'Grim Sleeper' serial killer convicted in Los Angeles

Rubbish collector Lonnie Franklin killed at least 10 women between 1985 and 2007

(Getty Images)

The serial killer known as the Grim Sleeper has been found guilty by a jury in Los Angeles, more than 30 years since his first victims were murdered. Lonnie Franklin, 63, was convicted of killing 10 women aged between 15 and 35, in a long but sporadic spree that lasted from 1985 to 2007.

The victims were all shot or strangled, and their bodies dumped in alleyways close to Franklin’s home in South Los Angeles. One of dozens of witnesses at the three-month trial was Enietra Washington, 57, who testified that Franklin had sexually assaulted and shot her, snapping her picture with a Polaroid camera before he dumped her from his vehicle during the attack in 1988. Franklin was also found guilty of Ms Washington’s attempted murder.

Franklin claimed his early victims amid the violent crack cocaine epidemic that overtook Los Angeles and other US cities in the 1980s and 1990s. A 2014 documentary by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, Tales of the Grim Sleeper, speculated that the authorities were insufficiently concerned with the lives of his alleged victims, some of whom worked as prostitutes, many of whom were addicts, and all of whom were black.

Police failed to connect the slayings at the time, in part because at least three serial killers were active in South Los Angeles during the same period. Chester Turner was convicted of killing 14 women in 2007. Michael Hughes, convicted of seven murders, was sentenced to death in 2012. Both remain on California’s death row. Franklin proved to be particularly elusive, earning his sinister nickname because his murders appeared to cease between 1988 and 2002.

More than two dozen detectives investigated the original spate of Grim Sleeper killings in the 1980s, but only closed in on a suspect after DNA advances in the 2000s helped to develop new leads. When Franklin’s son Christopher was arrested on firearm and drugs charges, his DNA proved a match for that found on several of the victims.

A former rubbish collector who at one point was mechanic for the LAPD, Franklin was finally arrested in July 2010, after a police officer posed as a waiter at a restaurant where he was attending a birthday party. The officer harvested the crucial DNA samples from a napkin, a drinking glass, and an uneaten pizza crust.

The penalty phase of the trail begins on Monday, when jurors will hear further evidence to determine whether the married father-of-two should face the death penalty, or be sentenced to life in prison. Prosecutors are expected to show them evidence that Franklin was in fact the killer of at least five further women, but escaped being charged for their murders.