Between 1985 and 2007, nine women and a 15-year-old girl were found dead in the alleys and trash bins of South Los Angeles. Most had been shot in the chest with the same small-caliber handgun; the later ones were strangled or shot. For more than two decades no one was charged. The families of several of the women did not learn until 2008 that police had linked their daughters' deaths to one man.
That man was Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a retired city sanitation worker and former police garage attendant who fixed cars in the backyard of his house on West 81st Street, a few miles from where most of the bodies were found. He was arrested in July 2010 after California's new familial DNA search pointed investigators to a relative of his, and DNA taken from food he left at a pizza restaurant matched the crime scenes. On May 5, 2016, a Los Angeles County jury found him guilty of 10 counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. He was sentenced to death that August and died at San Quentin State Prison on March 28, 2020, with his automatic appeal still pending.
The press called the killer the "Grim Sleeper", a name LA Weekly gave him in 2008 because the killings seemed to stop in 1988 and resume in 2002. Investigators later came to believe there had been no real pause.
Little is known of Franklin's early life. He was 57 when he was arrested in 2010. Fernando Cole, who told ABC7 in 2016 that he had known Franklin for more than 40 years, described a friendship in which the two men confided in each other.
In 1974 Franklin was serving in the U.S. Army in West Germany, where he worked as a cook, according to testimony reported by ABC7. In 1974, when he was 21, he and two other soldiers were convicted by a German court of raping a 17-year-old girl.
Back in Los Angeles, Franklin went to work for the city. The city's personnel director said in 2010 that he was hired in 1981 as an attendant at a Los Angeles Police Department garage, where he helped work on cars. News reports throughout the case described him as a former city trash collector and sanitation worker. A neighbor told ABC7 that he later worked for the city as a mechanic at the LAPD's 77th Street station and then retired. In 2010 the Associated Press called him a former mechanic, and at his house he ran an auto repair business out of the backyard.
The house, which the Associated Press described as lime green, stood on the 1700 block of West 81st Street, between Western Avenue and Harvard Boulevard. At the time of his arrest he was married and had two adult children, according to City News Service. Neighbors said he was friendly and quiet. He worked on cars in his front yard and stopped to chat with people walking by. Glenn Williams, who ran an auto parts store on Western Avenue, said Franklin came in every day and knew all his children. "He was a nice, friendly person," one neighbor told City News Service. A customer said he had charged her 15 dollars for a 10-minute repair. Steve Robinson, who lived across the street for more than 20 years, said in 2016 that he had never suspected him.
Noah Thurmond, who worked on cars with Franklin, told ABC7 he could be pushy and full of unwanted advice but seemed normal. Fernando Cole said Franklin had shown him photographs of women who looked, Cole said, "drunk or dead or something." When Franklin was arrested, Cole first assumed it was for car theft.
He had no criminal record in California and was on no police list of local suspects, according to a 2017 review of Christine Pelisek's book about the case.
In April 1974, Franklin and two other Army privates abducted a 17-year-old girl from a street and drove her to a field near Ludwigsburg, north of Stuttgart, where they raped her. She later told Los Angeles police and a jury that she had been threatened with a knife and believed they would kill her. About an hour earlier, according to an Army report on the case described in court in 2016, the soldiers had tried to abduct another woman, whose screams witnesses heard.
On the drive home Franklin gave her his telephone number, and police arrested him after a sting in which she arranged to meet him at a train station, LAist reported. A German court convicted all three men. A former Army judge advocate, Captain Frank Pyle, testified that Franklin had told the German court the sex was consensual. Franklin served less than a year in prison; police and prosecutors did not know why he was released early, LAist reported, citing People magazine. His trial lawyer in Los Angeles, Seymour Amster, who reviewed the records, said the Army accepted the German court's findings and gave Franklin a general discharge, leaving his punishment to the German justice system.
