Los Angeles police detectives are reexamining at least 30 unsolved killings of women in South Los Angeles, seeing if they can link any of the homicides to the man accused of being the Grim Sleeper serial killer, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., who appeared briefly in court Thursday, where he was charged with 10 counts of murder.

Franklin allegedly killed seven women between 1985 and 1988, when his crimes seemed to abruptly stop, authorities say. The slayings resumed in 2002, another murder happened in 2003 and a third one in 2007, police said. They suspect Franklin may be responsible for more homicides during that gap.

Detectives have spent the last two days serching Franklin’s home, collecting photo albums, documents, business cards and other records that they hope can provide a better picture of the suspect and perhaps provide links to other victims. A law enforcement source familiar with the investigation said police recovered multiple firearms from Franklin’s home and will be testing the weapons to see if there is a match to the ballistics evidence from the crime scenes. There is no DNA evidence in any of the 30 cases, which is significant because authorities said they tied Franklin to some of the 10 killings based on information from DNA databases. Many of the cases are three decades old and occurred during a period when several serial killers were allegedly operating in South L.A.

To many of his neighbors and customers, Lonnie Franklin Jr. was just a friendly mechanic who often stopped to chat as he tinkered on cars in the front driveway of his mint-green house on 81st Street. But after police identified him as a serial killer Wednesday, other neighbors recalled traits that suddenly seemed chilling. Some neighbors said Franklin made no secret of enjoying the company of sex workers, who he would often bring back to a camper parked in his backyard filled with old cars and junk. Another neighbor, Sherwood Howard, said Franklin would show off nude photos he took of the women from the neck down and talk about his exploits. He kept the pictures in the garage.

The 57-year-old man was arrested at least 15 times over four decades but was never sent to state prison despite the recommendation of probation officers, court and jail records show. He was arrested for burglary, car theft, firearms possession and assaults, but his crimes never were considered serious enough to send him to state prison or to warrant his entry in the state’s DNA database, authorities said. Despite the long and varied record, Franklin did not commit the kind of violent crimes against women that might have drawn the attention of detectives in the Grim Sleeper case. Investigators now plan to use DNA to tie Franklin to dozens more murders, looking at more than 30 cold case files dating to 1984, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said Friday.

“Now that we know who he is, where he lives, the cars he drove, have people to interview, we will go over all those old cases and look for connections,” Beck said.

-articles from skcentral.com rewritten and adapted by admin-

A retired police mechanic, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 57, was arrested and charged Wednesday in Los Angeles’ Grim Sleeper serial killings after decades of frustrated investigations into at least 11 slayings dating back 25 years -- between 1985 and 2007 in which the killer targeted young black women and one man. The killer was dubbed the “Grim Sleeper” because he apparently took a 14-year hiatus in his crimes.

The “Grim Sleeper” case has dogged police even though they had the killer’s DNA, a description from a survivor and had offered a $500,000 reward. The victims were shot, strangled, or both, usually after some kind of sexual contact. Ten victims were women and several were prostitutes. Police have said it’s possible that the male victim, Thomas Steele, who was shot in 1987, was a friend of another victim or discovered the killer’s identity. All the bodies were found outdoors, often in alleys a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 57, was arrested at his home in South Los Angeles on Wednesday morning after police said they made DNA matches linking him to the killings of 11 people over the last three decades. Prosecutors said they have charged Franklin with 10 counts of murder, noting that he is eligible for the death penalty. Dozens of police officials closed off a block around the 81st Street house where the arrest was made. Neighbors described the man who lives there as friendly and quiet. They said he was often seen working on cars in his front yard and would sometimes stop to chat with passers-by.

In recent days, the LAPD received the results of what is known as a familial DNA search, which trolls through state felon databases for partial DNA matches that would indicate a match to a relative. The suspect in the killings had left DNA evidence at several of the crime scenes. The LAPD learned that a man in state prison showed a strong familial match. Detectives questioned the man, who was too young to have committed several of the older murders, and he led detectives to his father, Franklin. Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said detectives got a piece of discarded pizza with Franklin’s DNA to make the link.

