http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks-20101221,0,6086520.column
A brutal but vital approach
Photos of possible 'Grim Sleeper' victims can provide answers
There were a million other things I should have been doing on the computer last Thursday night working on my weekend column, wrapping up my online holiday shopping....
But instead, I sat clicking one by one through 180 photos of women linked to a man accused of being a serial killer.
I studied the smiles, the eyes, the state of dress, or undress, of women whose images were found by police among the effects of the South Los Angeles man charged with 10 murders blamed on the " Grim Sleeper."
The Los Angeles Police Department wants to know the identity and fate of the women and to account for a 14-year gap in the string of serial killings. The Times posted the gallery online and published it on the front page after it was publicly released by the LAPD.
I can't say what bothered me most as I went from photo to photo images like the first, a tight-lipped close-up of what appears to be a dead woman, or the last, a young lady with a radiant smile and a missing front tooth.
It would be putting it mildly to say the photo tour unsettled me. It was horribly, chillingly mesmerizing. And I was far from the only one both fascinated and troubled by the images.
The Times' online gallery has drawn more than 18 million page views from more than 300,000 individuals a level of interest that shocked many in the newsroom. The number of clicks beat the single-day record for latimes.com, set the day Michael Jackson died. These couldn't all be people looking for missing family members and friends. I wasn't.
From the viewer comments it's clear the photos drew plenty of amateur sleuths, analyzing tinfoil-covered windows and tattoos. We heard from the curious and the concerned, the voyeuristic and the judgmental, the prayerful and the perverted.
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