The woman came from Germany to Los Angeles in May 2016 to testify at the penalty phase of his trial.
The killings began in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic. In the 1980s Los Angeles averaged about 800 murders a year, more than half of them in South Central, and the police were stretched thin. Several men were killing women in the same neighborhoods at the same time. An LAPD task force pursued what it called the "Southside Slayer" before police realized that more than one killer was involved. Two other men were later convicted of killing women in South Los Angeles in that era: Chester Turner, a truck driver sentenced to death in 2007, and Michael Hughes, who is serving life for four killings.
In February 1989 a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, R.R., was arrested and charged with murdering three women in the area. He was released after independent experts found the LAPD had made errors in its ballistics tests. LA Weekly reported in 2008 that DNA showed he could not have been the man later called the Grim Sleeper. He died in 2003.
Community members and families said for years that the police did not investigate seriously because the victims were Black and poor, and because some used drugs or traded sex. The Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, founded by the activist Margaret Prescod, held vigils, handed out more than 100,000 flyers and objected to the police label "the prostitute killings", pointing out that some of the victims were not sex workers.
Debra Jackson was 29 and the mother of two. Her body was found in an alley in South Los Angeles on August 10, 1985. She had been shot three times in the chest.
Henrietta Wright was 34, the age given in the trial reporting, and a mother of five. (A Los Angeles Sentinel report in June 2016 gave her age as 35.) She was found in an alley on August 12, 1986, shot twice in the chest. Her daughter Rochell Johnson was 4 when she died and told the jury in 2016 that she had visited her mother's grave for the first time only the year before. Her son, Willie Bush, said he passed out when he learned she had been killed, and that he still felt guilty for not having been there to protect her. Her niece, Irene Ephriam, who was in her 20s, had to identify the body.
Barbara Ware was 23. She was shot in the chest two days before her 24th birthday, and her body was found under debris in an alley on January 10, 1987. Her stepmother, Diana Ware, largely raised her. Her father, Bill Ware, died of cancer in 2002 without knowing who had killed his daughter. Diana Ware made hundreds of bus trips to court hearings over the years before the trial. "His baby," she called Barbara, speaking of her late husband after the death verdict.
Bernita Sparks was 26. She was found in a trash bin on April 16, 1987, shot once in the chest. (One Associated Press list gives April 15.) Twenty years later, the last victim in the series was found in the same alley.
Mary Lowe was 26. She had danced on the television show "Soul Train", her sister Kenneitha Lowe told the jury. LA Weekly reported that she had said she was going to a Halloween party. Her body was found behind a large shrub in an alley on November 1, 1987; she had been shot in the chest. Her sister visits her grave to talk to her. "I want to know who killed my baby!" her mother, Betty Lowe, told LA Weekly in 2008. Her cousin Tracy Williams called the killing the family's "introduction to murder, death and killing."
Lachrica Jefferson was 22. Her body was found in an alley on January 30, 1988. She had been shot twice in the chest.
Alicia Alexander, known as Monique, was 18. She grew up in a stable two-parent home, took ice-skating lessons and rode horses, according to Pelisek's book as described in a 2017 review. In September 1988 she went out offering to buy her father something from a liquor store and did not come back. Her body was found in an alley on September 11, 1988. She had been shot in the chest and strangled. Her father, Porter Alexander Jr., kept her belongings for decades "because she's not gone in my heart." He attended the court hearings for six years so that Franklin would know he was there.
At least one man was among the cases investigators linked to the series in its early years. LA Weekly's 2008 list of 11 cases included Thomas Steele, whose body was found in an intersection around August 14, 1986. The state Attorney General's office said in 2010 that the 11 victims then attributed to the killer included one man. Detective Dennis Kilcoyne said that year that Franklin had not been charged in the death of the man because there was no DNA evidence.
