Grim Sleeper Victims

Beginning in the mid-1980s, a series of murders targeting young women unfolded across the impoverished neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. The first confirmed killing linked to the case was that of Debra Jackson in August 1985; over the following two decades the same offender would be tied to the deaths of at least ten people, most of them Black women, several of whom struggled with addiction during the era's crack-cocaine epidemic. Many victims were shot with a small-caliber handgun and their bodies discarded in alleys, dumpsters, and abandoned lots. Because the killings appeared to pause for roughly 14 years, from 1988 until 2002, the press later nicknamed the unidentified suspect the 'Grim Sleeper.'

For years the cases drew comparatively little public attention or investigative urgency, a neglect that community activists and victims' families attributed to the victims' race, poverty, and marginalized circumstances. DNA evidence eventually connected many of the killings to a single perpetrator, but the profile matched no one in California's offender database, and the investigation stalled. The final confirmed victim, Janecia Peters, was found on January 1, 2007.

The break came in 2010 through a pioneering forensic technique. Investigators conducted a familial DNA search, scanning the state database not for an exact match but for a close partial match that could indicate a blood relative. The search flagged Christopher Franklin, who had been entered into the database after a 2008 felony conviction and was too young to have committed the earlier murders. The near-match pointed investigators to his father, Lonnie David Franklin Jr. Detectives then covertly collected discarded 'abandoned DNA' from a slice of pizza Franklin left at a restaurant, and it matched the crime-scene evidence. It was the first time California's familial-search protocol had led to an arrest in a criminal case, marking a significant moment in forensic practice.

Franklin, a former city sanitation worker and police garage attendant, was arrested on July 7, 2010. When police searched his home, they recovered hundreds of photographs and videos of women, prompting authorities to release the images publicly and raising concern that he may have had many additional, uncharged victims. A Los Angeles Police Department task force reviewed the material for possible further cases. On May 5, 2016, a jury convicted Franklin of ten counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. The same jury recommended a death sentence on June 6, 2016, and on August 10, 2016, a Los Angeles County judge formally sentenced him to death.

Franklin was sent to death row at San Quentin State Prison. On March 28, 2020, corrections officers found him unresponsive in his cell; he was pronounced dead that evening at age 67, with authorities reporting no signs of trauma. His death ended the appeals process before any execution. Investigators have said they believe the true number of victims may be considerably higher than the ten for which he was convicted, given the gap years and the trove of photographs recovered from his home, though those additional cases were never formally charged.