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Judge Sentences 'Grim Sleeper' Lonnie Franklin Jr. to Death for 10 Los Angeles Murders

After more than fifteen relatives of the dead spoke, Judge Kathleen Kennedy imposed death on every murder count against the former city sanitation worker.

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A television camera operator and a reporter standing under bright lights on a downtown Los Angeles sidewalk at dusk, palm trees and a courthouse building behind them

More than fifteen relatives of the dead spoke first. One by one, on Wednesday, August 10, 2016, they stood in a Los Angeles County courtroom and described what Lonnie David Franklin Jr. had taken from them. Then Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy, 28 years on the bench, sentenced him to death.

"I can't think of anyone I've encountered in all my years in the criminal justice system that has committed the monstrous crimes that you have," she told him.

Franklin, 63, a former city sanitation worker and onetime garage attendant for the Los Angeles police, had been convicted on May 5 of ten counts of first-degree murder, with the special circumstance of multiple murders, and one count of attempted murder: nine women and a 15-year-old girl, killed in South Los Angeles between 1985 and 2007. A jury had recommended death after a six-month trial. Kennedy imposed it on every murder count, refused a new trial and rejected the defense argument that California's death penalty was unconstitutional.

The woman behind the attempted-murder count spoke too. Enietra Washington had been shot and survived, and at trial she pointed across the room at Franklin and said, "That's the person who shot me." Now she told him, "You are truly a piece of evil."

Franklin had said nothing in his own defense during the trial, and he did not address the judge. He broke his silence only to answer the sister of Georgia Mae Thomas, who told him to turn around and face her. "I've never seen you before in my life," he told Vivian Williams. "It's a bald-faced lie." She said she forgave him anyway, because the Bible taught her to, and that she would pray for him.

During the penalty phase, prosecutors had tied him to four more murders of women, between 1984 and 2006, and a woman testified that Franklin and two Army companions had kidnapped and raped her in Germany on April 17, 1974. Prosecutors have said he may have had as many as 25 victims. He arrived on death row at San Quentin on August 17, 2016, and died there on March 28, 2020, without being executed.

What this story covers. The sentencing, the family statements, the May 5 conviction and its counts, the special circumstance, the six-month trial, the penalty-phase evidence of four more murders and the 1974 attack in Germany come from the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office news release of August 10, 2016. The judge's words, her rulings on the motions, Enietra Washington's statements, the exchange with Vivian Williams and the prosecutors' estimate of up to 25 victims come from CBS Los Angeles and the Associated Press the same day. His arrival on death row and his death come from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's release of March 29, 2020. The additional killings were never charged.

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