Garbage man found guilty of killing 10 women in ‘Grim Sleeper’ serial killer case

Nearly 30 years after the first victim was found sprawled in a South Los Angeles alley, the man authorities dubbed the Grim Sleeper serial killer was found guilty on Thursday of murdering nine women and a teenage girl in a series of slayings that took decades to connect.

The verdict means that Lonnie David Franklin Jnr, a former Los Angeles police garage attendant and city garbage collector, officially becomes one of California’s most prolific serial killers. The murder counts at his trial spanned from 1985 to 2007, with a gap of 14 years from 1988 that earned him his infamous nickname.

For families of the victims, the jury’s decision caps years of anguish over whether the killer would face justice and bitter feelings that authorities didn’t do enough in the early years to solve the murders.

“I can’t even begin to explain. You wait so long and you don’t think it will come. You knew in your heart it would be this, but it’s surreal,” said Samara Herard, sister of Princess Berthomieux, who at age 15 was found strangled and beaten in 2002 in an Inglewood alley. “She deserved to live a full life. I’m here for her.”

All the victims were young and black, some leading troubled lives during the chaotic 1980s in South LA Many of the women were left strewn along a corridor in the Manchester Square neighbourhood, their partially dressed or naked bodies – some decomposing – were found amid the filth and garbage of alleyways. All were discarded without identification, and each was initially labelled Jane Doe.

“They suffered from the same frailties and the same imperfections that all humans do, and they had the same hopes and the same dreams for their futures that we all have,” Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman told jurors during closing arguments in the trial. “None of them deserved to be brutally dumped like trash as if their lives had no meaning.”