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The Grim Sleeper_ What The People He Left Behind Remember · Luke's English Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: You know what the news calls you. I don't damn well,
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: you know Ryan Reaper something, the Grim Sleeper. I don't
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: think I know something like that. Yeah, that's all on you.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: That's Lonnie Franklin Junior. He's being interviewed by the LAPD
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: on the day of his arrest. In speaking the serial killers,
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: I've learned something important. Serial Killers aren't born, They're made.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: They emerge from a perfect storm of circumstance, pressure, and opportunity.
• 0:31
  Speaker 3: Who are right to rot a murder or dead body
• 0:34
  Speaker 3: or brump?
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: And nowhere is that clearer than the case of the
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Grim Sleeper.
• 0:40
  Speaker 4: All of these people, if you say you don't know
• 0:44
  Speaker 4: through scientific evidence, are all point in the finger. And
• 0:50
  Speaker 4: Lonnie David Franklin.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Junior convicted of ten murders, suspected of dozens more, maybe
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: even hundreds. This is a monster hiding in plain sight.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: How did this happen?
• 1:07
  Speaker 5: I feel like LAPD didn't care. I feel like, at
• 1:09
  Speaker 5: the end of the day, the government didn't care because
• 1:12
  Speaker 5: it was a bunch of black women.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: Walking in the footsteps of the Grim Sleeper and talking
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: to the people.
• 1:17
  Speaker 6: Who knew him best.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: It's a obvious police have been looking at serial killers
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: the wrong way, not just in this case, in all
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: of them. I'm James Buddy Day. This is unmarked. When
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: most people think of LA, they picture Hollywood movie stars,
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: the Hollywood Sign, Malibu Rodeo Drive. It's the postcard vision
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: of palm trees, lightning, sunset boulevard. I've probably spent more
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: time in LA than in the city where I actually live.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: I've filmed many documentaries there and attended my fair share
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: of Dodger games. But that's not Lonnie Franklin's La. The
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: Grim Sleeper stocks south Central Inglewood and Hawthorn. Lonnie Franklin
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: lived right there on West eighty first Street, tucked beside
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: the Lax Flight Path, about a mile and a half
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: from what is widely considered the only permanent open air
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: sex market in America.
• 2:17
  Speaker 5: I met the Grim Sleeper in two thousand and nine, well, no,
• 2:22
  Speaker 5: two thousand, like two thousand and seven, in between, like
• 2:24
  Speaker 5: two thousand and seven, two thousand and nine, and I
• 2:28
  Speaker 5: dated him several times.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: This is Dominique Smith. Like many of the witnesses, she
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: still lives in the neighborhoods next to the airport. Dominique
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: is one of dozens, maybe hundreds of former sex workers
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: who crossed paths with Lonnie Franklin over the twenty two
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: years leading up to his arrest. During that time, Franklin
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: picked up hundreds of women and in many cases left
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: their bodies in alleys, dumpsters, or unmarked places that will
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: never be uncovered.
• 2:57
  Speaker 5: Prior to dating him, for me, the grim Sleeper or Lanni,
• 3:04
  Speaker 5: I heard about women being missed in that area, and
• 3:08
  Speaker 5: there was like rumors about you know, him hurting women.
• 3:12
  Speaker 5: But there's always rumors about the track, So I didn't
• 3:16
  Speaker 5: pay no mind because I was, you know, into the
• 3:19
  Speaker 5: money part of it.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: Lonnie never left South central Los Angeles. He'd lived there,
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: found his victims there, left dozens of bodies in his wake,
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: and yet it took decades to identify him. Decades. The
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: best place to start is nineteen seventy four. Lonnie is
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: twenty two years old, stationed overseas with the US Army
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: in Stuttguard, West Germany. Lonnie isn't a big guy. He's
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: about five to nine African American, not physically imposing, but intelligent,
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: soft spoken, and disarmingly ordinary. In the army, he trains
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: as a mechanic, a skill he'll use his entire life,
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: but during his service, something significant happens, something that will
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: cast a shadow over the rest of his life and
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: eventually Los Angeles. This is Cliff Sheppard, a former LAPD
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: detective who worked on the Grim Sleeper Task Force, now retired.
• 4:17
  Speaker 7: We found out that Lonnie Franklin was stationed in Germany.
• 4:21
  Speaker 6: He was in the army. We found out that he.