In November 1988, two months after Alicia Alexander's death, a woman then 30 accepted a ride in South Los Angeles from a man driving an orange Ford Pinto. The Los Angeles Sentinel gives the date as November 19, 1988; LA Weekly's 2008 account gives November 20 and says she was picked up at 81st Street and Western Avenue. She had turned down the ride at first. In the car the man called her by another woman's name, and when she said that was not her name, things went quiet. She did not see or hear a gun, but realized she had been shot in the chest. When she asked why, he said, "Because you were dogging me out." She told him to take her to a hospital and warned him, "If I die, I'm going to haunt you."
She testified that he then assaulted her and pushed her out of the moving car. She made her way to a friend's porch and asked the friend to call 911, and she survived surgery. LA Weekly reported in 2008 that she described a Black man in his 30s with short hair; at trial she said he wore a short-sleeved uniform shirt and khaki pants. A composite sketch was made from her account. Bullets taken from her chest matched the gun used in the earlier killings. She told the jury that about a year later the same man appeared at her home in Inglewood and asked whether she knew him.
According to the Associated Press, she led police to a house on West 81st Street in 1988, and officers searched it extensively. It was three doors from Franklin's house.
Ballistics tests in 1987 had shown that the same .25-caliber handgun was used in several of the killings, and eventually eight of the early cases, including the survivor's shooting, were tied to it. Police had a weapon and a sketch but no name. Billboards offering a 500,000-dollar reward and showing the sketch were posted eight blocks from Franklin's house; Police Chief Charlie Beck said in 2010 that Franklin drove past them every day. Beck said investigators had an "evolving theory" that the near miss in 1988 had affected his behavior, but that they could not be certain without a confession.
After Alicia Alexander, no killing was publicly linked to the gun for more than 13 years. Detectives eventually concluded he had not stopped at all.
Princess Berthomieux was the youngest. She had grown up partly in foster care, and her foster sister, Samara Herard, said she "became like my daughter." After Herard's mother died, the girl was moved to another foster home, and Herard and her father did not learn of her death until about a year later. LA Weekly reported that she was reported missing on December 21, 2001. Her body was found hidden in shrubbery in an alley in Inglewood on March 9, 2002. She was 15 and had been strangled. "He doesn't value life," Herard said after the verdict.
Valerie McCorvey was 35 and the mother of one. She was found strangled at the entrance to a locked alley on July 11, 2003; LA Weekly reported that a crossing guard found her. Her aunt, Mary Taylor, told LA Weekly in 2008 that she feared the case would never be solved.
Janecia Peters was 25 and had a son who was 5 by the time of the arrest. On January 1, 2007, a man searching a dumpster off Western Avenue found her body in a sealed trash bag, near a discarded Christmas tree. She had been shot in the back. After her death her mother, Laverne Peters, raised her son as his guardian. "There's no greater pain than the loss of a child," she said in 2010. Janecia's sister, Jovana Peters, told Franklin at his sentencing: "You didn't just take anyone off the street, you took someone who was really loved."
The link between the old and new killings came from DNA. Saliva had been found on several of the victims, but the profile matched no one in any state or federal database. In 2004, cold-case work found that saliva on Mary Lowe matched DNA from the 2002 and 2003 victims. In 2007 the LAPD received forensic lab results connecting one man's DNA to the killings of 2002, 2003 and 2007, and the task force tied those cases to the 1980s killings. A zip tie from the bag that held Janecia Peters's body later yielded the same DNA.
In 2007, under Chief William Bratton, the LAPD formed a small squad to work the 11 linked cases, known as the 800 Task Force and later as the Grim Sleeper Task Force of the Robbery-Homicide Division. Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, who pressed for the unit, led it. Six detectives worked in a restricted room at police headquarters. The department did not announce the link. Kilcoyne told LA Weekly he had briefed Bratton four or five times.
The families were not told. Laverne Peters told LA Weekly in 2008 that she had not been told her daughter's death was linked to the others. She believed the city was ignoring the victims because "they are poor little black girls." "Nobody came to us," Porter Alexander said. City Councilman Bernard Parks Jr. said that leaving the council out of the loop "boggles the mind."
