On the morning of July 7, 2010, under the supervision of Detective Michael Oppelt, 60 to 70 members of LAPD gathered on either end of the 1700 block of 81st Street and prepared to descend onto the residence of Lonnie Franklin. “I was staged down the street with the whole team by about 9:15 a.m.,” Oppelt would remember. When Franklin was spotted leaving his house to cross the street, the Go order was given. A pre-arranged arrest plan was put into action and Franklin was apprehended without incident. He was transported in a cruiser downtown to police headquarters and booked on multiple murder counts and one count of attempted murder. He was photographed, fingerprinted, and compelled to provide DNA evidence through both oral swabbing and a blood sample. In a suspect interview room, he was interrogated by detectives Kilcoyne and Coulter.
Meanwhile, at the Franklin residence, under the supervision of Detective David Holmes, as many as 150 law enforcement personnel swept in to begin executing a search warrant that allowed them to explore Franklin’s home, garages, vehicles, and property. Forty crime analysts participated in the massive undertaking of scouring the private world of Lonnie Franklin, looking for any clue that could connect him to the crimes with which he was being charged.
The reality of what had happened began to hit the neighborhood, especially after the televised ten-clock press conference made in the middle of 81st Street. “It was a real big surprise,” Donna Harris says. “When the police told the neighbors they solved the case of the Grim Sleeper, we thought they had arrested Lonnie because one of his friend had done it. Then they said on TV that Lonnie was the one, and it knocked everyone off their feet. Everybody. The neighbors were all coming out on their porches crying. We were totally lost because we thought there was no way Lonnie had done this.”
Neighbor Eric Robinson expressed his feelings to The Los Angeles Times: Lonnie “volunteers at the park. A very good man. His daughter just graduated from college, I believe. He’s a good mechanic, works out of his garage. …I’m not pretty shocked; I’m all the way shocked.” Mildred Davis, whose son Franklin taught to be a mechanic, was heartbroken. “One way or another, our community was deceived,” she says. “If this is true and Lonnie did what they said he did, then Lonnie deceived us. If this is not true, then the LAPD deceived us. But, no matter what, this neighborhood has been deceived.”
On Thursday, District Attorney Cooley charged Franklin with 10 counts of murder (for seven women killed between 1985 and 1988 and three killed between 2002 and 2007) and one count of attempted murder. Franklin was charged with special circumstances, due to the multiple murders, which made him eligible for the death penalty. When Franklin appeared at 1:30 p.m. in Superior Court, he entered a plea of not guilty. He was ordered back to jail to be held without bail. Earlier in the day, at 11 a.m., at a press conference held at Parker Center, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Chief Charlie Beck, and Attorney General Jerry Brown announced the capture of the Grim Sleeper. Some family members of the victims attended. One was LaVerne Peters, who held a picture of her daughter Janecia wearing her high school graduation cap and gown. “This presents some relief,” Peters told reporters. “There is nothing worse than having a child murdered.”
Including the day of the arrest, Detective Oppelt oversaw a search of 1728 West 81st Street that lasted three days. On the front lawn, police set up blue canopy-like tents, with “LAPD” emblazoned on the sides, that covered tables at which teams of detectives sat to book evidence recovered by a squad of law enforcement personnel examining every inch of the property. Besides the three-bedroom, two-bath house with a covered patio and an assortment of vehicles, including an RV and a camper (all of which were impounded), there were three attached garages at the rear of the property. The garage area “was dense with personal property, nearly floor to ceiling, wall to wall,” Oppelt would say. Or as one neighbor puts it: “The garage area was very neat. Neat as a pin. Everything was in place. If Lonnie had two screws, they’d be in a bag and hanging up in their place. But you have never seen so many items in an area that size. It was like a small warehouse.”
Over the three days, police booked 900 items into evidence. They took photo albums, business cards, financial records, medical records, a ski mask, handcuffs, a suspicious brown paper bag, an LAPD officer’s pad, a flier about a missing person. They removed ammunition and firearms, including a shotgun and nine handguns. One gun, a FIE Titan .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol, was hidden in a black pouch in a dresser drawer in the guest bedroom. The pouch also contained a partially full magazine and loose rounds, ten rounds total. In the coming days, when police submitted the pistol for ballistic tests, analysts concluded it was the weapon used to kill Janecia Peters.
