By Chris Bartholomew
This serial killer didn't come into the public eye until August of 2008. Wonder how he felt when he woke up to see a billboard asking the public for help in the search for a serial killer linked to at least 12 murders.
The billboard advertises the cities $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a murder suspect known as the 'Grim Sleeper'. At the intersection of 98th Street and Western Avenue, the billboard has all the victims' faces on it.
The most elusive serial killer west of the Mississippi took a 13-year break. Now he's back. Police think the killer is still in the area and that he is at the youngest 43-years-old now based on when the killings started if he were 18. But he could be in his late 50s by now too.
In August 1985 a stranger began a horrific campaign of murder and rape that went almost unnoticed by the people of Los Angeles. In 1988 the killings stopped and Los Angeles Police Department breathed a sigh of relief. Silent relief that is, as the public was never informed that a serial killer was out there, after all, and here we go again, they did not want to panic the city at-large over a killer who was targeting mostly “street people” who voluntarily got into his car.
That relief lasted for over a decade until March 2002 when a 14 year old girl became the killer's 4th known victim after a 13 year hiatus. Now the LA police and public face a terrifying reality; the serial killer who has so far claimed 11 confirmed victims has awoke and is once again prowling the streets of LA. Striking at will and vanishing into the night.
Family, friends and community members gathered together on Jan 1st '09 to hold a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Grim Sleeper killer. The night coincided with the second anniversary of the last known murder, 25-year-old Janecia Peters, whose body was found in a dumpster on January 1, 2007.
In a string of attacks spanning two decades, ten women and a man have been shot, with the same weapon, and dumped in close proximity to each other in and around the South Central area of the city.
All the victims are black, and at least some of the women were prostitutes. A majority had been sexually assaulted after their deaths, and most of their bodies were dumped in the same alleyway.
Since the Grim Sleeper is anywhere between his early 40s and late 50s, he is older and capable of patience. He might be the type who thinks he can wait out the initial flurry of press about his crimes and start up again when the heat is off.
The Grim Sleeper is a classic prostitute killer, in many ways. He targets women who have worked the streets, sometimes torturing them before he dumps them somewhere along Western Avenue. He may think he's somehow doing a service, that's how many serials justify what they do to themselves, especially if they kill prostitutes. They're not even all that aware, sometimes, that they really just like the domination and control.
The Grim Sleeper's DNA profile didn't match any sample in the state-offender or federal crime databases. They were hoping a long-shot effort to identify the man through DNA “familial” testing would identify the killer's family, and eventually lead police to the killer. The attempt to search the crime databases for the killer's brother or father, whose DNA would appear similar to that of the anonymous Grim Sleeper's, was the first known major use of the “familial DNA” method in investigating a crime. However, the long-awaited DNA test was a huge disappointment, failing to turn up any clues to the Grim Sleeper's identity.
The killer is still out there, somewhere in Los Angeles, and police are pursuing numerous avenues in hopes of catching him before he kills again.
The biggest mystery, other than the killer's identity, is why he apparently stopped killing between 1988 and 2001, and between 2003 and 2007, although his bloody footprint may be linked to other cold cases from this period.
The police are looking into thirty other unsolved cases, and believe that at least six of these will come to be victims of the Grim Sleeper because the unsolved cases have many similarities to those carried out by the serial killer, including locations where the bodies were dumped.
On August 7, 1985, 29-year-old cocktail waitress Debra Jackson left a friend's Lynwood, Calif. home, headed on foot to catch a bus back to her apartment in South Central.
Debra never made it. Three days later, her decomposing body was found under a carpet remnant in a back alley near West Gage Avenue. She had been shot three times in the chest with a small-caliber pistol.
One year and two days after the grisly murder of Debra Jackson, another woman was found dead in an alleyway. Henrietta Wright's remains were found under a mattress on West Vernon Ave, just three miles from where Debra's body was discarded.
Henrietta had been shot twice in the chest, and her mouth had been gagged with a cloth.
Two days later, 36-year-old San Diego man Thomas Steele was discovered dead from a gunshot wound to the head at the intersection of 71st and Halldale Avenue. He had been in the neighborhood visiting his sister.
Months later, a pretty 23-year-old named Barbara Ware was found in another alley, on East 56th St. Barbara had been shot once in the chest, and authorities pulled her body out from under a pile of debris. According to cops, neighbors told them that they saw a man take Barbara's remains out of a vehicle.
