Garbo guilty of 'Grim Sleeper' murders

A former rubbish collector in Los Angeles has been convicted of 10 "Grim Sleeper" serial killings that spanned two decades and targeted vulnerable young black women in the inner city.

Lonnie Franklin Jr. showed no emotion as a clerk read the 10 murder verdicts in Los Angeles County Superior Court after a two-month trial in the potential death penalty case.

Franklin was also found guilty of one count of attempted murder.

The killings from 1985 to 2007 were dubbed the work of the "Grim Sleeper" because of an apparent 14-year gap after one woman survived a gunshot to the chest in 1988.

The crimes went unsolved for decades and community members complained that police ignored the cases because the victims were black, poor and some were prostitutes and drug users.

Much of the violence unfolded during the nation's crack cocaine epidemic when at least two other serial killers prowled the part of the city then known as South Central.

The 10 victims, including a 15-year-old girl, were fatally shot or strangled and dumped in alleys and garbage bins. Most had traces of cocaine in their systems.

Franklin, 63, a one-time rubbish collector in the area and a garage attendant for the LA Police Department, had been hiding in plain sight, said Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman.

Police eventually connected Franklin to the crimes after a task force was assigned to revisit the case that dozens of officers failed to solve in the 1980s.

The DNA of Franklin's son, collected after a felony arrest, had similarities to genetic material left on the bodies of many of the victims.

An officer posing as a busboy later retrieved pizza crusts and napkins with Franklin's DNA while he was celebrating at a birthday party.

It proved a match with material found on the breasts and clothing of many of the women and on the zip tie of a rubbish bag that held the curled-up body of the final victim, Janecia Peters. She was found on January 1, 2007, by someone who was rifling through a rubbish bin and noticed her red fingernails through a hole in the bag.

Silverman described the victims as sisters, daughters and mothers who suffered frailties but had hopes and dreams.

She projected photos of the 10 women from happier days, many smiling from headshots that captured their youth and the hairstyles of the times. The images were in stark contrast to gory crime scene and autopsy photos also displayed of half-naked bodies sprawled among garbage - images that made family members wince, weep and recoil in the gallery.

During his closing argument, defence lawyer Seymour Amster claimed a "mystery man with a mystery gun and mystery DNA" was responsible for all the killings.