LA Weekly's crime reporter, Christine Pelisek, learned of the secret task force in 2008. Her cover story ran on August 27, 2008, under the headline "Grim Sleeper Returns: He's Murdering Angelenos, as Cops Hunt his DNA." She and her editor, Jill Stewart, gave the killer the name "Grim Sleeper" for the apparent 13-year gap in the killings, the Columbia Journalism Review reported. The police had resisted going public, fearing they would scare the killer off; Pelisek argued it was a matter of public safety.
Within days of the story, the Los Angeles City Council pledged a 500,000-dollar reward. The LAPD began reaching out to families, attending vigils and meeting church and community leaders. Kilcoyne said in 2008 that the true number of victims might be about double the 11 known cases. The Columbia Journalism Review gave Pelisek one of its "Laurels" in 2010 for her reporting and her advocacy for the victims.
The killer's DNA was in no database, so investigators turned to a technique no state had yet used on this scale. A familial search compares a crime-scene profile with the profiles of convicted offenders, looking not for an exact match but for someone who shares enough rare genetic markers to be a close relative, such as a father, son or brother. Attorney General Jerry Brown adopted a policy allowing it in 2008, over strong objections from civil rights groups that called it an invasion of privacy. The searches were limited to major violent crimes with a serious risk to public safety, and only after other leads were exhausted.
The first familial search in the Grim Sleeper case, run in 2008, found no relative in the data bank. In 2009 a relative of Franklin's was convicted of a felony weapons charge in an unrelated case, and his DNA was entered into the state data bank. The second search, run at the state's Jan Bashinski DNA Laboratory in Richmond, produced a profile that ranked high as a likely father, son or brother of the unknown killer. The Attorney General's two releases give the date of that search differently, as April 28, 2010, and as June 2010. Y-chromosome testing pointed to a paternal relative. State agents then compared birth records, prison records and the places where the family had lived with the places where the bodies were found, and on June 30 they gave the LAPD Franklin's name as an investigative lead, the Associated Press reported. The relative was never a suspect.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, investigators built a family tree of the relative's male kin and settled on his father, and detectives put Franklin under 24-hour surveillance. On July 5, 2010, they followed him to John's Incredible Pizza in Buena Park, where he was attending a birthday party, Vice reported. A detective posing as a busboy collected what he left behind: napkins, glasses, a fork and a partly eaten slice of pizza. The DNA matched the profile from the crime scenes.
At about 9:20 a.m. on July 7, 2010, police arrested Franklin in front of his home. Chief Beck visited the scene, and investigators set up a command post and began a search expected to take days. The District Attorney's office charged him with 10 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, with the special circumstance of multiple murders, which made him eligible for the death penalty. "This arrest provides proof positive that familial DNA searches must be a part of law enforcement's crime-fighting arsenal," Brown said. Beck said the families had "stood with us, been patient with us for the last 23 years."
"I had doubt in my mind after all the years that I would not live to see this day," Porter Alexander said. Janecia Peters's aunt, Diane McQueen, said the family missed her "a whole lot" and was glad the day had come.
Detectives and evidence technicians recovered thousands of items from the house and garage, including photographs and videotapes. In a wall of the garage they found a Polaroid photograph of the woman who had survived in 1988. Photographs of several of the dead women were also in the house, and prosecutors said at least one of them appeared to have just been shot when the picture was taken. A small refrigerator in the garage, which prosecutors called his "trophy chest", held photographs of scores of women. Police also recovered a Titan pistol that prosecutors said was used to kill Janecia Peters, and a second Titan pistol that they linked to the death of Georgia Mae Thomas in 2000.
In the garage they also found a high school identification card belonging to Ayellah Marshall, 18, who disappeared in 2006, and a Nevada identification card belonging to Rolenia Morris, a mother of two who was last seen in September 2005. Neither woman has been found.
