On the night of November 19, 1988, Enietra Washington, a thirty-year-old mother of two, was walking to a friend's house in South Los Angeles when a man in an orange Pinto pulled up and offered her a ride. She thought he was harmless. Without warning he pulled a handgun and shot her in the chest. She remembered him climbing on top of her and a camera flashing as she lost consciousness, and she remembered telling him, as she looked him in the eye, that if she died she would haunt him. He pushed her out of the moving car, apparently believing she was dead. She lived. In 2010 detectives searching the house of Lonnie David Franklin Jr. found a Polaroid of her, partly nude and bleeding from the wound. In February 2016, nearly three decades after the attack, she pointed at him in a Los Angeles courtroom and said, "That's the person who shot me."
Franklin was convicted of ten murders committed between 1985 and 2007 and of the attempted murder of Enietra Washington. Every one of the women was Black, and all of them were left in the South Los Angeles neighborhoods where he lived. Prosecutors told his jury he had killed five more. The killings ran through the years when crack cocaine was tearing through the neighborhood, and for most of that time the families of the dead did not know that the police had tied their daughters' deaths to one another.
He was born on August 30, 1952, and grew up in South Central Los Angeles. In the 1970s he served in the Army in Germany. At his penalty trial a woman testified that in 1974, while he was stationed there, she was gang-raped by three men, and prosecutors linked Franklin to the attack; some accounts say he was convicted of it and served less than a year before a dishonorable discharge. Back home he married, had two children, and worked for the city as a trash collector and then as a garage attendant at a Los Angeles Police Department station.
The first woman he was convicted of killing was Debra Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old cocktail waitress. On August 10, 1985, she left a friend's house in Lynwood to catch a bus home to South Central; she was found in an alley, shot three times in the chest. Henrietta Wright, a mother of five, was found in an alley on August 12, 1986, shot twice in the chest, barefoot, wrapped in a blanket, covered with a mattress and gagged with a cloth. Her age is given as thirty-four in the trial reporting and thirty-five elsewhere. Barbara Ware, twenty-three, was found under debris and garbage in an alley on January 10, 1987. Bernita Sparks, twenty-six, was found in a trash bin that April with her shirt and pants unbuttoned. Mary Lowe, twenty-six, was found behind a large shrub in an alley on November 1, 1987. Lachrica Jefferson, twenty-two, was found on January 30, 1988, and Alicia "Monique" Alexander, eighteen, on September 11, 1988. Most were shot in the chest with a .25-caliber handgun; some had been beaten and sexually assaulted. Several of the women used drugs, and some traded sex to pay for them. Most had cocaine in their systems when they were found. Prosecutors said he used their addiction, luring some of them to a camper in his backyard with money and drugs.
Ballistics tied the 1980s killings to one gun. At the time, investigators were hunting what they called the Southside Slayer, a single killer blamed for a wave of murders in South Central that were later found to be the work of several men. Washington's description produced a composite sketch. The trail went cold. Her attack came two months after Alicia Alexander's death, and then the killings that anyone had linked seemed to stop.
The next body linked to the gun and the DNA was that of Princess Berthomieux, fifteen, found on March 19, 2002. Valerie McCorvey, thirty-five, was found strangled on July 11, 2003. On January 1, 2007, a homeless man collecting cans from a dumpster off Western Avenue found Janecia Peters, twenty-five, a mother, naked in a black garbage bag near a discarded Christmas tree, wearing only a gold heart pendant. She had been shot with a .25. Saliva found with her body matched DNA from the older scenes.
That link was made in 2007, and in June of that year the LAPD formed a small squad, the 800 Task Force, to run it down. It did not announce what it knew. Janecia Peters's mother, Laverne, noticed her daughter's case being moved from the 77th Division to elite detectives downtown and suspected it was part of something larger, but when detectives came to see her, she said, they did not tell her. She believed the city had kept the families out of it because "they are poor little black girls." In August 2008 the LA Weekly reporter Christine Pelisek published the story that a serial killer active since 1985 was still at work, and the paper gave him his name, the Grim Sleeper, for what looked like a thirteen-year pause. Porter Alexander learned from her article that his daughter Monique had been one of the killer's victims. "Nobody came to us," he said.
