IAPE Evidence Blog

LA Weekly Blogs, blogs.laweekly.com
BYLINE: Simone Wil­son
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San Fran­cisco, CA

‘Grim Sleeper’ Sus­pect Lon­nie Franklin Jr. Wouldn’t Have Been Caught With­out It

Lon­nie Franklin Jr. was just a sketch, before DNA test­ing made him a suspect.

We totally get the Fourth Amend­ment cru­sade against test­ing the DNA of any and every per­son arrested on felony charges:

It’s inva­sive, pre­emp­tive and Big Brother-esque.

But even if only 50 per­cent of said arrestees are con­victed of their charges — a 2009 fig­ure cited by Brown-appointed Pre­sid­ing Jus­tice J. Anthony Kline before declar­ing the tests uncon­sti­tu­tional last week in state appel­late court — a close-to-home accused ser­ial killer makes us won­der. Might a cou­ple big fish be worth the discomfort/righteousness of the exonerated?

Includ­ing one of the biggest, bad­dest fish ever to (allegedly) rape and pil­lage Los Angeles:

Lon­nie Franklin Jr., sus­pected of killing at least 10 black pros­ti­tutes in South L.A. And just yes­ter­day, though Franklin’s has pleaded “not guilty” to all charges so far, LAPD inves­ti­ga­tors announced they’ve linked 230 more miss­ing per­sons to the hor­rific spree.

Lon­nie Franklin Jr.

In August 2008, before Franklin was arrested, Chris­tine Pelisek, for­mer LA Weekly crime­hunter, named the ruth­less, face­less ser­ial killer “The Grim Sleeper” after stum­bling across a back room filled with vic­tim pho­tos and clues at the LAPD’s homi­cide headquarters.

Today, the Wall Street Jour­nal points to ser­ial killers Den­nis Rader and Gary Leon Ridg­wayne, both caught on pre-conviction DNA tests, as prime liv­ing argu­ments to counter the personal-privacy diehards.

But Franklin’s cap­ture might make an even stronger case:

The sci­ence of test­ing for famil­ial DNA was hotly pur­sued by LAPD in 2008 when police real­ized that the Grim Sleeper sociopath, who had been slaugh­ter­ing peo­ple since 1985, had kept his nose clean and stayed out of jail. …

No doubt, work­ing with police every day as an LAPD mechanic, he knew every trick for avoid­ing arrest. He knew cop lingo and police habits.

But then, his son screwed up and appar­ently got nabbed by cops. His son got a mouth swab. His son’s DNA test lit up like a Christ­mas tree:

His son’s DNA, police tell LA Weekly, matched in so many ways that LAPD knew they’d found a close rel­a­tive of Grim Sleeper, the most elu­sive ser­ial killer to ever haunt the West­ern United States.

Felony tri­als are long and hard to prove. For guys as system-savvy as Franklin, avoid­ing jail time is only a mat­ter of delays and pre­cau­tions and slip­pery legal tac­tics. Swab­bing for DNA at the time of arrest could pro­vide access to the smartest — and there­fore, per­haps, most dan­ger­ous — of criminals.

The (very legit­i­mate) fear at the heart of the ACLU fight against arrestee DNA test­ing is that the entire sam­ple is kept in an FBI data­base, instead of just used by local police for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, like a famil­ial fingerprint.

We’re the first to raise an eye­brow at any­thing that plays into the feds’ round­about drive to obtain full bio­met­ric pro­files of every­one who so much as talks to police. See: “FBI Doc­u­ments Reveal ICE’s ‘Secure Com­mu­ni­ties’ Pro­gram Was Man­dated to Fur­ther FBI’s Own Creepy Bio­met­ric Database.”

From a Jour­nal print story: “Some fear that gene tech­nolo­gies will be devel­oped down the road to unearth even more pri­vate infor­ma­tion, like whether some­one has a predilec­tion for violence.”

Indeed: That would suck. Why don’t sci­en­tists just iden­tify the serial-killer gene already, so we can quar­an­tine these Franklin types before they raise the first blade, “Minor­ity Report” style?

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

NEWS CHANNEL 7, wjhg.com
BYLINE: Mered­ith Ter­Haar, meredith.terhaar@wjhg.com
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Panama City, FL

Panama City — Twenty-two years after his exe­cu­tion, the FBI now has a DNA pro­file for ser­ial killer Ted Bundy. A lab tech­ni­cian found a 33-year-old vial of Bundy’s blood last month in an evi­dence locker. Experts were able to extract his DNA, which will now be used to see if he was involved in any unsolved murders.

Ted Bundy’s killing spree lasted from 1974 to 1978. Most of the killings hap­pened in 6 west­ern states. But the final 3 hap­pened in Florida. Two Tal­la­has­see co-eds at an FSU soror­ity house, and a 12-year-old Lake City girl. Bundy was arrested in Pensacola.

Shortly after his arrest Bundy agreed to talk to a group of local inves­ti­ga­tors, includ­ing the Bay County Sheriff’s Office Chief of Inves­ti­ga­tions, Frank McK­ei­then, who was inter­ested to see if he’d com­mit­ted any undis­cov­ered killings.

But when the inves­ti­ga­tors arrived, Bundy refused to see them. “Usu­ally when you do an inter­view like that it’s to deter­mine whether there may be a body some­where that we don’t know about. I think Julie Snell was the clos­est homi­cide case and that actu­ally hap­pened in 1979 after he was in cus­tody,” said McKeithen.

