Why Didn’t the LAPD Tell Anyone About the Grim Sleeper for 25 Years?
By 1988, the LAPD had the ballistics. They had the pattern. Same .25 caliber weapon. Same ten-block radius in South LA. Same profile of women being killed. They knew a serial killer was responsible. They told nobody.
Not the public. Not the families. Not Enietra Washington — the only woman who survived an encounter with Lonnie Franklin Jr. and could have identified him. For twenty-five years, multiple LAPD chiefs kept the Grim Sleeper a secret while Franklin continued killing. The families didn’t learn their daughters were connected until journalists at LA Weekly broke the story in 2007.
Franklin was eventually caught through familial DNA in 2010. At his home: over a thousand photographs of women. Among them, the Polaroid he took of Enietra, bleeding and unconscious, twenty-two years earlier. The finale of Surviving Serial Killers on History’s Hidden Killers — the story of a system that failed because the women being killed were invisible to the people paid to protect them.
Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod
This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.
#GrimSleeper #EnietraWashington #LonnieFranklin #SurvivingSerialKillers #HistorysHiddenKillers #TrueCrime #LAPD #SouthLA #TrueCrimePodcast #JusticeServed