The series of killings included victims, mostly female, in the city of Los Angeles, in unincorporated areas of L.A. County and in Inglewood since the 1980s. A survivor in 1988 described her attacker as black, in his 20s, 5-foot-8 to 5-foot-10, about 160 pounds, soft-spoken and articulate, with neatly trimmed hair and a pockmarked face. DNA and ballistics evidence have connected the killings of 10 women and one man from 1985 to 2007, police said. After 1988, the killer did not commit any known homicides until 2002 and last struck on Jan. 1, 2007.

Franklin has twice been convicted of felonies, according to court records, both for receiving stolen property. One was in 1993 and the other was 2003. He served a year in jail for the first conviction and was sentenced to 270 days in jail in the 2003 case.

Franklin was expected to be arraigned Thursday.

-articles from various sources rewritten and adapted by admin-

Britain’s top serial killer expert, Professor David Wilson, reveals the explosive evidence which has convinced him that serial killer Peter Tobin is dance hall fiend Bible John. He has been investigating Tobin for more than three years and says he would stake his credibility on Tobin being the notorious killer.

In exclusive extracts from his new book The Lost British Serial Killer, Wilson reveals why he believes Tobin committed the three brutal, unsolved murders in Glasgow that have been blamed on Bible John. And he describes the bombshell courtroom moment when he became certain that Tobin was guilty of the murders.

Wilson, professor of criminology at the Centre for Criminal Justice Policy and Research at Birmingham University, became convinced he was looking at Bible John during Tobin’s trial for the 1991 murder of teenager Dinah McNicol. Hitch-hiker David Tremlett was a reluctant witness, as police initially suspected he had murdered Dinah.

“He shared a hitched lift from Liphook Music Festival in Hampshire with her. She was sitting in the front of Tobin’s cab while he was in the back and he overheard a conversation where Tobin said to Dinah that the Cambridge Folk Festival was ‘more my style’. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He was trying to imply he was socially superior and that he could be trusted. This was the exactly the same type of conversation that witness Jeannie Williams had in the back of a Glasgow taxi all those years ago with Bible John. Jeannie recalled how the killer seemed to want to make out he was a cut above everyone else. He talked about how he didn’t support Celtic or Rangers, which was highly unusual in Glasgow, and how he didn’t drink at Hogmanay. He talked about his cousin’s hole-in-one at golf and it was exactly the same technique he was using.

“Tobin kept his head down and rarely made eye contact throughout the trial but he looked up at this statement and I thought, ‘You are looking up because you know the significance of that’. I looked around the court but no one else had picked up on it. Despite the decades between the conversations, the link, to me, was clear and I wanted to stand up and shout, ‘Peter Tobin is Bible John!’”

During his research for the book, Wilson visited the sites of the Bible John murders and interviewed witnesses and former detectives. The murders stopped when Tobin left Glasgow. His travels around Britain, raping and possibly murdering other women, could explain why the killings came to a sudden halt in 1969 after three deaths in less than two years.

Wilson first became interested in Tobin when he was convicted of murdering Angelika. The evil handyman hid her body under the floorboards of St Patrick ’s Church in Anderston, Glasgow. Wilson said: “I was fascinated that a man in his sixties was capable of such a violent crime. I tracked down his first wife Margaret Mackintosh. Bible John was a sexual sadist and we have testimony from Margaret of Tobin’s sexual sadism. Jeannie gave a surname for John and she thought it was something like ‘Sempleson’ or ‘Templeton’. Tobin used the name John Semple. That is a striking piece of evidence that cannot be coincidental.”

The criminologist accepts there may never be definitive proof that Tobin is the infamous serial killer but he added: “I am as convinced as it’s able to be. As far as I am concerned the case is closed.”

Tobin, 63, will die in jail, having been convicted of murdering Scots schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton, Essex teenager Dinah and Polish student Angelika Kluk in Glasgow. He has since been linked with as many as 48 victims – and a special police operation has been set up to probe links between Tobin and a string of unsolved murders. We might never know the truth!

