An important arrest was made Wednesday June 7, 57 year old Lonnie David Franklin Jr. has been charged with 10 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. The murders that Franklin is charged with include one man and the rest all young African-American women. The “Grim Sleeper” moniker was applied by law enforcement due to a long, 14 year lull between murders from 1988 to 2002. Franklin was found using a controversial search method called the Familial DNA Matching.
Franklin was reportedly a mechanic for a Los Angeles Police Department station near the center of the 1980’s murder spree. The majority of the killings were confined to a 2 mile radius in South Los Angeles, just a few miles east of the Hollywood Park Race Track. Several detectives, led by Dennis Kilcoyne, have been working full time on this case for years. ABC News reports that, although there were many suspects identified, they failed to zero in on Franklin. A newly adopted technique called Familial DNA Matching provided the much needed clues to this investigation.
About Familial DNA Matching: In April of 2008, California adopted an aggressive approach to a controversial crime fighting technique known as familial or “partial match” DNA searching. The policy is aimed at identifying a suspect through DNA collected at a crime scene by looking for potential relatives in the California state’s database. State Atty. General, Jerry Brown said the new approach was justified by violent crime plaguing California (2000 homicides per year), and said, “It would be used only when other leads had been exhausted”.
Partial or familial DNA matching has been used in Britain for years with a 10-14% rate of catching perpetrators. The United States government employed a variation of this process in Kansas supporting the apprehension of Dennis Radar, the self described “BTK” serial killer.
In the case of Mr. Franklin, the suspect’s son was arrested and convicted in a felony weapons charge and swabbed for DNA in 2009. After being added to the California database, detectives were alerted regarding a partial match to evidence found at the “Grim Sleeper” crime scenes. Upon investigation of Franklin’s relatives a match was found to Lonnie Franklin.