• 4:23
  Speaker 7: Was arrested for sexual assault to German women. Back there,
• 4:29
  Speaker 7: he and a couple of other army personnel apparently pecked
• 4:33
  Speaker 7: them women up, took them out, and then sexually assaulted them.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: The details of this incident will not become public until
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: Lonnie's murder trial decades later, but according to court records,
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: Private Lonnie Franklin Junior and two other servicemen approach one
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: or possibly two women. I've heard different versions, but one
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: of the victims is a seventeen year old girl. They
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: offer her a ride drive to a remote area, and
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: she'll later testify they threaten her with a knife and
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: assault her when one of the men photographs the attack.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: This is a defining moment for Lonnie. He'll spend the
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: rest of his life trying to return to that night.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Decades of criminology and forensic psychology show that for sexually
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: violent offenders, these early assaults confuse violence with arousal. The
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: first act becomes a blueprint, and later acts become attempts
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: to recreate or intensify that original experience. This isn't nostalgia,
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: it's conditioning, and with Lonnie, that conditioning becomes the emotional
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: template that governs the next three decades of his life.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: He spends night after night, often with other men, picking
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: up women, taking photos, inflicting suffering, but in nineteen seventy four,
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: nobody catches on. At the time, Lonnie already has a
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: juvenile record suspicion of car theft, stealing property from a
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: vehicle probation, and the Army's internal investigation recommends a three
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: year sentence, but Franklin only serves a year for reasons
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: the LAPD have never been able to determine.
• 6:16
  Speaker 7: He did serve some time, was released back to the
• 6:19
  Speaker 7: United States and came back to Los Angeles. I know
• 6:22
  Speaker 7: in the mid seventies seventies seven or so he's back
• 6:26
  Speaker 7: in his neighborhood.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: When Franklin returns home, he finds a community beginning to fracture,
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: and this is a reoccurring theme in serial killer investigation,
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: something I've seen time and again. Chaotic moments create vulnerable populations,
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: whether it's war or culture, and that's where men like
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: Lonnie Franklin Junior thrive. In this case, the chaotic moment
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: is the nineteen eighties crack cocaine epidemic.
• 6:54
  Speaker 6: Because of the advent of rock cocaine. In the eighties,
• 6:58
  Speaker 6: you saw an.
• 6:59
  Speaker 7: Explosion of gangs growing, violence growing, and drugs.
• 7:05
  Speaker 6: I mean, the rock cocaine was everywhere.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: Walking around La today, you can still see the scars,
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: the faded mural half scrubbed off a liquor store wall,
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: the strip of motels with boarded windows and hourly rates,
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: the corners where memorial candles burned down. The bones of
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: that era are still visible, and the architecture and the
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: policing in the way the neighborhoods talk about violence like
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: it's weather.
• 7:31
  Speaker 5: It's funny because I said, I grew up in that neighborhood,
• 7:34
  Speaker 5: Like I grew up literally four blocks down, so like
• 7:37
  Speaker 5: that's the area I was in. Like it's crazy. Do
• 7:40
  Speaker 5: you make more money further down? Western For those who don't.
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: Know that again, is Dominique Smith, and what she's describing
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: is the unique geography of South central you see in
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: the eighties, the influx of crack cocaine creates a vulnerable
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: population of black women. Hundreds of people battling addiction drift
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: towards two parallel streets, Western and Figaroa, and this forms
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: a dependable market for traffickers, dealers, and buyers. These two
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: streets grow into one of the most visible tracks on
• 8:15
  Speaker 2: the West Coast, still visible today. By the mid eighties,
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: Lonnie spends most of his days in the front yard
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: of his lime Green family home. It's one owned by
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: his parents passed down to him. It's walking distance from
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: where the victims are picked up and from where many
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: of the bodies are eventually discovered. This again is Detective
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: Cliff Shepherd, and.
• 8:39
  Speaker 7: In his backyard he had a garage. Garage had like
• 8:42
  Speaker 7: three stalls to it.
• 8:44
  Speaker 6: He added one on a one time.
• 8:46
  Speaker 7: Plus he had vehicles, including one RV, and he was
• 8:50
  Speaker 7: entertaining women in.
• 8:51
  Speaker 6: The back of them.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: Lonnie Franklin Junior is married around this time, though despite
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: two children, friends and neighbors recall the relationship barely existed
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: as early as the mid eighties. The couple lives largely
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: separate lives.
• 9:06
  Speaker 8: I sort of figured back then maybe their marriage what
• 9:09
  Speaker 8: it's supposed to be in and she had a job
• 9:12
  Speaker 8: to kept her away from home.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: That's Richard Harris. He lived across the street from Lonnie
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: his entire life. They knew each other for decades.
