Something smelled funny.
Donna Harris had lived on this block in South Los Angeles for most of her life. For the last three years, she had resided in a large brown bungalow on the south side of the street near Western Avenue—1742 West 81st Street—but she had grown up in a house across the street where her elderly parents still lived. She chose this bungalow because it was big enough for her family—a son plus four foster children—yet close enough to her parents so that she could care for them. Her father, William, now retired after putting in 48 years as a construction worker, was a real character. His salty language and good-natured prickliness were matched only by his astute sense of observation. Nothing got past him, and he said what he thought in direct, unvarnished terms. Donna was just like him.
On this beautiful summer day—July 3, 2010—Donna had all the windows open in her house. It was not so hot she needed air conditioning, and, when possible, she preferred fresh air. Only today, the air was not so fresh. As morning segued into afternoon, she noticed a distinctly appalling odor. It became so bad she found herself thinking, What is that?
Eventually, Donna concluded the odor was coming from the fertilizer her next-door neighbors put on their lawn the day before. But, honestly, the smell was too strong for fertilizer, even fresh manure. It was so pungent it cut off your breath. Finally, she couldn’t stand it any longer and closed the windows. Irritated, Donna, spotting her neighbors out front, decided to confront them. When she got to her porch, she saw her father in his yard. He headed for the neighbors as Donna did.
“Where the hell did you get that manure from?” he said. “It smells like a dead person. That stinks too loud to be regular fertilizer.”
The neighbors didn’t understand how the fertilizer could be causing such a stench. As they were all talking, Donna spotted Lonnie Franklin, whose house was two doors down from her neighbors at 1728 West 81st Street. He was in his yard too. Donna had known Lonnie since he and his wife, Sylvia, a hard-working, church-going woman who immigrated to the United States from Belize, moved into the neighborhood in the early 1980s. Donna had been raised with Lonnie’s children, Christopher and Crystal, both of whom had moved off 81st Street when they grew up. Formerly a worker with the City of Los Angeles, first as a garage attendant for the nearby 77th Street Community Police Station of the Los Angeles Police Department and then as a truck operator for the Department of Sanitation, Lonnie was the neighborhood mechanic. He had three garages, all attached to one another, in his backyard where he worked. Whenever anything was wrong with your car, you took it to Lonnie. He was efficient. If he couldn’t fix it, he knew someone who could. Best of all, he didn’t charge the high prices you’d pay at a regular mechanic shop. Because he was excellent and inexpensive, Lonnie was always in demand.
He walked over from his yard to join them.
“What y’all smell? Gas?” he asked. “Is there a gas leak?”
“No,” Donna said. “There’s no gas leak. Don’t you smell it?”
“Smell what?”
“That odor.”
“I don’t smell anything,” Lonnie said.
“We think it’s coming from some fertilizer they put on the yard here,” Donna said.
“That ain’t no regular shit,” Donna’s father said to the next-door neighbors. “It smells like somebody got ground up in there. That don’t smell like no fertilizer. Something’s up with that.” He waited, then added, “Where’d ya’ll get that from anyway, Mexico?”
Since the neighbors were originally from Mexico, that comment seemed to end the conversation. Continuing to downplay the odor, Lonnie headed to his house where, Donna had noticed, he was staying without his family for the long holiday weekend. This was unusual. In previous years, during the week before the Fourth of July, Lonnie loaded up the family in their RV and drove up north for a vacation near Sacramento, where Sylvia had family. But this year Sylvia went alone, leaving Lonnie at the house on 81st Street. She didn’t even take the RV. It was parked in the back yard.
Donna’s father went home too, and Donna returned inside. She would just have to stick out the odor. There was nothing else to do.
Then, the next morning, when she went out onto her porch to see what kind of day the Fourth of July was going to be, Donna noticed, much to her amazement, that the odor was gone. Not partially. Completely. Gone. Yesterday, it was so bad it made her sick. Today, she didn’t smell anything. Just air. Fresh air. When she tried to imagine what happened, she chalked it up to the neighbors watering their lawn heavily last night before they went to bed. The water must have forced the fertilizer deep into the soil. Or so she guessed. In a way she didn’t care. She was just happy the odor was gone.
On major holidays like Christmas or Thanksgiving or the Fourth, Donna had a tradition of preparing a tray of strawberry daiquiris and Jell-O shots and taking it around to her neighbors to offer them a toast. It was a simple gesture, but her neighbors got a kick out of it, especially the older ones. So later that day, Donna made up her tray of drinks. As she proceeded from house to house, she realized Lonnie was watching her. When she headed toward his house, he rushed out to meet her at the gate so she wouldn’t come onto his property. As they lingered on the sidewalk at his driveway entrance, his neatly painted mint-green bungalow with its immaculately groomed lawn there behind him, Lonnie picked up a daiquiri.
