In late May 1987 police in South Los Angeles found the body of Carolyn Barney, twenty-nine, in an empty house not far from where Louis Craine's parents and brother lived. She had been raped and sodomized and then strangled. While officers worked behind the cordon, they noticed a man watching them whose behavior struck them as wrong. They took him in on May 29 and questioned him for hours, and by the end he had confessed to killing Barney and two other women.
The two others were Loretta Perry, twenty-four, killed on January 25, 1987, and Vivian Collins, found strangled on March 18 in the 1600 block of East Century Boulevard. Both, like Barney, had been raped before they were strangled. Perry's death had been put down to a drug overdose. After Craine described killing her, her body was exhumed and examined again, and the pathologists found that he was right. The women were among the many killed in South Los Angeles in those years, young and poor and often caught up in the crack epidemic, some of them working as prostitutes; the deaths were grouped for a time under the name Southside Slayer, until investigators understood that several men were killing at once.
Craine was thirty. He had been born in Los Angeles on January 6, 1957, the third of four children, showed signs of intellectual disability early and left school after the fourth grade. In the early 1970s he left his parents' home and drifted, working a series of unskilled construction jobs, and he was unemployed when he was arrested. Under questioning he blamed his older brother, Roger, for Vivian Collins, saying Roger had strangled her during sex after the two of them paid her. Their relatives, including their mother, gave Roger an alibi for that day, and he was never charged.
Prosecutors added two older cases: Gail Ficklin, twenty-four, killed on August 15, 1985, and Sheila Burton, thirty, killed on November 18, 1984. Their bodies, like the others, had been found not far from his parents' house. That made five counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances, and a possible death sentence.
The trial opened in early 1989. The central physical evidence was a bloodstained shirt carrying the blood type of one of the victims. His own family testified against him. His mother told the court he had repeatedly shown aggression toward prostitutes and had been seen in a bloody shirt after one of the killings. Craine insisted he was innocent, said he had been pressured into confessing, denied that the shirt was his and accused his relatives of perjury. His lawyers presented tests showing an IQ of 69, a tendency to exaggerate and a high susceptibility to suggestion, the qualities that make a long interrogation dangerous, and asked for a forensic psychiatric examination; the request was refused.
On April 26, 1989, the jury convicted him of the murders of Ficklin, Perry, Collins and Barney and acquitted him of the murder of Sheila Burton. Two of the four had been counted among the Southside Slayer killings. On May 16 the same jury recommended death, and in June the judge imposed it; some summaries give the May date as the verdict. He was sent to San Quentin. He fell ill there and was moved to a hospital near San Rafael, where he died of complications of AIDS on November 3, 1989, some five months after he was sentenced; one account gives November 7. The automatic appeal that follows a California death sentence was never heard, so the questions his lawyers raised about his confession were never reviewed by a higher court.
The Southside killings went on after his arrest. Later investigations, some resolved only with DNA decades afterward, tied other deaths to Michael Hughes, Chester Turner, Daniel Lee Siebert, Ivan Hill and Lonnie Franklin Jr. Police suspected Craine of more killings than the five he was charged with, but no other case was brought against him.