The Case of the Grim Sleeper

At 9:20 a.m. on July 7, 2010, undercover officers from the Los Angeles Police Department stepped out of an unmarked car and arrested 57-year-old Lonnie Franklin Jr. as he came out of his house on 81st Street at Western Avenue. He made no attempt to resist. The officers recited the charges: 10 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, stretching back to 1985. By 10 a.m., 81st Street was cordoned off while six forensic teams searched Franklin’s house and garage. They took away more than 900 items, according to subsequent grand jury testimony. In a bedroom, they found a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol, later identified as the gun allegedly used to kill the last of the victims, 25-year-old Janecia Peters. In the garage, they found some one thousand photographs of women, many exposing their breasts for the camera. But even more dramatic than this pile of evidence was the way the cops found Franklin–by using his son’s DNA.

I’d like to report a, uh–a murder, a dead body or something.

Where at?

The address is 1346 East 56th Street, in the alley. And the guy that dropped her off was driving a white-and-blue Dodge van, 1 PZP 746.

Did you get a look at him?

Uh-uh, I didn’t see him.

How long ago did this happen?

It happened about–about 30 minutes ago, ’cause I’m down the street at the phone … Like, he threw a gas tank on top of her and a–and the only thing you can see out is her feet.

What is your name?

Oh, I’m staying anonymous. I know too many people. O.K., then. Bye-bye.

The 911 caller was chirpy. It was as if he were making a social call. But what he said about the body was spot-on. When Sergeant Allan Seeget and Officer Robert Diaz of the LAPD walked down the alley with their Streamlight flashlights shortly after midnight that Saturday, Jan. 10, 1987, they found 23-year-old Barbara Ware’s body facedown under a pile of trash and an empty gas tank. Only her white sneakers were sticking out. She had been shot 12 to 15 hours beforehand, the coroner later estimated. There was semen in her mouth and cocaine in her blood. The cops put her down as another victim of the crack-cocaine epidemic that raged through South L.A. from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, driving murder rates to record highs.

But Ware was not a crack killing, and her murder was the beginning of a nightmare for the LAPD. The police established that Ware’s attacker was responsible for the deaths of six other women, all within a 2.5-mile radius, from 1985 to 1988. Then he appeared to stop, only to resume 14 years later, killing three more. And for two decades, the LAPD got nowhere on the murders. Leads petered out, while relatives of the victims accused the cops of dragging their feet because the victims were poor, young black women, many involved in drugs and prostitution.

Then, 23 years after the first murder, a veteran homicide detective named Dennis Kilcoyne teamed up with a state forensics expert to solve the case using a sophisticated new analysis known as familial DNA searching. It enables cops, under certain circumstances, to track down a suspect by cross-referencing a DNA sample from a parent, sibling or child, often without the relative’s knowledge. The test, which has been used in Britain for nearly a decade, raises the possibility of breakthroughs in a number of unsolved crimes in the U.S. But it is also stirring up controversy in all branches of law enforcement for its startling challenges to individual privacy. Four states have already okayed the use of intrafamily DNA searches, which means it won’t be long before the courts take up the question of whether it is appropriate to use DNA obtained from one family member to find another. “You are going to have a bunch of people say, ‘That’s good law enforcement. They found the bad guy,'” says John Copacino, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in criminal procedure. “But you are also going to have some folks who say that this is a little scary, a little Orwellian, when it comes to privacy concerns.”

The One That Got Away

Lonnie David Franklin Jr. had lived much of his life on the wrong side of the law. He was first arrested, for car theft, in 1969, at age 16. His rap sheet shows he was arrested 15 more times over three decades, for burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, carrying a loaded firearm, possession of burglary tools. But his crimes were never serious enough to get him time in state prison. After a stint in the Army, Franklin got married and settled down in the house on 81st Street, half a block east of Western Avenue. His wife worked for a local school district, and they had two children. (They are still married, and she visits him in jail.) From 1982 to 1989, he drove a city sanitation truck, collecting trash from the streets and alleyways around Western Avenue.

Franklin was popular with his neighbors. He knew how to fix cars, and he sold refrigerators and flat-screen televisions for conspicuously low prices. He was a Robin Hood figure in a neighborhood that never had a lot of heroes, which may be why neighbors ignored his habit of chatting up the women along Western at night. “I would talk to him on the street all the time. He even gave me a Christmas present,” says Joe Cole, 62, a retired warehouse guard who lives across the street from Franklin’s house.

