives during the chaotic 1980s in South Los Angeles.
The dead were left along a corridor in the Manchester Square neighborhood. Their partially clothed or naked bodies — some decomposing — were found amid the filth and garbage of alleyways. All were left without identification, and each was initially labeled Jane Doe.
Franklin’s fate will be determined in the next phase of the trial, when jurors hear evidence to help them decide whether he should be executed or sentenced to life in prison without parole. Prosecutors are expected to present evidence that Franklin killed at least five more women for which he wasn’t charged.
“They suffered from the same frailties and the same imperfections that all humans do, and they had the same hopes and the same dreams for their futures that we all have,” deputy district attorney Beth Silverman told jurors during closing arguments in the trial. “None of them deserved to be brutally dumped like trash as if their lives had no meaning.”
The deaths of the women, some of whom were drug addicts or worked as prostitutes, failed to elicit the same alarm that put Los Angeles on high alert during rampages of other prolific serial killers in Southern California, such as the Hillside Stranglers or Richard Ramirez, the so-called Night Stalker.
The slayings in the midto late 1980s coincided with a surge of homicides in South L.A. linked to the crack cocaine epidemic.
Several other serial killers were operating in the same area in those years. Michael Hughes was later convicted of killing seven women, Chester Turner of 14 women and a fetus. Both are on California’s death row.
In the case of the Grim Sleeper, the victims’ deaths would not be connected for decades, and police kept the slayings quiet despite suspicions that a serial killer was stalking young black women.
That decision led to outrage and condemnation from many who came to believe that the killer was able to continue as a result of police indifference.
Prosecutors argued that Franklin was connected to each of the 10 slain victims, as well as an 11th who survived, by DNA evidence, ballistics or both. Franklin’s DNA was found on seven victims.
A gun found in his home was used to kill one woman, according to court testimony. Police criminalists testified that bullets from eight other victims — seven of whom were killed and another who survived — were fired from another weapon that was never recovered. Franklin’s DNA was on the bodies of three of those women, according to testimony.
“The evidence in this case is the voice of the victims who can no longer speak for themselves,” Silverman said during the trial.
Franklin, 63, did not testify. The defense argued that other men could have committed the slayings, pointing to DNA not belonging to Franklin that was found on some of the women’s bodies, their clothes and the crime scenes.
In his closing argument, defense attorney Seymour Amster suggested that a relative or an associate of Franklin’s who called him “uncle” was responsible. He seized on testimony by Enietra Washington, believed to be the Grim Sleeper’s only survivor, who told jurors that she was raped and shot by an assailant nearly 30 years ago. In court, she identified Franklin as her attacker.
Amster pointed to one account Washington gave police in which she said she accepted a ride from a “youngster” in his 20s who told her he needed to make a stop at his uncle’s house to pick up some money. Washington testified that the house where he stopped was Franklin’s home on 81st Street. After the stop, she said, she was sexually assaulted and shot.
Amster said Washington’s description of her at- tacker did not match Franklin, who would have been 36 at the time.
“It is our position that there is a nephew, or a youngster, who is involved and did each and every murder,” the defense attorney told jurors. He did not name a possible suspect.
The prosecutor mocked that argument as a “grand conspiracy theory,” noting that Amster had waited to raise it until the last day of trial. Silverman pointed out that Washington told police that her attacker took photographs of her. Police later found a photograph of Washington in the wall of Franklin’s garage, Silverman told jurors.
Ballistics tests showed that Washington was shot by the same firearm used to kill seven victims in the case, the prosecutor argued.
The victims, in the order they died, were: Debra Jackson, 29; Henrietta Wright, 35; Barbara Ware, 23; Bernita Sparks, 25; Mary Lowe, 26; Lachrica Jefferson, 22; Alicia Alexander, 18; Princess Berthomieux, 15; Valerie McCorvey, 35; and Janecia Peters, 25.
The trial highlighted the difficulty authorities encountered in identifying the perpetrator until breakthroughs in DNA science helped detectives zero in on Franklin.
Police began to connect the victims after Peters’ body was found in a garbage bag in a dumpster in 2007. DNA taken from the scene matched evidence from two earlier slayings, prompting investigators to begin looking for DNA matches with killings from the 1980s and more recent deaths up to the early 2000s.
Detectives, however, did not know to whom the DNA belonged.
In 2008, officials checked DNA taken from state prisoners but didn’t find a match.
A year later, then-state Attorney General Jerry Brown approved a new technique called a “familial search” that allowed officials to check whether a crime suspect’s DNA partly matched that of anyone in the state’s offender DNA database.
Another check produced a partial match to Franklin’s son, whose DNA had been taken when he was arrested in 2008 and charged with firearm and drug offenses.
Investigators focused their efforts on the elder Franklin and launched a surveillance operation.