This is a fascinating case. I'm originally from the LA area and I've never heard of it. It's incredible how many of these types of cases, serial killer of prostitutes, goes on and on and on and many people just never know. There's several of these same scenarios of unsolved cases across the nation. Too sad..............NOBODY deserves to die like this.
Thanks for contacting the PD
cleo612. That was my thought as well, that it was a 'case #.' I saw it was connected to one particular case and I went to see when it was and got side-tracked reading other websites, etc about this case. By the time I got back, you'd already handled it. Good job!
http://www.laweekly.com/2009-03-12/news/grim-sleeper-39-s-sole-survivor/1
Grim Sleeper's Sole Survivor
http://lapdblog.typepad.com/lapd_bl...ble-for-12-victims-between-1985-and-2007.html
Serial Murder Case Update Grim Sleeper Responsible for 12 Victims between 1985 and 2007
The first link I put up there, the 'sole survivor' has lots of good information. IMHO, IF I were investigating this case, I'd look very carefully at everything she said. Because she's alive to tell her story, I believe she has a couple of IMPORTANT clues.
1. He referred to her by a 'local prostitutes name.' They really, really need to check out that person, the local prostitutes, friends, family, associates,........IF they can find them after all these years.
"But now, she says, he was entirely different. He drove off, started to say something, turned a corner — then went quiet. “He asked me, ‘Why did you dog me out?’” she recalls. She had no idea what he was talking about. He called her by the name of a well-known local prostitute who walked the streets around Normandie Avenue and looked like Margette, except the streetwalker wore an auburn wig while Margette’s black hair was cropped short like a boy’s.
Margette remembers thinking that his weird use of the streetwalker’s nickname was an odd coincidence, because a few days earlier somebody else mistook her for the auburn-wigged woman. But Margette, a tough young woman who’d been involved in a few scraps, wasn’t scared. She was much bigger-boned than her thin, spindly-looking companion, and she was irritated by his hostile tone — something she heard often from the malingering drug dealers and gangsters in her area.
“Who do you think you are talking to?” she responded, showing him some attitude. He suddenly pulled a small handgun out of a pocket on the driver’s side of the Pinto, and shot her in the chest as he drove along the residential streets."
2. He also took her too a residence and she waited outside in the car. That's actually what led up to the actual shooting. They need to find out who lived there then and their friends, family, and associates. Maybe the guy used to live there? or his family? He said it was his uncles?
He merely needed to make a quick stop at his uncle’s house to pick up some money, or so he said.
They wound through residential roads in his sporty car, ending up on a street whose name she did not take note of. The polite stranger parked outside a mustard-colored house partly obscured by hedges, got out, walked up to the house, briefly talked to someone inside, and returned about 10 minutes later.
3. His car was very distinct. SOMEONE MUST have known him when he had this car. SOMEONE MAY HAVE done WORK on this car. They need to air this part of the story on AMW. Of course, they may have already and I just didn't see it.
She was passing D & S Market in South L.A. when she noticed an orange Ford Pinto with a white racing stripe on the hood. She remembers the parked car because “it looked like a Hot Wheels car,” she says, pointing to the run-down market on West 91st Street and Normandie Avenue where the car sat that day.
From inside, the driver, a black man in his early 30s, asked her if she wanted a ride. He looked neat. Tidy. Kind of geeky. He wore a black polo shirt tucked into khaki trousers. She declined the offer. He kept asking her. She refused again, thinking, “I like chocolate milk, but he wasn’t my type.”
“He told me, ‘That is what is wrong with you black women. You think you are all that,” she says. The two traded friendly barbs back and forth. But his comment, which she took as a playful diss, prompted her to change her mind. Just 30, she enjoyed hitchhiking in those days, and accepted his offer of a ride for a few blocks to her friend’s house. Despite the drug violence raging in neighborhoods around her, it wasn’t neat-looking strangers who had her concerned. “It wasn’t a worry,” she recalls.
Once inside, Margette was impressed by the car’s interior. The gear-shift handle was memorable, pimped out with a ping-pong-sized marble ball. The inside was all-white, with white diamond-patterned upholstery. She liked what she saw, and when he invited himself to the party, she said he was welcome to come.
Just some interesting points,
JMHO
fran
PS...
elliottness I'm glad you contacted someone about the other cases in Canada. Interesting as well.............fran
