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 some type of sexual contact, others strangled.
As prosecutor Beth Silverman showed photo after photo of the 10 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 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 since his arrest in 2010.
The “Grim Sleeper” name was coined because of an apparent 14-year gap in the murders between 1988 and 2002.
Police have dueling 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 victims whose bodies weren’t found.
In her opening statement to jurors, Silverman said Franklin took advantage of the crack cocaine epidemic in South Los Angeles, targeting women “willing to sell their bodies and their souls in order to gratify their dependency on this powerful drug.”
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.”
“There’s more to it than people want to believe,” Franklin’s attorney Seymour Amster told The Associated Press last week.
Silverman said the killings all were linked by firearms or DNA that matched Franklin. She showed jurors photos, found in Franklin’s 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 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 Janecia Peters, 25, whose naked body was found in the fetal position in a trash bag.
Police arrested Franklin three years later.