“Cheers!” he said, taking a sip.
“Sure am glad that odor’s gone,” Donna said.
“I still don’t know what y’all were talking about,” Lonnie said. “I didn’t smell anything.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Donna said. “It’s gone now. What are you doing Wednesday? I need my car worked on.”
Once they made plans for Lonnie to repair her car, Donna walked home. As she went about the rest of her day, she completely forgot about the odor from yesterday—the odor that smelled like a dead person.
William Harris was not the type of man to stick his nose into other people’s business. But, after his retirement, he enjoyed sitting on his front porch. Not for any particular reason; he just found it relaxing. From his vantage point, one of the houses he could see best was Lonnie’s, since it was directly across the street. Harris knew that Lonnie was running a chop shop in his backyard, stripping down stolen cars and selling off the parts. Everyone on the block knew it. It would have been hard to miss; over the last two decades, Lonnie kept getting arrested for grand theft auto. Most of the arrests ended in dropped charges or probation. But, one night in February 1993, police found Lonnie in the backyard stripping a stolen Jeep Wrangler with the help of Christopher, his 11-year-old, a stolen Toyota waiting in the garage to be next. Because of the flagrancy of the crime—the cars were right there—and the participation of his young son, Lonnie got convicted and sentenced to a year in jail. After this episode, some neighbors, Harris among them, became concerned that Lonnie was passing down his shady ways to his son.
During the years Harris had his construction job, he headed off to work each morning at 5:00 a.m. More often than not, he noticed that Lonnie was still up. If he wasn’t busy in the backyard, he was coming and going in one of his cars or vans. Now, as Harris sat on his porch and observed Lonnie day in and day out, he got an unsettling feeling about him. Lonnie had always had a penchant for prostitutes. He never hesitated to talk about his escapades with hookers, including taking pictures and videotapes of some of them. Sylvia must have known about her husband’s sexual tastes but looked the other way. What was bothering Harris about Lonnie, though, went beyond stolen cars and prostitutes.
Finally, Harris started telling people, including Donna, about his gut feeling. “Lonnie’s up to some shit,” he’d say to her. “He’s doing way more than what you think he’s doing in the middle of the night. There’s something about him. There’s a dead cat on the line.”
The first time Lonnie got wind of Harris making these comments, he was miffed. “He should mind his own damn business,” Lonnie said to neighbors. As time passed and Harris continued to speak his mind, Lonnie got furious. So he started a rumor. Harris, he told people, was a police informant. In a neighborhood still home to its share of drug dealers and gang members, this was a potentially deadly claim. When Donna heard what Lonnie was saying, she was livid. She confronted him right after New Year’s in January 2010.
“I hear you’ve been going around saying my father is a snitch,” Donna said as they stood in Lonnie’s front yard.
Lonnie was flummoxed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Look,” Donna shot back, “my dad is 70 years old. He’s doing what he’s supposed to do—sitting on his porch. He’s an old man. He’s retired, bought his home. If your business wasn’t in the street, he wouldn’t have anything to sit out there and look at.”
“I said I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Whatever, Lonnie,” Donna fumed. “Leave him alone!”
Donna stalked off in a huff.
Later that day, Donna heard a knock at her door. She and Lonnie had a long-running source of jest between them over the fact that she drank Pepsi and he preferred Coca-Cola. When she opened the door, Lonnie was standing there with a Pepsi in one hand and a Coca-Cola in the other. He handed her the Pepsi.
“We still friends?” he said.
“We’re still friends,” Donna said. “We just had a misunderstanding.”
There was good reason why Donna was worried if some of her more dangerous neighbors perceived her father as a police informant. Lately, police were on 81st Street all the time. Starting in 2008, a steady stream of detectives had shown up to ask people about a serial killer known as the Grim Sleeper. From the mid-1980s until now, he had killed at least ten women, most of them within a mile or so of 81st Street. He was nicknamed the Grim Sleeper because, after murdering seven women and attempting to kill an eighth between 1985 and 1988, he appeared to have gone into a 13-year lull before, as if awakening from a long sleep, he started to kill again in 2002.
Since 2008, police had become more aggressive in their search for the Grim Sleeper. They released to the public details about the killer and his victims. The City of Los Angeles offered a $500,000 reward for information leading to his arrest and prosecution. Police mounted an advertising campaign featuring fliers and billboards showing pictures of the victims and a police-artist rendering of the killer. One of those billboards stood around the corner on Western Avenue at 79th Street, looming over a barbershop.
