In November 1988 a woman of 30 survived a shooting in South Los Angeles. Twenty-seven years and three months later, on February 25, 2016, she took the witness stand against Lonnie Franklin Jr. She was the only known survivor of the series that came to be called the Grim Sleeper murders, and for most of the years in between, no one had been charged.
That interval, long past the point at which most people stop expecting a courtroom, runs through every case that follows. In some the survivor waited nine years to be heard; in others, more than forty. The wait had different causes. Evidence sat untested. A suspect sat in another state’s prison. A prosecutor chose not to pursue a case. A man pleaded guilty before anyone could be called. What the cases share is a witness who had lived with what happened for a long time and then repeated it, under oath or at a sentencing lectern, to strangers.
Franklin, a former city sanitation worker and police garage attendant, was arrested in South Los Angeles in July 2010 after a familial DNA search of the state data bank pointed to a relative of his. His trial opened in February 2016. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him on May 5, 2016, of 10 counts of first-degree murder, with the special circumstance of multiple murder, and of one count of attempted murder. Nine of the ten dead were women; the tenth was a 15-year-old girl. They had died between 1985 and 2007.
The attempted-murder count was the woman who testified in February. Patch and ABC7 reported her testimony as that of the sole survivor; every other count concerned a death. The jury began deliberating on May 4, and it returned verdicts on all eleven counts the next day.
A second woman came to the same courtroom in May 2016 for the penalty phase, traveling from Germany. In 1974, when Franklin was a soldier stationed in West Germany, a German court had convicted him and two other American soldiers in a case involving a woman. She testified before the penalty jury about that case, forty-two years after it. LAist reported that Franklin served less than a year in prison there and received a general discharge from the Army. Her evidence was put to the jury as part of the penalty phase, where the question was the sentence, not guilt.
The jury recommended death on June 6, 2016. Judge Kathleen Kennedy imposed the sentence on August 10, 2016. Franklin died at San Quentin State Prison on March 28, 2020, while his automatic appeal was still pending.
Andrew Urdiales, a former U.S. Marine, was convicted of eight murders in two states: five in Southern California between 1986 and 1995, three in the Chicago area in 1996. It was the Illinois cases that came to court first, because Chicago detectives matched a revolver seized in Hammond, Indiana, to the three women killed there, and he confessed in April 1997.
In September 1992 a 19-year-old woman survived an assault in the Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs. No one was arrested, and Urdiales was never charged with it. Her account was evidence about his conduct that did not rest on his own statements. The Illinois Supreme Court, summarizing the record, referred to her by initials.
She first testified in 2004, in Livingston County, Illinois, at the sentencing hearing that followed his conviction for the murder of Cassandra Corum. Jury selection there had opened on April 19, 2004; on May 10 the court, sitting without a jury on guilt, rejected his offer to plead guilty but mentally ill and his insanity defense. The sentencing jury heard the state’s evidence in aggravation, including the California killings drawn from his own statements and, from the witness stand, this woman. That was almost twelve years after the crime. The jury returned a sentence of death, which Illinois later commuted to life without parole when it abolished capital punishment in 2011.
California took him to trial in Santa Ana in 2018, before Judge Gregg Prickett, with Senior Deputy District Attorneys Matt Murphy and Eric Scarbrough prosecuting. His lawyers, led by Denise Gragg, did not dispute that he had killed the five women; they argued childhood trauma and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and asked for second-degree murder. Reports of the trial place the woman from 1992 on the stand a second time, now twenty-five years and more from the night she was describing. The jury convicted Urdiales on May 23, 2018, and recommended death on June 12.
At sentencing on October 5, 2018, she spoke to him. CBS Los Angeles reported that she told him she forgave him, and that she said this did not mean he did not deserve the death penalty. Judge Prickett imposed five consecutive death sentences, so that each would stand on its own if another were overturned. Urdiales reached California’s death row on October 12. He was discovered unresponsive in a cell at San Quentin on November 2, 2018, and pronounced dead soon after midnight; the state investigated the death as a suicide.
In Chicago, the wait ran in two stages. On November 27, 1997, a woman survived on the South Side. Police arrested Andre Crawford in January 2000 on an unrelated matter and obtained video-recorded statements from him, and a lineup followed in which she picked him out. The Illinois State Police laboratory later matched DNA in her case to him. She was, among the twelve cases the State brought together against Crawford, the only one in which the woman lived.
Then nothing happened for nine years and eleven months. Crawford was held in the Cook County Jail through all of it; ABC7 described him at trial as the longest-held inmate in the jail’s history. The State filed more than 200 counts across twelve cases and dropped 139 of them before trial. When it finally came before one jury in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Judge Evelyn B. Clay presiding, the trial ran six weeks. About 90 witnesses testified, some 450 exhibits went in, and the transcript came to nearly 10,000 pages.
