Serial Killer Stalked Los Angeles in 'Incredibly Calculated' Way Until Son's Arrest Helped Lead to Capture

The Grim Sleeper serial killings of young Black women began in the 1980s in South Los Angeles when the crack epidemic was raging.

The victims' naked or partially clothed bodies were left to rot under garbage and debris in dumpsters and alleyways along Western Avenue.

Most of the victims, who struggled with drug addiction, were either shot at close range in the chest with a .25-caliber pistol, strangled, or both.

For decades, the identity of the killer remained a mystery until 2010 when the Los Angeles Police Department arrested Lonnie Franklin Jr. for the slayings.

Franklin’s 23-year killing spree and his eventual capture are now the subject of a two-hour special, Cold Case Files: The Grim Sleeper, premiering on Friday, Nov. 8 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on A&E.

The special is narrated by award winning actress and producer Regina Hall.

“He hurt a lot of people in many ways,” says Hall about Franklin’s reign of terror. “You can see how that loss affected an entire community.”

“It was incredibly calculated,” she tells PEOPLE. “He understood the times and he understood that people wouldn't look for that group of women. He understood it wouldn't get coverage, and he saw that, and it's quite manipulative. He was compelled to hurt people.”

Hall says she was struck by the “true callousness of how he discarded and treated the victims.”

“I was just thinking about living in that community, what that would've felt like,” she says. “It would've been terrifying.”

“It's pretty incredible that someone could just murder that many people,” she says.

A trail of murders — and a survivor's harrowing story

The Grim Sleeper killings began on Jan. 15, 1984, with the murder of Sharon Dismuke. Dismuke, 21, was found dead on the floor of a men’s bathroom in an abandoned gas station.

The killing of Debra Jackson, a 29-year-old cocktail waitress, came next, on April 10, 1985. Her decomposing body was found under a carpet in an alley near 1017 West Gage Avenue.

The murder of Henrietta Wright, a mother of five and cafeteria worker, followed one year later in Aug. 1986. Her body was also discovered in an alley.

Next came the murders of Barbara Ware, 23, school monitor Bernita Sparks, 26, Mary Lowe, 22-year-old Lachrica Jefferson, Inez Warren and Alicia “Monique” Alexander.

Alexander, 18, was found on Sept. 11, 1988 – six days after she went missing – in an alley at the rear of 1720 West 43rd Place.

All the women had been shot in the chest with a .25 caliber pistol.

Police finally caught a break just over two months later when they discovered a live victim: Enietra Washington.

Washington, a then 30-year-old mother of two, was walking to her friend’s house when a stranger pulled up next to her and politely offered her a ride in his orange Ford Pinto.

She initially declined the offer, but the stranger continued to press, at one point saying, “That’s what’s wrong with you Black women. People can’t be nice to you.”

She changed her mind because she felt sorry for the man she described as short, in his early 30s, and dressed neatly in khakis and a button-up shirt.

Washington, who later testified at Franklin’s murder trial, said that as the two drove through Los Angeles on the night of Nov. 19, 1988, the man told her he needed to make a quick stop at his uncle’s house to pick up money.

They ended up on a side street, where he parked at a house near an apartment building and auto shop. He got out, walked up to the house, briefly talked to someone at the front door and returned about 10 minutes later.

Once he returned, he started acting strange. He accused her of “dogging him” and called her another woman’s name. “I thought he said ‘Brenda’ and I was like, ‘That is not my name,’” she later testified.

Then, she said, everything went “eerily quiet” and she realized she had been shot in the chest. Washington began to fade in and out of consciousness and awoke to him sexually assaulting her. She said she blacked out again but woke up to the flash of a Polaroid camera.

After the attack, he started the Pinto and then pushed her out. She then picked herself up off the street and stumbled many blocks to the house of a friend, who called an ambulance.

However, despite giving a description of her attacker and the Pinto to police and taking them to the street where he'd stopped briefly, the assailant wasn't caught, and the Grim Sleeper cases went cold.