• 9:21
  Speaker 6: She was a school principal.
• 9:23
  Speaker 8: At what school.
• 9:24
  Speaker 6: I don't know.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: You have to form a picture of what Lonnie's life
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: is like day to day. He doesn't work in a
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: traditional sense. He survives on hustling and crime, insurance fraud, drugs,
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: trafficking and stolen goods, loan sharking, whatever brings in the cash.
• 9:42
  Speaker 8: I always thought it was because of the money you have.
• 9:44
  Speaker 8: You would always keep a stack of money one hundreds
• 9:47
  Speaker 8: and fifties to Maybe that's how he got his women
• 9:51
  Speaker 8: in the car waking fashion, money and drugs because he
• 9:53
  Speaker 8: always kept my hand full of drugs.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Lonnie's crimes are tolerated, but they don't go unnoticed. Least
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: records show that Lonnie is arrested at least fifteen times
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: car theft, burglary, receiving stolen property, assaults, firearm possession, grand theft,
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: auto battery, assault likely to produce great bodily injury, false imprisonment,
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: it's all there. He serves some brief prison sentences, but
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: in his community he's well known and well funded.
• 10:23
  Speaker 8: He would buy cars and from insurance auctions, totaled out
• 10:28
  Speaker 8: cars and have his crew go steal a car just
• 10:31
  Speaker 8: like it and take the parts off of it and
• 10:34
  Speaker 8: sell his car, but practically new.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: Because of the criminal hustle, Lonnie is wealthy by neighborhood standards.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: He employs people. Folks come to his house every day.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: His backyard is a maze of cars and junk. But
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: people in the community, those who knew him, they remember
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: him fondly.
• 10:53
  Speaker 8: Ever, none he was perceived as a nice guy. He
• 10:56
  Speaker 8: was a really nice guy to live in your neighborhood.
• 10:58
  Speaker 8: He would fix your car for free if he knew you.
• 11:01
  Speaker 8: He wouldn't charge anything for fixing your car. If you
• 11:05
  Speaker 8: need to buy a car from him, he would charge
• 11:06
  Speaker 8: you a little bit or nothing.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: At night, when his neighbors are asleep, Lonnie cruises the blade.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: He rotates through cars, sometimes an orange pinto, other times
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: a large blue and white church fan. He converts with
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: a mattress and a tripod. In the back, and just
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: like his nineteen seventy four conviction in Germany, he's not alone.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: He picks up sex workers alongside other men and he
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: photographs the encounters.
• 11:35
  Speaker 8: And he was very weird. He was like, he bragged
• 11:39
  Speaker 8: a lot on girls. Did he had did he girls?
• 11:42
  Speaker 8: Did he meet girls? Did he picked up girls? Did
• 11:44
  Speaker 8: he had sex with? He kept a photo album of
• 11:47
  Speaker 8: a lot of women he would show us. He would
• 11:50
  Speaker 8: show us albums and albums. He had stacks of them.
• 11:54
  Speaker 8: Somebody out of the group would always say they know
• 11:56
  Speaker 8: this girl that girl, and sometimes it maybe feeled it
• 12:01
  Speaker 8: maybe he's doing this to see if we knew he neim.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: I want to be clear, as far as we know,
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Lonnie commits the murders alone, even though he gets a
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: thrill out of including others on the margins.
• 12:13
  Speaker 8: I do carpet in linoleum, and I used to clean
• 12:16
  Speaker 8: the carpet in his mobile home. He had a miniature
• 12:18
  Speaker 8: mobile home, and I used to clean carpet. And I
• 12:21
  Speaker 8: cleaned his carpet and it looked like he said it
• 12:24
  Speaker 8: was oil stains, but it didn't clean like oil stains
• 12:27
  Speaker 8: because it wouldn't come out. It seems like it was
• 12:30
  Speaker 8: bloodstains in the carpet.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: The scary truth is that no one knows when Lonnie
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: truly begins to kill women or how many murders he
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: commits during those early years. For example, as early as
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: nineteen eighty two, on June ninth, a woman named Catherine
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: Davis is struggling with addiction and sex work. She's last
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: seen one block from Figaroa. Never seen again, and Davis
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: has never been officially tied to Lonnie Franklin Junior, but
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: people in the neighborhood, including her family, believe she was
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: one of the victims, and she's not the only one.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: Even though according to official records, Franklin's first known victim
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: isn't until two years later. We know that in the
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: years leading up, Lonnie is living in his parents' house
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: halfway between Western and Figueroa, working as a garbage collector.