From the property, police recovered 1,000 photographs of women, a number of them in sexually suggestive poses. In addition, an extensive collection of pornographic videos was discovered. Many of the tapes were amateur efforts with a man—perhaps Franklin—giving directions on how a woman should pose for the camera. Then, in a mini-refrigerator in one of the garages, an investigator found an envelope containing a picture of Janecia Peters. In the picture, she is alive. Near the refrigerator, the investigator discovered not only a Polaroid camera but also a photograph of Enietra Washington. In the picture, she is sitting in a car bleeding.
It was, Oppelt later said, the most extensive search he had ever overseen. “Once I saw the chief of police himself walk down 81st Street, I realized they didn’t do this on a hunch,” a neighbor says. “They knew why they were here. They knew what they were looking for. It was serious.”
At a hearing in August, Louisa Pensanti, Franklin’s attorney, who had replaced the public defender he was assigned after his arrest, made it clear she was not willing to have a preliminary hearing in the near future—a position frustrating to the district attorney staff. In December, in an effort to generate additional evidence, police held a press conference and released to the public 180 pictures of 160 women from the 1,000 photographs they recovered from Franklin’s property. In the pictures, many of the women are nude or partially nude. A number of the pictures show a woman with her eyes open and smiling. Some, however, depict a woman with her eyes shut as if she were asleep or dead.
Police said they were disseminating the pictures to determine whether the women were dead or alive. It was obvious what else LAPD was trying to do: find information, especially leads concerning more victims, to fill in the 13 years when the Grim Sleeper was supposedly dormant. “Obviously, we have a hole in this story,” Chief Beck told The Los Angeles Times, “and we are trying to fill that hole.” Following the press conference, LAPD was flooded with emails and phone calls. Some women recognized themselves and called in. Others spotted family members who were still alive. “There was a picture of my niece at a birthday party,” one neighbor says. As a result of the phone calls and emails, LAPD identified 20 of the 160 women. Police were also supplied, or so they said, with information about Franklin and potential additional victims.
Anxious to secure an indictment, District Attorney Cooley convened a secret grand jury in March 2011 to hear testimony in the matter of The People of the State of California versus Lonnie David Franklin Jr. Cooley assigned three deputy district attorneys to the case—Beth Silverman, Marguerite Rizzo, and Patrick Dixon. During one week, the prosecution called 40 witnesses ranging from an array of experts to detectives like Dennis Kilcoyne and Michael Oppelt to Enietra Washington. At closing, the prosecution showed the grand jury a pictorial line-up of the victims, not unlike the one that once appeared on billboards throughout the city.
“Remember these images when you go back and deliberate,” Marguerite Rizzo told the grand jury. “Remember that these women were troubled and vulnerable women. Lonnie Franklin preyed on these women. [He] probably lured them into his car and then murdered them. But murdering them wasn’t enough. …Even in death he had to do more. He had to humiliate and degrade these women by dumping their naked or half-naked bodies like garbage in the litter-strewn alleys of Los Angeles. He threw their bodies in Dumpsters like household trash. He stuffed them into trash bags and then threw the bags into a Dumpster. These women, no matter what their struggles, did not deserve to die.”
On March 24, 2011, the DA got what he wanted when the grand jury indictment was unsealed in Superior Court. “Lonnie David Franklin Jr.,” read a statement from the district attorney’s office, “the alleged Grim Sleeper serial killer accused of murdering 10 victims over a more than 20-year span, was arraigned today on an indictment charging him with the killings.”
On April 5, LAPD held a press conference to announce they had now established the identity of a majority of the 160 women whose pictures they had released. Only 55 remained unidentified. Of that group, they were focusing on eight as possible additional victims, with an emphasis on three who were directly connected to evidence taken from Franklin’s property. Then, in August 2011, as the number of potential additional victims dwindled, police made a surprising announcement. They were going to explore 230 other murders to see if Franklin committed any of them. Essentially, police were proposing to look at all unsolved murders that had occurred in South Los Angeles since Franklin was discharged from the Army in 1976. Police were even “taking a second look” at some solved murders, according to a department spokeswoman.
