ON THE last day of 2007, Janecia Peters, 25, excitedly phoned home to say she had a new place to stay in South Los Angeles. She told her worried mother, Laverne, that despite her troubled times, at last she'd found her own little safe house.
The next day, a homeless man wandering down a back alley found her body wrapped only in a black plastic bag next to a discarded Christmas tree.
Miss Peters's death – one of the shootings that occur on an almost daily basis in this working-class ar
ea of the city – was hardly reported by a media more fascinated with the Hollywood stars living 20 miles to the north.
But that changed this week, when, in response to investigations by a weekly magazine and Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) forensic teams, the city council announced a $500,000 (about £280,000) reward for information leading to the conviction of the man believed to be the most prolific serial killer west of the Mississippi.
Miss Peters was the latest victim linked via DNA evidence to the killer known as the "Grim Sleeper", so named because he was dormant for 13 years before re-emerging to kill again.
Since 1985 there have been 11 victims. They are all black, mainly poor, often drug addicts or prostitutes. All were killed with the same .25 calibre gun; many were sexually assaulted.
Among the dead was Bernita Sparks, 25, who told her mother in April 1987 she was going to the shop for cigarettes. Her body was found the next day in a rubbish bin; she had been shot in the chest, strangled and beaten.
In October 1987, Mary Lowe, 26, told her mother she was going to a Halloween party. Her body was found fatally shot in an alley near a hangout spot for prostitutes.
Another victim, Lachrica Jefferson, 22, was found in January 1988 in an alley with a napkin placed over her face, on which was scrawled one word: Aids.
Then, just before the killer was to drop from sight for more than a decade, a woman was picked up, raped and shot in November 1988. She survived to describe her attacker as a young black man with short hair who drove an orange Ford Pinto.
According to LA Weekly newspaper, she persuaded her would-be killer to let her live. Unidentified out of concerns for her safety, she is the Grim Sleeper's only known eyewitness.
But then the case went cold. Los Angeles' inner ghettos of Paramount, Watts and Compton disintegrated into gang and crack cocaine wars;
police departments were overrun and the Grim Sleeper slayings were lost among a backlog of murder and violent crime records.
The killer came out of hiding for two more murders in 2002 and 2003, of a 14-year-old prostitute and a 35-year-old woman.
In 2004, bolstered by advances in forensic medicine and a departmental initiative to re-examine cold cases in the light of advances in DNA technology, an LAPD team made a breakthrough, using samples of the killer's saliva to link the two more recent murders to the 1980s killings.
Denis Crevins, a spokesman for the LAPD, said earlier this week: "This individual committed several homicides from 1985 through 1988, and then there was a 13-year hiatus. What accounted for that gap we still don't know."
Detectives are now speculating that the killer could have been serving prison terms for perhaps unrelated offences during the 13-year gap.
The LAPD is convinced the answer could lie in a familial match to DNA, and are checking records of DNA taken from more than one million criminals in state archives.
Advocates of privacy rights are up in arms, but the police are under pressure to find the killer fast and say that they have no choice as all other leads have been exhausted.
Laurie Levenson, a professor of criminal law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former prosecutor, said yesterday: "Killers come out of the limelight when they need attention; sometimes they feed off the attention. They may have been out of circulation because they were in custody or a safe environment, or on medication.
"DNA has changed the business of cold cases … (but sometimes police] will apprehend someone on a murder and the cold case is never solved.
"There is a fascination with killers. It's like a movie. The public's mind gravitates toward evil. They love the whodunnit. And unfortunately, they now love blood and gore."
Two decades of murder and only one eyewitnessAUGUST 1985: Debra Jackson, 29, a cocktail waitress, found dead in an alley. She had been shot three times.
• AUGUST 1986: the body of Henrietta Wright, 35, was found gagged and shot. Two days later, the body of Thomas Steele, 36, the only known male victim, was found shot in the head.
• JANUARY 1987: Barbara Ware, 23, was found dead in an alley, shot once in the chest.
• APRIL 1987: Bernita Sparks found fatally shot in the chest, strangled and beaten.
• OCTOBER 1987: Mary Lowe, 26, found dead in an alley.
• JANUARY 1988: Lachrica Jefferson, 22, died from two gunshot wounds to the chest.
• SEPTEMBER 1988: Alicia "Monique" Alexander, 18, found fatally shot in an alley.
• NOVEMBER 1988: The only known surviving eyewitness told of being raped and shot, and of an orange Ford Pinto driven by a young black man. Bullets from her body matched those in other victims.
• FEBRUARY 1989: Sheriff's deputy and narcotics detective accused of murdering three prostitutes, but later cleared.
• MARCH 2002: Body of Princess Berthomieux, 14, is found in an alley. She had been shot, strangled and beaten.
• JULY 2003: Valerie McCorvey, 35, found fatally shot and strangled. DNA match is established through saliva on previous victims.
• JANUARY 2007: Janecia Peters, 25, found dead. The Task Force is assembled.
• SEPTEMBER 2008: A £220,000 reward offered for information leading to the arrest and capture of the killer and/or accomplice(s).
• SEPTEMBER 2008: LA officials report the city's lowest murder rate in 40 years.
The full article contains 1021 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
