Guilty verdicts in Grim Sleeper serial killer case

Nearly 30 years after the first victim's body was found sprawled in a South Los Angeles alley, the man authorities dubbed the Grim Sleeper serial killer was found guilty Thursday of a series of slayings that spanned more than two decades.

With the verdicts, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a former Los Angeles police garage attendant and city garbage collector, officially becomes one of California’s most prolific and enduring serial killers. The murder charges at his trial spanned deaths from 1985 to 2007, with a gap of more than 13 years that earned him his ominous nickname.

After a day and a half of deliberations, jurors found Franklin guilty of 10 counts of murder in the killings of nine women and a 15-year-old girl. Jurors also found Franklin guilty of one count of attempted murder.

The trial lasted nearly three months. The victims were all young and black, with some leading troubled lives during the chaotic 1980s in South L.A. The dead were left along a corridor in the Manchester Square neighborhood. Their partially clothed or naked bodies — some decomposing — were found amid the filth and garbage of alleyways. All were left without identification, and each was initially labeled Jane Doe.

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