The Grim Sleeper : The True Story of Serial Killer Lonnie Franklin An Anthology of True Crime

By Jonah Hall

A DETECTIVE'S NIGHTMARE 
There he was sitting emotionless and quiet for the past six years in a Los Angeles courtroom, without ever uttering a word in his defense. Lonnie Franklin Jr. also didn't have much of a reaction when he was sentenced to death for the murders of a teenage girl and nine women. 

Better known by his moniker, Grim Sleeper, a name given to him by the L.A. Weekly in 2008, Lonnie Franklin Jr preyed on drug addicts and prostitutes in a crime spree dating back three decades in Los Angeles. One of the longest operating serial killers in history, the Grim Sleeper targeted poor black women from 1985 until 1988. The killings stopped abruptly and no one was apprehended by the police...Until he began again. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201286620

Book preview

THE GRIM SLEEPER : THE TRUE STORY OF SERIAL KILLER LONNIE FRANKLIN

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JONAH HALL

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LONNIE FRANKLIN

THE RAILROAD KILLER

BIKINI KILLER

TED BUNDY

TRAILSIDE KILLER

TOY BOX KILLER

CLASSIFIED AD RAPIST

BLONDE BUTCHER

THE SCUMBAG

SICKO JOSEPH DUNCAN

LONNIE FRANKLIN

There he was sitting emotionless and quiet for the past six years in a Los Angeles courtroom, without ever uttering a word in his defense. Lonnie Franklin Jr. also didn’t have much of a reaction when he was sentenced to death for the murders of a teenage girl and nine women.

Better known by his moniker, Grim Sleeper, a name given to him by the L.A. Weekly in 2008, Lonnie Franklin Jr preyed on drug addicts and prostitutes in a crime spree dating back three decades in Los Angeles. One of the longest operating serial killers in history, the Grim Sleeper targeted poor black women from 1985 until 1988. The killings stopped abruptly and no one was apprehended by the police.

His name was taken from the apparent gap that followed the initial spate of murders. Police at that time were under the impression that the killer may have been in prison during the fourteen-year period but they later surmised that he may have laid low after one victim survived. Police today believe that he never rested and he continued killing women although no other murders were attributed to him aside from the ten.

Whether he was actually dormant during that time or was better at hiding his crimes, the Grim Sleeper reemerged in 2002 to go on another killing spree. It was not until the year 2010, with considerable advances in DNA technology that old cases were reopened and luck finally revealed the real identity of the Grim Sleeper.

Early Years

Not much is known about Lonnie Franklin Jr’s early years but he is believed to have been born in Los Angeles on the 30th of August 1952 and to have been raised in South Central LA. At the time of his arrest, he was married to a Belizean woman, had two children and was retired. He has served in the United States Army and received a general discharge in 1975.

He had a criminal record dating back to 1989, consisting of two charges of possessing stolen property in 1993 and 2003, a charge for misdemeanor battery in 1997, and a charge of misdemeanor assault in 1999. Franklin served time in prison for one of the charges of stolen property, and he was also arrested for other charges several times in his life, the first being for auto theft in 1969 when he was only sixteen years old.

He was a very able mechanic and even worked for the police station as a garage attendant for some time. Neighbors often described him as very helpful, offering to help with car repairs and he was known as somewhat of a local handyman, chatting with neighbors and passers-by while doing his tasks. He did not fit the profile of a serial killer, most of which are white between the ages of 20 and 30. Franklin was a black male who committed his first murder at the age of 32.

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How a Bite of Pizza Led to His Arrest

Although he has just been recently convicted and is awaiting the death penalty, Lonnie Franklin started his killing spree in the 1980s. However, it wasn’t until 2010 when the police arrested a suspect in the case – and it all came down to a bite of pizza. The tale of how the case developed over the years is an incredible story about science, reviving cold cases, and the anguish of the families of the victims who wanted nothing but justice.

Police, with the help of federal drug agents, monitored Franklin around the clock, watching his every move. Several years before the arrest, a group of detectives worked tirelessly chasing down dead ends and any lead they could get their hands on.

Police began investigating the murders after they discovered a number of dead women in dumpsters and alleyways during the mid-1980s. They codenamed their task force the Southside Slayer because at that time the police thought that the murders were committed by one person named the Southside Slayer. The crimes were officially made known to the public on the 23rd of September 1985. Due to the huge number of killings in the area, the Sheriff’s Detectives and the LAPD realize that it was a challenge to determine whether the murders were linked or not. Some of the other men responsible for the murders in the area were Daniel Lee Siebert, Ivan Hill, Louis Crane, and Michael Hughes.

