Lonnie Frankln - the Grim Sleeper |
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My Hunt for the L.A. Serial Killer
L.A. reporter Christine Pelisek met a source at the coroner's office, who gave her a hint that a serial killer might be on the prowl. Here she reveals her four-year hunt for a suspect in the slaying of dozens of women in Southern California.
by Christine Pelisek
The Daily Beast
July 9, 2010 |
My hunt for the serial killer began inside the crumbling, formaldehyde-reeking office of the Los Angeles County Coroner.
I had gone to the battered building on Mission Road many times before. But that day, in January 2006, was stranger than usual: my skin tingled and a light sweat broke out on my forehead as my source at the coroner's office told me that his office was quietly launching a task force to investigate whether more than three dozen murders in the Los Angeles area were connected.
I knew I had stumbled onto something that no one else had reported: a serial killer on the loose in Southern California.
My hunch, it seemed, had been right—a serial killer was on the loose in Los Angeles, still lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike again.
For the next four years, I became, in effect, a detective—an easy transition, given my love for crime shows that had begun as a kid, watching reruns of 'Columbo.'
What I didn't imagine that January day, however, was the strange twists and turns the story would take before a suspect in the Grim Sleeper case was finally arrested on July 7 this year.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that detectives had started combing through many more cold case files, on the suspicion that the Grim Sleeper may have been responsible for even more murders than initially thought.
But let's start at the beginning, which was the hush-hush list of 38 dead women, many of them dumped in dumpsters and along parkways and alleyways, a list I eventually cajoled from my source at the coroner's office.
Because the bodies were found throughout Southern California, I began calling each of the several law enforcement agencies that operate in the area, and finally I stumbled upon a detective who gave me a detailed description of one of the victims, a 14-year old prostitute, named Princess Berthomieux, whose body was discovered strangled and beaten in an alley in Inglewood on March 19, 2002.
This was a key break because the detective revealed that this murder had been linked, through DNA tests, to another cold case—the murder of Valerie McCorvey in 2003. The detective also revealed that those two cases had been matched, using posthumous DNA testing and ballistics, to nine unsolved cases in the 1980s.
I then learned another crucial fact: detectives at the elite Robbery-Homicide unit at the Los Angeles Police Department—who only handle politically sensitive, top-shelf cases involving celebrities, politicians, cop killers, and crimes expected to generate headline—had quietly been investigating the links between these killings.
My hunch, it seemed, had been right—a serial killer was on the loose in Los Angeles, still lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike again.
In a 2008 front page story for the LA Weekly, where I work as a reporter, I wrote about the existence of the secret task force investigating a number of killings that went as far back as 1985, beginning with the murder of cocktail waitress Debra Jackson. After the 1980s murders, the killer had apparently taken a 13-year hiatus before resuming his bloody assaults again in 2002, confining his bloody deeds almost exclusively to poor, black neighborhoods.
His last known victim was the beautiful 25-year-old Janecia Peters, who was left in a dumpster near Western Avenue on January 1, 2007. And in May 2008, police confirmed that male DNA evidence, later shown to be saliva left near Peters' body, matched DNA from the 2002 Berthomieux murder.
My editor and I came up with the name “Grim Sleeper” in a nod to his mysterious and long break from killing, (rejecting some pretty bad nicknames, such as “Ripper van Winkle.”)
A few days after my story was published, the LAPD held its first press conference to acknowledge that a serial killer was afoot, finally asking for the public's help in apprehending him. Bernard Parks, a City Councilman, helped get the approval for a $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Grim Sleeper. Parks, a former LAPD chief, was furious that police officials had never bothered to inform him that a serial killer was on the loose in his own district.
He was not the only one who was angry. I tracked down several family members of the girls and women who had died in the 1980s. None had been interviewed by journalists, and—more disturbingly—none had been told by police that their daughters were suspected victims of a serial killer. For years, they had lived in the dark about the mounting body of evidence against the Grim Sleeper.
I clearly recall their sad and surprised faces when they spoke about their lost daughters and sisters, their anguish just as strong as it had been twenty-some years ago. But because of the public pressure and anger, the LAPD eventually met with members of the victims' families, arranging several town hall meetings and sponsoring a prayer vigil with church groups.
Most importantly in terms of solving the killings, California Attorney General Jerry Brown in the fall of 2008 finally gave the green light to test the DNA of prisoners in California prisons, so that a relative of the Grim Sleeper might be found. But the “familial DNA” test failed to turn up any matches.
There were many other blind alleys along the way, times when both detectives on the case, and I, suspected the wrong man. Many nights, I couldn't sleep—not for fear that the Grim Sleeper would come after me. But the murders were getting to me, as were the psychics and morbid crime gadflies.
Then, a few months ago, at a press conference to unveil a new billboard showing a composite sketch of the killer, the supervisor of the Grim Sleeper Task Force, Dennis Kilcoyne, told me police was conducting another “familial DNA” test. He was cautiously optimistic that a DNA match might be found.
I was on vacation in Canada when the LAPD started to shadow an unassuming man named Lonnie David Franklin Jr., who lived near Western Avenue, the epicenter of the killings. A week earlier, the LAPD had been notified by the California Department of Justice crime lab that Franklin's son, arrested in 2009 on a weapons charge and swabbed for his DNA, was a ‘familial DNA” match to the Grim Sleeper.
Franklin was arrested as he walked out of his mint green home he shared with his wife of 30 years.
It turned out that the suspected killer was in the midst of the LAPD. He was a one-time mechanic who had worked at one of the LAPD police stations in the early 80's. He allegedly graduated to stealing cars and household appliances.
The first call I made after I heard the news was to Laverne Peters, the mother of Janecia Peters, who had been killed in 2007 not far from the Franklin house. Our first conversation had been two years earlier and, when I reached her, she told me that, moments earlier, she had been thinking about her daughter, wondering if the police would ever solve her murder.
Laverne was in a state of shock. We had waited for so long, often wondering if this day would ever come. Her reaction summed up exactly how I felt. “It is so unbelievable, I almost have a headache,” she said. “He was right under their noses all the time.”
Christine Pelisek is a reporter at the LA Weekly, where she has been covering crime for the last five years. In 2008, she won three Los Angeles Press Club awards, one for her investigative story on the Grim Sleeper.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-09/las-serial-killer/ |
