#Grim sleeper unsolved serial killers trial
Franklin was linked at trial to 14 slayings, including four women he wasn't charged with killing. "We can now be at peace.”įranklin had been on death row since August 2016 for the deaths of nine women and a teenage girl. “I won’t say I’m pleased he died but at the end there was justice for all the bad things he did in his life," Diana Ware said. The stepmother of a victim named Barbara Ware told People magazine she was shocked by the news.
An autopsy will determine the cause of death however, there were no signs of trauma, corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton said in a statement. He was 67.Ĭalifornia corrections officials said Franklin was found unresponsive in his cell at San Quentin State Prison on Saturday evening. (AP) - Lonnie Franklin, the convicted serial killer known as the "Grim Sleeper" who preyed on the women of South Los Angeles for more than two decades, has died in prison. The method linked the murder scene samples partially to the DNA of Franklin’s son, who had been convicted of drug and firearms offences in 2008.SAN QUENTIN, Calif. Investigators eventually linked the crimes to Franklin by using a controversial forensic technique called familial DNA, in which they compared samples found at crime scenes to that of convicted criminals on a police database. The gap between the two sprees led to the killer being dubbed the “grim sleeper”. There were two subsequent killings, one the following year and another in 2007.Ī police task force established that the later killings were tied to the earlier unsolved murders. There was then a 14-year gap until 2002, when Princess Berthomieux, aged 15, was found murdered. The Los Angeles Police Department was criticised for keeping the killing wave quiet, despite suspicions that there was a serial killer at large. The spate of killings began in 1985 and continued until 1988, during which seven women were murdered. Franklin was also convicted of attempting to murder her.
The main witness against him was Enietra Washington, who survived after being attacked and left for dead. “None of them deserved to be brutally dumped like trash as if their lives had no meaning.”įranklin did not testify at the trial. "They suffered from the same frailties and the same imperfections that all humans do, and they had the same hopes and the same dreams for their futures that we all have," Beth Silverman, Los Angeles’ deputy district attorney, told jurors during the trial’s closing arguments.
He left their bodies in alleyways under piles of rubble or in dumpsters. In a trial lasting nearly three months, jurors heard how Franklin, an African-American, preyed on often troubled women who were also black, raping them and then killing them by either shooting or strangling them. There are suspicions he may be responsible for at least half a dozen other murders for which he was not charged. He could face the death penalty for the killings, which began in the mid-1980s and stretched over a 22-year period. Lonnie Franklin Jnr, 63, sat impassively as the verdicts were read out in a Los Angeles courtroom, while the families of his victims burst into tears. A former garbage collector officially became one of California’s most prolific serial killers on Thursday after a jury found him guilty of the so-called “grim sleeper” murders that took the lives of nine women and a 15-year-old girl.
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