“I came on board through his wife,” Louisa Pensanti said to me one evening in late September 2011 over a long dinner at Musso and Frank Grill in Hollywood. A fixture of “old” Hollywood, on Hollywood Boulevard, it’s the haunt where F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner came to drink while Orson Welles, regal in his regular booth, presided over a room that routinely saw the likes of Charlie Chaplin or Rudolph Valentino as dinner guests. Pensanti wanted to come here because she likes the restaurant’s ambiance. Her office is also located nearby. “It was Lonnie’s wife’s wish he have outside counsel, not a public defender,” Pensanti said. “We met and talked about what could be done.”
When I asked about her financial arrangement with Franklin, since it was widely reported she agreed to represent him pro bono, Pensanti would only say, “I have been privately retained.” Did she reach out to the Franklins first? “There was a connection that was made.”
How Pensanti ended up on this case was a point of interest to many. After all, she would not be considered among LA’s top-tier criminal attorneys, such as Mark Geragos, Gloria Allred, or Robert Shapiro, although she could be if she handles this case well when it goes to trial. She has had prior careers—actress, producer, real estate agent—but when she worked closely with a criminal attorney for several years she fell in love with the law and, just over a decade ago, became a lawyer herself. Without question, this will be the most high-profile trial in which she has appeared.
But she seemed to understand the enormity of her undertaking. If she was under any delusion about what was in store for her, reality hit on the day she made her first appearance in court and the prosecution handed over 9,000 pages of discovery, then wanted to know when they could schedule a preliminary hearing. She told them it would be at least seven months, much to the consternation of the prosecution. In fact, Pensanti intentionally delayed having a preliminary hearing because she hoped the DA would become impatient and take the case before a grand jury to secure an indictment. That way, the prosecution would end up spelling out its case by revealing the legal roadmap it planned to use to seek a conviction.
That’s what happened when the grand jury met in March. Not only did Pensanti have the grand jury testimony, but to support that testimony the prosecution turned over additional discovery material, bringing the total number of pages to 22,000. Now that she knew the prosecution’s strategy, Pensanti believed their case will be attackable at trial.
“What does this case involve?” she said, picking over her dinner, a plate of steamed spinach. “Not just familial DNA, which is being used in only a couple of states, but ballistics. But they don’t have a murder weapon.”
While the prosecution will argue the first eight attacks were carried out with the same gun, it was never recovered by police. But what about the gun police did recover—the FIE Titan .25-caliber pistol, supposedly used to kill Janecia Peters, that was hidden in a dresser drawer in the guest bedroom of Franklin’s house?
“The police found a gun,” Pensanti said. “But the problem is, it is not the same gun used in the Peters murder. The gun does not match the bullet. The cross section of a barrel will show small grooves or striations all along the lands and grooves. These are created when the barrel is made. Ballistics experts have long thought that no two gun barrels have the exact same markings. These markings leave unique striations or impressions on the bullet as it is fired. They believe this allows a bullet to be traced back to a particular firearm. In this case, the gun and the bullet did not provide a match.”
So what is the prosecution’s case? “They are linking a few of these murders,” Pensanti said. “Not all are linked up by DNA and not all are linked up by ballistics. They are trying to link up a .25-caliber weapon with a few victims and DNA with a few victims. What they will do is prove by circumstantial evidence, except we’ll say the bullets came from the same gun for the first eight cases, but how do we know Lonnie owned the gun? And how do we know these bullets came from the gun, the gun used to kill these women? There could be multiple .25-caliber guns.”
“What do you think about their DNA evidence? Is it compelling?”
“We have a problem with how things were done in the 1980s and 1990s in terms of DNA,” Pensanti said. “Cellmark was the company used by LA County to do their DNA work. Cellmark had to shut down some of their facilities because they were not carefully handling DNA samples. One facility in New Jersey was shut down completely. The DNA taken from that far back—the 1980s—we are going to find out if they handled it correctly. They have to provide us with bench notes from their testing so we can study them and evaluate their accurateness.”
And what about familial DNA? “What they are finding with familial DNA is, it’s a male linage thing. It could be anyone in your linage. One possibility is, it could be someone in the Franklin family but not Lonnie.”
“What do you make of Enietra Washington?”
“Her description of her assailant: He was an African-American who had pockmarked skin. Lonnie doesn’t have pockmarked skin. He has no dermatological abrasions whatsoever. Also her composite rendering of her assailant looks nothing like Lonnie. Nothing. Anyway, she had been doing drugs that night.”
“What’s it been like for Franklin in jail?”
“Good until just recently. The district attorney requested a voice exemplar, which was conducted on September 8. While Lonnie was brought over from Men’s Central Jail to Parker Center, someone went into his cell and took his personal telephone book with all of his phone numbers in it. It was there before he left. It went missing in his jail cell on September 8. I wrote a letter to Internal Affairs to whom I spoke on September 20 and found out my letter of complaint had been turned over to Men’s Central. What kind of oversight is that?”
“What’s your point?”
“This case is so political. I mean, at their press conference right after the arrest, the Mayor of Los Angeles, the Chief of Police, Bernard Parks, now on the City Council, they all made statements to the public that sounded as if Lonnie had already been convicted. They didn’t say he was a suspect. They talked like he was found guilty. It was a done deal.” Pensanti paused. “This has been shocking to me. It’s shocking that our public officials don’t know anything about the Constitution of the United States. They are supposed to be upholding the Constitution, not shredding it to pieces. The bottom line is, the murders they couldn’t pin on Chester Turner they’re trying to pin on Lonnie.”
“They were taking the voice exemplar test to prove Franklin made the 911 call in 1987 reporting the murder of Barbara Ware. What if that test comes back with a match?”
“If that was his voice on the call,” she said, “they will have proven that Lonnie saw someone dump a body in a Dumpster. It doesn’t prove he murdered Barbara Ware.”
It was getting late. We had talked for three hours. We had been in Musso and Frank’s for so long you could almost feel the ghosts of the past hovering around the room.
“You’ve spent a lot of time with Lonnie Franklin,” I said, wrapping up. “What kind of person is he?”
“Lonnie is very sweet,” Louisa Pensanti said. “Very personable. He’s interested in the community he’s now in. So we talk a lot about what’s going on in jail. But I’ll say this. I’ve been around evil in my life. You know when you are in the presence of evil. Lonnie Franklin is not evil.”