The 7100 block of Western Avenue, where Ware lived in 1987, was in the middle of one of the main crack-cocaine drags in South L.A. Every night, young men cruised up and down the road, blasting rap music out their car windows, buying and selling “rock” and checking out the women who worked the sidewalks to pay for their next hit. Ware, who was 23 and had a 4-year-old daughter, waitressed a bit but soon got sucked into the sordid world outside her front door. “We tried to get her off drugs. We had not too much success,” says her stepmother Diana Ware. “It was kind of a rough period.” L.A. was averaging over 1,000 murders a year, three times as many as in 2010.

Barbara’s autopsy revealed that she had been killed by a single .25-caliber bullet that entered the front of her body, passed through her sternum and the right side of her heart and lodged behind her posterior 10th rib. Soot on her clothing indicated she had been shot at close range, the coroner said in grand jury testimony, “consistent with the victim sitting in the passenger seat of a car and being shot by the driver.” But soon enough, Barbara was just another case number–DR 87-1302331–on the unsolved-murder list. “The detectives said they were overwhelmed by what was happening,” says Diana.

From 1985 to 1988, seven women were shot from the left side by what police ballistics experts determined to be the same .25-caliber gun, their bodies all dumped in trash heaps or dumpsters in the dark alleys leading off Western Avenue. While most of the victims had saliva residue on their breasts, only Ware had semen traces in her mouth. DNA matching was not done then; the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database wasn’t operational until 1998. But the evidence samples were dried, frozen and stored.

On the evening of Nov. 19, 1988, a man driving an orange Pinto pulled up alongside 30-year-old Enietra Washington on Normandie Avenue, four blocks from Western, as she was walking to a friend’s house. He offered her a lift. She refused at first but eventually got into the car. Now 53 and still living in the same area, Washington remembers hearing loud music playing in the car but doesn’t recall the gunshot: “It all went quiet, and I just knew I had to get out, and he told me to shut up or he would shoot me again. I didn’t even know he had shot me once.” When she saw the blood on her blouse, she passed out. She came to as he was taking pictures of her with a flash camera and managed to tumble out of the car. Despite having lost a quart of blood, Washington survived. Surgeons took a bullet from her that matched the .25-caliber gun that had been used to kill seven other women in the neighborhood. Washington gave police their first description of the suspect–a neatly dressed black man with a pockmarked face. The cops never found the Pinto, and there were no more killings associated with that .25. As the crack epidemic waned and detectives were reassigned, the cases went unsolved.

The Sleeper Awakes

Fourteen years after Washington survived the attack, the bodies of several young black women were again dumped along Western Avenue–one in 2002, one in 2003 and one on New Year’s Day 2007, when the body of Janecia Peters was found shot and strangled inside a trash bag in a dumpster. The gun was different, but DNA testing on saliva from the new victims’ bodies matched the preserved samples of saliva and semen from the 1980s, and detectives realized the old killer was back. The count of his known victims had risen to 10. And his DNA still wasn’t registered in any database. His return, though, earned him a nickname from the L.A. Weekly: the Grim Sleeper, because of the way he had disappeared and then returned.

In May 2007 police chief William Bratton called on Kilcoyne to set up a task force to track down the serial killer. Kilcoyne, one of the LAPD’s top detectives, was the obvious choice to take over. He had been on the force 30 years and had worked some 400 murders. Bratton gave him eight detectives and a crime analyst full time–a huge allocation of resources for the LAPD. “I told them to go out and reinvestigate each murder with fresh eyes,” Kilcoyne says.

As pressure for results intensified from victims’ relatives and terrified neighborhood residents, Kilcoyne’s task force tracked down retired mailmen from the district to see if they remembered anything suspicious. They exhumed the body of a pastor with a reputation as a womanizer who had died after the last murder to see if his DNA matched. (It didn’t.) They got vice cops to scoop up men of a certain age who approached working girls in the area. Kilcoyne developed 400 new suspects, collecting DNA from many of them by using cigarette butts or personal items discarded in public, but for three years nothing panned out. “We were hitting our heads against the wall,” he says. “It was very frustrating. We were all on blood-pressure pills.”

He kept coming back to the killer’s DNA, collected from seven of his victims: “We had this beautiful DNA profile on somebody, and we just didn’t have a name or a face to go with it.” He didn’t know much about DNA, but he knew someone who did–Jill Spriggs, chief of California’s bureau of forensic services, in Sacramento.

