LOS ANGELES – A former trash collector in Los Angeles was convicted Thursday of 10 “Grim Sleeper” serial killings that spanned two decades and targeted vulnerable young black women in the inner city.
Lonnie Franklin Jr. showed no emotion as a clerk read the 10 murder verdicts in Los Angeles County Superior Court after a two-month trial in the potential death penalty case.
Franklin also was found guilty of one count of attempted murder.
Jurors were told to return May 12 for the trial’s penalty phase. Franklin could receive the death penalty.
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The killings from 1985 to 2007 were dubbed the work of the “Grim Sleeper” because of an apparent 14-year gap after one woman survived a gunshot to the chest in 1988.
The crimes went unsolved for decades and community members complained that police ignored the cases because the victims were black, poor and some were prostitutes and drug users.
Much of the violence unfolded during the nation’s crack cocaine epidemic when at least two other serial killers prowled the part of the city then known as South Central.
The 10 victims, including a 15-year-old girl, were fatally shot or strangled and dumped in alleys and garbage bins. Most had traces of cocaine in their systems.
Franklin, 63, a onetime trash collector in the area and a garage attendant for the Los Angeles Police Department, had been hiding in plain sight, said Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman.
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Police eventually connected Franklin to the crimes after a task force was assigned to revisit the case that dozens of officers failed to solve in the 1980s. The DNA of Franklin’s son, collected after a felony arrest, had similarities to genetic material left on the bodies of many of the victims.
An officer posing as a busboy later retrieved pizza crusts and napkins with Franklin’s DNA while he was celebrating at a birthday party.
It proved a match with material found on the breasts and clothing of many of the women and on the zip tie of a trash bag that held the curled-up body of the final victim, Janecia Peters. She was found Jan. 1, 2007, by someone who was rifling through a trash bin and noticed her red fingernails through a hole in the bag.
Silverman described the victims as sisters, daughters and mothers who suffered frailties but had hopes and dreams.
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She projected photos of the 10 women from happier days, many smiling from headshots that captured their youth and the hairstyles of the times. The images were in stark contrast to gory crime scene and autopsy photos also displayed of half-naked bodies sprawled among garbage — images that made family members wince, weep and recoil in the gallery.
Defence lawyer Seymour Amster challenged what he called “inferior science” of DNA and ballistics evidence. During his closing argument, he introduced a new theory: a “mystery man with a mystery gun and mystery DNA” was responsible for all the killings. He said the man was a “nephew” of Franklin’s who was jealous because his uncle had better luck with romance, though he offered no supporting evidence or any name.
Amster based the theory on the testimony of the sole known survivor, Enietra Washington, who was shot in the chest and crawled to safety after being shoved from an orange Ford Pinto in November 1988. She testified that her assailant said he had to stop at his “uncle’s house” for money before the attack.
Washington later led detectives to Franklin’s street.
Silverman scoffed at the “mystery nephew” notion, saying it was as rational an explanation as a space ship killing the women. She said the shooter had just lied to Washington about an uncle and was probably stopping at his house to get his gun.
The attack fit the pattern of seven previous killings and showed how the killer carried out the crimes, Silverman said. The bullet removed from Washington’s chest matched ammo retrieved from the previous victims and she provided a detail that would later prove telling.
Washington described how her attacker took a Polaroid photo of her as she was losing consciousness. Police searching Franklin’s house more than two decades later found a snapshot of the wounded Washington slouched over in a car with a breast exposed. It was hidden behind a wall in his garage.
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