Most of the slayings had a pattern. The women were either choked, fatally shot, or both and their partly naked bodies were dumped in trash bins and alleys in the impoverished areas where Franklin lived. Police were unable to connect the crimes to a serial killer for years and the families of the victims, as well as residents of the community, complained that not much attention was given to the crimes and the police could have done a better job. They believed that the plight of the victims was ignored because they were poor black women, and some were even prostitutes who used drugs.

Franklin only came under suspicion after the creation of a force that was tasked to reexamine cold cases following a final killing in 2007. In September 2008, officials declared that they were offering a reward of $500,000 to help catch the killer and in November a story about the Grim Sleeper appeared on the popular TV program America’s Most Wanted. Although the program stated that the killer was a black male, they did not want to rule anyone out.

Ballistics from a .25 caliber gun used in the crimes played a key role in his capture, but the investigation was sealed when then-Attorney General Jerry Brown permitted the contentious use of a DNA probe into the felon database of California. Using DNA collected from the murder scenes in the early part of 2010, detectives were able to link the crimes to Franklin’s son whose DNA was in the system. He had been previously arrested for felony weapons possession in 2009.

Franklin traveled to Northern Orange Country, near Buena Park, where he stopped to grab a pizza. Armed with new evidence, a detective posed as a busboy at the pizza parlor to collect a pizza crust, a fork, napkins, and a drinking glass which Franklin had used and had enough DNA for testing.  There was a call for the DNA evidence to be thrown out due to claims of reasonable expectation of privacy but because the food where the DNA came from was already discarded, the court overruled the claim. When the lab results came out, it connected him to evidence found on several discarded bodies.  When he was arrested and interrogated Franklin wouldn’t confess. He denied all the charges brought against him and ignored all the evidence that was hard to dispute.

The police theorized that he targeted black women as an act of vengeance against a female figure who may have wronged him in the past by hurting victims who resembled her in some way. Others also suggested that he got sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on women.

House Raid

Form the outside nobody would know that a serial killer lived in Lonnie Franklin Jr’s house. It looked like it was something that came out of a fairytale. It was mint-green with a pointy rooftop and was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. The house stood out among the neighborhood’s other bungalows which had a cream color.

Franklin shared the house with his wife of 32 years. Inside, there were several framed family photos on bookshelves and tables. There was also a cot in the cluttered office where Franklin’s mother-in-law sometimes slept. His grandchildren often came by to visit and they had their very own room filled with plush toys.

However, this respectable looking home was really a house of horrors. It was where he kept all the morbid trophies that he had taken from his victims. During a three-day search of the house, investigators found handguns, jewelry and almost a thousand photographs –many of them sexually explicit – as well as hundreds of hours of an x-rated video depicting the women who police believe were murdered.

On some of the video, a man, who they believe was Franklin, can be heard coaxing women to pose. There was also at least one video showing the hand of a man touching a woman who appears to be unconscious.

Investigators believe that the earrings, necklaces, rings, and watches that were found in Franklin’s house may have belonged to the victims and that they were kept as morbid mementos as a way for Franklin to relive his crimes over and over again. Former LAPD Chief Bernard Parks said, He was clearly proud of his accomplishments. He was obviously documenting his work. It is not uncommon for criminals to keep grisly souvenirs to amuse themselves.

The Trial

Although he was arrested in 2010, it was not until February 2016 when Lonnie Franklin Jr’s trial started after much delay. The massive amount of evidence spanning thirty years caused a lengthy pretrial discovery. When his trial began, he pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of murder and a single count of attempted murder. Closing arguments began on the 2nd of May 2016 and jury deliberation began on the 4th of May 2016.

After six years of waiting, three and a half months of trial and one day of jury deliberation, he was finally sentenced to death on the 10th of August 2016, exactly 31 years after the death of his first confirmed victim, Deborah Jackson. Despite his conviction, there are still plenty of details which remain unclear such as the reason why LAPD took more than two decades to finally arrest the person responsible for so many murders.

Death Sentence

A jury decided that the Lonnie Franklin Jr, who was sixty-three at the time, should be sentenced to death for the murder of nine women and one teenager. As the verdicts in punishment were read, the victims’ family members cried and some rocked back and forth. One prosecutor asked the jurors to show Franklin the same compassion he showed his victims and asked for the death penalty, while an emotional defense lawyer asked the jurors to sentence him to life without parole to hasten the healing process of the victims’ families.

