David Allen Jones was a part-time janitor who could barely read. In 1995 he was convicted of murdering three women in South Los Angeles, Debra Williams, Mary Edwards and Tammie Christmas, and sentenced to thirty-six years to life. Questioned without a lawyer, he had admitted using drugs with the women in the places where their bodies were later found, and the jury heard that as a confession. He served eleven years. DNA later showed that two of the three had been killed by Chester Turner, and police and prosecutors said they were confident Turner was the likely killer of the third.
Turner was born on November 5, 1966, in Warren, Arkansas, and came to Los Angeles with his mother at five, after his parents separated. He went to public schools, dropped out of Locke High School, and worked as a cook and delivery driver for Domino's Pizza while living with his mother. When she moved to Utah he drifted between homeless shelters and missions. He fathered four children with different women; some were raised by his mother after his arrest. Through the late 1980s and 1990s he was repeatedly jailed for theft and drug possession, from 1987 to 1989, from 1989 to 1992 and from 1993 to 1995, and again for car theft, and in April 1997 for assaulting an officer and cruelty to an animal. The killings fit into the gaps.
Most of them happened in a corridor four blocks wide on either side of Figueroa Street, between Gage Avenue and 108th Street. Almost all the women were Black. Most were addicted to crack cocaine, several were homeless, and several were working as prostitutes. Each was raped and strangled and left partly or wholly undressed, in alleys, on trash piles, in garages and behind empty buildings. The first known victim, Diane Johnson, twenty-one, was found by two passing motorists on March 9, 1987, in a road construction site west of the harbor. In June 1987 an eleven-year-old boy, Alvin McThomas, found Elandra Joyce Bunn, thirty-three, on a pile of trash, her eyes battered and her head and neck cut. Annette Ernest, twenty-six, from Louisiana, was found on the shoulder of a road on October 29, 1987; her mother, Mildred White, was a friend of Jerri Johnson Tripplett, whose daughter would be killed six years later.
In January 1989 Anita Fishman Breier, thirty-one, was found outside a garage in an alley off Figueroa. Her nephew remembered her as upbeat and happy, and her sister, Suzanne, had been trying to help her through her addiction. On September 23, 1989, Regina Nadine Washington, twenty-seven, was found in a garage off Figueroa. She was about six months pregnant, and the death of the fetus was ruled a homicide. On November 16, 1992, Debra Williams was found on West 98th Street in Vermont Vista; her age appears as twenty-eight in some records and thirty-two in others, and her first name is also spelled Deborah. On December 16 Mary Edwards, forty-one or forty-two by different accounts, was found on the 9700 block of South Figueroa. In April 1993 Andrea Tripplett, twenty-nine, was found behind a vacant building on Figueroa; she was five and a half months pregnant, but California law at the time did not treat a fetus at that stage as viable and no charge was brought for it. On May 16, 1993, Desarae Ellemae Jones, twenty-nine, was found in a backyard. Her brother Frank described her as smart, outgoing and funny, and said that before her addiction took hold she had worked at a rest home for the elderly.
Natalie Joan Price, thirty-one, was found beside a vacant house in Vermont Knolls on February 12, 1995. On November 6, 1996, Mildred Williams Beasley, forty-five, originally from Michigan, married and the mother of a teenage son, was found in the bushes beside the 110 Freeway. Cynthia Annette Johnson, thirty, was strangled in the Green Meadows neighborhood in February 1997. On February 3, 1998, Paula Donnell Vance, thirty-eight, who was homeless and mentally ill, was found at the Olympia Tool business; five security cameras recorded parts of her murder, and in the frames the killer was a dark shadow and little more. One camera would have caught his face but had swung away moments before he came into view. The last known victim, Brenda Bries, thirty-nine, was found strangled in a portable toilet near Little Tokyo on April 6, 1998, about fifty yards from the hotel where Turner was staying.