On December 16, 2010, the LAPD posted more than 100 of the photographs on its website and asked the public to help identify the women. The images showed faces or distinctive features. Kilcoyne said the department had a duty to identify the women, who might well be alive, and to confirm it. Within four days detectives had identified enough of them to remove 29 photographs. By January 2011 more than 50 women had been identified, and tips had led to four new missing persons cases. Beck said releasing the pictures had been a hard decision. In June 2016, Detective Daryn Dupree testified that 34 of the women in about 180 released photographs had still not been identified, and that five women in the photographs were confirmed dead but not attributed to Franklin.
After his arrest, Detectives Kilcoyne and Paul Coulter questioned Franklin at police headquarters in a session of nearly an hour that was later shown to the jury. He said he had no idea why he was there. Shown photographs of the victims one by one, he said he did not know them. He called Henrietta Wright "butt ugly" and Bernita Sparks "fat." Kilcoyne told him his DNA "only connects to one person in the world." Franklin answered, "I don't know," and later, "I can't explain it." "It's not me," he said, and he repeated that he had not killed anyone. When he said he would need a lawyer, detectives told him he would be arrested for 10 murders and one attempted murder and asked him to swab his cheeks. Prosecutors said he did not seem surprised, and that he laughed at times.
At his first court appearance, his arraignment was postponed to August 9, 2010, at the request of his first lawyer, Regina Laughney. A grand jury indicted him in 2011. On August 1, 2011, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman told the court her office would seek the death penalty. At that hearing prosecutors won the right to take a voice sample from him, to compare with two 911 calls they believed he had made. His lawyer at the time, Louisa Pensanti, said she was still reviewing tens of thousands of pages of evidence.
The trial was postponed repeatedly. Witnesses retired or died, experts had to reexamine evidence, and at least two mothers of victims died during the wait. Seymour Amster became his lead lawyer. Silverman led the prosecution with Deputy District Attorney Marguerite Rizzo, a forensic science specialist. The judge was Kathleen Kennedy of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, who at one point said the lawyers seemed to have a vendetta against each other. "I want you to stop it," she told the lawyers.
Opening statements were given on February 16, 2016, in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. Silverman showed the jury photographs of the 10 victims, and some relatives wept and left the room. She said the murders "followed a pattern." Franklin, she said, knew the streets, blended in, and lured women into his car with the promise of crack cocaine. All of the victims had first been found as unidentified women, and relatives later identified them. Autopsies found cocaine in all but one. Porter Alexander walked out when the photographs of his daughter were shown. "The day of reckoning is here," he said.
The evidence was scientific. Prosecutors said DNA from saliva found on seven of the victims matched Franklin, with odds of a coincidence that were astronomically small, and that firearms evidence linked eight of the shootings to the same .25-caliber gun. The photographs found in his house tied him to several of the women. In all, 61 witnesses testified over about three months.
On February 25, 2016, the woman who had survived in 1988 testified. Asked who had attacked her, she pointed at Franklin. "That's the person who shot me," she said. She told the jury she was "100 percent" certain, and she recognized herself in the Polaroid found in his garage. Under cross-examination she said the sketch made after the attack "didn't really look like" him, and she acknowledged having used marijuana laced with cocaine several hours before she got into the car. The defense pointed to differences between Franklin and the description she gave in 1988.
Amster reserved his opening statement and called the case circumstantial. He argued that the DNA and ballistics evidence was "inferior science", noted that DNA from other men had been found on several bodies, and suggested that an unknown man was the real killer. "Each and every murder in this case could have been done by a mystery man with a mystery gun with mystery DNA," he told the jury. Silverman answered: "If there is some mystery man out there, how come we didn't pick up his DNA on victim after victim?" Franklin did not testify.
