By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, January 2011
In early January 2011, the LAPD announced it had opened four new missing-persons inquiries after releasing 180 photos found in the possession of suspected serial killer Lonnie Franklin Jr. — the “Grim Sleeper” defendant. The photos had been published in December 2010 on the LA Times website; in the weeks that followed, the LAPD received thousands of tips, identified 53 of the women in the photos, and tied at least one — Janecia Peters — to the underlying murder case. The original FishbowlLA framing tracked the photo-release-to-tip-mobilization-to-new-cases mechanism the LAPD-LA Times collaboration had produced.
Then
The Grim Sleeper case had been one of LA’s most-cited unsolved serial-killer investigations across the late 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Franklin had been arrested in July 2010 after a familial-DNA database hit, ending a serial-murder cycle that had been operating in South LA across decades. The December 2010 photo release was structurally an investigative-public-information mobilization — the LAPD was using the LA Times’s online reach to surface unaccounted-for victims.
The 53 identifications and four new missing-persons cases were a substantial response. Janecia Peters had been confirmed as one of Franklin’s murder victims; the other identifications and the four new missing-persons cases produced a substantially expanded picture of the broader victim pool. The Crimestoppers tip line (800-222-8477) and the LAPD’s anonymous-tip text line had been the primary public-engagement infrastructure.
Matthew Fleischer’s FBLA framing treated the case with appropriate weight — recognizing that the photo release was an unusual move that had produced real investigative progress, while also acknowledging that the four new missing-persons cases were sobering rather than triumphant. The piece linked back to the LA Times’s original photo gallery and to the Daily Beast’s reporting on the case.
Now
Lonnie Franklin Jr. was tried in 2016 and convicted of ten counts of first-degree murder for killings committed between 1985 and 2007. He was sentenced to death; he died on death row at San Quentin in March 2020, age 67, of natural causes. The “Grim Sleeper” name had referenced the apparent 13-year gap in the killings between the late 1980s and the early 2000s.
The 180-photo trove never fully resolved as an investigative artifact. Multiple women in the photos were never definitively identified; the broader question of whether Franklin’s victim count was substantially higher than the ten confirmed counts has remained one of the LA cold-case community’s most-discussed open questions. Documentary work — including the 2014 HBO film Tales of the Grim Sleeper by Nick Broomfield — substantially expanded the public record of the case across the years that followed.
The LAPD’s broader use of public-photo-release-to-mobilize-tips investigative strategies has continued across the years since, though the institutional ethics of releasing photos of unidentified women has been substantially revisited in subsequent law-enforcement-and-victim-advocacy discussions.
The 2011 piece reads now as one of the small documented moments when the post-arrest investigative phase of the Grim Sleeper case was producing the most active public-engagement output. The four new missing-persons cases mentioned in the original piece were part of the larger case-file that has continued to generate cold-case work in the years since — including across the multiple post-2016-conviction documentaries that have re-examined the broader Franklin victim pool.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.