For a quarter century, women were murdered in South Los Angeles, and almost no one outside their families seemed to notice. The killer earned a grim nickname for a long, apparent pause in his crimes — but investigators now believe he may never have truly stopped. He was finally caught in 2010 through a technique that had never cracked a case before: a DNA match not to him, but to his own son. The most haunting discovery came after his arrest, when police found hundreds of photographs of women in his home — many of whom have never been identified.

The Forgotten Murders

Beginning in the mid-1980s, women were found dead in the alleys and dumpsters of South Los Angeles — most of them Black women, many of them struggling with poverty, addiction, or working in the sex trade. Their deaths drew little of the attention or urgency that other victims received, and for years the families of the missing and murdered felt the city had simply looked away. That neglect was its own kind of cover for the man responsible.

The Sleeper

The press named him the Grim Sleeper because the killings appeared to stop for a long stretch in the late 1980s and 1990s before resuming in the 2000s. Investigators would later doubt that the “sleep” was real, suspecting that the murders had continued and simply gone unconnected. Either way, the same killer had been operating in the same small part of the city for an extraordinarily long time.

A First in Forensics

The break came from a then-novel method. Crime-scene DNA did not match anyone in California’s databases — but a familial DNA search, looking for close relatives, returned a partial match to a young man named Christopher Franklin, who had recently been arrested on a weapons charge. The DNA suggested the killer was his father. Undercover officers shadowed 57-year-old Lonnie Franklin Jr., a former city employee, and collected a discarded slice of pizza and a plate to capture his DNA. It matched. On July 7, 2010, he was arrested without resistance, in the first U.S. case solved through a familial DNA search.

The Photographs

When investigators searched Franklin’s home, they found hundreds of photographs and videos of women. Police took the unusual step of releasing many of the images to the public, hoping to identify the women and learn whether they were alive. The discovery raised a terrible possibility: that Franklin’s known victims were only a fraction of the truth, and that his real toll might number in the dozens.

Trial

In 2016, Lonnie Franklin Jr. was convicted of ten murders — nine women and a teenage girl — and an attempted murder, and was sentenced to death. He never confessed and offered no explanation. He died on California’s death row in 2020, taking whatever he knew about the women in those photographs with him.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Grim Sleeper case is two stories at once. The first is a forensic milestone: the moment familial DNA searching proved it could catch a killer who had evaded detection for decades. The second is an indictment of indifference — a reminder that he was able to hunt for twenty-five years largely because his victims were Black, poor, and easy for a city to overlook.

The thing that finally caught Lonnie Franklin Jr. was a database entry belonging to his son. But the photographs in his home suggest his ten convictions are only the part of the story anyone could prove. So how many of the women in those pictures were victims no one ever reported missing?