The Grim Sleeper

Los Angeles in the 1980’s was a Meccah for several prolific serial killers.  Many of these monstrous men and women were caught, tried and convicted for their crimes during this toxic time our country’s past, however today on The Secret Sits we are going to discuss one killer who made it out of the 1980’s without being caught until much later and this paved the way for his moniker, The Grim Sleeper.

Don’t forget to leave us a Rating and Review on Apple Podcast.

Support the show

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/TheSecretSits

Send show suggestions to:

TheSecretSitsPodcast@gmail.com

Follow us on our social media at:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwnfvpNBYTo9BP1sVuFsfGQ

TheSecretSitsPodcast (@secretsitspod) / Twitter

https://www.instagram.com/thesecretsitspodcast/

https://www.facebook.com/TheSecretSitsPodcast

https://www.tiktok.com/@thesecretsitspodcast?lang=en

You can find our podcast on:

Apple Podcasts
Stitcher
Spotify
Buzzsprout.com
Goodpods
Google Podcasts
Amazon Music
iHeart Radio
Pandora
Podcast Addict
Podchaser
Pocket Casts
Deezer
Listen Notes
Player FM
Podcast Index
Overcast
Castro
Castbox
Podfriend

#TheGrimSleeper #LonnieFranklinjr #EnietraWashington #800TaskForce #JaneciaPeters #LAPD #Crime #TrueCrime #Podcast #Survivor #LA

Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/TheSecretSits)

Transcript

Los Angeles in the 1980’s was a Meccah for several prolific serial killers.  Many of these monstrous men and women were caught, tried and convicted for their crimes during this toxic time our country’s past, however today on The Secret Sits we are going to discuss one killer who made it out of the 1980’s without being caught until much later and this paved the way for his moniker, The Grim Sleeper.

In 2007 in a small dingy room in the bowls of the LAPD headquarters, there is a group of 6 detectives who have named themselves the “800 Task Force”, this name is not cool like the Avengers or anything, it is simply the number of the original room the task force met in, room 800.  And when this task force was moved from room 800 to make room for a new sex-crimes team, they simply decided to keep the nickname. 

There is no press allowed into this task force’s room, in fact, they don’t even allow other detectives into the room.  The main wall of the room is papered with photographs of young dead women.  This task force was assembled in 2007 under Chief Bill Bratton and their singular focus was to solve 11 murders which had taken place in Los Angeles, California starting in 1985.

There had been very few leads and even less arrests and detectives had endless theories about who they believed could be responsible for these atrocities.  The case has gone on for so long, that detectives have retired and been replaced time and again.  Every time that a changing of the guard happened, new fresh-faced detectives would always think they had detected patterns or leads that had never been explored, but in the end, they just ended up with more egg on their faces.

It has now been four years since the police have finally recognized that this has been the work of one lone killer.  And with that fact came some others, like, this unknown killer would now be the most enduring serial killer in California history and the longest-operating serial killer west of the Mississippi.  For some unknown reason this killer stopped his rampage in 1988 and he did not resurface for 13 years, killing again in 2002 and 2003.  The only clues left for the 800 task force to pursue was if they could get Attorney General Jerry Brown to sign off on a new controversial DNA probe of the California felon database.

“He could be some computer nerd out there for all we know,” says Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, a friendly yet hardened man in his early 50s, as he sips a coffee at a Starbucks one morning in late summer. It was Kilcoyne who urged the LAPD brass to set up the 800 Task Force. “It could be anybody…. In this case, it has gone on so long — we have to be open to any possibility.”

This set of murders originally began in August of 1985, a time when Los Angeles was dealing with an epidemic of PCP raging Angelenos and crack wars.  Also, at this time Los Angeles’ murder rate had skyrocketed.  During a three-year spree seven women and one man were killed and left in alleyways and dumpsters along the Western Avenue in South Los Angeles.  The same gun had been used in each case.