• 13:21
  Speaker 8: When we first met Lonnie, he was working. He was
• 13:23
  Speaker 8: on the trash truck. That's when I first noticed him.
• 13:27
  Speaker 8: He was doing the trash back when the trash man
• 13:29
  Speaker 8: was on the back of the truck and he had
• 13:31
  Speaker 8: to jump off and dump the trash can.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: There's a persistent belief among neighbors and investigators that some
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: of Lonnie's victims may still be buried inside the massive
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: Los Angeles landfill system in unmarked graves. But we know
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: from DNA that Lonnie killed a woman in nineteen eighty four.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: On January fifteenth, Franklin picks up twenty one year old
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: Sharon Dismuck. Franklin is thirty one at the time. Her
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: body found at an abandoned gas station, shot twice, gagged
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: and left on the concrete. At the time, the investigation
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: is minimal. Police don't even realize she's a victim in
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: the Grim Sleeper case until more than twenty years later,
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: when she's connected through ballistics when the murder weapon is
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: found inside Lonnie's bedroom. DNA also confirms Lonnie murdered twenty
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: nine year old Deborah Jackson on August tenth, nineteen eighty five.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: Police find the body in an alley near West Gage Avenue,
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: two blocks from Figuarat. She's shot three times in the chest.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: By this point, more than a dozen women have gone
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: missing from Western and fig many not even properly documented
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: as missing.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: Frankly, you have a major problem.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: That's LAPD Detective Dennis Kilcoyn, speaking to Lonnie on the
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: day of his arrest. Twenty years later, he describes the
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: simple truth it will take investigators decades to figure out.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: You had this problem for at least that we're aware of.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: For twenty five years. You creep out, you pick up
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: these young ladies that are out working Western or figure
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: out whatever. In the middle of the night, you'd have
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: sex with them, you'd kill them, and then you dumped
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: their bodies and alleys throughout the city of Los Angeles,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: most of them here not too far from your house.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: The tragedy of this situation is that if police had
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: thoroughly investigated even one of those early murders, if they
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: had interviewed the women on Western and fig listened, recognize
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: them as a vulnerable population, paid closer attention to the
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: geography and the fragile communities around it, the trail would
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: have led right to Lonnie's house.
• 15:46
  Speaker 7: Decades earlier, all these victims had been shot, all of
• 15:50
  Speaker 7: them but one or female, all shot with a twenty
• 15:55
  Speaker 7: five caliber bullet, and the bullets were compared thought to
• 16:00
  Speaker 7: be fired from the same gun. So after about the
• 16:03
  Speaker 7: second murder are firearms unit and the detectives for those
• 16:09
  Speaker 7: divisions and one was seventy seventh said Okay, it looks
• 16:13
  Speaker 7: like we've got a serial murderer out there.
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: At that point, the LAPD establish a task force. They
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: call these cases the strawberry murders.
• 16:24
  Speaker 8: Well, a woman that does anything for drugs, such as
• 16:27
  Speaker 8: sexual favors, stuff like that, is known as a strawberry.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: It's a surprising lack of respect for the victims in hindsight,
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: and perhaps it contributes to the fact that the task
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: force stalls almost immediately, really for two major reasons. First,
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: there's no consensus on how many women are missing. Many
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: disappearances aren't reported, others are dismissed or misclassified. Countless cases
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: fall through the cracks. Second, at this time, there are
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: at least seven serial killers operating around Western and Fig.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: Seven in the period we're talking about. Daniel Lee Siebert,
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: Lewis Crane, Ivan Hill, Michael Hughes, and Chester Dwayne Turner
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: are all operating on the stretch of roads so small
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: you could drive it in about ten minutes. In fact,
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: it was originally believed that all these men, including Lonnie,
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: were one person, dubbed the south Side Slayer, and by
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven, when the task force is abandoned. Four
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: of these men have been arrested, and it leaves police
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: with the false impression that no one else is out there.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: This is a phenomenon I've seen many times in these cases,
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: and it's called case clearance pressure. Police departments are judged
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: heavily on clearance rates, so once a high profile offender
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: is arrested, and in this case, they arrested four, there's
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: a lot of pressure to close other open cases and
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: reassure the public. Pressure creates this perverse incentive assign unsolved
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: murders to the offender already in custody, even when the
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: evidence doesn't fully match. Over my career, I have seen
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: this repeatedly. Wayne Williams, Henry Lee Lucas, even the Zodiac
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: Killer all include cases lumped in that clearly belong to
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: someone else. And ironically, this is where the name the
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: grim Sleeper comes from. But it isn't police who coin it.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: It's la Weekly Reporters interpret missing and incomplete data to
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: be long gaps or sleeps between murders and assume the
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: killer went dormant. But that isn't what happened.