The partial result of that inquiry came some weeks later when, at a press conference at Bethel A.M.E. Church in South LA, LAPD announced they had identified seven of the 55 remaining unidentified women. Police also disclosed that, based on their investigation, they could now charge Franklin with three additional murders and one attempted murder, but had decided not to because they didn’t want to delay the upcoming trial for the crimes he had already been charged with. They even revealed the names of the victims and the dates on which the crimes took place. Two murders, one in 1992 and one in 2000, occurred in the 13-year lull in killing that gave the Grim Sleeper his name to begin with. That detail was glossed over. Moreover, LAPD did not seem concerned that what they were doing—detailing the crimes a suspect had allegedly committed before announcing he would not be prosecuted for them—might be viewed by many as highly prejudicial.
On Thursday, July 8, at the press conference held downtown, government officials had been unqualified in their confidence that, with the arrest of Franklin, they had captured the Grim Sleeper. “Today, I’m proud to announce the terror has come to an end,” Mayor Villaraigosa said at the podium. “Yesterday, the LAPD arrested Lonnie David Franklin Jr. They found the man we believe to be the Grim Sleeper.” To put the case into historical perspective, Chief Beck, addressing the landmark use of familial DNA technology, asserted, “This will change the way policing is done in the United States.”
But the most boastful claim came from Dennis Kilcoyne when he was speaking with reporters after the press conference. “There are folks here, just out of an abundance of caution, who use ‘allege’ or ‘alleged,’ ‘could be’ and ‘would be,’” he said. Franklin’s “our man. One hundred percent.” Rarely, considering the concept of due process, has a law enforcement official been so bold. Yet that’s how confident police brass were. They wanted the public to know the right man had been caught.
Still, such unqualified public statements could come back to haunt the prosecution. That will not be the only problem the DA has to deal with. For, despite the assertions to the contrary, the prosecution will have formidable obstacles to overcome when the case goes to trial. First, no weapon was recovered for the seven homicides and one attempted homicide committed during the 1980s. Ballistics may prove that all eight crimes were carried out by the same Saturday night special, but police have never found the gun. Nor have police been able to recover the orange Pinto connected by eyewitnesses to at least three of the crimes or the van reported by the 911 caller used to dump the body of Barbara Ware. As a result, for all but one of the crimes police have neither a weapon nor a vehicle used in the commission of the crime.
Second, police made numerous gaffes during the many-years-long investigation. One of the most glaring will certainly be highlighted at trial. Lynda Hoover may have discovered a near fatally wounded Enietra Washington on her doorstep in November 1988, but police did not interview this vitally important witness for almost two decades, not until 2007. It would be hard to fathom why they took so long, since, besides Washington, Hoover was the second-most critical source of firsthand information concerning the assault supposedly carried out by the killer who would become known as the Grim Sleeper.
There were other police miscues. The search warrant generated by police, for example, was marred with errors. Some were minor, such as the omission of dates and places easily found in the public record. Others were more fundamental. Within the warrant itself, police contradicted which detective actually conducted the all-important DNA swabbing on the door handle of Franklin’s van. The detective was revealed as “Pazo” in one place in the warrant, “Trujillo” in another.
Police also mishandled DNA evidence. One screw-up was so conspicuous that the prosecution had to address it before the grand jury. On April 20, 1987, James Innes, an LAPD courier, picked up from the coroner’s office two sex kits, used to gather DNA evidence from a victim. On this day, Innes collected the sex kit for Bernita Sparks, Kit #780. The second, Kit #773, was for a murder, committed a month earlier, not related to the so-called “.25-caliber” series. Innes took both kits to the LAPD property room where he booked them into evidence.
“It became apparent to us,” Dennis Kilcoyne would admit to the grand jury, “that Mr. Innes inadvertently applied Bernita Sparks’ evidence, with Sex Kit #780—he attached it to Sex Kit #773. He attaches the wrong LAPD label to the wrong box. He switches the labels; he attaches the labels to the wrong boxes, basically is what he does.” Because of this blunder, as LAPD criminologists ran tests on what they thought was the sex kit for the victim of the recent month-old murder, they were actually conducting tests on evidence belonging to Bernita Sparks. Indeed, during 1987, LAPD labs ran tests on that wrong sex kit from April until December. Finally, after eight months, they discovered the mistake and corrected it, returning #780 to Sparks and #773 to the other victim.
“Our error,” Kilcoyne would try to explain to the grand jury, “as embarrassing as it is, is mislabeling. The error has nothing to do with the content of the boxes. The error has nothing to do with both these boxes being opened on somebody’s workbench at the same time and the evidence being mingled with one another. [Two cases] mislabeled—that’s that. Mr. Innes created this mess… probably because he had too much on his plate and got confused.”