The jury called for the death penalty on all murder counts and sentencing was set on the 10th of August 2016. During the penalty phase, the prosecutors connected him to several other slayings and detectives believed he killed at least twenty-five more women. All the name of the ten victims were read by the judge and in each case, the judge told him that he shall suffer the death penalty.

After the initial conviction, prosecutors showed more evidence against Franklin. One woman testified that Franklin was one of the three men who gang-raped her in Germany in 1974. Before he was sentenced, Franklin’s lawyer made last-ditch efforts to keep him off death row. A few hours after he was sentence to death, the lawyers released a statement saying that the death penalty is a waste of the taxpayer’s money. There are currently more than seven hundred people on California’s death row and since 2006, no one has been executed.

Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy told Franklin, 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, while he sat there stone-faced and defiant.

How He Choose His Victims

His victims also strayed from the standard profile. While most serial killers target white females, the victims of the Grim Sleeper were all black, though similar to other serial killers, he chose a few prostitutes.

Frustrations were aired during Bill Bratton’s reign as Police Commissioner in LA when he and other elected officials paid no mind to the resurgence of murder in black neighborhoods. There were no big press conferences and officials focused their attention on other things, such as eating nutritiously. Even with the killer ravaging black and poor neighborhoods, there was no alert from the LAPD and there was no interest to form a task force to solve the murders even after two more bodies were found in 2002 and 2003. Although there was a clear pattern to the killings, the LAPD did not share their discovery with the families of the victims.

List of Victims

Deborah Jackson

The first of the ten murders that were attributed to Franklin was on the 15th of August 1985 in Los Angeles. Her name was Deborah Jackson and she was working as a cocktail waitress. She left her friend’s house and took the bus to her apartment and was never seen again. Her body was found days later in an alley with three gunshot wounds to the chest.

Henrietta Wright

Henrietta Wright was 35 when she became one of the victims of the Grim Sleeper. She was found dead on the 12th of August 1986 in an alley. She was shot twice in the chest, was wrapped in a blanket and covered with a mattress. She also was barefoot and was gagged with a cloth.

Barbara Ware

Barbara Ware was only twenty-three when she was found under a pile of trash in an alley on the 10th of January 1987. She had been shot in the chest once. A man who said he saw Ware’s body as it was being dumped called 911 to report what he had seen. According to call transcripts, the witness wished to remain anonymous because he knew too many people. He also reported a full license number for the van that he had seen dumping the body: 1PZP746. The van that was described by the caller was later found in a church parking lot about five miles from where the body was found.

Bernita Sparks

Bernita Sparks told her mother that she was going out to the store to get some cigarettes but she never returned home. She was only twenty-six when she was found in a trash bin a day after she left home, beaten, strangled and shot in the chest with what police believed was a small-caliber gun.

Mary Lowe

On Halloween night in 1987, Mary Lowe, twenty-six years old, told her mother that she was going to a party and that was the last time she was seen alive. Her body was found the next day in an alley, covered up, and shot once in the chest with a small-caliber gun.

Lachrica Jefferson

Lachrica was only twenty-two years old when she was found on the 30th of January 1988. Like the others, she was found in an alley, shot in the chest once.

Alicia Alexander

On the 11th of September 1988, Alicia asked her father whether he needed anything from the liquor store before leaving the house. She was found a few days later in an alley near Western Avenue and 43rd Place. Police say the eighteen-year-old had been sexually assaulted before she was shot in the chest.

Enietra Washington - A Survivor and a Witness

Enietra is the only person lucky enough to have survived the Grim Sleeper. She was raped and shot in November 1988 before she managed to escape. She was the star witness in the trial of the accused serial killer, Lonnie Franklin Jr. She described getting how Franklin in his orange Ford Pinto pulled up alongside her and offered her a ride. After she initially declined, Franklin told her, That’s what’s wrong with you black women. People can’t be nice to you.

She reportedly felt sorry for him and ultimately accepted that fateful ride. She recalled how he shot her in the chest while she sat in the passenger seat. He sexually assaulted her as she was losing consciousness and she vividly remembered seeing a flash from a Polaroid camera, before she was pushed out of the car.  A photo of a partly nude and bleeding Washington was later found hidden behind a wall in Franklin’s garage. Photos of other victims were also found in his home.

When she recovered from her injuries, she led police to a Spanish bungalow just three doors down from Franklin’s house. Detectives staked out the house - and the entire neighborhood – but they failed to make any arrests.

Princess Berthomieux

Princess disappeared on the 21st of December 2001 and nobody had a clue to her whereabouts until three months later on the 19th of March 2002, when her body was found in an alley. A passerby found her body in the shrubs. She was strangled and beaten