Suddenly in 1988, the killings (pertaining to this gun) just stopped.  And slowly Los Angeles became the second-safest big city in the US.  Also, during this time DNA was making its meteoric rise to fame as the newfangled crime-solving tool.  In 2001 the LAPD began looking at its backlogged cases from the 80s and 90s, having DNA run on samples of hair and skin from these older cases.

In 2004 the LAPD’s lab got a DNA hit, and this hit tied DNA from the 2002 and 2003 killings to the eight unsolved murders on Western Avenue from the 80s.  LAPD detectives now knew that they had a very experienced serial killer who was back in business.  The detectives in homicide where overwhelmed with their case load at this time, aside from these murders, they were also working on the Chester Turner case whose DNA matched to 14 strangulation deaths.  Newcomer Bill Bratton did not make the South LA murders a top priority for the department, because these murders were happening in lower socioeconomic area of the city and they were happening to mostly women of color, who are always marginalized.

It was 2004 and leaders in and around LA were transfixed by a three-way race for mayor between Hahn and challengers Bob Hertzberg and Antonio Villaraigosa.  However, the disinterested elite in the city were about to get a wake-up call.

On January 1 of 2007, a homeless man collecting cans from a Dumpster off Western Avenue discovered the lifeless body of 25-year-old Janecia Peters near a discarded Christmas tree. She’d been placed in a black garbage bag wrapped tightly with a twist tie. She was nude except for her gold heart pendant. Her shooting barely even made the news, and even those who covered the murder misreported it, calling it a stabbing.  Another marginalized black woman.

Janecia’s mother, Laverne Peters, heard a news report that a black teenager had been found dead along Western Avenue. She never dreamed it was her own daughter Janecia. She was in Inglewood with Janecia’s 4-year-old son, visiting other family members. “Her son had a Christmas present for Janecia,” Peters recalls. “He wrapped it himself, in aluminum foil and red rope.”

The day before, Janecia had telephoned her mom. “She just said, ‘I got a place.’ She was really excited …. Whoever she was going to stay with, she felt she was safe.”

It turned out that she wasn’t, and Janecia died at the hands of the Grim Sleeper. Peters and dozens of other mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers were never told their loved ones had been killed by the same serial killer.

There has been no press conference by Bratton, who had enough time to weigh in on Lindsay Lohan’s love life. Unlike city leaders who stood up for their city’s residence with the “BTK Killer” near Kansas City and the “Green River Killer” who terrorized Seattle, Los Angeles’ City Hall is either unaware, or has kept news of California’s longest-operating killer under wraps.  Even local journalists hadn’t picked up on the story, they hadn’t assigned him a moniker like, The Green River Killer or The Hillside Strangler, in fact the name, The Grim Sleeper, was chosen by the Weekly in order to mark his 13-year hibernation period before he immerged to kill again.

Bernard Parks’ chief of staff and son, Bernard C. Parks Jr., whose district is ground zero in the killings, accused Chief Bratton of purposely keeping former Chief Parks in the dark. “Leaving us out of the loop about something so important boggles the mind,” Parks Jr. said

Laverne Peters had long suspected that Janecia’s death was part of something bigger. And her feelings were somewhat confirmed when her daughter’s murder case was transferred from the 77th Division to a group of specialized detectives in 2007.

Detective Kilcoyne’s small unit tried to let people know that a predator was using their backyards as a hunting ground. Task force detectives working the 11 murders informed Vice and Homicide detectives, as well as all sex workers in the neighborhood. But of course, there were a multitude of police who did not want the public’s help with the case and they supported leaving the public in the dark.

Betty Lowe, whose daughter Mary was killed by the Grim Sleeper in late 1987, doesn’t want to hear stories about why police can’t find her child’s killer. She learned for the first time in 2006 that Mary was the victim of a serial murderer, and her anger came quickly. “We are not going to let this go,” Lowe says. “I have wanted this case solved so I can get on with my life…. I want to know who killed my baby!”