Bernita Sparks' last words to her mother were that she was leaving their home on West 69th Street to go buy a pack of cigarettes on April 15, 1987. The 26-year-old woman was found in a trash bin on South Western Ave. the next morning. She had been strangled, beaten and shot in the chest.
Later that year, Mary Lowe, 26, told her mom that she was going out to a Halloween party, but never came home. Witnesses told police that Mary had spent part of Halloween night at the Love Trap Bar before leaving on foot.
Her body was found in a Western Ave. alleyway the next morning. A neighbor later told police that they saw Mary get in a rust- or orange-colored Pinto, driven by a young black man.
Three months later, a 22-year-old named Lachrica Jefferson was found dead. The young woman with past ties to drug abuse and prostitution had two gunshot wounds to the chest. Her remains were recovered in an alley, with a napkin placed over her face that had the word 'AIDS' written on it.
On September 11, 1988, Alicia “Monique” Alexander vanished after leaving to run to the store for her father. The 18-year-old was never seen alive again. Her body was found days later with evidence of sexual assault and gunshot wounds.
From 1985 to 1988, police say the Grim Sleeper killed at least eight people, and there were few witnesses and fewer leads, until a woman escaped the clutches of the killer.
The woman was walking down the street in November 1988 when a young, good-looking black man approached her. He was driving an orange Ford Pinto, the same car described in the murder of Mary Lowe.
Jackie says they exchanged words, and while initially she had no intention of getting in the handsome stranger's car, he eventually persuaded her to let him give her a ride to her sister's house.
But Jackie said that never happened: she was shot in the chest while her attacker raped her.
Jackie says it was because she pleaded for her life and reasoned with her abductor that he spared her. She says he was driving her to a nearby hospital when he pushed her out of his moving car. She was able to get to safety, and remains the Grim Sleeper's sole known survivor.
After Jackie's harrowing ordeal, cops say the serial killer with a penchant for single, black women with checkered pasts simply disappeared for 13 years.
On December 21, 2001, police say runaway prostitute Princess Berthomieux vanished, and was found three months later, strangled and beaten in Inglewood, Calif. The 14-year-old was found naked in an alley.
On July 11, 2003, Valerie McCorvey was discovered strangled and sexually assaulted in an alley, partially clothed.
In the next two years, technicians at a police DNA lab made a huge break in the case: they were able to link the Princess Berthomieux and Valerie McCorvey murders to the Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, and Mary Lowe using DNA evidence.
Furthermore, cops would use the bullets retrieved from Jackie to link nine of the victims together. All of the attacks in the 1980s were committed with the same .25 caliber handgun.
On New Year's Day 2007, a homeless man walking by a trash dumpster near Western Ave. discovered the body of 25-year-old Janecia Peters. Janecia had last been seen the night before at a nearby motel.
When authorities arrived, they found her naked remains in a garbage bag. She had been shot once in the back, and most likely died of asphyxiation. Cops soon ascertained that the gun used in Janecia's murder was the same type used in all nine of the Grim Sleeper's attacks in the 1980s.
Soon, police linked DNA found at the Janecia Peters crime scene to the McCorvey-Berthomieux murders, which were also linked to three prior slayings. The murders would all be ultimately linked to one serial killer, the Grim Sleeper.
In 2007, the 800 Task Force was charged with cracking the Grim Sleeper serial killer case. Cops say L.A.'s long-active serial killer has at least 11 deceased victims and one survivor.
They say the Grim Sleeper targets black women who live in South Los Angeles neighborhoods. The women sometimes have drug habits or a history of prostitution.
Editor's note: this article was written in January 2009, when the case was unsolved and the familial DNA search described above had failed. It was run again in 2010 against a newly added sample and returned a partial match to Christopher Franklin, whose father Lonnie David Franklin Jr lived a few streets from where several of the bodies had been left. Franklin was arrested on July 7, 2010, the first arrest in the United States obtained through a familial DNA search. He was convicted on May 5, 2016 of ten of these murders and the attempted murder of the survivor named here as Jackie, and sentenced to death on August 10, 2016. He was found dead in his cell at San Quentin on March 28, 2020, of natural causes, with no appeal resolved. Hundreds of photographs of women were recovered from his property, and the Los Angeles police released them publicly in an effort to identify them.