Los Angeles:
It was the most painful sort of ordinary.
One summer day in 1985, a woman turned up dead in a South Los Angeles alleyway. Almost exactly a year later, another woman with fatal bullet wounds was found, in another alley nearby. And so it went, for nearly 25 years -- with a 13-year lull in which the killings seemed to stop -- black women, many of whose struggles with drugs had worried or alienated their families, were found dead and discarded around the streets and alleyways of South Los Angeles.
Their killings went unsolved in part because of a lack of witnesses and evidence, but also because Los Angeles County -- and particularly the beleaguered corridors south of the 10 Freeway -- endured so many murders, some at the hands of other serial killers, it took a long time to confirm that 10 women and one man were killed by the "Grim Sleeper," so called for his supposed killing hiatus.
"Bodies accumulated," said Detective Clifford Shepard, who has worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for more than 25 years. "You just didn't have any information back then. It was an insane time."
Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a mechanic and auto thief who lived among the victims for all those years, was arrested this month after almost a quarter-century of brutality, linked to the killings through a sophisticated use of DNA analysis.
Most of the victims' bodies were found within two miles of Mr. Franklin's home in a fairly circumscribed section of South Los Angeles near the 110 and 105 Freeways. Some were dumped along quiet stretches of south Western Avenue, where single-story homes sit next to ramshackle motels, auto body shops and a park. Others lay in the alleys that cut through residential blocks on either side of Western's commercial strip, an area dotted with fast food restaurants, liquor stores, and churches big and small.
In many ways, the case sums up the long and painful history of a neighborhood where drug crimes, gang violence and an uneasy relationship with the police combined to hinder the arrest of Mr. Franklin, and contributed to the demise of women whose footing in their community was so unsure, there were few left behind to rage for justice. Most were unaware until recently then that their loved one's killer had taken other lives.
"I didn't know about other murders," said Betty Lowe, the mother of Mary Lowe, the sixth victim. "When the detective was assigned to the case I called practically every day and every day they told me, 'Nothing yet,' so I thought it was never going to happen for us."
While South Los Angeles remains one of the more troubled areas of the city, the arrest of Mr. Franklin also illuminates in many ways how far it has come, both through the vast reduction in violence and the evolution of law enforcement technology and tactics.
"The Grim Sleeper case spans all of that history of South L.A.," said Joe Hicks, vice president of Community Advocates Inc., who grew up in South Los Angeles. "His activity began in a period of Los Angeles when things were dramatically different, and particularly in the neighborhoods where he operated, and it wasn't unusual to find bodies in the alleys.
"But the way things have changed over the course of years, the ways the later victims were dealt with, the interaction between the police and community, the way that people in the neighborhood decided we are not going to tolerate" crime and violence among young people, he added. "You superimpose the Grim Sleeper on that, and it is very interesting."
The 1980s and 1990s, when crack use was widespread, marked a time of intense violence in urban America. There were more than 800 people killed in Los Angeles every year but two from 1985 to 1995. By comparison, 314 people were killed here in 2009.
When the first victim, Debra Jackson, 29, turned up dead, the police were already trying to grapple with other killers who preyed on women, largely women who traded sex for drugs -- known as strawberries -- in South Los Angeles. A South Side Slayer task force, named for another suspected killer or killers of women, was assigned to unravel the murders.
"So many black females were being killed at that time," said Fred Miller, a retired detective who worked on the early cases, "it was like an epidemic. You'd get a call, get out of bed and go to the alley dumpster."
While at least three men were tried and convicted of multiple murders during that time, a series of women and one man were killed by someone who evaded detection. The first clue came after a fourth victim, Barbara Ware, turned up in an alley in 1987, about three miles from Mr. Franklin's home. Detectives realized then, through ballistics, that there was a tie between Ms. Ware and two previous female victims.
Yet, leads were few. There was an orange Pinto that the lone survivor described to the police. In 1987, a call was made to 911 from an unknown person describing a body being thrown from a blue-and-white 1976 Dodge van.
Families said they felt largely left out of the loop. They never knew at the time that ballistic evidence linked the victims, or about the 911 call or the blue-and-white van, or often, the simple status of the investigation.
"We didn't know anything about that," said Sherry Ware Costa, Barbara Ware's aunt. Barbara Ware's father ran a store about nine blocks from Lonnie Franklin's green house. Had the police been more forthcoming, family members said, leads could have developed.
"My husband was into custom cars," said Diana Ware, Barbara Ware's stepmother. "He would've noticed a Pinto like they were describing."
The victims had similar profiles. Friendly, struggling, usually mixed up with drugs. One night in 1988, 18-year-old Alicia Alexander, who had once been picked up by the police, walked out of her parents' house bound for the corner store to get a soda. A few days later her body was found in an alley off Western Avenue.
Save an initial visit by homicide detectives in 1988, Porter Alexander, Alicia's father, said the investigation seemed opaque, and too soon petered out in spite of his many calls to the police. Ms. Ware said detectives visited her husband's furniture store periodically in the late 1980s, but "after that, we didn't hear anything," until the Grim Sleeper began to kill again.
"In the 1980s and in the '90s there was much less information shared," said Cmdr. David R. Doan, chief of detectives for the Los Angeles Police Department, largely because of mutual antipathy; the police feared the perpetrator's associates would clue him in to their work, and the community distrusted a police force with historically bad relationships with minorities here.
Not that there wasn't community agitation. In 1984, Margaret Prescod founded the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, a group of church and community members eager to pressure the police to solve the South Side Slayer killings. "The fact is that these lives were devalued," Ms. Prescod said. "If these murders had happened in Beverly Hills, don't you think the response would have been different? The whole world would have known about it."
In November 1988, after seven women and one man had already been killed, Enietra Washington encountered a man in a Pinto who offered her a ride. She was shot in the chest, and then sexually assaulted and photographed before being pushed from the vehicle into the street, but she survived. "She gives us a lot of things that fit what we physically know about the other crimes," Commander Doan said. Then, the killing stopped. One theory, Commander Doan said, is that Ms. Washington's survival spooked the murderer. Another was that he simply changed his m.o. and that more deaths will eventually be linked to him.
After the Los Angeles riots, efforts among the police to build relations in South Los Angeles slowly commenced. The South Side task force had been disbanded. The Coalition ground to a near halt. "There wasn't anything we could sink our teeth into," Ms. Prescod said.
Then, in 2002, Princess Berthomieux, a troubled foster child who sometimes turned to prostitution, was found strangled and beaten in an Inglewood alley. A year and half later, a crossing guard discovered the body of 35-year-old Valerie McCorvey, and then, on Jan. 1, 2007, a homeless man discovered the body of 25-year-old Janecia Peters near a discarded Christmas tree. It seemed the Grim Sleeper had awoken, and the police assembled a new task force.
Several things had happened in the years between the clusters of killings. DNA technology had advanced, and a new state law required felons to give up samples, which was leading to many more connections of violent crimes. Christine Pelisek, a reporter for LA Weekly who coined the Grim Sleeper's nickname, wrote about the case and the pressure was back on.
Another thing had changed: The new task force was much more inclusive of the families..
"Time has taken a lot of the anger away," Ms. Ware Costa said. "Now we just want to know why. Why would you do this? What kind of evil person is this."