- dude is evil
Photo: POOL/Reuters
Lonnie Franklin Jr, dubbed the Grim Sleeper, sits in court during opening statements in his murder trial in Los Angeles.
Their bodies were dumped in alleys and garbage bins in South Los Angeles, some naked, some covered with mattresses and trash. Most had been shot in the chest after sexual contact, others strangled.
As prosecutor Beth Silverman showed photo after photo of the victims to a packed courtroom on Tuesday, family members of the dead young women shook as they wept. Some covered their faces, others had to walk out.
It was an emotional beginning to the long-awaited Grim Sleeper trial, which began Tuesday in a Los Angeles courtroom more than 30 years after the first victim’s death.
Lonnie Franklin Jr has pleaded not guilty to killing nine women and a 15-year-old girl between 1985 and 2007 in one of the city’s most notorious serial killer cases. Franklin, 63, has been behind bars awaiting trial for nearly six years since his arrest in 2010.
The Grim Sleeper nickname was coined because of an apparent 14-year gap in the murders between 1988 and 2002.
Police have multiple theories about the gap. Some think the killings stopped after one intended victim survived in 1988, scaring off the attacker. Other investigators believe there were more victims but their bodies just weren’t found.
'Grim Sleeper': 160 pictures of women may be serial killer's victims, say police
Autopsies showed all but one victim had cocaine in their systems when they were killed. Some had turned to prostitution.
“This was the perfect opportunity for someone who preyed on women,” Silverman said. “Someone who knew the streets and the dark alleys by heart, someone who lived there and was able to blend in, someone who knew where the drug-addicted women and perhaps prostitutes would congregate and who knew how to lure potential victims into the darkness and the isolation of a vehicle through the promise of crack.”
Franklin’s attorney Seymour Amster will deliver his opening statement later in the trial. “There’s more to it than people want to believe,” Amster told the Associated Press last week. On Tuesday before the trial, he told ABC News that “The defense has thoroughly ... prepared for this case, and we believe that before it is done, there will be a different story told than what the prosecution is stating.”
Silverman said the killings all were linked by firearms or DNA that matched Franklin. She also showed jurors photos that Franklin had in his home of two victims, including one who had just been shot in the chest when she was photographed.
As many as 30 detectives investigated the Grim Sleeper killings in the 1980s. They exhausted leads within a few years. A special squad of detectives was assembled after the most recent killing, the June 2007 shooting of 25-year-old Janecia Peters, whose naked body was found in the fetal position inside a trash bag.
Police arrested Franklin three years later, after his DNA was connected to more than a dozen crime scenes. An officer posing as a busboy at a pizza parlor got DNA samples from dishes and utensils Franklin had been using during a birthday party.
Family members of the Grim Sleeper victims and a survivor of the attacks have been frustrated by repeated delays in the case and were eager for the trial to start. But proceedings have been slowed by acrimonious delays and clashes between attorneys.
Watch 'Grim Sleeper' Serial Killer Heads to Court Here
Courtesy: Guardian
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