Detectives set out to identify the women on the film and tape, knowing that some could be additional homicide victims.
There were several photos of each woman, and police whittled the collection down to 180 images. They believe that about 20 of the pictures show women also captured in the other photographs.
PHOTOS: Images found in possession of 'Grim Sleeper' suspect
For months they slogged through images in missing persons databases and coroner records, hoping for lucky matches. The work proved fruitless. With the detectives no closer to identifying the women, police turned to the public Thursday for help. At a news conference, they released cropped versions of the images that show the women's faces, hoping the women themselves, their family members or acquaintances will recognize them and contact investigators.
Police said they were sensitive to the harm and embarrassment the release of the photographs could cause women who never told their family or friends about the encounters. In the end, however, they decided that the need to identify the women outweighed the potential harm. For similar reasons, the Times has decided to publish the photographs on its website.
"As a police department, we have an obligation to account for the welfare of these women," said veteran homicide Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, who headed the task force that hunted Franklin. "We're trying to fill in the life and times of Lonnie Franklin over the past 30 years, and talking to people is a big part of that. These are obviously women who had a conversation or two with this guy.... I won't be surprised if we find some of them were his victims."
Police have employed the strategy before in other high-profile serial cases. Most notably, investigators went public earlier this year with a trove of photographs of women and girls taken by killer Rodney James Alcala. But with Alcala's and some other similar cases, police waited until after the killers had been convicted before releasing images.
LAPD officials decided they could not wait. With little known about Franklin, they hope the women will be able to provide answers that have so far eluded detectives.
"The question of the day is, 'Why?' " Kilcoyne said. 'What was he doing to get these women to do this sort of stuff on film? Typically, people use drugs as leverage, but we didn't find one iota of evidence that he was into that."
Franklin is accused of murdering 10 women and attempting to kill another who survived. Authorities say they have linked Franklin, 58, to the killings through a combination of DNA and ballistics evidence. The former city sanitation worker and LAPD garage attendant has pleaded not guilty and remains in custody.
Louisa Pensanti, Franklin's attorney, expressed concern about the release of the photographs, saying prosecutors have not yet provided her with copies of the images as part of the legal proceedings. She added that the move will make it difficult for Franklin to receive a fair trial. "I think it's proper that they try to find out everything they need to, but to do it now, and in this way, will taint the jury pool," Pensanti said.
The discovery of the photographs came at the end of a long, frustrating search for the killer, whom the LA Weekly dubbed the Grim Sleeper for the long stretch between killings.
The killer's first known slaying occurred in the summer of 1985, when a 29-year-old woman was shot three times in the chest and her body left in an alley near West Gage Avenue, police said. Three years passed before ballistics tests alerted police that the same handgun used to kill the first woman had been used in seven other killings.
The case went cold until 2004, when DNA testing linked the earlier killings to genetic evidence found on the body of a 14-year-old girl found strangled and beaten in an Inglewood alley in March 2002 and a woman killed in 2003. Then, in January 2007, DNA tests linked the killer to another woman's slaying.
The killer's DNA profile did not match any of the millions taken from convicted felons and arrestees that are kept in law enforcement databases. Kilcoyne and half a dozen detectives painstakingly tried to track down prostitutes, drug dealers and pimps who were active in the area during both periods of killings, hoping someone would be able to lead them to the killer. Several tantalizing leads went nowhere.
The break came this summer when a new, controversial form of DNA matching that searched for potential relatives of the killer led detectives to Franklin's son. Undercover officers trailed Franklin for days until they surreptitiously collected a DNA sample that, police said, tied Franklin to the killings.
Authorities combed his house, as well as a garage, vehicles and a trailer in the backyard, finding most of the photos in the trailer. The people in the images appear to span a wide range of ages, from teenagers to women in their 40s or older. Many of the subjects are smiling. In some, however, the women appear dead, heavily drugged or asleep.
Steve Katz, co-executive producer of the TV show "America's Most Wanted," said Thursday that police have long been releasing photos of possible victims of crimes. The reach of the Internet, he said, has made the strategy more effective. "In days gone by, it would be a local story, maybe picked up by the national networks," Katz said. "It was difficult to get those pictures out in front of a wide audience."
Last week, police in Albuquerque, N.M., released photographs of seven unidentified women thought to be connected to a serial killer who is linked to the murders of 11 other women.