• 18:39
  Speaker 7: We LAPDA have been blasted over the years for not
• 18:44
  Speaker 7: caring for the people, not caring about the victims, and
• 18:47
  Speaker 7: ignoring what's happening.
• 18:48
  Speaker 6: That is not true.
• 18:50
  Speaker 7: Problem is a city of four hundred and sixty five
• 18:52
  Speaker 7: square miles, over three million, three and a half million people,
• 18:56
  Speaker 7: and we have a lot of crime in the nineties
• 18:58
  Speaker 7: where we're hitting over a thousand and murders a year.
• 19:01
  Speaker 7: That's you know, three people a day depending what area
• 19:04
  Speaker 7: you are. And I'm aware of murders, three murders occurring
• 19:08
  Speaker 7: in one day in South Los Angeles.
• 19:09
  Speaker 6: So you only have so much power that you can
• 19:14
  Speaker 6: devote to it so much.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: This is the environment. Lonnie thrives in a chaotic landscape
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: where vulnerable people are overlooked and where a predator blends
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: into the noise.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I right to vote a murder, a dead body
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: or something. They're rats. Thirteen forty six East fifty sixth
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: Street in the alley and the guy that dropped the
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: argue driving a white and blue Dodge Van.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: That is the nine to one to one call from
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: January tenth, nineteen eighty seven, thirty minutes after Lonnie Franklin
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: Junior leaves the body of Barbara Ware in an alley.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: She's twenty three later confirmed through DNA, and she is
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: isn't the only victim we know about. Lonnie kills Henrietta
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: Wright thirty five on August twelfth, nineteen eighty six, and
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: it goes on and on and on. Bernita Sparks tells
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: her mother she's going to buy cigarettes. She never returns.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: She's later found shot to death with Lonnie's twenty five
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: caliber semi automatic pistol. On April fifteenth, nineteen eighty seven,
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: Mary Lowe twenty six, tells her mother she's going to
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: a Halloween party. She's later discovered shot. Investigators believe she's
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: killed on or around November one, nineteen eighty seven. Then
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: on January thirtieth, nineteen eighty eight, Lonnie murders Leatricia Jefferson,
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: shot with the same twenty five caliber pistol later tied
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: to Lonnie through ballistic evidence. Eight months later, on September eighth,
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: nineteen eighty eight, he murders Alicia Alexander, again with the
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: same handgun. This is by no means a comprehensive list.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: There are many families still in South Los Angeles who
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: believe their loved ones were killed by Lonnie Franklin Junior,
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: but never connected to his case. Officially possible victim Rosalind
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: Gillies is last seen on January tenth, nineteen ninety one,
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: never heard from again. Another possible victim, Lisa Renee Knox,
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: disappears on May eleventh, nineteen ninety three. Never found. Another
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: possible victim, Anita Parker, vanishes on November seventeenth, nineteen ninety eight.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: Never found.
• 21:37
  Speaker 5: I feel like LAPD didn't care. I feel like, at
• 21:40
  Speaker 5: the end of the day, the government didn't care because
• 21:42
  Speaker 5: it was a bunch of black women. So had it
• 21:45
  Speaker 5: been anywhere else, it would have been televised more.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: We have every reason to believe many of these women
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: fell victim to Lonnie Franklin Junior. After his arrest, detectives
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: uncover more than a thousand photographs and hundreds of hours
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: of video inside his home. These images show women in
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: disturbing poses, and some are seemingly unconscious. And then there
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: are the survivors. Many women survived violent or disturbing encounters
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: with Franklin during this time. For example, on November twentieth,
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: nineteen eighty eight, Franklin shoots in Tria, Washington, with the
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: same twenty five caliber gun, but she survives. She becomes
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: a key witness in the case. But even though she
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: leads police right to Lonnie Street, where Lonnie is frequently
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: standing out front of his house with the twenty five
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: caliber pistol in his pocket, the LAPD comes up empty.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: Here is LAPD detective Paul Colter interviewing Lonnie years later
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: after his arrest. In the video, Lonnie denies owning the
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: twenty five caliber handgun found in his home and used
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: in many of the murders.