Donna was especially aware of the police presence because detectives kept coming to interview her. In the 1980s, her house belonged to an older man named Aothus White. He ran a bookie-joint out of the house, complete with holes in the door so gamblers could place bets. Besides gambling, almost anything else went on at 1742 West 81st—drug use, drug dealing, prostitution. More than one prostitute died of an overdose there. So police were aware of the house, which Donna bought three years ago from White’s grandson, who inherited it from his grandfather.
The house had also been pointed out to authorities by a woman who survived the Grim Sleeper. It was, she said, a location he had taken her to on the night he almost killed her. That’s the reason detectives kept returning to talk to Donna. They always had more questions about the house and its history.
The neighbors knew about the police presence on the block, Lonnie among them. Every week or two, it seemed, Lonnie pointed out to Donna police who were lurking about. “Go down to the corner and look at that sedan with the man sitting in the front seat reading a newspaper,” he’d say. “That’s an undercover cop.”
But the police, just like the weekend’s ordeal with the awful odor, were far from her mind today—Wednesday, July 7, 2010—as Donna went about her morning schedule. Having dropped off the kids at school and returned to 81st Street, she needed to find Lonnie to give him her car keys. That was Lonnie’s arrangement with friends. He’d get your keys, pull your car into his backyard, work on it (even driving it down the street if he needed parts), return it to you, and give you back your keys. Then you’d pay him when you got a chance.
This morning, Donna spotted Lonnie at the auto shop on the corner. “Hold on a minute,” she said. “I’ll go get my keys. They’re at my parents’ house.”
“Let me drop something off at my house and I’ll meet you,” Lonnie said.
And off they went. Inside her parents’ house, Donna called out to her father: “I’m going to go give Lonnie my keys.” Then she picked them up and started for the door.
When she stepped on the porch—it was 9:20 a.m.—Donna saw Lonnie heading from his house toward her. He had just reached the middle of the street when, from Western Avenue on one end of the block and Harvard Avenue on the other, as if suddenly appearing from nowhere, an army of police stormed the street in numbers Donna had never seen. With sirens blaring and lights flashing, patrol cars and paddy wagons sped from each end of the block. Policemen jumped out of the vehicles as they screeched to a halt. There were so many cops swarming the block, Donna thought it looked like a war zone.
A stampede of officers headed toward Lonnie. There had be 60 or 70 of them. SWAT teams even followed the first line of cops, marching around the corner from Western. Lonnie froze as a pack of cops surrounded him. Donna stopped in her tracks. Still holding the keys she was about to hand to Lonnie, she was overcome by the spectacle of it all.
“Damn, Lonnie,” she said impulsively, “whose car did you steal this time, Obama’s?”
An expression came over his face. Donna thought she made a mistake by using the word “steal.” Maybe she said something that was going to get him into more trouble than he was obviously already in. Then she realized that whatever was happening had nothing to do with stealing cars. That look of anguish frozen on his face, still there when he turned his back to Donna and stared up into the sky, would haunt her for weeks.
Swiftly, police seized Lonnie, led him to a squad car, forced him into the back seat, and slammed the door. Then the car sped off and was gone.
The neighbors were stunned. As detectives went around asking questions, people were told to watch television at ten that morning and everything would be explained. So, at ten, Donna, her parents, and a handful of neighbors gathered around the television set in the living room of Donna’s parents’ house. Sure enough, at ten, a breaking news bulletin interrupted regular programming. Captain Kevin McClure of LAPD stood at a microphone in the middle of 81st Street, near where Lonnie had just been arrested.
“At about 9:20,” McClure said into the microphone, a reporter or two milling in the background taking notes, “we made an arrest here in the 1700 block of 81st Street of the suspect that has been known to many as the Grim Sleeper. The suspect is Lonnie David Franklin. He is 57 years of age.”
As the television blared, everyone in the living room of Donna’s parents’ house sat speechless. They could not believe what they had heard. The captain continued giving details about the arrest. Finally, Donna’s father spoke up. “I knew it,” he blurted out. “I knew it. Ya’ll said I was crazy. If ya’ll had let me get him, we’d all have some money!”
“But, Daddy,” Donna said, “you weren’t talking about Lonnie killing anyone.”
“I know,” he said, “but I told you there was something else he was doing. I told you.”
Donna said what she did to her father because, like many residents of South Los Angeles, she was suspicious of LAPD. For good reason. It was a department notorious for its corruption, incompetence, and police brutality, all of which had gone on for decades. Donna had known Lonnie for almost 30 years. He watched out for her son, her foster children, her parents. He was her friend. Maybe he knew someone connected to the murders, Donna thought, but there was no way Lonnie killed ten women. No way. True, he had his run-ins with police, but he was no killer. They had the wrong man. And why arrest Lonnie now? After all, the saga of the Grim Sleeper had a long and sordid history.