Power the Grid Dissolves Fallen Nation
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YOUR CAR COULD A NORTH CAROLINA HOW TO FIX A WILDLIFE REFUGE SLOWLY POWER THE GRID FALLEN NATION & PAY YOUR BILLS! DISSOLVES Nov./Dec. 2011 $5.99 US / $6.99 CANADA MILLER -MCCUNE .COM NOT FORGOTTEN SINCE THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT’S COLD CASE UNIT BEGAN OPERATIONS 10 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, DETECTIVES HAVE ARRESTED SEVEN SERIAL KILLERS, AND DOZENS OF OTHERS, WHO THOUGHT they had—literally—goTTEN AWAY WITH MURDER. HOW THE LONG, SLOW CONFLUENCE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, PAIRED WITH THE GRIT AND DETERMINATION OF A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE, GOT COLD KILLERS OFF THE STREETS. BY MATTHEW MC GOUGH Miller-McCune.com NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011 55 NOT FORGOTTEN from a discarded piece of pizza—and Franklin’s genetic profile was compared to the Grim Sleeper’s: they matched. In arresting Franklin, the LAPD wrote a new page in the history of DNA foren- 1. sics: never before in American history had an active familial search been used THE GRIM to solve a homicide. California is one of SLEEPER only four states where familial searching Lonnie Franklin Jr., arrested last year, is legal, but the LAPD’s success in the is suspected of Grim Sleeper investigation has become a murdering at least 10 women prime argument for expanding its use. in Los Angeles. Today, a quarter-century after DNA analysis was used in a murder investiga- tion for the first time, the LAPD has be- come renowned worldwide for its skill in using DNA to solve homicides. It wasn’t always this way. Ten years ago this fall, the LAPD’s His list of victims could read like a yearbook: Cold Case Homicide Unit was born. Debra Jackson, 1985; Henrietta Wright, 1986; Barbara Ware, Bernita When it opened its doors, the brand-new Sparks, and Mary Lowe, 1987; Alicia Alexander and Enietra Washington, unit had seven detectives, and a stagger- 1988. Then, after a break of more than a dozen years—the “sleeper” peri- ing caseload: more than 9,000 unsolved od that inspired his nickname—Valerie McCorvey, 2003. Four years after murders committed in Los Angeles since that—Jenica Peters, 2007. 1960. The officer in charge of the new All of the victims were black women. They were as young as 18 and unit was a veteran LAPD homicide de- as old as 36 when he ended their lives. Most were sexually assaulted and tective named David Lambkin. Lambkin then shot, their bodies left in alleys or trash bins along a stretch of Western retired in 2007. He and his wife, Jane, a Avenue in South Los Angeles. It is a poor, predominately black neighbor- former LAPD civilian employee, live in OS ANGELES TIMES/MCT ANGELES OS L hood hemmed in on all sides by freeways. Prostitution and drug activity are a small town on the Olympic Peninsula, : IC common. Murders committed there typically receive little media attention. northwest of Seattle. Violent crime of H GRAP The South L.A. cases did not become a priority for the LAPD until 2007, the type Lambkin routinely handled as , when DNA analysis revealed the women had a common killer—one who a detective is nearly nonexistent there. LAPD had gone undetected for at least 22 years and was presumably still active. The living room of the Lambkins’ mod- ern home looks out on a slate-colored bay. In concert with an overcast sky, the A task force of six detectives was assembled to hunt for the suspect, who the media view from the picture windows appears dubbed “The Grim Sleeper.” Countless leads were pursued but, frustratingly, none a study in grays. Los Angeles feels very panned out. Detectives hoped his DNA profile might already be on record for some far away. other offense, but it wasn’t. The investigation seemed to have reached a dead end— Asked to recount the first days of the save for a new and controversial data-mining technique called “familial searching.” cold case unit, Lambkin speaks with the In violent cases when conventional DNA searches fail to produce a match, and frankness of someone who’s proud of his all other investigative leads have proved fruitless, there is a last-ditch option: search- association with the LAPD, an institution ing the database for near-matches who are likely to be close relatives of the suspect. he served for nearly three decades but no In the Grim Sleeper case, the familial search turned up the DNA profile of a felon longer feels beholden to—if he ever did. who shared multiple genetic markers. The man was too young to have committed the He does not whitewash the monumental earliest murders, but detectives quickly honed in on his father, a