One avenue that had yet to be pursued was that of the killer leaving a trail of his own DNA behind, crime-scene analysts discovered traces of the killer’s dried saliva on some of the victims’ breasts, however; this DNA did not match any currently in CODIS.

Because of this, they decided to use familial DNA research to help them with the investigation, hoping that The Grim Sleeper may have a family member who was in the prison system.

But those DNA clues were currently locked up in an obscure government crime lab 376 miles north of Los Angeles, controlled by the unpredictable attorney general, Jerry Brown, who wanted to be the next governor of California. In familial DNA testing, a match of at least 16 “markers” could indicate a close relative. Brown’s spokesman, Gareth Lacy, said,” It is not something that will all of a sudden crack thousands of cases.” But, “if it is a lead, if you have a killer at large, if it can help, we want to work with the agency.”

Some civil rights groups view looking for relatives by probing the state felon DNA archive as an invasion of privacy. They also criticize such comparisons because of “false positives” that could wrongly identify somebody who is not actually a family member.

Eventually, Brown publicly announced that he would allow “familial” DNA surveys of the California prisoner database — but only if all other leads had been exhausted and the criminal being sought posed a threat, and this description fit the Grim Sleeper perfectly.

What police do know is that in August 1985, Debra Jackson was found shot to death. A year later, on August 12, 1986, Henrietta Wright was found dead. Two days later, the body of Thomas Steele was discovered in the middle of an intersection. Barbara Ware was found in a trash bag in January 1987. Bernita Sparks told her mother she was going to buy cigarettes but was found shot to death on April 16, 1987. Mary Lowe told her mother she was going to a Halloween party, and was discovered shot, on November 1, 1987. Lachrica Jefferson was found shot in January 1988. In September 1988, Alicia “Monique” Alexander asked her father if he wanted anything from a liquor store and never returned.

By the mid-’80s, detectives had begun to suspect the killings might be the work of the Southside Slayer, a fabled, evil, perpetrator who at one point was suspected in at least 20 other homicides in the county. Victims were found in parks, alleys, roadsides and school yards. Most were black sex workers working in South L.A. Many had been sexually assaulted. In one recurring clue, cat hair was found on some of the victims.

Police pursued, but ultimately discarded, many suspects, and investigated numerous alleged getaway cars. They sought a black man between 28 and 35, with a pockmarked face and a Caribbean or East Coast accent. A 1984 dark-colored Buick Regal with a baby seat. A late-model Plymouth station wagon. A 1960 Ford pickup with gray primer. A two-door red Ford Pinto with tinted rear-window glass.

The crazy part about this time period in Los Angeles, the 1980s I mean, was that there were so many active serial killers and gangs participating in murders that bodies were being found weekly so in 1986 the Black Coalition Fighting Black Serial Murders was launched. The coalition declared that, quote “the low-profile media coverage and problems with the investigation are all examples of women’s lives not counting and black prostitute women counting least of all.” End quote.

Then the LAPD got its biggest break of all, in the form of Victim No. 9. She was the sole survivor, attacked just before the Grim Sleeper vanished for 13 years. 

Early on Sunday, November 20, 1988, the E.R. doors crashed open at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance. A woman had been sexually assaulted and shot, and the bullet that tore through her chest had collapsed her lung and made it nearly impossible to breathe. As workers rushed the blood-drenched victim, Enietra Washington, to surgery, she could hear scattered bits of conversation between two relatives who had raced to her side at the hospital, her aunt and uncle.

Gasping for breath, she was surprised to see Superman himself peering down at her. This Superman — a doctor who looks like the late superhero actor George Reeves — leaned close to inform Enietra that he had to place a tube in her chest. “I asked him if I was going to die. He said, ‘I don’t know.’”

Enietra, his only known survivor, is Exhibit 1. Or perhaps that honor goes to the smashed bullet dug from her torso — a .25-caliber hunk of metal partially flattened after striking her chest bone, and now a crucial piece of evidence in LAPD’s hunt for the killer.

