Lonnie David Franklin

Los Angeles police detectives are reexamining at least 30 unsolved killings of women in South Los Angeles, seeing if they can link any of the homicides to the man accused of being the Grim Sleeper serial killer. Sources with the Los Angeles Police Department told The Times that the 30 cases share similarities to the slayings linked to Lonnie David Franklin Jr., who appeared briefly in court Thursday, where he was charged with 10 counts of murder involving women killed over three decades in South L.A. Some — but not all — of the victims in the unsolved cases lived on the margins of society, including drug users, prostitutes and those suffering from mental illness.

For well over two decades, the killer had eluded police. His victims, most of them prostitutes in South Los Angeles, had lived on the margins of society, and their deaths left few useful clues aside from the DNA of the man who had sexually assaulted them in the moments before their deaths. A sweep of state prisons in 2008 failed to come up with the killer or anyone related to him. Then, last Wednesday, startling news came to the LAPD: A second "familial search" of prisons had come up with a convict whose DNA indicated that he was a close relative of the serial killer suspected of killing at least 10 women.