The jury, seven women and five men, began deliberating on May 4, 2016. On Thursday, May 5, after about a day and a half, it found Franklin guilty on all counts: 10 counts of first-degree murder, with the special circumstance of multiple murder, and one count of attempted willful, deliberate and premeditated murder for the 1988 shooting. Franklin, 63, showed no visible reaction.
"They read it and I said, 'We got him,'" Porter Alexander said. "It took all this time, but we got him." Samara Herard said she wanted to remember "the sweet little girl who had her whole life in front of her." Silverman called Franklin a "serial killer who was hiding in plain sight." Chief Beck said the families "heard the news they had been hoping for." Kilcoyne, retired by then, said it had dawned on him that it had been nine years since Janecia Peters was killed.
The penalty phase opened on May 12, 2016. Amster declined to make an opening statement. Silverman told the jury about killings for which Franklin had never been charged. She had decided not to add them to the case, she said, because doing so would have delayed a trial that had already taken nearly six years. Judge Kennedy ruled the evidence admissible but suggested that Silverman take a more "conservative route" to avoid problems on appeal.
Sharon Dismuke, 21, was killed in January 1984, more than a year before Debra Jackson. Silverman said the gun used to kill her matched the gun used to kill Janecia Peters in 2007, and she called the two deaths "like bookends on this series of murders." Inez Warren, 28, was killed in August 1988. Her killing fit the pattern, prosecutors said, but a DNA kit from her case was accidentally destroyed in 2000. Georgia Mae Thomas, 43, was killed in December 2000, in the middle of what had been called the killer's sleep. The gun used to kill her was found at Franklin's home, and prosecutors said his fingerprint was on a magazine from it. A defense fingerprint expert, Kurt Kuhn, agreed under questioning that Franklin's prints were the source of the impressions on the magazines, though he would not say they excluded everyone else. Silverman also presented the disappearances of Rolenia Morris and Ayellah Marshall. Amster said there was no evidence that either woman had been the victim of a violent crime. "It was the crack epidemic," he said. "Anything could have happened."
Relatives testified about the women the jury had already found he killed. "A devastating blow," Porter Alexander, 75, called the news of his daughter's death; he said nothing would stop him attending court "other than death." Mary Alexander walked to the stand with a cane and called Monique "my baby girl", "precious, loveable," a daughter who loved everybody. Kenneitha Lowe, Rochell Johnson, Willie Bush and Samara Herard also spoke.
On May 26, 2016, the woman Franklin had attacked in Germany in 1974 testified through an interpreter, with her husband beside her. She said she had never recovered. The defense drew its own point from the German case: other men had taken part in it, and Amster said the question of whether others were also involved in the Los Angeles killings would be "the issue that's most looked at by the appellate court."
Closing arguments began on June 2. On June 6, 2016, after about eight hours over a day and a half, it recommended death. "I'm glad it's over, and that he'll never get out to hurt anybody else," said Diana Ware. "Justice has been served." Mary Lowe's sister said the verdict let her sister "fly her wings." Alicia Alexander's brother, Donnell Parker, said the verdict set a precedent: "We cannot allow people to have a license to go around killing." Amster attacked the cost of capital cases. "Who cares about Lonnie Franklin," he said. "He's a footnote."
On August 10, 2016, more than a dozen relatives and friends of the victims addressed Franklin in court. "You sit there with a blank face, since the whole trial, no remorse, no nothing, but today is our day," a victim's sister told him. Alicia Alexander's mother demanded that he look at her and asked why he had shot and strangled her daughter; he appeared to say "I didn't do it", or, by another account, "I don't know ma'am." When Vivian Williams, the sister of Georgia Mae Thomas, confronted him, he said, "I've never seen you before in my life." She told him she forgave him and would pray for him. Several other relatives also said they forgave him. The woman who had survived in 1988 spoke from the gallery. "You are truly a piece of evil," she told him, and compared him to Charles Manson.