• 22:59
  Speaker 9: You don't know any more hand no more? What about
• 23:02
  Speaker 9: that twenty five caliber there in your closet?
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: A pistol?
• 23:07
  Speaker 9: Yeah, over does not matter, It's not Yeah, that's my
• 23:11
  Speaker 9: brother in law is We just took that piste of
• 23:15
  Speaker 9: last week.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: If police had performed a targeted geographic search or gone
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: door to door, they likely would have found Lonnie years earlier,
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: which makes sense because of a discipline called geographic profiling.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: This is what we've been getting wrong about serial killers.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: Research shows that most serial killers commit their crimes within
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: five miles of their home. One major study of fifty
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: four serial killers found that eighty seven percent of their
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: crimes fell within that radius. With geographic profiling, the idea
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: is simple. Offenders choose locations. They know the alleys, they
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: cut through the corners, They watch the places where they
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: feel invisible. Victim encounter attack sites, disposal points. They all
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: fall within this little comfort zone and get this. Using
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: conventional profiling, the FBI has claimed that there are maybe
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: fifty serial killers in the United States at any given time,
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: but using geographic profiling and DNA links, one research group,
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: the Murder Accountability Project, has shown there are over two
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: thousand active serial killers in the US. But in the
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: eighties and nineties, the LAPD never connects these dots. They
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: think he's sleeping, they think he stopped. They're wrong, but
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: they don't wake up until two thousand and seven. By
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: that time, California has completely overhauled its DNA laws. What
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: was once collected only for violent felony cases is expanded
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: to all felony convictions and eventually all felony arrests under
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: Proposition sixty nine in two thousand and four. The state
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: also clears out a backlog of untested evidence and requires
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: new DNA samples to be uploaded into the federal system.
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: These reforms transform California's DNA archive from a modest collection
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: into one of the largest in the country, and almost overnight,
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: cold cases across the state begin getting solved at a
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: rapid rate, But despite being arrested dozens of times, the
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: LAPD never collects Lonnie Franklin Junior's DNA. In two thousand
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: and three, Lonnie is even charged with a felony that
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: requires a mandatory DNA sample, but despite a lifetime record
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: of violence, he is allowed to plead it down to
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: a misdemeanor, avoiding DNA collection entirely. This means Lonni is
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: on probation when he commits many of.
• 25:50
  Speaker 10: The murders now long when I'm metline.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: This is Pamela Brooks, another former sex worker who encountered
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: Lonnie in two thousand and seven.
• 26:01
  Speaker 10: So he came down in his van one day and
• 26:05
  Speaker 10: he kept serving the block.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: According to Pamela, she goes with Lonnie into the back
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: of his van, where he asks her to wear a
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: collar and pose.
• 26:13
  Speaker 10: For him, you know, talking like, well, we really don't
• 26:17
  Speaker 10: have to do anything. I want you to start being
• 26:19
  Speaker 10: like a bargain act like adult.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: Pamela refuses, and when Lonnie isn't paying attention, she slips
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: out and walks away before he can follow. It's a
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: decision that may have saved her life.
• 26:30
  Speaker 10: But I did know he was a grim sleeper until
• 26:33
  Speaker 10: it all came out the wash, you know what I'm saying.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: On January first, two thousand and seven, the body of
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: twenty five year old Geniessa Peters is discovered on the
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: ninety five hundred block of Southwestern Avenue by a homeless
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: man searching dumpsters for cans.
• 26:49
  Speaker 7: Dumpster was a little bit different from the original location
• 26:53
  Speaker 7: that was down maybe a building, but it was still
• 26:57
  Speaker 7: there right there in that alley. So this guy is
• 27:02
  Speaker 7: using these alleys, he's familiar with these alleys.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: LAPD Police Chief Bill Bratton convenes the eight hundred Task Force,
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: a specialized investigative team assembled to solve what they wrongly
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: believe is only eleven unsolved murders dating back to nineteen
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: eighty five.
• 27:19
  Speaker 7: Two of the women, Brenda Sparks and.
• 27:25
  Speaker 6: I don't call the other one off hand.
