At the time, no one knew that Debra Jackson was the “first.”
She had been 29, a cocktail waitress with a broad smile and thoughtful eyes. When she was found in an alley in 1985, dead from three bullets to her chest, no one knew that it was the beginning of something horrific – that at least eight other women and one 15-year-old girl would be shot with the same gun that killed Jackson.
But on Wednesday, when a photo from Jackson’s autopsy three decades ago was displayed in a Los Angeles courtroom for her younger sister to identify, her death was an obvious, awful harbinger of what lay ahead.
One by one, siblings, cousins, daughters and fathers were called up to examine autopsy photos of the 10 people allegedly killed by the “Grim Sleeper” over the course of more than 20 years. Then their attention was directed toward Lonnie Franklin Jr., the man who prosecutors say is behind the murders – did they recognize him?
None of them did, according to the Courthouse News Service.
It was a wrenching day of testimony in what has already been a long and harrowing trial. Rochell Johnson, the daughter of alleged victim Henrietta Wright, was made to look at an image of a woman with a white shirt stuffed down her throat. The woman’s nearly nude body, riddled with bullet wounds, had been found under a discarded mattress in a south L.A. a year after Jackson was killed.
“Do you recognize the person in this photo?” Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman asked, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“My mother,” Johnson replied, unflinching.
Later, Porter Alexander Jr., who has attended nearly every day of the trial and pre-trial hearings in the six years since Franklin was charged, was asked to look at an image of an 18-year-old whose body was found in an alleyway in 1988.
“That’s my baby daughter,” he said, according to CNS.
Franklin has pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of murder and one attempted murder. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
For years before Franklin was charged in the killings, police had no idea who was behind the murders of so many women. The 1980s were hard for the city, and for south L.A. communities in particular, and so many people were dying – at least four other serial killers have been convicted or confessed to killings in that area at that time.
But some of the deaths seemed to be linked: Between 1985 and 1988, the bodies of seven young black women and one man were found shot and abandoned in back alleys and dumpsters on or around a single street, Western Avenue. The killer seemed to prey on vulnerable women in particular – some worked as prostitutes, some struggled with drug addition. When their bodies were found, many of them had been sexually assaulted.
Police got within a hair’s breath of the killer. An investigation into the attempted murder of Enietra Margette Washington, who said she was shot by Franklin in 1988, led them to a home three doors down from where the man they’d eventually arrest was living, according to LA Weekly.
But they didn’t catch him. And then he disappeared.
Almost two decades later, in 2007, a homeless man collecting cans from a dumpster off Western Avenue came upon a black trash bag containing the nude body of 25-year-old Janecia Peters. A police task force was assigned to investigate the killing, and DNA evidence linked it back to the eight murders from the ’80s as well as two other killings in 2002 and 2003.
In 2008, LA Weekly published a long investigation into the search for the killer, whom they dubbed “the Grim Sleeper” in a nod to his decade-long hiatus. But police still didn’t know who the murderer might be.
It wasn’t until 2010 that a familial DNA search – a controversial technique by which law enforcement scans DNA databases for partial matches in hopes that the match might be a relative of the suspect – brought police to Franklin. He was arrested and charged with 10 murders and one attempted murder – he has not been charged in the death of the man associated with his case.
But that was not the end of the investigation. Relentless though the series of autopsy images screened in the LA courtroom Wednesday may have been, police have reason to believe “the Grim Sleeper” may have even more victims that haven’t been identified.
A few months after Franklin was arrested, police published 180 photos of women and teenage girls taken from Franklin’s home during his investigation. In some of them, the women seemed to be asleep, unconscious, or even dead. In others, they smiled and laughed. A few of the photos were also close-ups of possibly identifying marks, like tattoos.
“These people are not suspects, we don’t even know if they are victims, but we do know this: Lonnie Franklin’s reign of terror in the city of Los Angeles, which spanned well over two decades, culminating with almost a dozen murder victims, certainly needs to be investigated further,” Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck told reporters at a press conference, according to Reuters. “And we certainly don’t believe we are so lucky or so good as to know all of his victims. We need the public’s help.”
Hundreds of other images uncovered from the home were not published, according to the LA Times. Some of them were explicit.
Six years later, 35 of the women in the photos remain unidentified.
We don’t know who these women are,” LAPD detective Daryn Dupree told People last year. “We want to make sure these women are okay.”
According to Dupree, police are particularly interested in two images of a woman found in an envelope inside Franklin’s freezer. Detectives had discovered a photo of Peters, Franklin’s last alleged victim, in the same envelope when they uncovered it in 2010.
“We think it was a trophy bag,” Dupree said. “We want to know if this person is still alive.”
In 2011, after reviewing hundreds of unsolved homicides and missing person reports, police said they’d traced six other deaths back to Franklin, according to the Los Angeles Times. But the case had moved so slowly so far that they feared that seeking more charges would just lead to further painful delays. In a strategic move, authorities decided to move forward with what they had. And last month, the trial finally began.
Wednesday, the final day of testimony for the prosecution, was tense but tearless, according to the Courthouse News Service. There were no emotional outbursts from the family members who spoke on the stand, just grim resilience.
Donnell Alexander, whose younger sister Alicia is alleged to be the eighth “Grim Sleeper” victim, has attended every day of the trial with his father. It’s important for him to be there, he told CNS, because his sister could not be.
“This whole case is not only about my sister but other girls,” he said. “So, we have to be here to support them because otherwise their voice wouldn’t be heard.”
He tried not to pay attention to Franklin, who spent much of the trial staring quietly at the wall in front of him, according to the news service.
“That’s negative,” Alexander said. “I try never to think of him, just about the love that I have for my sister. That’s how we get through it.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Sarah Kaplan
