Why Didn't the LAPD Tell Anyone About the Grim Sleeper for 25 Years?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is History's Hidden Killers. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
In 2010, LAPD detectives knocked on Enrieta Washington's door and showed her a Polaroid photograph. It was a picture of a young black woman, unconscious, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest, slumped in the passenger seat of an orange Ford Pinto. The woman in the photograph was Enrieta.
She was 27 when it was taken. The man who shot her had snapped that Polaroid as a trophy in 1988 and put it in his garage. It sat there for 22 years, next to more than a thousand other photographs of women, many of them appearing unconscious or dead. The picture existed since 1988 The investigation in any real sense didn't.
This is the final episode of Surviving Serial Killers, part of our History's Hidden Killers Weekly Series. And the thread that runs through every story in this series lands hardest right here. Every one of these survivors saved themselves because nobody else was going to do it. But Enrieta Washington's case goes further than that. She survived as serial killer, and then the system that was supposed to catch him spent 25 years not caring enough to try. Because the woman, or the women I should say he was killing, didn't look like the women whose deaths made the front page. And you know what I'm talking about.
November 19th, 1988, South Los Angeles, Enrieta Washington, 27, mother of two, walking to her friend Linda's house before a party. She noticed an Orange Ford Pinto with white racing stripes on the street. Stopped to admire it. The driver noticed her. He called out. She ignored him. He called out again, and Enrieta told him, if he wanted to talk, he had to come to where she was. He pulled up. Black man, early thirties, polo shirt, khakis, non-threatening, offered a ride to Linda's house. She declined. Then he threw a line at her that she said changed her mind. That's what's wrong with you, black women. People can't be nice to you. That's the quote.
She felt sorry for him.
He shamed her and she got in the car.
Lonnie Franklin Jr, born and raised in South LA. Army stationed in Germany, convicted in 1975, alongside two other soldiers for attacking a 17-year-old girl overseas. Dishonorable discharge, served less than a year. Back in LA, he worked as a trash collector for the city. At one point, he was employed as a mechanic for the LAPD. Let that one register, the man who would later kill at least 10 women in South LA once fixed cars for the police department that couldn't be bothered to catch him. He married a woman named Sylvia. They had two children. He was a neighbor, a colleague, a regular guy on the block, respectable by every visible measure. He had already begun one of the longest killing sprees in Los Angeles history. First confirmed kill, Deborah Jackson, 29 August 10th, 1985 By the night he picked up Enrieta, at least seven women were dead. Every one of them young, every one of them black, every one of them living in South LA.
When she was in the Pinto, the conversation was easy. Pleasant even, nothing alarming. Then Franklin said he needed to stop at his uncle's house for money. He went inside when he came back. He was a different person. He was agitated, angry. He accused Enrieta of disrespecting him, called her by another woman's name. Confused, she turned to face him. He shot her in the chest with a 25 caliber handgun at point blank range. No warning.
Enrieta never heard the gunshot. Silence. She reached for the door. I'll shoot you again. She pled, if I do die, I'm gonna ask the Lord, let me haunt you the rest of your life.
She told him she had kids. She faded in and out as Franklin drove through South LA, passed out, woke up in the darkness. He was on top of her. She fought two weeks, screamed, passed out again, woke to flashlight light. He was taking Polaroid photos of her. She felt the door handled, found it, opened it. While the car was moving, Franklin pushed her out. She hit the asphalt, rolled to the curb.
And saw the blood for the first time.
Bleeding from her chest, she dragged herself along the sidewalk until she recognized the street light, made it to Linda's house. Nobody home. Linda had already left for the party.
And Irina collapsed on the porch and waited. Linda found her later and called an ambulance. Harbor UCLA Medical Center. The bullet had collapsed her lung, but her ribs and sternum deflected it away from her organs. Three weeks in the hospital recovering from a wound that should have killed her. She learned what Franklin had done to her while she was unconscious. Now here's how the story stops being about one woman's survival and becomes an indictment of an entire institution. LAPD detectives visited an Irina in the hospital. She gave a complete statement despite the pain she was in, worked with a sketch artist, and the detective suggested she was someone who worked the streets.