Bundy was even­tu­ally tried and con­victed in Orlando, and exe­cuted in Starke in 1989. Before he died, Bundy con­fessed to 30 mur­ders, but inves­ti­ga­tors believe he may have killed many more.

McK­ei­then did inter­view 2 other ser­ial killers with noto­ri­ous records; Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole. The only local tie was Lucas’ con­fes­sion to the 1980 mur­der of John McDaniel, father of for­mer Jack­son County Sher­iff Johnny McDaniel. “After inter­view­ing Otis Toole, I am not con­vinced that he is linked to he any mur­ders here in Bay County.”

But the pair con­fessed to far more mur­ders than they actu­ally com­mit­ted. “Unfor­tu­nately the more they con­fessed the more they got out of jail, got to ride around, got treated dif­fer­ently. So that was a tragedy that hap­pened, they killed peo­ple they just didn’t kill as many as they con­fessed to,” said McKeithen.

McK­ei­then is hop­ing the new Bundy DNA evi­dence will help close other cases, long thought to be impos­si­ble to solve. “Hope­fully some­one some­where has evi­dence from the 70’s that they are able to still process for DNA.”

The FBI will upload Bundy’s DNA pro­file to its national data­base Fri­day. Agents will release any matches on Monday.

Jack­son County extra­dited Henry Lee Lucas to Mar­i­anna to stand trial for John McDaniel’s mur­der, but decided against a trial because he was already on death row in Texas. Texas exe­cuted Lucas 10 years ago this month. Toole was exe­cuted in Texas in 1996.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

The Billings Gazette, billingsgazette.com
BYLINE: JESSIE MCQUILLAN and DAN WEINBERG The Billings Gazette
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Billings, MT

The Mon­tana House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives has before it a bill that, if enacted, will mea­sur­ably improve our jus­tice sys­tem. Sen­ate Bill 58, co-sponsored by Sen. Lynda Moss, D-Billings, and Sen. Jim Shock­ley, R-Victor, will have county law enforce­ment pre­serve DNA sam­ples on evi­dence found in cer­tain seri­ous, vio­lent crimes. The bill has already passed the Mon­tana Senate.

The Mon­tana Asso­ci­a­tion of Coun­ties doesn’t want this bill to pass. Its lob­by­ists claim the expense of stor­ing small bits of DNA evi­dence is too expen­sive for the coun­ties to take on. They also claim that facil­i­ties that store evi­dence are already inad­e­quate. There are sto­ries of mold grow­ing in one evi­dence room and poor doc­u­men­ta­tion in others.

MACO’s claims of poor evi­dence stor­age are true. Some of Montana’s coun­ties need to do a bet­ter job of main­tain­ing evi­dence. The integrity of our jus­tice sys­tem depends on it. Cases are deter­mined by the qual­ity of evi­dence. Their claims are not true that stor­ing small bits of DNA evi­dence would be unpre­dictably and unnec­es­sar­ily expensive.

If you were to talk with MACO rep­re­sen­ta­tives or lis­ten to the leg­isla­tive hear­ings, you would envi­sion entire auto­mo­biles and sofas being stored in enor­mous ware­houses. These require­ments are false. SB58 requires only that small sam­ples of DNA be pre­served, and offers clear ways for coun­ties to dis­pose of unnec­es­sary evidence.

Since DNA was first used in foren­sic sci­ence, hun­dreds of peo­ple nation­wide have been exon­er­ated for crimes they did not com­mit. DNA tells a story with 100 per­cent accu­racy. Match­ing bio­log­i­cal mate­r­ial, assum­ing the evi­dence is main­tained, is accu­rate and true. The other value of DNA is that it has shown us how fal­li­ble the other meth­ods of foren­sic sci­ence have been. The true value of eye­wit­ness iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, hair analy­sis, bal­lis­tics analy­sis and coerced con­fes­sions all dimin­ish com­pared to DNA.

Texan Craig Watkins is the Dal­las County Dis­trict Attor­ney. When he took office sev­eral years ago, he was asked to sign a piece of paper that would have cleaned up the county’s evi­dence room and destroyed sam­ples of DNA. Mr. Watkins chose not to sign that paper. Since that day, over 40 men and women, con­victed in Dal­las and housed in Texas jails and pris­ons, have been exon­er­ated using those sam­ples of DNA. These were all inno­cent peo­ple, wrong­fully con­victed and imprisoned.

If jus­tice is not your chief con­cern but safety is, then con­sider this: In nearly 40 per­cent of the cases where some­one has been exon­er­ated of a crime using DNA, law enforce­ment went on to find the real per­pe­tra­tor using that same sam­ple of DNA. When we prop­erly store and use DNA evi­dence, we get real crim­i­nals off the street.

If jus­tice is not your chief con­cern but eco­nom­ics is, how do you rec­on­cile the cost of stor­ing small sam­ples of DNA with the cost of impris­on­ing inno­cent peo­ple (more than $34,000 per inmate per year)? MACO com­plains that the state of Mon­tana should store DNA, not the coun­ties. Presently, the state crime lab does main­tain some stor­age. The coun­ties need to do their part.

What is the value of free­dom for Mon­tanans who have com­mit­ted no crime? What is the value of jus­tice? This is our Dal­las moment.

Jessie McQuil­lan of Mis­soula is exec­u­tive direc­tor for Mon­tana Inno­cence Project. Dan Wein­berg is the organization’s founder and president.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org