A break in the case

It wasn’t until after the Los Angeles Police Department started its cold case unit in the early 2000s that the killer was linked through DNA and ballistics to the deaths of 15-year-old Princess Berthomieux — a 15-year-old runaway found strangled in Inglewood in 2002 — mother of two Valerie McCorvey, 35, in 2003 and Janecia Peters, 25, in 2007.

Peters’ lifeless body was discovered in a dumpster at 9508 South Western Avenue. Peters had been shot in the lower back, paralyzing her from the waist down.

However, the killer's DNA profile was not in CODIS, the national database for DNA.

Franklin, a seemingly unassuming grandfather and a former LAPD mechanic and sanitation worker, was finally caught in 2010 through familial DNA testing after his son, Christopher, was arrested for carrying a weapon in the summer of 2009 and had to give up a DNA swab.

Says Hall, “Of course in hindsight, you're like, 'He would have to be from that community — who else would've been able to slip in and out unseen?'"

She adds: "He certainly didn't fit the profile of a serial killer per se, and yet, of course he did, but not the one we imagine. We have this idea, 'Oh, I know what a serial killer would look, and act, and be like.' And he didn't do that, he wasn't that, which is I think another reason he got away with it for so long.”

“I doubt that he would've stopped,” Hall adds. “He was most interested in not getting caught."

Once it was determined that Christopher was related to the killer, detectives followed the elder Franklin to a pizza place in Buena Park. As Franklin finished his meal, a detective posing as a busboy collected a fork, two plastic cups, a plate and a pizza slice left by Franklin.

A few days later, DNA taken from the pizza slice came back as a match to DNA found on one of Franklin's victims.

During a three-day search of Franklin's property, investigators found women's necklaces, rings, earrings and watches, as well as more than 500 photographs of various women — many of them naked or engaged in sex acts.

In one of Franklin's bedrooms, authorities discovered an FIE Titan .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun, otherwise known as a "pocket pistol." It was later determined to be the gun used to kill Peters.

In a backyard garage, an LAPD firearms examiner found a Polaroid photograph of Washington, the survivor who'd told police about her harrowing experience.

Also found in an envelope was a photo of Peters, as well as a school identification card of 18-year-old Ayellah Marshall and the Nevada driver's license of 31-year-old Rolenia Morris. Both women were reported missing in February and September 2005, respectively, and last seen around Franklin's home at 81st and Western Avenues in Los Angeles.

Their bodies were never found.

During his trial, prosecutors painted Franklin, a former corporal in the United States Army, as a sexual predator who killed women who “weren’t submissive enough.”

“These crimes were about power and control,” prosecutor Beth Silverman told the jury during her closing arguments.

“It is clear the defendant got pleasure from killing these young women because that’s how they all ended up,” Silverman said. “He definitely wanted to degrade these women by dumping their bodies like trash. He got off on that too and that is why he did it over and over. It gave him gratification.”

Franklin was convicted in May 2016 of the murders of Jackson, Wright, Lowe, Sparks, Ware, Jefferson, Alexander, Berthomieux, McCorvey and Peters, as well as the attempted murder of Washington.

Prosecutors also provided evidence that he also killed Dismuke, Morris, Marshall, and 43-year-old Georgia Mae Thomas, and that he attempted to kill Laura Moore, who was a 21-years-old waitress in May of 1985 when she was shot three times in the chest.

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The following month, the same Los Angeles jury decided that Franklin Jr. should be put to death on all counts for the murders.

In March 2020, Franklin was found unresponsive in his prison cell on San Quentin State Prison’s death row. He died soon after. He was 67.

PEOPLE Senior Writer Christine Pelisek covered the Grim Sleeper case extensively and is the author of the book The Grim Sleeper: The Lost Women of South Central. She is interviewed extensively in the A&E special, along with survivor Washington and victims’ families.

Cold Case Files: The Grim Sleeper premieres Friday, Nov. 8 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.