The crime scene DNA matched no one in the state's databases. California's first familial search, which looks for close relatives of an unknown offender, produced a partial match in 2010 to Christopher Franklin, who had been convicted of a felony weapons charge. When the son was ruled out, detectives turned to his father. An undercover officer posing as a server at a restaurant where Lonnie Franklin was attending a birthday party picked up what he left behind: a half-eaten slice of pizza, a fork, napkins, cups and a piece of chocolate cake. The DNA on them matched. He was arrested on July 7, 2010.
In his house and garage investigators seized about 180 photographs of women, nearly two hundred pictures and videos by another count. Many were never identified, and police released pictures to the public to find out whether the women were alive. Six years later, a detective testified that thirty-four of them still had not been identified. "We don't know if they're dead or alive," he said. In the garage searchers also found a high school ID card belonging to Ayellah Marshall, an eighteen-year-old senior at Hawthorne High School who vanished in January 2006, and a Nevada ID card belonging to Rolenia Morris, a mother of two who disappeared in September 2005. Neither woman has been found. In the videotaped police interrogation played at his trial, Franklin denied the killings, laughed at times, and called one victim "fat" and another "butt ugly" as detectives showed him their photographs.
His trial did not open until February 16, 2016. Franklin did not testify. On May 5 a jury of seven women and five men, after a day and a half of deliberation, found him guilty of ten counts of first degree murder with the special circumstance of multiple murders, and of the attempted murder of Enietra Washington.
In the penalty phase Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman laid out the killings he had not been charged with. The gun that killed Sharon Dismuke, twenty-one, found in an abandoned gas station restroom on January 15, 1984, was the same one that killed Janecia Peters twenty-three years later; Silverman called the two deaths "bookends" on the series. Dismuke's younger sister, Tina Saunders, told the jurors that Sharon used to sing her siblings to sleep. Inez Warren, twenty-eight, was found on August 15, 1988, shot in the chest and beaten about the head. Georgia Mae Thomas, forty-three, was found on December 18, 2000, shot twice in the chest; the gun that killed her was recovered from Franklin's home with his fingerprint on the magazine. That killing fell squarely inside the years he was supposed to have been asleep. Prosecutors also presented the presumed killing of Rolenia Morris. On June 6 the jury recommended death on all ten counts.
He was sentenced on August 10, 2016, thirty-one years to the day after Debra Jackson's death. More than fifteen relatives of the victims spoke. "You didn't just take anyone off the street, you took someone who was really loved," said Jovana Peters, Janecia's sister. When one mother asked him to face her and tell her why he had killed her daughter, he turned and appeared to say, "I didn't do it." Washington spoke from the gallery. "You are truly a piece of evil," she told him. "You're right up there with Manson." Laura Moore, who had not been called at trial, told the judge he had picked her up at a bus stop on May 5, 1984, and shot her six times. "I just want to ask him why, why?" she said. None of Franklin's family came to court.
Judge Kathleen Kennedy denied a new trial and imposed death on every murder count. "I can't think of anyone I've encountered in all my years in the criminal justice system that has committed the monstrous crimes that you have," she told him, and she warned the families that closure was not what the trial was about: at the end of the day, their loved one was still gone. His lawyer, Seymour Amster, said life without parole would have been the better verdict.
Franklin arrived on death row at San Quentin on August 17, 2016. On the evening of March 28, 2020, guards found him unresponsive in his single cell, and he was pronounced dead at 7:43. He was sixty-seven. A corrections spokeswoman, Terry Thornton, said there were no signs of trauma and that the Marin County coroner would determine the cause of death; the prison said it had no cases of the coronavirus. No cause has ever been made public. Governor Gavin Newsom had halted executions in California the year before, and Franklin was one of some 727 people on the state's death row. He died with his appeal unresolved. Police have said he killed at least fourteen women and may have killed as many as twenty-five.