Grim Sleeper to be Put to Sleep

One of the few times the Death Penalty is justified in my view…

Jurors vote for death sentence for ‘Grim Sleeper’ serial killer

A Los Angeles County jury decided Monday that the man known as the “Grim Sleeper” serial killer should be put to death, closing an important legal chapter in the grisly slayings of at least nine women and one teenage girl that terrorized South L.A. for more than two decades.

The verdict against Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a 63-year-old former sanitation worker, drew muted sighs of relief in the downtown courtroom from victims’ relatives who were passing tissues back and forth, letting slight sobs go as each victim’s name was read aloud. Franklin, wearing a yellow dress shirt and neck tie that he put on as he entered the courtroom, appeared to remain stoic as he has the entire trial.

He was convicted last month of 10 murders between 1985 and 2007 but authorities believe he is responsible for more. Jurors rejected defense arguments that he should spend the rest of his life in prison rather than face execution.

The victims’ bodies were often dumped naked on roadsides or among trash in humiliating fashion, and the victims were all initially listed as Jane Does, leaving the killings unconnected for decades.

During the penalty phase of the trial, prosecutors connected Franklin to an additional five killings. The district attorney’s office decided not to charge Franklin with those crimes because he was already facing the death penalty and prosecutors did not want to further stall a trial that had already been beset by delays.

In all, investigators think Franklin may have killed as many as 25 women during the years he spent stalking one of the city’s most vulnerable populations.

In her closing argument to the jury, Deputy Dist. Atty. Beth Silverman gave a blistering recounting of each victim’s final moments, speaking with a palpable disdain for Franklin. The defendant, seated underneath a projector that displayed pictures of his victims’ battered and bloody bodies, never looked up.

“They were so vicious, they were so calculated, and they were so demeaning,” Silverman said of the killings. “The way that these women ended up, half of them naked … all of them in filthy alleys.”

Defense attorney Dale Atherton countered by appealing to the jury’s conscience in a plea for mercy. Executing Franklin, he said, would only “delay the healing process” for the victims’ families.

“Every time they think of the approaching execution date, it will be like opening the wounds again,” he said.

 

Grim Sleeper Serial Killer, Convicted

Black serial killers are rarer than white. About 90% of serial killers in the US are white males. It is unclear whether that is because black killers tend to kill fellow blacks, and thus go unnoticed by the police…Or if there are sociological reasons. In this case, the killer, Lonnie Franklin probably killed dozens more than he was convicted for.

Lonnie David Franklin Jr. Guilty For All 10 ‘Grim Sleeper’ Killings Of Women

Lonnie David Franklin Jr. killed nine women and a teen girl in a Los Angeles crime spree dating back 30 years.

A former sanitation worker accused of being the “GrimSleeper“ serial killer was found guilty of murder on Thursday for the slayings of nine women and a teenage girl in a Los Angeles crime spree dating back 30 years.

The Superior Court jury reached its verdict on all 10 counts of murder against the defendant, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 63, after deliberating just over a day, capping a trial that stretched over more than 11 weeks.

Franklin, who could face the death penalty, also was convicted of attempted murder for an attack on an 11th victim who survived being shot, raped, pushed out of a car and left for dead in 1988.

Judge Kathleen Kennedy instructed jurors to return to the courtroom on May 12 for the start of the trial’s penalty phase.

Franklin, whose attorney sought to raise questions about DNA evidence presented during the trial, was convicted of fatally shooting or strangling seven victims between August 1985 and September 1988, and three others between March 2002 and January 2007.

The gap of more than 13 years between the two spates of murders earned the killer the “GrimSleeper“ moniker. Since his March 2011 indictment, police said they had gathered evidence linking Franklin to at least six more slayings, some of which took place during the previously presumed lapse in killings.

Franklin, who sat impassively in court as the verdicts were read on Thursday, has been in custody since his arrest in July 2010.

These are pictures of other possible victims of the “Grim Sleeper”

 

Arrest In Serial Stabber Case

This undated photo released by the Arlington, Va., County Police Department shows Elias Abuelazam. Abuelazam, suspect in a string of 18 stabbings that terrorized people across three states and left five dead, was charged Thursday, August 12, 2010 with assault with intent to murder in connection with a July 27 stabbing in Flint, Michigan. Abuelazam was arrested at a gate at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as he tried to board a plane for Israel, officials said Thursday. (AP Photo/Arlington County Police Department)

Atlanta Police have announced the arrest of a suspect in the multistate serial stabber case. The suspect was attempting to board a flight to Israel, apparently on an expired Israeli passport. No word yet on the identification of the suspect, but police have said the man had ties to both the Flint, Michigan and Leesburg, Virginia areas.