-article by Lynn Mcpherson rewritten and adapted by admin-

Nearly a quarter century has gone by since someone ran over Tina Stensaa, a 17 year old girl, in Weed on Valentine’s Day in 1986, leaving her mangled body on the rain-soaked asphalt of South Weed Boulevard for a passing motorist to find.

Siskiyou County investigators hope they may have finally found her killer. Siskiyou County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Susan Gravenkamp said a confession posted on a website points to Keith Hunter Jesperson, a 55-year-old convicted serial killer. He is serving four life sentences in Oregon for murdering eight women in six states. In January, he pleaded guilty to murdering a still-unidentified woman in 1992 in Riverside County. A judge sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison to be served concurrently along with his three other life sentences. Jesperson is known as “The Happy Face Killer” because he would send notes signed with a smiley face to newspapers, detailing his crimes.

The Stensaa case went cold for 24 years, until Weed detectives recently discovered the posting on a website devoted to serial killer news. The site reposted a copy of a 1998 question and answer interview with Jesperson. The interview has since been reposted on a number of similar websites devoted to serial killers. In the posting, Jesperson doesn’t name his victim, and the year he provides in the alleged confession is incorrect. But the description of how he killed his victim appears to match how Stensaa died.

Jesperson claimed to have met a woman at Silva’s Restaurant while he was waiting for his girlfriend, a worker at the now-closed Truck Village truck stop. His girlfriend had stood him up for a date. He claimed he met a woman who “wanted to party” at the restaurant, so he took her back to his big rig to have sex. They were interrupted by Jesperson’s girlfriend who knocked on the big rig’s door. “I turned to my new friend who now was wanting to be my new lover and pal and grabbed her by the throat and held her till she passed out,” Jesperson said. “Tying her up and gagging her, I taped the knots so they would stay tight.” He allegedly confesses to moving the truck to a new spot, pulling the woman out of the truck and placing her under the big rig’s tires, then driving over her.

The last time her family saw her alive was on February 13, 1986.

-article by Ryan Sabalow, rewritten and adapted by admin -

Antwan Maurice Pittman, 31, charged with murdering one of nine Rocky Mount women found dead in similar circumstances in recent years, is also a suspect in at least five of the other cases, including the deaths of two women whose remains were found in recent weeks.

Although no new charges against Antwan Pittman have been filed, investigators have turned up more evidence in a string of murders in and around Rocky Mount that date back to 2003, authorities said. Police are looking into possible links in the deaths of 10 people and two women reported missing.

Pittman, a registered sex offender, was arrested in September, and charged with first-degree murder in the death of Taraha Nicholson when his DNA was found on Nicholson’s body. He had a criminal history of soliciting prostitutes in East Rocky Mount and at different points in his life lived near each of the secluded areas where most of the victims — all with known histories of prostitution and illegal drug use — have been found. One woman’s body was found in a wooded area behind Pittman’s former residence in Scotland Neck. Five of the women were found along Seven Bridges Road, and at one point, Pittman lived nearby in the Battleboro community.

The 160-person team expanded its search to areas inside city limits, along Melton Drive and Pennsylvania Avenue, where the bodies of Elizabeth Smallwood and Travis Harrison were found. A fisherman and his son found Harrison’s body along the Tar River behind Tom Stith Park in 2006. Harrison, 24, was a known crossdresser whose background mirrored the nine female victims. So far, the bodies of Nicholson, Harrison, Jackie Thorpe, Jarniece Hargrove, Christine Boone, Ernestine Battle, Denise Williams, Elizabeth Smallwood, Roberta Williams and Melody Wiggins have been found in wooded areas northeast of Rocky Mount.

The suspect’s trial was expected to start on May 3, but both the prosecutor and defense team said they needed more time to review the evidence in the case. And with more evidence coming in from law enforcement officers, the trial could be delayed for months.

-articles by Mike Hixenbaugh and Eric Eckard rewritten and adapted by admin-