Spriggs is a striking figure–tall with a piercing stare and a degree in forensic science and chemistry, as well as an M.B.A. She could have walked off the set of CSI, except that she hates the show. “You can’t solve cases in 60 minutes,” she says–and the illusion that you can “creates unreal expectations among jurors.” Spriggs has 440 staffers working in 13 laboratories around the state and a budget of $85 million. She knew the Grim Sleeper’s DNA was not among the 10 million samples in the FBI CODIS database, but she had another idea, familial DNA searching.

Standard forensic DNA testing–familiar to all CSI watchers–involves seeking a direct match between DNA found at a crime scene and the DNA of a suspect. It was first used in a criminal investigation in 1986. Since 2002, forensic scientists in the U.K. had been working on a new type of DNA analysis that uses sophisticated software to search databases for DNA of a suspect’s close relatives if they cannot get a direct hit. No two people have the same DNA, apart from identical twins–and even they may have some variations, according to recent research. But parents, children and siblings generally share more DNA traits than unrelated people, and computers can identify those shared patterns. Even if the actual offender is not in any DNA database, a close relative might be, allowing police to construct a family tree, seek out relatives who could have been in a position to carry out the crime and, with a little luck, make the leap to a legitimate suspect.

The British got their first familial-DNA conviction in 2004 when a truck driver died after a brick was thrown through his windshield on a motorway in southern England. DNA found on the brick produced no direct hits in the U.K.’s database but gave police a near match to a man whose brother Craig Harman, after providing authorities with a DNA sample, turned out to be a perfect match. Harman later confessed to the crime. The British have conducted some 210 familial DNA searches in the past nine years, with a conviction rate of 11.9%.

Familial DNA searches are not foolproof. Complete strangers can share significant similarities in their genetic makeup, so searches generate many false positives, which must be painstakingly eliminated by further refining the computer search or by consulting investigators. Still, even familial DNA’s critics agree that it will lead to the identification and conviction of more criminals, in part simply because of the data pool available. U.S. Department of Justice statistics show that 48% of people in jail have a relative who has also been incarcerated.

But the U.S. has been slow to adopt familial searches largely because of privacy concerns. Stephen Mercer, chief attorney in the forensics division of Maryland’s office of the public defender, says familial DNA searching will subject families of a convicted felon to “permanent genetic surveillance” and warns that the practice would disproportionately invade the privacy of African Americans, who make up 13% of the U.S. population but 38% of the prison population. “If success is the only criterion for adopting a new technique,” Mercer tells Time, “then goodbye to the Fourth Amendment, goodbye to privacy in the U.S.”

Denver district attorney Mitch Morrissey, a strong proponent of familial DNA searches, points out that crime labs performing DNA searches should not disclose any names to the police until they have found a probable match. “This is not guilt by association, not even probable cause,” he says. “It is a lead, which may or may not lead to an arrest.” Morrissey concedes that African Americans are overrepresented in law-enforcement DNA databases but says “that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use a scientific tool that is effective to find a guilty person.”

How familial DNA searches square with privacy is a question that will eventually find its way into U.S. courts. Under pressure from policy chiefs to clarify its position, the FBI decided in July 2006 that it would not perform familial DNA searches of its own national CODIS database but would permit individual states to use familial searches within their own jurisdictions.

In the midst of this charged debate, Spriggs went to California attorney general Jerry Brown–now the governor–to persuade him to allow familial searches. Brown was initially opposed. Was it right to use someone innocent of a crime to get at someone who was guilty, his team asked, just because they were blood relatives? And what if a familial search turned up unacknowledged offspring or unexpected paternity?

Spriggs and Los Angeles district attorney Steve Cooley made a strong case to Brown that protocols to protect privacy could be made airtight by not revealing any information about familial-search matches to law enforcement until a search of public records had located a relative who was a likely suspect. Spriggs also pledged that familial search would be used only as a last resort in violent cases of murder or rape and where all other investigative avenues had been exhausted. And they told Brown they had the perfect test case: the Grim Sleeper.

Match Point

Franklin retired from the sanitation department in February 1989, at age 36, on disability for a shoulder injury. From 1989 to 2003, he was arrested nine times, convicted twice and sent to jail once. But California did not take DNA samples from nonviolent convicted felons until 2004, so his DNA was never entered into the state’s genetic database. He kept up his nighttime cruising habits, according to his neighbors–driving up and down Western, talking to the women he met along the streets. He liked to take pictures of some of the women, often with their breasts exposed. Sometimes he showed the pictures to Cole, the neighbor across the street. “All he talked about was women,” says Cole.

