Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Evil Among Us: The Grim Sleeper’ on Tubi, a Sloppy True Crime Documentary About a Notorious South Central L.A. Serial Killer

Hey, Tubi does true crime too, most recently in the form of Evil Among Us: The Grim Sleeper, a feature-length documentary that zeroes in on serial killer Lonnie David Franklin Jr., who raped and murdered numerous women in South Central Los Angeles over the course of more than two decades. The film follows the formula of previous Evil Among Uses, which dug into the Golden State Killer and Ted Bundy, all of which add to the ever-growing pile of true crime content, a lot of which can’t decide if it’s journalism or sensationalism – which is the question we’re setting out to answer here. 

EVIL AMONG US: THE GRIM SLEEPER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In Aug., 1985, a mother of three who struggled with addiction and lived in poverty was found dead in South Central Los Angeles, with three bullet wounds and cocaine in her system. It was one of the 1,300 homicides committed in the crime-plagued city that year, but that specific profile would rise above the din once more bodies of women with similar backgrounds, many of them sex workers, began turning up in the same South Central neighborhood. It was a chaotic time – one commentator says “there were a lot of Jane Does” among the hundreds of homicides, some of them shot and others strangled to death. The police were overwhelmed. The unknown perpetrator was dubbed the Southside Slayer, but a handful of the murders were linked by the use of a .25 caliber pistol. And then the case went cold.

Meanwhile, we get a profile of Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a family man from South Central. He’s described as a pillar of the neighborhood who always had a kind word and helped his friends, fixing their cars and loaning them a few bucks when they needed it. He grew up in the area, and had a dark past: As a teenager, he was busted for grand theft auto and burglary, and was expelled from school for fighting. He joined the Army in the early 1970s and, while stationed in Germany, ended up doing time for being among three soldiers who abducted and gang-raped a woman. Upon his release and military discharge, he moved back to South Central, where he got married, had two kids – cue a talking head: “They seemed like a normal happy family” – and worked as a mechanic and garbage collector. A garbage collector who, notably, might know all the ideal, discreet places to dump the bodies of women he raped and murdered.

The Southside Slayer case lay dormant until 2007, when a fresh murder was remarkably similar to the killings from the 1980s. By then, DNA technology had advanced to the point where evidence from cold cases could be reexamined. Even though the old and new evidence could be linked, investigators couldn’t find a DNA match in the database. The cops sat quietly on the case until LA Weekly reporter Christine Pelisek used a source at the coroner’s office to piece together a story stating that a serial killer was likely operating in South Central; she dubbed him the “Grim Sleeper” because he had apparently hadn’t committed a murder for nearly two decades. The expose pushed the police to go public with the investigation, offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Ironically, a billboard advertising that reward went up a couple blocks from where Franklin lived.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There are some thematic ties to Netflix doc Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy. Otherwise, The Grim Sleeper is a Hard Copy– style documentary that plays up the phony drama (think Capturing the Killer Nurse, but even cheesier) and likely doesn’t add much to a story that previously inspired other documentaries (Tales of the Grim Sleeper was shortlisted for Oscar consideration in 2014) and a Lifetime original movie with Macy Gray in it. It also has similar SoCal serial killer tones a la HBO’s Golden State Killer exploration I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which is still the gold standard for true-crime docs.

Performance Worth Watching: LaWana Wilson, a survivor of a rape and attempted murder by Franklin, appears briefly in the film, recounting what she remembers of her ordeal.

Memorable Dialogue: “I think it’s absurd to think he just stopped one day and started up another day, 14, 13 years later.” – one commentator doesn’t quite buy the “Grim Sleeper” theory

Sex and Skin: Nothing beyond vague descriptions/mentions of Franklin’s sexual assaults.

Our Take: Netflix, Hulu and other top-tier streamers have released a lot of sensationalist true-crime junk, but they likely would have passed on Evil Among Us: The Grim Sleeper, which is sloppy and borderline-tasteless enough to deserve banishment to relative obscurity on Tubi. It’s cheap-looking, repetitive, disorganized and leans heavily on scripted talking-head commentary by obscure true-crime podcasters (the host of The Hot Garbage Show: True Crime podcast does some heavy lifting here, and, not having listened to said podcast, I’m not sure if we should judge it by its title). And while director/executive producer Victoria Drew interviews detectives who worked on the case and gets commentary from people who knew Franklin, the majority of the talking heads here have us wondering if she couldn’t have found people with more credible expertise on the subject.

In its late stages, the film half-heartedly broaches the notion that the LAPD mishandled or at least deprioritized the Grim Sleeper case; journalist commentator Dana Blair asserts that a string of murders in Beverly Hills would get more focused attention than a case involving the deaths of underprivileged Black women. But the assertion is dropped in and forgotten, Drew forgoing any deeper analysis for a straightforward accounting of events via a choppy timeline that’s muddy and slightly confusing, and has us running to Wikipedia for a clearer version. And anytime we can go to Wikipedia and get the same amount of information – notably without corny slo-mo reenactment footage or a generic and uberdramatic musical score – does not bode well for the worthiness of a documentary film.

Our Call: Evil Among Us: The Grim Sleeper doesn’t transcend its Tubi original status, I’m sorry to say. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.