Nothing about the investigation found him. In March 2002, working as a security guard at a homeless shelter downtown, he asked a forty-seven-year-old woman for a cigarette lighter, seized her by the neck and raped her for about two hours, threatening to kill her if she went to the police. She went. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to eight years, and was sent to the Sierra Conservation Center in Tuolumne County. The conviction required him to give a DNA sample to the state's database. In September 2003 it matched evidence from the murders of Paula Vance and Brenda Bries. By October 2004 ten more unsolved killings had been matched to him, and on December 22, 2004, he was arraigned on ten counts of murder and pleaded not guilty. Sexual assault kits collected in the 1980s and 1990s had been sitting untested for years.
The same review freed David Allen Jones. Detectives going back over similar cases that had been closed found his convictions and, rather than treating them as a reason to rule Turner out, sent the physical evidence to the LAPD crime laboratory for new DNA testing. Two of the four rape kits in his case had already been destroyed. What remained excluded Jones in the Williams and Edwards killings and matched Turner, and the blood typing did not match Jones in any of the three. Nothing could be tested in the Christmas case. Jones was released in March 2004. He later received a settlement of seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars from the City of Los Angeles and a further seventy-four thousand six hundred dollars in state compensation, and the department opened an internal review of his investigation, examining the identification procedure and the handling of evidence.
Turner was charged with ten murders and a count for Regina Washington's unborn child. On May 10, 2007, a jury convicted him on all eleven. Judge William R. Pounders, sentencing him to death on July 10, said the evidence was overwhelming and that he had methodically located lone women. Prosecutors called him one of the most prolific serial killers in the city's history. In February 2011 he was charged with four more murders, those of Elandra Bunn, Debra Williams, Mary Edwards and Cynthia Annette Johnson, and brought back from San Quentin to stand trial. He was convicted on June 19, 2014, and sentenced to death a second time on June 26. Judge Robert J. Perry called the DNA evidence irrefutable.
On November 30, 2020, the California Supreme Court decided the automatic appeal from the first trial. Justice Carol Corrigan wrote that the challenge to the statistical evidence about the DNA matches failed, but that one hearsay claim had merit: to show that Regina Washington's unborn child could have survived outside the womb, the prosecution had relied on an autopsy report by a pathologist who did not testify. The conviction on that count was reversed. The judgment was affirmed in every other respect, and the death sentence stood. The automatic appeal from the 2014 judgment is separate and has not been reported decided. California has had a moratorium on executions since 2019.
His series overlapped in time and place with Lonnie Franklin's, and both ran through years in which, on the police department's own later account, the deaths of women in that part of the city were not investigated as they should have been. Two separate series ran in the same corridor, and neither was read as a series for years.
The DNA database eventually reached beyond California. On September 24, 1998, three teenagers walking through a parking lot behind a business at 165 East 900 South in Salt Lake City found the body of Itisha Camp at the bottom of a stairwell, partly clothed, with a scarf around her neck. The medical examiner found she had been strangled. She was twenty-one, or twenty-two by some reports, was working as a prostitute, and had been in Salt Lake City only two or three weeks. The case went into Utah's cold case database in 2019. In 2023 DNA from her pants, her back and the scarf was entered into the national database and matched Turner. Detectives found that he had been on parole in California in 1998 for car theft and drugs and had absconded to Utah, and a Salt Lake City police report that year listed him as the victim of an assault. On June 14, 2024, the Salt Lake County District Attorney, Sim Gill, charged him with one count of first-degree aggravated murder, apparently the first murder charge he has faced outside California. Gill said he hoped the charge would bring some relief to Camp's family after twenty-five years of not knowing whether her killer was still free. Turner is presumed innocent of that charge unless it is proved.
A series of killings ran for eleven years in South Los Angeles, put an innocent disabled man in prison for eleven more, and was resolved not by investigation but by a database hit that arrived because of an unrelated rape. In 2024 Turner was reported to be on death row at San Quentin.