In 2008 a billboard offering a $500,000 police reward for information on the Grim Sleeper (and bearing a crude police artist’s rendering of the killer) went up at 79th and Western, two blocks from Franklin’s house. A neighbor later told the police she was riding with him in his car one day and said she would love to get that reward. Franklin told her, “They’ll never catch that guy. The picture probably doesn’t even look like him.”

From Sacramento, Brown gave his approval to try a familial DNA search. Spriggs was hopeful; California has the fourth largest DNA database in the world, after the U.S., the U.K. and China. Even though the Grim Sleeper wasn’t among the 1.8 million DNA samples on file in the state’s main laboratory in Richmond, there was a chance that one of his relatives was.

After six months–at a cost of $500,000–of writing DNA-scanning software and setting up protocols prohibiting investigators from communicating with or surveilling a putative family member with a close match to the crime-scene DNA, Spriggs and her team ran the search in Richmond in October 2008. They got nothing. “Goose eggs,” says Kilcoyne, remembering the disappointment. More than a year passed before Spriggs tried again, hoping some samples newly added to the DNA database would generate a match. On June 22, 2010, they got a hit: a young man named Christopher Franklin, arrested and later convicted on a November 2008 firearms charge. He was too young to have carried out the ’80s murders, but public records revealed that his father Lonnie was the right age and had not been in prison or out of the country at the time of any of the murders. And Lonnie lived at 1728 81st Street, right in the center of the area where all the bodies had been found.

Spriggs flew to L.A. on July 2 and gave Lonnie’s address to Kilcoyne–with strict instructions that he and his men shouldn’t go near Christopher. What they needed was a DNA sample from Lonnie. It was July 4 weekend, but Kilcoyne pulled in dozens of detectives on overtime to follow the suspect. “Within several hours, I had 22 detectives surveilling Lonnie, following him everywhere, waiting for him to toss a cigarette butt or a soda can or even spit in the street,” Kilcoyne says. He was almost certain they had found the Grim Sleeper, but until they had Lonnie’s DNA, “you had to keep one small window of doubt open.”

On Monday, Lonnie went into a pizza parlor, and a quick-thinking detective donned a hat and an apron and made himself a temporary busboy. They got his DNA off a napkin and a piece of pizza crust, and at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, July 7, Kilcoyne got a call from the lab to say the DNA was a perfect match. He called his undercover officers who were watching the house and told them to make the arrest. He also put in a call to Spriggs. “Hey,” Kilcoyne said when she picked up, “this thing works.”

Lonnie Franklin was indicted by a grand jury in March on 10 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. He denied all the charges. Franklin’s lawyer, Louisa Pensanti, says the defense will question the DNA and ballistic evidence and will be particularly aggressive in challenging the familial-DNA-search technique on privacy grounds. “That begs to be litigated,” she says.

The Grim Sleeper’s one known survivor, Enietra Washington, says as soon as she saw Franklin in the courtroom in March, she recognized him. “It all flashed back,” she says. “His hair had changed a bit, but the face was the same.” After the arrest, the cops played a tape of the 911 call reporting Barbara Ware’s murder to Franklin’s neighbors on 81st Street. Everyone who heard the tape, according to the cops, said it sounded like Franklin.

Already three other states–Colorado, Texas and Virginia–have allowed familial DNA searches. Only two jurisdictions, Maryland and the District of Columbia, have expressly ruled them out. A bill permitting the FBI to perform familial searches of its nationwide DNA database was introduced in Congress last year but never made it out of committee. Privacy advocates and law-enforcement experts will be watching closely to see what kind of challenge to familial DNA Franklin’s lawyers can mount in the trial and how the judge will respond. Appeals are likely, no matter the outcome. Because Franklin has been charged with 10 unconnected murders and one attempted murder, the case is not expected to go to trial until at least 2013.

At the beginning of November, the LAPD announced it had linked Franklin to six more murders and one more attempted murder but would not be charging him with the additional crimes for the time being, to avoid slowing down the current proceedings. As the case inches toward trial, it comes to rest on an irony likely to become more common in forensics labs and criminal courtrooms: the alleged killer was ultimately unmasked because his DNA linked him both to a person to whom he gave life and those whose lives he took away.