• 27:28
  Speaker 7: They were found in dumpsters around ninety fifth Street in
• 27:31
  Speaker 7: Western about ten years apart. We had a DNA profile
• 27:37
  Speaker 7: for our guy. We had him on about six murders
• 27:43
  Speaker 7: that connected them from murders from the eighties to two
• 27:47
  Speaker 7: thousand and seven.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: But Lonnie has more victims than anyone realizes. Georgia May Thomas,
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: forty three is found fatally shot on December eighteenth, two thousand,
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: just a mile from where Barborough ware was left. Ballistics
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: match the weapon to multiple other victims. Princess BERTHOMMEU fifteen
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: disappears in December two thousand and one. She's found strangled
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: and beaten in an Inglewood alley. DNA from her body
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: links directly de Launy. In July two thousand and three,
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: a crossing guard in Westmont discovers the body of Valerie McCorvey,
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: thirty five. She has trauma to the neck.
• 28:29
  Speaker 9: Two thousand and two, Christian lady, do you recognize her?
• 28:37
  Speaker 9: I'm going Princess, you've never seen her before?
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: Okay?
• 28:43
  Speaker 4: In two thousand and three, Christian lady has been with two.
• 28:49
  Speaker 9: Have you never seen her? You don't know that lady.
• 28:57
  Speaker 9: You've never seen her all, mister Franklin, Just like the
• 29:04
  Speaker 9: other one, your DNA was found by this young lady.
• 29:09
  Speaker 9: Is there a way to explain that? I don't know?
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: Two more women, Aliah Marshall, eighteen, missing since two thousand
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: and six, and Roleina Morris thirty one missing since two
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: thousand and five. Neither found, but Marshall's student ID and
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: Morris's driver's license and photo are later found inside a
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: refrigerator in Lonnie's garage. When Lonnie is arrested in twenty ten,
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: the LAPD describes it as a quote painstaking process, claiming
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: detectives undertook quote revolutionary DNA work to finally solve the case.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: This is not true. The LAPD caught Lonnie Franklin Junior
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: completely by accident. In twenty ten, Lonnie's son, Christopher is
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: arrested on an unrelated felony charge. When Christopher's DNA is
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: uploaded into the state database, it triggers a familial match
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: to the Grim Sleeper murders. At the time, Christopher is
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: living with Lonnie at the house on West eighty first Street.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: Detectives trail Lawnie, knowing that he's Christopher's father. They wait
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: for him to discard something with his DNA on it.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: When he throws away a piece of pizza crust, they
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: recover it, test it and it matches the grim Sleeper profile.
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: This is how the case breaks.
• 30:35
  Speaker 6: We had guys watching them. We have him.
• 30:38
  Speaker 7: He was going to Western Avenue when approaching women on
• 30:40
  Speaker 7: Western Avenue presented a problem for us because we didn't
• 30:44
  Speaker 7: want him picking up a woman on Western Avenue or
• 30:46
  Speaker 7: anywhere else at that time. We couldn't let that happen.
• 30:49
  Speaker 7: So we're trying to make a decision. What are we
• 30:51
  Speaker 7: going to do if he does that.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: Or tries Franklin is taken into custody on July seventh,
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: twenty ten. That morning, LAPD surveillance teams watch him leave
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: the house, unaware that detectives already have his DNA from
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: the discarded pizza slice. As he returns home later that afternoon,
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: officers move in. He surrounded in his driveway and arrested
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: without a struggle, the end of a twenty five year
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: killing spree hidden in plain sight.
• 31:23
  Speaker 8: One day, the LAPD showed up, and we thought it
• 31:26
  Speaker 8: was for the stolen cars, but he wasn't because they
• 31:30
  Speaker 8: had the crime lab. When the crime lab showed up,
• 31:32
  Speaker 8: we really knew it wasn't. Then one of the officers
• 31:35
  Speaker 8: the LPED officers explained to us that it was Delanie.
• 31:40
  Speaker 8: Franklin was arrested for multiple murders.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: Inside the house, detectives finally see what Lonnie has been hiding.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: Well.
• 31:50
  Speaker 6: We served the search water on his house.
• 31:53
  Speaker 7: We did a quick walk through once we got everybody
• 31:55
  Speaker 7: out to get an idea where we're going to examine
• 32:00
  Speaker 7: and who's going to be assigned to what area and
• 32:03
  Speaker 7: what search. He had an office, a bedroom, He had
• 32:10
  Speaker 7: a closet.
• 32:11
  Speaker 6: Inside the closet, I opened it up.
• 32:13
  Speaker 7: There was a military jacket in there. Pat of the
• 32:16
  Speaker 7: military jacket, I could feel there was a gun in
• 32:18
  Speaker 7: the pocket. I didn't pull it out, and I said, well,
• 32:21
  Speaker 7: wait for the search team to let them find it.