resident of South task faced by the new unit when it went Los Angeles named Lonnie Franklin Jr. A surreptitious DNA sample was collected— operational. COURTESY SCOTT/GETTY FRANKLIN: MARK SPREAD: IMAGES, PREVIOUS 56 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011 Miller-McCune.com Not only was each team of detectives responsible for more than 3,000 cold cases, but nothing had been al- located in the LAPD’s budget for basic investigative ne- cessities—like cars and computers that actually worked. “We weren’t given any fleet cars, only old cars that had been taken out of service because they were deemed not usable anymore,” Lambkin recalls. Unlike fresh homicides, where the majority of sus- pects and witnesses are typically still in the city, with cold cases it is common for people to have moved far from Los Angeles, and for detectives to have to go greater distances to interview them. And Lambkin had to call in favors to be able to scrounge up one comput- er for every two people. The new unit was crammed into a 250-square-foot former utility closet with no windows and a broken ventilation system. All the tele- phone jacks were along one wall, so phone handsets were constantly being passed across the room. A Los Angeles Times reporter who came in to write a feature on the new unit told Lambkin the office was the worst he’d ever seen. But Lambkin felt there was no more dignified work than trying to solve murders that society seemed to have forgotten. For victims’ families, he says, “this stuff never goes away. After awhile, they get tired of dealing with the department, and they quit calling. So there’s a huge moral reason to be looking back at them, now that we have these new tools.” The new tools were the revolutionary DNA, ballistics, and fingerprint data- bases that had come online in the 1990s. Lambkin had avidly followed their evolution. He knew these databases were rapidly improving detectives’ ability to identify people who very likely believed that they’d got- ten away with murder. In countless cases, Lambkin had seen firsthand how technology had made it possible to divine new leads from old crime-scene evidence. Given the number of long-unsolved murders on the LAPD’s rolls, and how much unanalyzed evidence the department was sitting on, Lambkin had no doubt that a cold case unit would be successful. For almost a decade, he’d lobbied for the LAPD to create one. As of Nov. 19, 2001, for the first time in its history, the LAPD had a team of detectives focused exclusively on solving cold case homicides. The unit would be run on a shoestring, but Lambkin had enough years on the force, and had weathered enough LAPD budget crises, to know how to wring results from paltry resources. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011 57 NOT FORGOTTEN 2. HEAVY LOAD David Lambkin and some of the thousands of cold case files at the LAPD. David Lambkin was an unlikely candidate to become an LAPD homicide detective. During high school, in Wisconsin, he got around town on a Harley- Davidson, and his classmates called him a “long hair.” He and his friends, he told me, were “the guys that made a brief appearance at prom without dates, wearing leather pants and jackets, just to hang out and make people uncomfortable.” In 1975, after graduating from college with a double major in theater and political science, he decided to pursue a career in fashion photography. He was accepted to the Art Center College of Design, a prestigious school in Pasadena, so he headed west. In Southern California, he moved in with his sister and brother-in-law, both of whom worked for the Los Angeles Police Department. Quickly, Lambkin realized how hard it would be to make it as a fashion photog- In 1981, Lambkin passed the LAPD rapher. “When it went from being a hobby to starting to become a career, I learned detective exam. But to his dismay, he to hate it,” he says. He dropped out of art school and signed up for criminal-justice was selected for an administrative detec- classes at a local college. One of his instructors was a retired FBI agent named tive position at the Police Commission. Robert H. Morneau Jr., a pioneer in sexual-assault investigations. Lambkin was So he respectfully requested an investi- riveted by the psychological aspects of the work. “Most of those guys tend to be se- gative position. Finally, he was granted rial offenders. You don’t get to work a lot of serial cases in other disciplines, not ones a transfer to his division of choice: that are that interesting,” he says. “Sexual offenders are really a unique breed.” Hollywood. In six more months, he was Lambkin was sworn in as an LAPD officer in February 1978. While work- working with the Sex Crimes Unit.