During the sentencing hearing Franklin became agitated when a victim’s relative said she had been friendly with him. Franklin was arrested in 2010.
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“She still talks to me in my dreams”, said another woman, who said she lost “her best friend, her sister, her everything”.
Prosecutors built their case on that DNA evidence, including Franklin’s saliva on many of his victims’ bodies, along with ballistic evidence and the testimony of a surviving victim.
“This defendant is completely irredeemable”, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman wrote in her sentencing brief, according to the Associated Press. Franklin faces formal sentencing Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016, after a jury found him guilty and said he should be executed. Franklin is thought to have killed over one hundred victims, potentially making him the most prolific serial killer in history.
Lonnie Franklin Jnr’s killings took place over more than two decades.
In a court filing this week, Franklin’s attorneys argued that presenting such evidence unfairly pushed jurors toward recommending death, saying that any “reasonable juror would feel sympathy” for the victims’ family members “with only one course of action available to the jury to acknowledge their pain”.
As expected, the victims family’s of the Grim Sleeper had their chance to have a say as well.
An 11th victim survived after being shot, raped, pushed out of a vehicle and left for dead in 1988.
Although the Grim Sleeper did indeed do a good job of covering his tracks, there was one fatal flaw in his plan to stay under the radar and continue to kill young, vulnerable women.
In rejecting a defense motion to set the death penalty aside, the judge noted they had presented nearly no evidence in favor of sparing his life, such as testimony about good deeds or a troubled upbringing. The then-unknown killer apparently fell dormant for years.
Franklin was connected to the crimes after a task force re-examining the old cases discovered that genetic evidence on one of the victims was similar to his son’s DNA, which was in a database because of an arrest. It took years for investigators to identify him as the suspect, a process aided by DNA analysis.
A detective posing as a busboy at a pizza parlor collected utensils and crusts while Franklin was attending a birthday party. Police have since accounted for the identities and whereabouts of some of the women, but others remain unknown. Franklin “sat stoically” as the sentence came down, the newspaper’s reported.
I can’t think of anyone I’ve encountered in all my years in the criminal justice system that has committed the monstrous crimes that you have.
No one has been put to death in San Quentin State Prison since 2006 and there are almost 750 inmates on death row.
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The grieving mother repeated her question louder: “Why?” “It was a long time coming, but all I asked for was the good lord to give me strength enough to make it every day”.