Some obvious questions arise. If LAPD mixed up the two sex kits in the first place, how can officials know for sure the contents of the sex kits were not mingled? Moreover, if the department mishandled Bernita Sparks’ sex kit, did it bungle those belonging to other victims included in the Grim Sleeper series? Since much of the prosecution’s case will be based on DNA evidence, how that evidence was handled will be a critical issue at trial.
Finally, the prosecution’s biggest liability may be its star witness, Enietra Washington. She has been heralded as the Grim Sleeper’s sole survivor, but over the years her story about the attack has not been consistent. Some contradictions are important. For example, when Washington spoke with LAPD detectives McGrath and Marlow she said her attacker used a Kodak Handle to snap pictures. She even specified its color—black with a grey front. However, in media interviews and in her appearance before the grand jury, Washington said her attacker used a Polaroid Instamatic.
What’s more, Washington told journalist Christine Pelisek that her assailant wore, to quote from an article written by Pelisek, “a black polo shirt tucked into khaki trousers.” He sounded like a preppy going out for cocktails on a Saturday night. Before the grand jury, however, Washington offered this alarmingly different description of her assailant’s appearance: “He looked like he had on work clothes at the time. It was like maybe an overall set. I’m not sure, but it was work clothes, like he just got off work. He had on dark clothing, maybe like a jumpsuit, khaki that I remember. Khaki being the material but dark colored.” Hardly a polo shirt tucked into a pair of chinos.
In addition, before the grand jury, Washington spoke at length about why she was walking along the sidewalk on the evening of November 20, 1988. She was headed, she testified under oath, to her friend Lynda’s house because the two women had plans to go to a party that night. “I was going to pick up my first few articles” at her apartment, Washington told the grand jury, “and then I was going around to my girlfriend’s house. I was going to get a change of clothes and get my hair done. We were going to a party.” But, when Lynda Hoover appeared before the grand jury, she testified that not only did she not have plans to go to a party with Washington on November 20, but that she had not seen her in almost a year.
Even more problematic, when Washington, lying curled up on Hoover’s porch bleeding, described what happened to her that evening, she said she had been attacked by two men, which Hoover reported to the grand jury. Hoover asked her more than once about the assault; each time Washington said there had been not one assailant but two. This glaring discrepancy was noted by members of the grand jury. The prosecution’s response was odd. Washington had lied to Hoover. Why? Because she was ashamed of what she was doing that night, the prosecution said. So what was Washington doing? From her testimony, all Washington did that night was prepare for the plans she said she had made with Hoover. Is there some other, more nefarious aspect of this story Washington has yet to reveal?
What’s more, grand jury testimony from DNA analyst Supria Rosner may also cause a jury to question Washington. When Rosner compared DNA evidence taken from Washington’s assailant to DNA supplied by Franklin after his arrest, she excluded him as the person who assaulted her vaginally. Further, DNA swab tests were inconclusive. The very DNA evidence the prosecution used to connect Franklin to the Grim Sleeper murders did not conclusively reveal him to be the attacker of his sole survivor. The prosecution might have circumstantial evidence connecting Franklin to the attack—an orange Pinto, a Polaroid photograph—but at trial the DNA testing results will weigh heavily. Maybe there were two men who attacked Washington, just as she said that night, and part of the DNA evidence collected from Washington belongs to the other man. That possibility could shed a whole different light on the case.
What the prosecution will have at trial is this: Franklin’s DNA on the zip tie used to seal the plastic bag containing the body of Janecia Peters but none of his DNA on the body itself. A picture of Peters found in a mini-refrigerator in his garage. The weapon, discovered in his guest bedroom, used to kill Peters, the authenticity of which will be aggressively challenged by the defense. DNA evidence, usually taken from the left or right nipple, connecting Franklin to some of the victims (Barbara Ware, Bernita Peters, Mary Lowe, Lachrica Jefferson, Princess Berthomieux), but not all of them. No weapon in any of the first ten cases. No getaway vehicle. And DNA evidence that does not conclusively establish Franklin as the assailant of the star witness, whose picture was found near his mini-refrigerator.
No doubt an adept prosecutor could easily build a winnable case around this evidence. But the contrary could be true. For all an agile defense attorney has to do is create “reasonable doubt,” and Los Angeles area juries have a history of embracing the concept of reasonable doubt. Witness O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake, Michael Jackson, etc.