In September 1987 the San Leandro police formed an investigation into a string of brutal daytime attacks on elderly women in their homes. Someone was forcing his way in on white women who were widowed or lived alone and beating them to death. He did not sexually assault them; he took money and valuables. By early October the killer had been linked to as many as thirteen murders, the latest in late August, and was suspected in more than two dozen robberies and attacks on elderly women going back to 1980. Because he struck around midday he was called the Day Stalker. Among the women killed were Pearl Larson, seventy-six, Norma Marglon, seventy-eight, Adeline Figuerido, eighty-nine, Ruth Anna Constantine, seventy-three, Agnes George, seventy-four, and Marie Lovardi, eighty-two.
A forensic pathologist later testified that Adeline Figuerido had died of as many as a dozen blows to the head, neck and face, with a brain hemorrhage and numerous broken bones; her daughters found her on the dining room floor, her hands tied behind her back and a blanket tied around her head. In October 1987 neighbors of Franklin Lynch, a thirty-two-year-old ex-convict who had served time for robbery and drug offenses, alerted investigators. He was taken into custody, and searches of his home turned up items belonging to Pearl Larson and then to Adeline Figuerido and Ruth Constantine. Accounts of the arrest differ, placing it on October 14 or 23 and in San Leandro or in Los Angeles, where one account says FBI agents picked him up.
Lynch was born on July 21, 1955. His father had supervised a machine shop in Oakland; he had a stable childhood and went to church regularly. He moved out at about seventeen, married and had six children. In his teens he began taking drugs, which became a cocaine addiction, and he was arrested several times for robbery and served years in state prison.
He was convicted of the three murders and of robbing two other women who survived, and in 1992 was sentenced to death and sent to San Quentin. On appeal in 2004 he argued, among other things, that he should have been allowed to represent himself, that errors had occurred at trial, and that California's death penalty law was unconstitutional and violated international law. The appeal was rejected. In 2024 his sentence was reduced to life without parole, and he was held at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
On February 4, 2026, the Alameda County District Attorney, Ursula Jones Dickson, conceded that he was entitled to relief under California's Racial Justice Act, and on February 9 the Superior Court vacated his convictions and sentence and ordered a new trial. His lawyers had argued that the prosecution used peremptory strikes to remove jurors because of race and used racially discriminatory language at trial; the court found that the trial prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney James Anderson, had engaged in racially biased conduct. The ruling followed a wider review of Alameda County capital cases. He had spent some thirty-two years under a death sentence. The killings linked to him beyond the three for which he was tried were never charged.