For five days, Dr. Superman monitored Enietra’s hazardous condition before extracting the bullet. It needed to “settle,” she says today, rubbing the bullet’s old entry spot, now a small white blemish. The doctor dropped it in a metal container and sent it to the LAPD.

The bullet sitting on a shelf in the city’s vast evidence room would prove to be an explosive link in a chain of DNA and ballistics evidence left at crime scenes. Yet Enietra had no idea she had escaped a madman, that she was the only living victim to have seen him up close or sat inside his car.

By the time Enietra was attacked that night, Los Angeles’ murder rate — and that of most big cities — had soared to an all-time high. In the 1980s alone, more than 50 black women, mostly sex workers and drug addicts, were found shot, strangled or stabbed, their bodies left in Dumpsters and alleyways in South Los Angeles.

Enietra shrugged off the attack on her as a case of mistaken identity, believing the thin, neat, polite and well-groomed African-American guy who shot her must have thought she was someone he was targeting, somebody he hated.

As police later determined, the bullet dug from her body in 1988 carries the signature scratches and other ballistics marks matching a bullet that, on a warm August evening three years earlier, killed cocktail waitress Debra Jackson. Before Enietra was shot, in fact, police had collected bullets from eight murder scenes, all with the same ballistics’ markings, pointing to the inescapable fact that a serial killer was at work.

Yet until 2006, Enietra was unaware of her role in this dark drama. Police kept the existence of the serial killer a secret from the public, and from her — and missed opportunities to use their sole eyewitness Enietra at police lineups of possible suspects.

But after she was shot, the killings with the .25-caliber gun abruptly halted, with eight dead. And Enietra Washington became the all-but-forgotten eyewitness to a serial killer, her name deep inside a thick file at LAPD.

For reasons still unexplained by Chief William Bratton, Enietra was left utterly in the dark about the real nature of the horror she faced in 1988. Moreover, most families of the 10 women and one man murdered by the Grim Sleeper were unaware that their dead loved ones are forever linked by the evil acts of a single man.

The night she was shot, Enietra was still stinging from a breakup with her husband, her Inglewood High School sweetheart. She had just returned from a trip to Louisiana to visit cousins, and was helping out an elderly man in her neighborhood whose wife had recently passed away. As evening approached, she got ready to go to a party with her best friend, Lynda Lewis.

Around dusk, she walked toward her friend’s house, dressed in her favorite blue-and-cream peasant blouse and tight cream-colored Calvin Klein denim mini. She was passing D & S Market in South L.A. when she noticed an orange Ford Pinto with a white racing stripe on the hood. She remembers the parked car because, as she said “it looked like a Hot Wheels car”.

From inside, the driver, a black man in his early 30s, asked her if she wanted a ride. He looked neat. Tidy. Kind of geeky. He wore a black polo shirt tucked into khaki trousers. She declined the offer. He kept asking her. She refused again.

Then the man said, “That is what is wrong with you black women. You think you are all that,”. The two traded friendly barbs back and forth. But his comment, which she took as a playful diss, prompted her to change her mind. Just 30, she enjoyed hitchhiking in those days, and accepted his offer of a ride for a few blocks to her friend’s house. Despite the drug violence raging in neighborhoods around her, it wasn’t neat-looking strangers who had her concerned. 

Once inside, Enietra was impressed by the car’s interior. The gear-shift handle was memorable, pimped out with a ping-pong-sized marble ball. The inside was all-white, with white diamond-patterned upholstery. She liked what she saw, and when he invited himself to the party, she said he was welcome to come.

He merely needed to make a quick stop at his uncle’s house to pick up some money, or so he said.

They wound through residential roads in his sporty car, ending up on a street whose name she did not take note of. The polite stranger parked outside a mustard-colored house partly obscured by hedges, got out, walked up to the house, briefly talked to someone inside, and returned about 10 minutes later.