In 2008, Los Angeles County sheriff's homicide investigators released pictures of 47 women. The photos had been taken in the 1980s by William Bradford, a professional photographer, who was convicted in 1987 of the slayings of two models. In the two weeks after the release of the images, sheriff's officials fielded more than 2,000 calls from around the country and Europe. Most of the women or family members confirmed the subjects in the photos were alive, although investigators could not account for about a dozen of them and believe strongly they may have been murdered.
"We'll never know," said retired Sheriff's Capt. Ray Peavy.
In the Alcala case, detectives seized hundreds of images from a storage locker the convicted killer rented, but waited three decades to release them as prosecutors struggled through several trials for a conviction.
Detectives have already fielded a wave of phone calls in the Grim Sleeper case. After Franklin's arrest, family and friends of about 75 missing women called, wanting to know if he could have been responsible for their disappearances.
Detectives were able to dismiss Franklin as a suspect in most of those cases but are pursuing the possibility that he's tied to a handful of them, Kilcoyne said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-grim-sleeper-20101217,0,3354006,print.story
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Here's an update:
Release of photos in Grim Sleeper case brings major response
LAPD is flooded with calls, e-mails and other tips after images of women found on the suspect's property are made public. Five tentative identifications have been made.
By Joel Rubin and Andrew Blankstein, Los Angeles Times
December 18, 2010
The Los Angeles Police Department was inundated with hundreds of phone calls, e-mails and other tips a day after detectives released photographs of unidentified women found in a trailer belonging to alleged serial killer Lonnie Franklin Jr.
"The information coming in is voluminous," said Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, who headed the task force that searched for Franklin. Officers, he said, have fielded "hundreds upon hundreds" of phone calls, as well as e-mails and text messages that flooded in through various hotlines and online accounts the department uses.
PHOTOS: Images found in possession of Grim Sleeper suspect
When Franklin, who is accused of sexually assaulting and murdering 10 African American women in South L.A., was arrested in July, authorities found a disturbing trove of about 1,000 photographs and hundreds of hours of video of women. Some of the images appeared to be innocent snapshots, but most showed the women in various states of undress and striking sexual poses.
Fearing that some of the women could be additional victims, detectives set out to identify them. Some of the material dated back to the 1980s and included video and digital camera images, Polaroids, conventional prints and even undeveloped film. The LAPD estimates that it is trying to identify about 160 people.
Attempts to find the women in missing persons databases and coroner's photographs went nowhere. With no other options, detectives began considering releasing the images to the public in hopes that the women themselves, family members or acquaintances would recognize them and contact investigators.
The decision to do so was not made lightly. Detectives said they were concerned about how the images should be presented to the public given the explicit nature of the material, and understood that the photo release could force the women to revisit encounters with Franklin from periods in their lives they would rather forget.
In the end, the LAPD opted to release closely cropped versions of the images that show the women's faces. Detectives also wanted to be sensitive to the families of the 10 women Franklin is alleged to have killed. Before the announcement, they invited members of the victims' families to LAPD headquarters to view the images that would be released.
Kilcoyne acknowledged that some might be offended by the decision to go public with the pictures and video stills. In the end, though, the need to know the fate of the women and how Franklin had come to collect the images outweighed the potential embarrassment to the women. For similar reasons, The Times has published the images.
"We are just trying to do what is right and decent," Kilcoyne said. "We are very cognizant of not causing embarrassment or anguish to the people depicted in the photographs."
Franklin has pleaded not guilty and is in custody awaiting trial.
The release of the images appeared to pay off. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said at a news conference Friday that information gathered from callers had led to tentative identifications of five of the women.
"We are working to verify that. I cannot give you any update on their well-being or status, but we have names to connect to some faces," Beck said. "I encourage the public to continue to bring us names."
Franklin is charged with killing seven women from 1985 to 1988 and three more between 2002 and 2007. He is linked to the killings through a combination of ballistics and DNA evidence, police and prosecutors have said.
It is the 14 years of apparent dormancy between the two sets of killings that has most confounded police and that led the LA Weekly to dub Franklin the Grim Sleeper. Before identifying Franklin as the alleged Grim Sleeper, Kilcoyne and others said it was unlikely the killer stopped preying on women during this period. More likely, they said, is that police did not find any evidence to link him to the bodies. So the discovery of the photos and videos was all the more unsettling, as detectives wondered whether they were looking at an eerie montage of women Franklin encountered during the period.
Beck said the photos may address the apparent gap in the killings. "One of the things Dennis [Kilcoyne] is hoping to determine from the public's response to these photos is what he was doing during the 14 years. Obviously we have a hole in his history, and we are trying to fill that hole," the chief said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-grim-sleeper-20101218,0,3747223,print.story
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