Los Angeles Jury Convicts Chester Turner of Murdering 10 Women and a Fetus Over 11 Years
A DNA match in an unsolved 1998 killing first linked Turner to the deaths. Further testing freed a man wrongly convicted of three of the murders.
Published
For more than a decade, women were strangled and left in alleys and vacant lots in South Los Angeles. On April 30, 2007, a jury convicted Chester Dewayne Turner, 40, of murdering 10 of them and the viable fetus of one.
Turner, a former pizza deliveryman and crack cocaine dealer, was tried before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Pounders. The killings began in 1987 and ran to 1998, and much of the trial was taken up with DNA evidence. The defense argued that someone else could have committed the murders, pointing to DNA that was not accounted for. Jurors also found true special-circumstance allegations of multiple murder and, for one of the women, murder during a rape. They were to return to choose between life without parole and death.
The women were Diane Johnson, Annette Ernest, Anita Fishman, Regina Washington, Andrea Tripplett, Deserae Jones, Natalie Price, Mildred Beasley, Paula Vance and Brenda Bries. Turner was first linked to the killings in 2003, when DNA from Vance's 1998 killing matched him while he was in prison for a 2002 rape. Further tests exonerated David Allen Jones, who had been convicted in 1995 of three of the murders, and he was released. "The only true justice would be for me to have my daughter back," said Andrea Tripplett's mother.
Turner was sentenced to death. In 2020, the California Supreme Court reversed the fetal murder conviction and affirmed the judgment in all other respects.
The Los Angeles Times gave Paula Vance's age as 41 in its account of the investigation and as 38 in its list of the victims.
Sources
- People v. Turner, S154459, Supreme Court of California
- L.A. man guilty in 11 deaths, Los Angeles Times (John Spano)
Related News
- October 23, 2004: DNA Links Imprisoned Rapist Chester Turner to a Decade of Killings of Women in South Los Angeles
- June 19, 2014: Los Angeles Jury Convicts Death-Row Inmate Chester Turner of Four More Murders of Women in South Los Angeles