Lonnie David Franklin Jr was convicted on May 5, 2016 of ten murders and one attempted murder committed in South Los Angeles between 1985 and 2007. He was sentenced to death on August 10, 2016 and was found dead in his cell at San Quentin on March 28, 2020, aged sixty-seven, of natural causes. The Los Angeles press called him the Grim Sleeper.
He was born on August 30, 1952 and lived almost his whole life in the same part of South Los Angeles. He served in the US Army in Germany in the 1970s. He worked as a garage attendant for the City of Los Angeles and then as a mechanic in the LAPD's own motor pool, and was known on his street as the man who fixed cars in his yard.
The women he was convicted of killing were Debra Jackson, twenty-nine; Henrietta Wright, thirty-five; Barbara Ware, twenty-three; Bernita Sparks, twenty-six; Mary Lowe, twenty-six; Lachrica Jefferson, twenty-two; Alicia Alexander, eighteen; Princess Berthomieux, fifteen; Valerie McCorvey, thirty-five; and Janecia Peters, twenty-five. Most were shot with a .25 calibre automatic or strangled, and left in alleys, in rubbish bins and under debris.
Enietra Washington was shot in the chest, photographed by him, and pushed from the moving car in 1988. She survived, described him and his car, and gave evidence at the trial nearly thirty years later. Her account was the only eyewitness description of him for two decades.
The killings were connected by ballistics in the 1980s. The link was not made public for more than twenty years. That is the substance of the complaint against the LAPD here, and the department has since acknowledged that the deaths of Black women in South Los Angeles during the crack epidemic were not pursued as they would have been in other parts of the city. An earlier task force on related killings had operated under a working name that was a racial slur.
The Grim Sleeper name came from an apparent thirteen-year gap between the 1988 attack on Enietra Washington and the killing of Princess Berthomieux in 2002. Detectives have never accepted that he stopped. Around a thousand photographs and videos of women were recovered from his house, many of the subjects never identified, and police released images publicly in an attempt to find out who they were.
He was identified in 2010 through California's first familial DNA search: a partial match to a profile taken from his son after a weapons conviction pointed investigators at the father. An undercover officer working as a restaurant server collected a discarded pizza crust and napkin, and the DNA on them matched the crime scenes. He was arrested on July 7, 2010.
The trial did not begin until 2016, six years later. He was convicted of ten murders and the attempted murder of Enietra Washington, and the jury recommended death. Judge Kathleen Kennedy imposed the sentence and said the case had exposed how little attention the victims had been given while they were alive.
He died before any appeal was resolved. Ten convictions stand, and the number of women in those photographs means the real figure is not known and probably cannot now be established.