The Grim Sleeper : Gripping South LA for a Reign of 25 years

We can be thankful that Lonnie Franklin is in prison for murder. On May 5, 2016 a jury found the so called "Grim Sleeper" guilty of the murders of ten women over the course of 14 years. This was relevant news to me since I was captivated by the HBO documentary Tales of the Grim Sleeper nearly a year before this conviction. At the outset of the film, directed by Nick Broomfield in 2014, we are made aware that the Grim Sleeper had been captured in 2010 and was awaiting the conclusion of his trial. The evidence was damning and he had little to prove innocence in court. But for over two decades Lonnie Franklin seemingly lived without fear of being caught for coldblooded serial murder.


Lonnie didn't hide, he just lived in a world where someone like him can rule the streets.    

At the start of the film, Broomfield enters Lonnie Franklin's South Los Angeles, CA neighborhood, and is treated with hostility by his former neighbors. They are in the mindset that Lonnie is innocent, that he was of good character, and it was all simply unbelievable. Maybe he was framed. Maybe it was lazy detective work. After spending more time in this neighborhood, and interviewing women - who did not have positive interactions with Lonnie - these same friends started requesting private interviews.

Still from Tales of the Grim Sleeper with one of Lonnie Franklin's friends and Nick Broomfield.

In these interviews friends would confess that they thought Lonnie was strange. He was kinky with women, he had his vices. He took photographs of women in precarious or violent positions. Lonnie had a gun. He wore it in his front pocket and showed it to people. It was the same gun the police would later identify as the murder weapon for seven out of the ten of his victims.

All of this was revealed and heavily padded with excuses and sheepish apologies. "I'm not proud of it." they would say. Lonnie's friends were well aware of his perversions, and they relished in it at the time. They swapped dirty photos, they shrugged and laughed when they saw hand cuffs in his car, and harbored the knowledge that Lonnie had a special van for putting women in bondage. But he was just "into women."

180 photos of women were found in Lonnie's house. Of the ten bodies found, all of the victims photos were in his collection.

When Lonnie asked some of these men to clean this van - on a fairly regular basis - no one thought twice when the rug had a dark substance in it. Then they convinced themselves it was oil, but looking back on it, it came up too easy to be oil. They can't quite picture it now. It could have been blood.

Later in the film other friends resurface to tell their tales, and they become more cavalier. Some of them are former crack addicts who admit they helped destroy evidence or even found women for him (who would most likely be his murder victims). These men did it for the crack he was supplying. It didn't matter that the car was filled with bloody clothes and God knows what else, these men needed to burn it to a crisp and get paid. It didn't matter that the woman they picked up was being tortured by Lonnie right in front of them, they needed to get high.

Forget about going to the cops. In this neighborhood the distrust for the police and the police's own disdain for this community helped facilitate a man like Lonnie. This was the perfect place to be a serial murderer. Women were being killed, and the cops weren't taking the time to investigate. These were crack addicts and prostitutes, or women who might fit the profile if you glance at the color of her skin and the street sign her body was found near.

The Grim Sleeper's ten identified victims

There are many survivors who were sexually assaulted and tortured. Women who tell the tale do not often have a section of the story where they report the crime to the police. At the time they were hooking and or high, and extremely vulnerable to arrest for their own crimes. All they could do was escape from his clutches, run for safety and learn their lesson never to sleep with him again. Lonnie knew this. That's why he got away with it for so long.

Near the end of the film, some of Lonnie's friends are laughing about him as they did at the very beginning. No longer are they hushed and concerned, ruminating over how someone they knew was very likely a serial murderer. Now they are quite sure he did it, and they gleefully approach Broomfield to share their anecdotes. All of their personal evidence has been compiled and outed among themselves.

Instead of laughing about how Lonnie would always be in his front yard chatting with the neighbors - truly painting an suburban ideal - they were laughing about how much Lonnie hated crackheads. They chuckled about how it was his first wife's fault that he hated crackheads, because she was one herself. They smiled about how he would openly tell them he was "cleaning up" the neighborhood. They all knew what it meant, and they were cool with it.

Lonnie was finally captured because his son Christopher was arrested. Lonnie had been arrested many times before for various crimes, but a new policy enforced by the LAPD to collect DNA from all arrested persons was only in existence since 2004. Lonnie narrowly escaped it after being convicted of a felony in 2003.

His son's DNA was a partial match to the DNA found on all of the bodies. Christopher could only be a relative of the Grime Sleeper. Besides, he was too young to have murdered the women who were killed in the 1980s. Lonnie Franklin's DNA was a perfect match.

Lonnie was sloppy. His DNA was all over the victims. The most vulnerable members of the community were too afraid to come forward. It was clear that the police didn't take it seriously anyway. Survivors that did come forward to the police went through the rigmarole of reporting, only to be filed away despite the multitude of evidence (descriptions of his appearance, the bright orange Pinto everyone knew he drove, bullets from the gun he consistently used, rape kits with his DNA). The key word here is consistent because Lonnie barely tried to hide, but it took 25 years for him to be stopped.

It's terrifying to think of the unreported crimes that occur in neighborhoods like this all of the country. Imagine a place the cops won't touch, the victims are doubly powerless, and a person like the Grim Sleeper will meet you in the middle.