“You need to take me to the hospital”, she testified that she told him that night. “You’re right up there with Manson”.
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The killings occurred over more than two decades and community members complained that police didn’t seriously investigate them because the victims were black and poor and many were drug users and prostitutes. They now say they don’t think he rested and could have left up to 25 victims behind.
Los Angeles Police Department’s special task force then followed the elder Franklin to a restaurant and watched as he threw out his rubbish which contained a discarded slice of pizza.
Franklin’s lawyers had suggested a mystery man was the real killer and has asked jurors to spare the defendant’s life.
Judge Kennedy said she has been a jurist for 28 years and could not think of anyone who had committed such monstrous crimes.
A judge has a rejected a defense motion to set aside the death penalty verdict for the man convicted of 10 murders in the “Grim Sleeper” killings.
In their court filing, Deputy District Attorneys Beth Silverman and Marguerite Rizzo countered that “a death sentence is clearly warranted based on the evidence and the law”.
Franklin had been so good at covering up his crimes that he had a decades long run as a serial killer and the Grim Sleeper killings seemed like they could have continued for as long as he wanted them to.
During the sentencing phase of the trial, prosecutors also linked Franklin to five further killings.
“You are truly a piece of evil”, Washington said.
“It’s a bald-faced lie”, he told Vivian Williams.
Williams, the sister of victim Georgia Mae Thomas, said she forgave Franklin for the “horrible things” he’d done because that’s what the Bible taught her.
Mary Alexander, whose 18-year-old daughter was murdered, asked Franklin to turn around and face her, an exchange reported in the LA Times. He was arrested when results connected him to the crimes. A Polaroid photo of the partly nude woman bleeding from her wound was found in his garage after his arrest.
Irene Ephriam waited almost three decades for her aunt’s killer to be brought to justice, but she said today that she never gave up hope that it would happen.
Lonnie David Franklin had been convicted of 10 counts of first-degree murder for the killings of nine women and a 15-year-old girl between 1985 and 2007.
The remaining victims were killed in 2002, 2003 and 2007, according to a 2011 grand jury indictment of Franklin.
The killer earned his moniker because of the apparent hiatus from 1988 to 2002, which police once theorized was due to him being imprisoned or laying low after Washington survived.
Franklin’s conviction will be automatically appealed.
After the sentencing, Franklin’s attorney Dale Atherton dismissed California’s death row system as “a joke” and voiced doubts over whether the punishment would ever be carried out.
More than a decade has passed since California’s last execution, when Clarence Ray Allen received a lethal injection in January 2006, after his conviction of paying a fellow inmate to commit three murders.
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Franklin is thought to have killed over one hundred victims, potentially making him the most prolific serial killer in history.
