The Grim Sleeper

Between 1985 and 2007, a serial killer stalked the streets of South Los Angeles, preying predominantly on Black women — many of whom were sex workers or struggled with drug addiction. The killer murdered at least ten women, though investigators believe the true toll may be higher. A suspected 14-year pause in killings between 1988 and 2002 earned him the chilling nickname "The Grim Sleeper," coined by journalist Christine Pelisek after the pattern was identified. Despite the number of victims, the case received relatively little media attention for years — a disparity critics attributed to the demographics of the victims and the neighborhood. The LAPD established a task force and connected the murders through DNA evidence recovered from multiple crime scenes, establishing that a single killer was responsible. A composite sketch was released and a reward offered, but the perpetrator remained unidentified. The DNA profile was run through national databases repeatedly, always returning no match. The break came through an innovative investigative technique called familial DNA searching. In 2010, California authorized law enforcement to search its DNA database not just for exact matches but for partial matches that might indicate a close relative. A search returned a partial hit for a young man arrested on a weapons charge — his father, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a former garbage collector and LAPD mechanic living in South Los Angeles, became the prime suspect. Detectives obtained a DNA sample from a discarded pizza crust at a restaurant and confirmed a match to the crime scene evidence. Franklin was arrested in July 2010. Lonnie David Franklin Jr. was convicted in 2016 of ten counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. He was sentenced to death. He died in San Quentin State Prison in March 2020 of natural causes before the sentence could be carried out. The case remains a landmark in the use of familial DNA searching in criminal investigations and prompted broader conversations about the unequal attention given to missing and murdered women of color.