Silverman's sentencing brief called him "completely irredeemable" and "a psychopathic, sadistic serial killer who takes joy in inflicting pain on women and killing them." The defense asked the judge to set aside the death verdict, arguing that evidence of uncharged killings presented only at the penalty phase had created new grieving families and swayed the jurors unfairly. Amster also sought a new trial on a claim that Silverman had mocked the defense by rolling her eyes in front of the jury, which Silverman called unsubstantiated.
Judge Kennedy denied the motion for a new trial, rejected the argument that California's death penalty was unconstitutional, refused to reduce the sentence to life without parole, and sentenced Franklin to death on all 10 murder counts. She said she had been a judge for 28 years and could not think of anyone she had encountered in the criminal justice system who had committed "the monstrous crimes" he had. She told the families that "closure is not what this trial is about" because, at the end of the day, "your loved one is still gone." None of Franklin's family attended court. He was ordered to San Quentin State Prison.
The conviction would be appealed automatically to the California Supreme Court, CBS Los Angeles reported, and an execution was unlikely soon because of legal challenges to the state's lethal injection procedure.
Franklin arrived on death row at San Quentin on August 17, 2016. In March 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions in California for as long as he was governor.
On Saturday, March 28, 2020, at about 7:20 p.m., staff found Franklin unresponsive in his single cell. Medical aid was given and an ambulance was called, and he was pronounced dead at 7:43 p.m. He was 67. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said his cause of death was pending an autopsy, but that there were no signs of trauma. CBS San Francisco reported that the Marin County coroner would determine the cause, and that San Quentin had no reported cases of COVID-19 at the time. He was one of 727 people on California's death row. His final cause of death was not reported.
"I won't say I'm pleased he died but at the end there was justice for all the bad things he did in his life," Diana Ware told People magazine, as quoted by the Associated Press. "We can now be at peace."
CBS Los Angeles reported at his sentencing that his conviction would be appealed automatically to the California Supreme Court. None of the reports of his death describes the stage his appeal had reached, and what became of the appeal after his death was not reported. He died convicted, with his appeal still pending.
The case made familial DNA searching a public question. Brown and Cooley defended the method; critics warned of guilt by association, arguing that a person could fall under suspicion because a relative's profile was in a database. Kilcoyne said in 2010 that about a dozen other unsolved cases were being reviewed. Detective Dupree said in 2016 that he believed Franklin was responsible for 20 to 25 murders, and police have said he may have had as many as 25 victims. Prosecutors at trial outlined 14 killings, including the four never charged.
Margaret Prescod's coalition pledged after the verdict to keep pressing for the women in the photographs who remained unaccounted for. At the time of the verdict she put their number at 35, and she said conditions in South Los Angeles were much like those when the victims were killed.
The case was the subject of the documentary "Tales of the Grim Sleeper", made for HBO, and of a Lifetime television film, "The Grim Sleeper", about an LA Weekly reporter's work on the case. Christine Pelisek's book "The Grim Sleeper" was published in 2017.
Proven by a jury verdict, with the appeal pending at his death: the murders of Debra Jackson, Henrietta Wright, Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, Mary Lowe, Lachrica Jefferson, Alicia Alexander, Princess Berthomieux, Valerie McCorvey and Janecia Peters, and the attempted murder of the woman shot in November 1988. A German court convicted him in 1974 of the rape of a 17-year-old girl, together with two other soldiers.
Suspected, never charged: the deaths of Sharon Dismuke (1984), Inez Warren (1988) and Georgia Mae Thomas (2000), which prosecutors presented as aggravating evidence; and the disappearances of Rolenia Morris (2005) and Ayellah Marshall (2006), whose bodies have not been found. The defense disputed all of these. The death of Thomas Steele, a man listed by LA Weekly in 2008 among the linked cases, was never charged for lack of DNA evidence.
