Grim Sleeper

On a Monday morning in the spring of 2007, a prosecutor named Truc Do stood to tell a jury about the world in which Chester Turner had killed — and to offer a requiem for a dark chapter in the heart of Los Angeles. Turner lived with his mom on Century Boulevard, drank fortified wine and made a sporadic living delivering pizzas and selling crack. His murderous binge, which took the lives of 10 women, began in 1987, a perilous time in South Los Angeles. Jobs had vanished.

As state forensic scientists savor their success in using DNA to nab the alleged Grim Sleeper, a federal court is considering shutting down a DNA collection program the state says has helped solve several violent crimes. During a court hearing last week, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals showed extraordinary interest in an ACLU lawsuit challenging the state's collection of DNA from people arrested, but not necessarily convicted, in felony cases. One judge said the court was struggling.

Los Angeles police confiscated hundreds of items from the suspected Grim Sleeper serial killer's South L.A. house and vehicles after his arrest last week, including firearms and ammunition, car seats possibly stained with bodily fluids, and pornographic photos and videos, according to court records. Police said Thursday they are continuing to build a case against Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 57, who has been charged with 10 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. "We still have a lot of work to do," said Det. Paul Coulter, one of the leading investigators on the case.

Authorities missed an opportunity years ago to catch the suspected Grim Sleeper serial killer before a final victim was slain, because his DNA was never collected as required under a 2004 law, according to interviews and records reviewed by The Times. Lonnie David Franklin Jr.'s genetic profile was supposed to be added to the state's DNA databank of offenders because he was on probation for a felony when voters approved Proposition 69, a sweeping expansion of the state's DNA collection.

Two Los Angeles police detectives arrived one day in 1987 to inform Bill and Diana Ware that their daughter Barbara had been found fatally shot, her body dumped in a back alley in South Los Angeles. The detectives carried hard presumptions about why she died, Diana Ware said, and so did her husband. It was 1987, during the height of the crack epidemic. Barbara, 23, had battled drugs for years. Bill Ware assumed she was killed in some type of dispute over drugs. It would be more than 20 years before the truth came out. Barbara Ware had been the third known victim of a serial killer now called the Grim Sleeper.

How deep did reporter Christine Pelisek get into the Grim Sleeper serial killer case? So deep that the victims' families demanded she sit in on one mass meeting with police. So deep that people she had never met delivered hunches and, in one case, a napkin smeared with a semen sample. So deep that the mystery figure killing young black women in South Los Angeles seemed to pop up everywhere, even in her dreams. When police finally identified and arrested Lonnie David Franklin Jr. last week in connection with a string of 10 killings dating to the 1980s, the credit went largely to an innovation that allowed criminals to be tracked through their relatives' DNA. But that the terrible, slow-motion slaughter even became known to the public owes to the obsessive reporting of Pelisek, a star investigative reporter for the LA Weekly.

Rights, and wrongs Re "Bearing arms, citing rights," and "Boy, 9, kills brother, 2," July 11 Let's call the members of the "open carry" movement, who promote the right to carry guns in public, what they are: selfish and egotistical. They love the attention they get walking the streets with a pistol on their hip, and they don't give a damn if it frightens people like me and my kids. I'm sure it makes you feel real big to parade around showing off your power to kill, but to those of us who don't live in your imaginary Deadwood, it's scary and disturbing.

The news conference called last week by the mayor, the police chief and other officials at the new Los Angeles Police Department headquarters was meant to celebrate the capture of a suspect in a decades-long series of murders in South Los Angeles. But in a far more subtle way, the proceedings also served as a slap-down to the notion of the moment — that government is bloated and unresponsive, unworthy of support and unable to produce success in the quick time frames expected by its citizenry.

A backyard mechanic identified by police this week as the Grim Sleeper serial killer had a lengthy criminal history stretching over four decades but was never sent to prison despite calls by law enforcement officials for tough sentences, according to Los Angeles County court records released Friday. Probation reports show that Lonnie David Franklin Jr. repeatedly cycled through the county's justice system years before he was charged this week with killing 10 women in South Los Angeles.

Frustrated by their inability to find the notorious killer known as the Grim Sleeper, whose DNA was not in a law enforcement database, Los Angeles police this spring asked the state to look for a DNA profile similar enough to be a possible relative of the killer. In April, state computers produced a list of 200 genetic profiles of people in the database who might be related to the alleged serial killer. Among the top five ranked as the most likely relatives was a profile that shared a common genetic marker with the crime-scene DNA at each of 15 locations that the crime lab examined.