But now, she says, he was entirely different. He drove off, started to say something, turned a corner — then went quiet. “He asked me, ‘Why did you dog me out?’” she recalls. She had no idea what he was talking about. He called her by the name of a well-known local sex worker who walked the streets around Normandie Avenue and looked like Enietra, except the sex worker wore an auburn wig while Enietra’s black hair was cropped short like a boys.

Enietra remembers thinking that his weird use of the sex worker’s nickname was an odd coincidence, because a few days earlier somebody else mistook her for the auburn-wigged woman. But Enietra, a tough young woman who’d been involved in a few scraps, wasn’t scared. She was much bigger-boned than her thin, spindly-looking companion, and she was irritated by his hostile tone — something she heard often from the malingering drug dealers and gangsters in her area.

“Who do you think you are talking to?” she responded, showing him some attitude. He suddenly pulled a small handgun out of a pocket on the driver’s side of the Pinto, and shot her in the chest as he drove along the residential streets.

Incredibly, Enietra did not lose consciousness, panic or flee. More than anything, she remembers being utterly baffled as blood began dripping down her blue-and-white peasant shirt. “That was something that stuck in my head,” she says. She demanded to know: Why had he shot her? And who would take care of her kids if she died? She felt blood trickle down her face, and her blouse grew wet with it.

Then, she blacked out, but was startled awake by the bright flash of a Polaroid camera. The man had taken her picture and sexually assaulted her. She remembers grabbing at him, and the two struggled. She pleaded to be taken to a hospital. He refused. Despite her half-conscious condition, she’s almost certain he told her he couldn’t take her to a hospital because he didn’t want to get caught.

The gunman peeled off through the night, Enietra bleeding beside him. He finally pulled over, pistol whipped her with his gun, opened her door and pushed her out of the car and onto the dark street.

But Enietra, was not done living, she picked herself up, and, in what is assumed to have been a state of shock, walked the many blocks to her best friend’s house, leaving a bloody trail along the street and smeared on parked cars.

She pounded on her friend Lynda Lewis’ front door, but nobody answered. In fact, Lewis had gone on to the party when Enietra didn’t show. She and her husband returned home at about 1 a.m. and found Enietra lying on the porch. Lewis recalls, “I was shocked and scared to death. 

It was while recovering in the hospital from her collapsed lung that Enietra got a visit from LAPD detectives. She described her attacker to a sketch artist, and drawings hit the streets. Detectives searched Department of Motor Vehicles records for an orange Ford Pinto, but there were thousands of those small hatchbacks in California. 

Police knew they had multiple dead victims, but kept Enietra in the dark.

Trying to find some method to the suspect’s madness, police had dubbed the killings the “strawberry” murders — a street term for troubled women who casually trade sex for drugs. The serial killer would coax women into his car, police believed, then “the suspect leans over and shoots them.” Police “worked around the clock” to determine which of the many killings were the work of the suspect.

In reaction to the leaked news that a new killer, someone other than the supposed Southside Slayer, was at work, the Black Coalition Fighting Black Serial Murders stormed a police-commission meeting, carrying placards saying, “No more police cover-up” and “Every life is of value,” and criticizing Gates for failing to warn residents about the murders.

Ironically, because LAPD had all but ceased contact with Enietra, she did not know her case was part of the Black Coalition’s protests, and the group did not know she existed. The coalition demanded a list of all the women slain in the South-Central area since 1983. 

When Sheriff’s detectives nearly 20 years after the fact revealed to Enietra that she had been shot by a serial killer, her mind raced. The feisty lady with the nerves of steel began to think back: Was that stranger on a bus who gave her the creeps years ago the serial killer?

What about the day she thought she saw that same man from the bus walking by her and asking, “Do you know me?” She had retorted, with a load of attitude, “Why? Am I supposed to know you?” Would she act that way toward a stranger today knowing what she knows now?