The "sleep": the name rests on an apparent gap between 1988 and 2002. Prosecutors said Georgia Mae Thomas was killed during it, and police came to believe he never stopped.
The defense theory: the defense argued at trial that another, unidentified man committed the killings. No evidence of such a man was presented, and the jury rejected the argument.
Accounts differ on several details: the length of the gap (13 or 14 years); the date of the 1988 shooting (November 19 or 20); the date Bernita Sparks was found (April 16, or April 15 in one AP list); Henrietta Wright's age (34 or 35); Princess Berthomieux's age (15 at trial; 14 in LA Weekly's 2008 report on her disappearance); Rolenia Morris's age (29 or 31); the arrest date (July 7 in most sources; July 8 in an LAPD release); the timing of the successful familial search (April 28 or June 2010); and the number of women in the photographs still unidentified (about 30, 32, 34 or 35, depending on the account and date).
April 1974: in West Germany, Franklin and two other U.S. soldiers abduct and rape a 17-year-old girl near Ludwigsburg; a German court convicts all three, and he serves less than a year.
1981: hired by the City of Los Angeles as an attendant at an LAPD garage.
January 1984: Sharon Dismuke, 21, is killed (suspected; never charged).
August 10, 1985: Debra Jackson, 29, is found.
August 12, 1986: Henrietta Wright, 34, is found.
January 10, 1987: Barbara Ware, 23, is found.
April 16, 1987: Bernita Sparks, 26, is found.
1987: ballistics tests link several killings to one .25-caliber handgun.
November 1, 1987: Mary Lowe, 26, is found.
January 30, 1988: Lachrica Jefferson, 22, is found.
August 1988: Inez Warren, 28, is killed (suspected; never charged).
September 11, 1988: Alicia Alexander, 18, is found.
November 1988: a woman, 30, is shot, assaulted and pushed from an orange Pinto; she survives.
December 2000: Georgia Mae Thomas, 43, is killed (suspected; never charged).
March 9, 2002: Princess Berthomieux, 15, is found in Inglewood.
July 11, 2003: Valerie McCorvey, 35, is found.
2004: cold-case DNA work links Mary Lowe's case to the 2002 and 2003 killings.
September 2005: Rolenia Morris disappears.
2006: Ayellah Marshall, 18, disappears.
January 1, 2007: Janecia Peters, 25, is found off Western Avenue.
2007: DNA links the 2002, 2003 and 2007 killings to the 1980s cases; the LAPD forms the 800 Task Force.
2008: California adopts a familial DNA search policy; the first search in the case finds no relative.
August 27, 2008: LA Weekly publishes "Grim Sleeper Returns"; the City Council soon offers a 500,000-dollar reward.
2009: a relative's DNA enters the state data bank after a felony weapons conviction in an unrelated case.
2010: a second familial search points to a likely relative; on June 30 state agents give the LAPD Franklin's name.
July 5, 2010: a detective collects pizza and utensils Franklin leaves at a Buena Park restaurant; the DNA matches.
July 7, 2010: Franklin is arrested at his home on West 81st Street.
July 8, 2010: charged with 10 murders and one attempted murder, with special circumstances.
December 16, 2010: the LAPD publishes more than 100 photographs found in his home.
2011: grand jury indictment; on August 1 prosecutors announce they will seek death.
February 16, 2016: trial opens.
February 25, 2016: the 1988 survivor identifies him in court.
May 5, 2016: jury finds him guilty on all counts.
May 12, 2016: penalty phase opens.
May 26, 2016: the woman attacked in Germany in 1974 testifies.
June 6, 2016: jury recommends death.
August 10, 2016: Judge Kathleen Kennedy sentences him to death.
August 17, 2016: received on death row at San Quentin.
March 2019: Governor Newsom orders a moratorium on executions.
March 28, 2020: found unresponsive in his cell at San Quentin and pronounced dead at 7:43 p.m., age 67; cause pending autopsy.