Some of the victims’ family members wept as Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy read out the death sentences.
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Enietra Washington, the sole known survivor in the “Grim Sleeper” serial killings joins relatives of victims speaking to the media after the sentencing for Lonnie Franklin Jr., a convicted serial killer known as the “Grim”.
But police believe he may have also been active and slaughtering during this period.
The judge handed down a death penalty sentence for each of the 10 murders. In each case, Kennedy told him, “You shall suffer the death penalty”.
Some of the victims’ relatives cried.
In the gallery, there were sounds of tearfulness, sighs, and other people repeatedly stated amen.
Several of his victims were prostitutes and drug addicts whom he shot or strangled, dumping their bodies in alleyways or trash bins.
There is a better than good chance that Franklin could have taken his Grim Sleeper persona all the way to his grave if it weren’t for his son who got pinched for a crime and put into the system. “My hope is that he spends the rest of his glory days in his jail cell, which will become his trash bag”, her mother said.
“Amen”, other family members in the audience said. The court heard Franklin had committed crimes dating back to the 1974 kidnapping and gang rape of a 17-year-old girl in Germany while he was in the U.S. military.
“I’d like for Mr. Franklin to turn around and face me”, she said. Alexander asked, gripping the lectern.
She repeated her question, louder: “Why?”
Again, he whispered, although it was impossible to make out what he said.
“On the inside I know you’re broken and you’re hurting just like all of us”, she said, adding she would pray for him.
Franklin’s face softened, and he nodded.
“The defendant is a serial killer who intentionally targeted victims who were easy to exploit”, they said in a written submission before the sentencing.
Silverman called Franklin a “serial killer who was hiding in plain sight”.
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. Seven women were killed between 1985 and 1988, and three more were killed between 2002 and 2007. The deaths drew little, if any, media attention.
The bodies of more than a dozen young women had been found in a rough section of Los Angeles for more than two decades before police acknowledged that the killings were the work of one man.
Authorities were able to link the slayings through ballistic and genetic evidence at the crime scenes that pointed to a single killer.
His DNA proved a match.
A break finally came in the case in 2010, when a search of state offender records turned up a partial match.
Before long, investigators focused on the convict’s father, Franklin. Two criminalists testified at trial that it was same weapon that killed one of the victims.
Despite there only being enough evidence to find him guilty of ten murders and one attempted murder, he was handed the death sentence.
Franklin’s own DNA was surreptitiously collected by a detective posing as a busboy who collected pizza crusts he had discarded and utensils he used at a birthday party.
Franklin earned the moniker “Grim Sleeper” because of a 13-year gap in the murders.
“She still talks to me in my dreams”, said another woman, who said she lost “her best friend, her sister, her everything”.
The high-stakes trial devolved, at times, into bitter back-and-forths between attorneys – and the discord continues.
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“Addiction caused these women to be extremely vulnerable”, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman told jurors.