• 32:25
  Speaker 6: But I'm certain it was going to be a gun.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: The home is filled with piles of belongings. There's magazines, junk,
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: household debris, and buried within are troves of pornography, sex toys,
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: homemade tapes, objects belonging to victims, and photographs of more
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: than one hundred and eighty women in various states.
• 32:46
  Speaker 6: In his garage.
• 32:48
  Speaker 7: One of the teams was going through holes in the
• 32:52
  Speaker 7: areas in the garage and reached in and pulled out
• 32:55
  Speaker 7: a handful of photographs of women.
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: And this again is Dominique Smith, who encountered Lonnie in
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: two thousand and seven.
• 33:05
  Speaker 5: I felt hurt because maybe if I would have said
• 33:08
  Speaker 5: something to somebody, I probably could have saved the life.
• 33:11
  Speaker 5: I was hurt because like just not caring enough to
• 33:16
  Speaker 5: know who's around me, or what am I what I'm
• 33:18
  Speaker 5: what I'm what I'm doing, or what predator I'm sleeping with.
• 33:23
  Speaker 5: That's what a hurt really came from. Like I knew
• 33:27
  Speaker 5: this man was a pervert. I knew he was weird,
• 33:31
  Speaker 5: and here you go, he a killer.
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: The same day of his arrest, Lonnie is interviewed by
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: LAPD detectives.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: I mean some do uh do you know what DNA is?
• 33:41
  Speaker 9: Yes, the bloods the life of anything anybody fluids in
• 33:46
  Speaker 9: their content.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: Okay, and it's it's it's like a fingerprint. M Yeah.
• 33:51
  Speaker 9: Only one person has that day.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: So you understand him probably better than I do.
• 33:56
  Speaker 9: But I don't know these people. Yeah, ye, five or
• 34:01
  Speaker 9: six people here in hold are so far.
• 34:03
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: He says little and asks for a lawyer after about
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: forty minutes, ending the interview. And it will take six
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: years before Lonnie David Franklin Junior, the man now known
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: as the Grim Sleeper, is convicted of ten counts of
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: first degree murder and one count of attempted murder. He's
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: sentenced to death, but before that sentence can be carried out,
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: he dies in prison before all the questions can be answered.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: The Grim Sleeper is found unresponsive in his cell on
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: March twenty eighth, twenty twenty, at the age of sixty seven.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: Prison staff attempt to revive him. He's pronounced dead shortly thereafter.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: There are no signs of trauma found on his body,
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: suggesting he dies of natural causes.
• 34:51
  Speaker 7: When I heard that Lonnie had died in president I thought, okay, well,
• 34:56
  Speaker 7: California won't make sure justice is done. God did so,
• 35:02
  Speaker 7: will never kill anybody else.
• 35:04
  Speaker 6: We're done here.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: For decades we've looked at serial killers the wrong way.
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: Most of these people are not Hannibal Elector. They're not
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: geniuses for the most part, not even drifters moving across
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: state lines. They're the people living among us, neighbors, coworkers,
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: the man fixing the car in his backyard down the street,
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: and the Grim Sleeper case shows exactly what this blind
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: spot looks like. Lonnie Franklin Junior is not a criminal mastermind.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: He's a man who operated for decades inside a few
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: square miles. Because the victims were vulnerable, the investigations under
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: resourced and the community's warnings ignored. The lesson from this
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: case isn't about how one killer got away, It's about
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: how many others we fail to see. If we want
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: to stop the next grim sleeper, the answers won't come
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: from profiling cliches are Hollywood tropes. They'll come from the
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: ground level, from listening to the people who are most
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: at risk, the people whose lives and deaths rarely make
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: the news. Because the truth is, serial killers don't vanish.
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: We just failed to look in the right places, and
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: when we do, the map lights up. If you go
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: to our social channels YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, you'll
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: see additional content about this episode, more phone calls, insights,
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: and interviews, and we'll be posting daily from the last
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: decade of our true crime reporting. This season on Unmarked,
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: you'll hear exclusive audio and interviews, calls and content, including
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: the last interview with Charles Manson. We're opening our archives
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: one case at a time. Subscribe to Unmarked so you
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: don't miss what we reveal next. This episode of Unmarked
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: is produced by John De Doe, edited by Dave Alderson
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: and our additional producers are Jesse Demray and Stephen Kluk.
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: One