DNA Links Imprisoned Rapist Chester Turner to a Decade of Killings of Women in South Los Angeles
Police called him the most prolific serial killer ever identified in Los Angeles. Another man had spent nine years in prison for three of the killings before DNA cleared him.
Published
For years, the killings of women along Figueroa Street in South Los Angeles drew almost no attention. On October 23, 2004, police said DNA had linked them to a man already in prison for rape.
Chester Dewayne Turner, 37, a former pizza deliveryman, was identified after a yearlong investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department's cold case unit, which called him the most prolific serial killer ever identified in the city. Police said DNA connected him to killings committed between 1987 and 1998, most of them in a corridor running along Figueroa Street. The women were raped and killed; some were homeless, and several had struggled with drug addiction. Turner was serving an eight-year sentence at the Sierra Conservation Center for a 2002 rape, and the DNA sample he gave after that conviction led detectives to him.
The case began with the killing of Paula Vance in downtown Los Angeles on February 3, 1998, which a surveillance camera recorded too poorly to identify the attacker. Detectives Cliff Shepard and Jose Ramirez of the cold case unit reopened it, and in September 2003 they learned that DNA from Vance matched Turner and that a second match tied him to the 1996 killing of Mildred Beasley. Testing of other unsolved cases followed, and "the number kept on growing," Shepard said.
The findings also cleared David Allen Jones, a mentally disabled janitor convicted in 1995 of three of the murders, who was released in March 2004 after DNA tests exonerated him in two and implicated Turner. On October 26, prosecutors charged Turner with murdering 10 women, with special circumstances that made him eligible for the death penalty, and District Attorney Steve Cooley called Jones's conviction "a system failure." At his trial in 2007, Turner was convicted of murdering Diane Johnson, Annette Ernest, Anita Fishman, Regina Washington, Andrea Tripplett, Deserae Jones, Natalie Price, Mildred Beasley, Paula Vance and Brenda Bries, and he was sentenced to death.
The LAPD said DNA connected Turner to 13 murders, while the Los Angeles Times reported 12. The LAPD gave Paula Vance's age as 38, while the Times said she was 41.
Sources
- Serial Killer Identified Through DNA Technology, Los Angeles Police Department
- DNA Analysis Links Inmate to 12 Slayings, Los Angeles Times
- Ten Murder Charges Filed, Los Angeles Times
- People v. Turner (S154459), Supreme Court of California
Related News
- April 30, 2007: Los Angeles Jury Convicts Chester Turner of Murdering 10 Women and a Fetus Over 11 Years
- June 19, 2014: Los Angeles Jury Convicts Death-Row Inmate Chester Turner of Four More Murders of Women in South Los Angeles