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.
Advertisement
The judge read the names of his 10 victims, in each case, telling him: “You shall suffer the death penalty”. She testified against Franklin at his trial.
Franklin denied any role in the killings to investigators, but didn’t utter a word in his defense at trial. Police believe he may have murdered as many as 25 women in total.
This video includes clips from ABC and images from Los Angeles Police Department and Getty Images. In June, a jury recommended execution rather than life in prison.
“I can’t think of anyone in all my years that has committed the kind of monstrous and the number of monstrous crimes that you have”.
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.
Most wore disheveled clothing suggesting they had been re-dressed and moved, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman said in her closing argument. “He is a psychopathic, sadistic serial killer who takes joy in inflicting pain on women and killing them”.
The sentencing came at the climax of a hearing at which 17 relatives of the victims read statements to the court.
“I would like to know why”.
“It’s a bald-faced lie”, he told Vivian Williams.
“She still talks to me in my dreams”, said another woman, who said she lost “her best friend, her sister, her everything”.
A detective posing as a busboy at a pizza parlor collected utensils and crusts while Franklin was attending a birthday party. Lab results connected him to some of the bodies and led to his arrest.
In his house, police found a gun used in killings and Polaroids of some victims, including one of Washington in which she was partly topless and bleeding from her gunshot wound. I think about her all the time.
The former rubbish collector fatally shot or strangled nine women and a 15-year-old girl between 1985 and 2007. Most of the women were fatally shot at close range, though two were strangled and two were shot and choked.
– Janecia Peters, 25, shot in the back and found naked inside a sealed plastic trash bag in a trash bin in an alley in South Los Angeles on January 1, 2007.
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.
Authorities said after Franklin’s 2011 indictment that they had evidence tying him to several more unsolved slayings, some of which occurred during the presumed lapse in killings.
Franklin’s conviction will be automatically appealed. California has not executed an inmate since 2006.
Advertisement
“At the end of the day the issue for the court is whether the evidence supports the jury’s verdict in this case – which was their conclusion that the aggravating circumstances so outweigh the mitigating circumstances that death is appropriate”, Kennedy told the courtroom. “I said, ‘If I die I am going to haunt you'”.
