Los Angeles Jury Convicts Death-Row Inmate Chester Turner of Four More Murders of Women in South Los Angeles
Prosecutors said DNA linked the former pizza deliveryman to the four killings. Jurors deliberated less than a day.
Published
Chester Turner was already on California's death row for murdering 10 women in South Los Angeles. On June 19, 2014, a Los Angeles jury convicted him of four more.
Jurors deliberated less than a day before finding the 47-year-old former pizza deliveryman guilty of first-degree murder, with special allegations that made him eligible for death, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said. Prosecutors said DNA evidence tied him to the four women, strangled between 1987 and 1997 in the years when crack cocaine tore through the city's poorest neighborhoods. Authorities counted Turner as one of at least three serial killers who preyed on women in South Los Angeles in that era, when more than 100 women there were killed in a series once blamed on a single "Southside Slayer."
On August 1, 2014, Judge Robert Perry gave him four more death sentences, for Elandra Bunn, 33, killed in June 1987; Deborah Williams, 28, in November 1992; Mary Edwards, 42, in December 1992; and Cynthia Annette Johnson, 30, in February 1997. "It's judgment day," said Gwendolyn Cameron, Johnson's sister. "He got what he had coming."
Prosecutors had once offered Turner life without parole for the four murders, and he turned it down. His lawyer, Kieran Patrick Brown, said Turner still denied killing anyone. Another man, David Allen Jones, a former janitor described as having the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, had served 11 years for three of the killings before DNA evidence pointed to Turner and prosecutors concluded that police had coerced his confessions. Prosecutor Robert Grace called Turner the most prolific killer in the city's history.
Turner's first judgment, in 2007, also included a term of 15 years to life for the death of a pregnant victim's unborn child. In November 2020 the California Supreme Court reversed that conviction and affirmed the rest of the judgment, including the death sentence.
Sources
- South LA Serial Killer Given Additional Death Sentences, CBS Los Angeles (Associated Press)
- Chester Turner Convicted Of Killing 4 More Women, CBS Los Angeles (Associated Press)
- People v. Turner (S154459), Supreme Court of California