She testified in the late autumn of 2009. The defense did not rest on her identification; it contested the evidence in one of the murder cases, where no DNA had been recovered and another man had earlier confessed, and argued that the DNA of more than one man should have appeared across the series. The jury deliberated a little more than ten hours and returned its verdict on Thursday, December 10, 2009, a few minutes before six in the evening. ABC7 counted the word guilty read aloud 24 times: murder of eleven women, attempted murder of the twelfth, and the related counts. A relative of one of the dead said afterward that he had waited ten years for that day.
The jury declined to impose death, and Crawford received natural life, with 30-year terms on the remaining counts. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed on December 16, 2013, and the Illinois Supreme Court denied leave to appeal on March 26, 2014.
Brian Dugan’s case is the one in which survivors waited longest to testify under oath. In November 1985 he pleaded guilty to the murders of Donna Schnorr, 27, of Geneva, and Melissa Ackerman, 7, of Somonauk, and received two life sentences. He pleaded guilty at the same time to other crimes against women and girls and received 155 years. Some of the women from those 1985 cases testified at a hearing in October 2009, twenty-four years on.
The reason was a third case. In 1985 Dugan had written out a confession to the 1983 murder of Jeanine Nicarico, 10, of Naperville, but DuPage County prosecutors refused to promise him he would not be executed, and no deal was struck. Two other men, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, were convicted and sentenced to death for the Nicarico murder. Cruz was acquitted at a third trial on November 3, 1995; the charges against Hernandez were dropped that December. DNA testing matched Dugan, and he was indicted for the Nicarico murder on November 29, 2005, while already in prison.
On July 28, 2009, he pleaded guilty to it in DuPage County and told the court that no one had aided, abetted or helped him. That plea set up a sentencing hearing before a jury, and the jury would decide between death and life. The prosecution put on women from his earlier crimes, and the Daily Herald reported that Dugan was made to face survivors in October 2009. A woman assaulted in Elmhurst in January 1977 had died in 2006; her husband told the court by stipulation that she had recognized Dugan on television after his arrest in 1985. A second woman testified about an encounter in Aurora in 1979, which Dugan told the court he did not remember. A third described August 1982; one of Dugan’s brothers later admitted giving him a false alibi in that case. None of the three incidents was among his convictions. Women assaulted in the series of crimes in May 1985, for which he had pleaded guilty, testified as well.
So thirty-two years separated the oldest of those incidents from the witness stand where the survivors, or in one case a stipulated statement from the survivor’s husband, finally entered the record. The jury returned a death sentence on November 11, 2009, and Judge George Bakalis imposed it on December 16. Governor Pat Quinn commuted it to life on March 9, 2011, the day Illinois abolished capital punishment. Dugan was serving life as of August 2020.
Carlton Gary’s survivor waited the shortest time of any of these women, and her testimony has had the longest life in the appellate record. On September 11, 1977, a woman in Columbus, Georgia, survived the first of the crimes that the state later attributed to one man. Gary was arrested in Albany, Georgia, on May 3, 1984, after a pistol stolen in Columbus in October 1977 was traced to him through relatives. The trial opened on July 28, 1986. She testified and identified him.
On August 26, 1986, a Muscogee County jury convicted Gary of three counts each of malice murder and two related felonies, the victims being Florence Scheible, 89, Martha Thurmond, 69, and Kathleen Woodruff, 74. The next day it returned death sentences. The state had put the nine Columbus cases before the jury, including the four deaths for which he was never charged, and the woman who lived stood as the one identification by a living victim. A second woman who survived, in February 1978, never identified him and died before the trial, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Gary denied everything until his execution. His lawyers argued over thirty years that blood-group tests and DNA results excluded him as the source of a stain tied to the woman who survived, and that other science, a shoeprint and a dental impression among it, pointed away from him. The state answered with fingerprints at four of the Columbus locations and DNA testing ordered in 2009 that matched him to one of the dead. Every court left the convictions in place: the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed in March 1990, the Eleventh Circuit rejected his federal petitions, and the trial court denied an extraordinary motion for a new trial on September 1, 2017. The Supreme Court of the United States denied review on March 15, 2018, and Georgia executed him by lethal injection that evening at 10:33. He was 67.
Joseph James DeAngelo never had one. He pleaded guilty on June 29, 2020, to 13 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery, and he admitted dozens of further crimes too old to prosecute, including a December 1975 shooting of a Visalia police detective. Prosecutors counted 87 victims at 53 locations in 11 counties.
A plea ends the need for witnesses, and so the survivors and the families were heard at the sentencing hearing in Sacramento instead, over several days in August 2020, before Judge Michael Bowman sentenced him on August 21 to eleven consecutive terms of life without parole, a further life term and eight years.
The oldest of the crimes were forty-five years old. Claude Snelling was killed in Visalia in September 1975. His daughter told the court, as the Associated Press reported, "My dad died saving my life that night and he is my hero." She said his death left a hole in her heart: he never walked her down the aisle and never met her children, and the man who had stalked her had been a police officer, someone sworn to protect people.