A year after she finally got clued in by the Sheriff’s detectives, the Grim Sleeper struck again, in January 2007. A homeless man discovered the body of Janecia Peters, and a DNA match linked the saliva found at the crime scene to the traces of human DNA left on some of the Sleeper’s victims. That June, with Bratton keeping a lid on things, the LAPD quietly launched the 800 Task Force to track the elusive psychopath.

The families of the victims now want results. Porter Alexander, whose daughter Monique was slain at 18, referred to the Grim Sleeper as a “turkey” and a “fool.” Alexander has his own theory about the killer: “He is very slick. I think he knows his way around the area. He swoops in and swoops out. He is not an outsider. He is very much aware of South Los Angeles.”

At a press conference held by Councilman Parks to debut a billboard depicting the faces of the 12 Grim Sleeper victims, a special person stood quietly in the crowd. Hers is the only face on the billboard that has been blacked out, as a precaution. As Parks asked for the public’s help and offered up the $500,000 reward, Enietra Washington, the sole survivor of the Grim Sleeper, stood unnoticed. And, she said nothing.

In 2004, detectives’ efforts resulted in a stunning, positive hit. Saliva found on 1987 victim Mary Lowe matched DNA found on the two women murdered in 2002 and 2003. 

The real murderer of seven women and one man was still out there — and now had killed twice more. His first victim after his 13-year hiatus was a habitual teenage runaway turned sex worker, 14-year-old Princess Berthomieux. Reported missing by her foster-care mother on December 21, 2001, her body was found four months later in an alley in Inglewood. Fifteen months later, in July 2003, a crossing guard discovered the body of 35-year-old Valerie McCorvey in an alley.

LAPD’s Kilcoyne says there could be “100 different reasons” why the Grim Sleeper took a 13-year break from 1988 to 2002. “It could be we aren’t connecting the cases…. I am sure we don’t have a lab report for everything he has done. There [could be] other cases that he has done that could drastically eliminate the gap,” and perhaps solve more murders.

Former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary says serial killers who take long breaks from carnage are “the exception to the rule,” and that makes L.A.’s sociopath tougher to figure out. 

In May 2007, the slaying of Janecia Peters, 25, was linked through DNA analysis to at least eleven unsolved murders in Los Angeles, the first of which occurred in 1985. That same year, in secrecy, the LAPD formed the "800 Task Force," composed of six detectives and overseen by the Robbery-Homicide Unit. After a four-month investigation, LA Weekly investigative reporter Christine Pelisek broke the news of the task force's existence, the link between Peters' killing and the earlier murders, and the silence of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William J. Bratton regarding the killer's existence. Villaraigosa and Bratton neither issued a press release nor warned the community. In some cases, LA Weekly was the first to inform the families that their daughters had long been confirmed as victims of a serial killer. 

In early September 2008, Los Angeles officials announced that they were offering a $500,000 reward to help catch the killer. On November 1, the case was featured on the Fox program America's Most Wanted. On February 25, 2009, Bratton addressed the press for the first time regarding the case, at which time the police formally gave the killer the "Grim Sleeper" nickname chosen by LA Weekly. Bratton also released a 9-1-1 call from the 1980s in which a man reported seeing a body being dumped by Franklin, giving a detailed description and license plate number of a van connected with the now-closed Cosmopolitan Church. 

On July 7, 2010 Lonnie David Franklin Jr was arrested. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office charged him with ten counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and special circumstance allegations of multiple murders in the case. Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley identified the suspect as 57-year-old Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a mechanic who worked between 1981 and 1988 for the City of Los Angeles in the sanitation department and briefly for the LAPD. Franklin was identified for arrest, at least in part, on familial DNA analysis. 

Police had found no exact match between DNA found at the crime scenes and any of the profiles in California's DNA profile database, so they searched the database for stored profiles that demonstrated sufficient similarity to allow police to infer a familial relationship. They found similar DNA belonging to Franklin's son, Christopher, who had been convicted of a felony weapons charge in 2008. Christopher was too young to have committed the murders, but the familial DNA match led investigators to look at his father, Lonnie, as the likely perpetrator. According to Cooley, detectives then used a piece of discarded pizza with Franklin's DNA to make the link. 

