The serial killer, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., received this sentence in a courtroom full of his victims’ family and friends. This started a series of slayings that perplexed the police.
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His gunshot and strangling victims were found dumped in seedy alleys, wrapped in carpets or hidden under discarded mattresses.
“That was a finding that the death penalty was the proper sentence”, the attorneys said in their filing.
The killing spree was the subject of a 2014 HBO documentary by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who claims the Los Angeles police failed to properly investigate because the victims were mainly drug addicts and prostitutes. As a effect of this lack of serious investigations, they were only believed to be random murders instead of a serial killer’s job.
“We got a just verdict”, said Alicia Alexander’s father, Porter Alexander Jr., who was a fixture during the court proceedings. By 1989 the police though the killer was either dead or in prison since it was believed the killings had stopped.
Former L.A. Weekly managing editor Jill Stewart and crime reporter Christine Pelisek gave him the nickname “The Grim Sleeper” based on a gap in killings from 1988 to 2002. “All of the murders in this case are first degree”.
Prosecutors said Franklin took advantage of some of his victims’ addiction to crack, luring them to his backyard camper with money and drugs before killing them.
Franklin denied any role in the killings to investigators, but didn’t utter a word in his defense at trial.
As expected, the victims family’s of the Grim Sleeper had their chance to have a say as well. One of those included Laverne Peters, who spoke on behalf of her 25-year-old daughter who had been killed by the Grim Sleeper and discarded in a dumpster. When he finished, Franklin left her to die on the street.
She told the jury that in 1988 as she walked to a friend’s house, she accepted a ride from Franklin after he drove by and approached her.
Nearly three decades after the attack, Washington told prosecutors Franklin’s modus operandi and declared on the trial. The bullet that was extracted from her helped to tie up the ballistic evidence.
Franklin sat upright and attentive throughout the trial, rarely speaking with his lawyers and showing no emotion as the verdicts were read. A detective posing as a busboy at a pizza parlor retrieved utensils and crusts touched by Franklin during a birthday party. It was of a man whose DNA had been entered into the system and it revealed that this man was related to the Grim Sleeper killer. And, in their search of Franklin’s home in 2010, investigators found 1,000 photographs and videos of women, some appearing to be unconscious.
Another victim, who testified against Franklin at trial, survived being shot, raped, pushed out of a vehicle and left for dead in 1988.
The 63-year-old was a “sexual predator” and “career criminal” whom DNA evidence showed had acted alone, Silverman said.
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Wednesday, Judge Kathleen Kennedy imposed the jury’s recommendation of death over life imprisonment, without parole.