The daughter of Lyman Smith, who with his wife Charlene was killed in Ventura in March 1980, told the court she had been treated as a suspect for two days after the deaths and had lived with the shame of it for decades, United Press International reported. She called the plea deal something short of justice, though she said she wanted to focus on the good that had come since.
These were statements, not testimony; nobody cross-examined them, and they changed no verdict. DeAngelo had already pleaded to everything. He was moved to the Protective Housing Unit at California State Prison, Corcoran, on January 26, 2021.
Vladimir Mirgorod is serving two life sentences in Russia. The Moscow City Court convicted him on January 30, 2012, of 16 murders of 15 women and a teenager committed in Moscow and the Moscow region between April 2002 and May 2004, and the Supreme Court of Russia upheld the verdict on June 21, 2012. Police had matched his fingerprints, taken when he registered on his release from a prison term for robbery in 2010, to evidence from murders in 2003.
Several women survived in 2003, Moskvich Mag reported, and gave investigators descriptions of the man. Two of those descriptions did not match each other, a point the magazine left open: either the man had changed his appearance, or a different person was responsible for one of the episodes.
The second case, reopened after DNA testing tied him to older killings, ended with a verdict in June 2025 in a Moscow district court: murders of 15 women and a man, and the attempted murder of a woman, with other charges, and a second life sentence. In March 2025, when the Investigative Committee announced the end of its inquiry, 360.ru reported that a woman who had survived him identified him years afterward and gave evidence. The Moscow City Court upheld the second sentence on December 9, 2025. Her place in the case rests on that late identification, which gave a series built on fingerprints and DNA a living witness.
Laid side by side, the cases differ more than they match. Franklin’s survivor waited twenty-seven years because nobody had a name to give her. Urdiales’s waited almost twelve years before an Illinois court heard her and more than twenty-five before California did. Crawford’s waited twelve, ten of them behind a jail’s delay, not hers. Dugan’s women waited up to thirty-two years while the law argued over a different case. Gary’s waited nine, and the arguments over her have not stopped. DeAngelo’s survivors were heard forty-five years on, without a trial.
Where a prosecution had a living witness, she was often the only one: in Franklin’s case the single survivor among eleven counts, in Urdiales’s the one source outside his own statements. In others, her testimony served as aggravation for a man already convicted or already pleading, and a jury weighing a sentence was asked to look at a woman who was alive, not only at those who had died. What the waiting cost the women is largely unrecorded. One of them stood at a sentencing hearing in 2018 and forgave the man in the dock, and in the same breath said what she thought he deserved.
• 1974: Franklin, a U.S. soldier in West Germany, is convicted by a German court with two other soldiers in a case involving a woman.
• September 1975: Claude Snelling is killed in Visalia, California; DeAngelo pleads guilty to the murder 45 years later.
• September 11, 1977: a woman survives in Columbus, Georgia, the first of the cases later attributed to Gary.
• May 3, 1984: Gary is arrested in Albany, Georgia.
• November 1985: Dugan pleads guilty in two murder cases; his written Nicarico confession is not accepted.
• August 26, 1986: Gary is convicted in Muscogee County after the 1977 survivor identifies him; death sentences follow August 27.
• November 1988: a 30-year-old woman survives a shooting in South Los Angeles.
• September 1992: a 19-year-old woman survives an assault near Palm Springs; no arrest.
• November 27, 1997: a woman survives in Chicago.
• January 2000: Crawford is arrested in Chicago.
• May 10, 2004: Livingston County, Illinois, convicts Urdiales of murder; the 1992 survivor testifies at the sentencing hearing.
• November 29, 2005: Dugan is indicted for the Nicarico murder.
• July 28, 2009: Dugan pleads guilty to the Nicarico murder.
• October 2009: survivors of earlier Dugan crimes are heard at his sentencing hearing; the jury returns death on November 11.
• December 10, 2009: Crawford is convicted of 11 murders and one attempted murder.
• July 2010: Franklin is arrested.
• March 9, 2011: Illinois abolishes capital punishment; Dugan’s and Urdiales’s Illinois death sentences are commuted.
• February 25, 2016: the 1988 survivor testifies at Franklin’s trial.
• May 5, 2016: Franklin is convicted; the 1974 witness testifies at the penalty phase later that month.
• August 10, 2016: Franklin is sentenced to death.
• March 15, 2018: Gary is executed.
• May 23, 2018: Urdiales is convicted in Orange County; he is sentenced to death October 5.
• November 2018: Urdiales dies in his San Quentin cell.
• March 28, 2020: Franklin dies at San Quentin.
• August 21, 2020: DeAngelo is sentenced after survivors and relatives speak.
• June 2025: Mirgorod is convicted in his second case; the verdict is upheld December 9, 2025.