One undercover police officer pretended to be a waiter at a restaurant where Franklin ate, collecting dishes, silverware, glasses, and pizza crusts to obtain DNA. The identification was used to arrest Franklin after his DNA was obtained and deemed a match. Saliva found on the victims established a DNA match linking Franklin to the deaths. 

Law enforcement missed an opportunity to catch Franklin because his DNA was not previously collected. In 2003, Franklin was convicted of a felony and was serving three years of supervised probation. In 2004, voters passed Proposition 69, which requires that DNA must be collected from all felons and everyone arrested on some specified charges. It also requires the expansion of the DNA database. Authorities collected and sorted through thousands of DNA samples. While he was on probation, Franklin's DNA was supposed to be entered in the system but was not as probation officers did not collect samples from people who were on unsupervised probation between November 2004 and August 2005. The probation department did not have the resources to collect samples until August 2005. 

On December 16, 2010, the LAPD released 180 photos of women, found in Franklin's home after unsuccessful attempts to identify the individuals, possibly additional victims. "These people are not suspects, we don't even know if they are victims, but we do know this: Lonnie Franklin's reign of terror in the city of Los Angeles, which spanned well over two decades, culminating with almost a dozen murder victims, certainly needs to be investigated further," said Police Chief Charlie Beck. 

In all, investigators found over 1,000 photos and several hundred hours of video in his home. The images show mainly black women of a wide age range, from teenagers to middle-aged and older, often nude. Police believe Franklin took many of the pictures, which show both conscious and unconscious individuals, dating back 30 years. The photos were released to the public in an effort to identify the women. 

On November 3, 2011, Reuters reported that the police were considering Franklin as a suspect in six more slayings of additional female victims. The police were investigating two of the six as potential victims killed during a 14-year lapse between an initial spate of Grim Sleeper murders that ended in 1988 and several more that began in 2002. Of the remaining four victims, two bodies were discovered in the 1980s and two were reported missing in 2005 but the remains of the other two were never found, police said. Detectives said they linked Franklin to the six additional killings after reviewing hundreds of old case files and seeking the public's help in identifying a collection of 180 photographs of women and girls that were found in his possession. 

Franklin was charged with ten murders and one attempted murder and held without bail. He was never charged in the death of a suspected eleventh victim, a black man, a crime for which DNA evidence was not found. After a lengthy pretrial discovery and several delays, the trial opened on February 16, 2016. Closing arguments began May 2, 2016 and the jury began deliberating May 4, 2016. On May 5, 2016, after nearly three months of trial and a day and a half of jury deliberation, Franklin was convicted of all counts. 

His sentencing hearing began a week later, on May 12, 2016. At the hearing, prosecutors presented evidence relating to four other victims they believed had been killed by Franklin. The four victims were not among the original set identified by DNA and ballistic evidence as Grim Sleeper victims, and had only been identified as such after his arrest. Three victims, Sharon Alicia Dismuke, Inez Warren, and Georgia Mae Thompson, were identified as likely Grim Sleeper victims by task force officers investigating unsolved missing persons and homicide reports dating back to 1976. The fourth, Rolenia Morris, was identified from evidence found at Franklin's garage after his arrest. Her body has never been found. Prosecutors did not charge Franklin with these murders for fear of delaying the trial even further. 

On June 6, 2016, a Los Angeles County jury sentenced Franklin to death. 

Lonnie David Franklin Jr., also known as the Grim Sleeper, died of natural causes while on death row at San Quentin State Prison on March 28, 2020.

Enietra Washington is a badass survivor and I guess I could have named this episode, the Survival of Enietra Washington, but then again, the Grim Sleeper terrorized the city of Los Angeles for years, and I wanted to make sure that the whole story was told today.  I’m John Dodson and this has been, The Secret Sits.  Audio Engineering by Gabriel Dodson.  Original art work provided by Tony Ley.