Louis Craine was born in 1957 and was an unemployed construction worker of thirty living in South Los Angeles.
Five women were named in the charges against him: Carolyn Barney, Loretta Perry, Vivian Collins, Sheila Burton and Gail Ficklin. They were strangled and sexually assaulted, and the accounts describe them as women working as prostitutes.
He was arrested on May 29, 1987, the same day Carolyn Barney was killed. He was charged with five murders and convicted of four.
He was sentenced to death and died in prison in 1989, roughly two years later. No appellate review of the conviction was completed, so nothing in the case was ever tested beyond the trial.
That matters more here than it would in most cases. South Los Angeles in these years had several men killing women in the same circumstances at the same time, and the overlap produced repeated confusion about which deaths belonged to which series. Some attributions were corrected only by DNA decades afterwards. This case was never revisited, because the defendant was dead.
Two limits on the entry. The count of four convicted and five charged is what the accessible record supports, and the roster previously carried it as the blended range four to five. And the years are given as 1984 to 1987 in some accounts and 1985 to 1987 in others.