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Arrest in Serial Stabber Case, posted with vodpod

 

The “Grim Sleeper”

Lonnie David Franklin Jr., Who Police Believe Committed at Least 11 Murders

Black serial killers are a rarity. The most infamous being the Atlanta child murderer, Wayne Williams. Perhaps they are not as rare as police profiles indicate, and it is just that their victims tend to get ignored.

Grim Sleeper serial killer suspect known as nice, funny ‘fix-it’ man

For more than 20 years an elusive killer dubbed the Grim Sleeper walked the streets of south Los Angeles, California.

The killer targeted black women, some of them working as prostitutes, shooting most of them with the same small-caliber gun.

Police combed the neighborhood where the killings occurred — a low-income area.

But some have said that because of the low-income profile of the area and the victims, the slayings were pushed aside as unrelated incidents.

Police eventually got the killer’s DNA and ballistics evidence, which allowed them to link at least 10 murders. But for years they could not match the DNA.

Then on Wednesday, police announced they believed they finally had their man, Lonnie David Franklin Jr.

Franklin, 57, is a former city trash collector who at one time worked as a garage attendant at an LAPD station and used his mechanical skills to help out around the neighborhood.

The same neighborhood was littered with composite sketches of the suspect. But police say nobody said anything about noticing the resemblance to Franklin who lived just eight blocks from one the sketches.

His arrest came as a shock to neighbors who said they knew him as a guy who helped fix their cars — on the same street near where police say he allegedly dumped his victims’ bodies.

Vehicles were a focus for detectives during their investigation. His only surviving victim told police after her escape that the suspect was driving an orange Ford Pinto when he picked her up.

One of Franklin’s neighbors said he was seen driving an orange Pinto once or twice. But the neighbor thought nothing of it, not knowing about the vehicle’s relationship to the case and not suspecting anything because Franklin was known as a “fix-it” man who always drove different cars he was working on.

 

Serial Killer in Kenya Blames Teacher Blood Cult

Cops Nab Woman Suspected of Leading of Killer Cult

A high school teacher has been detained in Kenya, after a self-confessed serial killer said that she told him to kill 100 people for good fortune. Philip Onyancha, 32, has confessed to killing 17 people, mostly women, and says he did so because teacher Elizabeth Wambui inducted him into her blood-drinking cult when he was in school in 1996, the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation reports. “My target was to kill 100 women,” Onyancha said. “I managed 17 and there were 83 to go.” He said he targeted women and young children because they were weak. Police nabbed Onyancha last Thursday when he called the father of one of his victims to extort money from him. Since then, he’s been remarkably helpful, leading them to various murder sites around the country. He’s neatly resolved so many unsolved murders that some Kenyans suspect he’s lying, a BBC correspondent reports.

 

Serial Killer… Who Won the Dating Game

Uhhhh… To those folks out there who are Internet dating…

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Talk about your date from hell!

Convicted serial killer won on ‘Dating Game’

Before he was a convicted serial killer, Rodney Alcala was a winning bachelor on “The Dating Game.”

“Oh yeah, I remember it quite clearly,” said Jed Mills, the game-show contestant who sat next to Alcala in 1978. “He was creepy. Definitely creepy.”

Found guilty in February of murdering four women and a child, Alcala, 66, is acting as his own attorney in the penalty phase of the trial. He is hoping to persuade the jury in Santa Ana, California, to spare his life.

The crimes Alcala committed date to the late 1970s. Nobody at the time knew the man with the wavy long hair and toothy grin was an apparent psychopath — an unstable, antisocial personality.

That includes Mills, a veteran television and film actor, whose only encounter with Alcala was when both of them appeared on “The Dating Game.”

“That’s when I became part of a nightmare, and I didn’t realize it was a nightmare until 32 years later,” Mills said.

Alcala, who already had been convicted for the 1968 rape of an 8-year-old girl, was the first contestant to be introduced in the game-show episode.