Franklin, 60, is charged with 10 counts of murder in the deaths of women — many of them prostitutes and drug addicts, whose corpses were often found dumped in alleyways and Dumpsters in South-Central Los Angeles — between 1976 and 2010, and who is believed to have taken a break of 13 years in between, hence the Grim Sleeper moniker.
Franklin was arrested in 2010 and at the time LAPD made public the photos, found in his possession, of some one hundred women they believed might be his victims. Some photos seemed to be normal snapshots, but others showed women undressing.
Many were identified through public outreach, but some were not. So the FB page is one more attempt to find the identify of women whose photos Franklin possessed when he was arrested.
For years, many Grim Sleeper killings were believed part of other sprees. News of an LAPD investigation into the killings as connected to one man was made public in 2008 by Christine Pelisek in the LA Weekly.
The Grim Sleeper case is fascinating for several reasons. But one of them is that it involves a black man. For decades, serial murderers were almost all white. Think Ted Bundy or the Green River Killer. But the chaos of the crack-epidemic years apparently created black serial killers, who often prayed on street women, and whom DNA technology has only recently allowed police to identify, in LA at least. Franklin is suspected to be one of them. Chester Turner and John Floyd Thomas are others.
