Man Charged in Killings City Didn’t Know About
by Charlie LeDuff
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 29 – When the police announced last week that they had tracked down the worst serial killer in the city’s history, the news was met here with detached astonishment.
Serial killer? What serial killer? For the better part of a decade, the police say, a man was raping and strangling women and almost nobody knew.
Chester D. Turner, 37, a convicted rapist and former pizza deliveryman, is charged with killing 10 women between 1987 and 1998. With the special circumstances of rape, he will be eligible for the death penalty. Detectives say Mr. Turner may have murdered a half dozen others, though they lack physical evidence to connect him to some of those crimes.
As it happened, Mr. Turner was already behind bars for an unrelated rape when detectives pieced together his secret with DNA evidence.
Moreover, another man – a janitor with the mind of an 8-year-old – spent nine years in prison for two of the murders now attributed to Mr. Turner. The man, David A. Jones, was released in March after he was cleared by DNA specimens.
While the women were being raped and killed, there were no handouts by the police to warn that the City of Angels had a devil in its midst. There was no dragnet; no shocking nickname like the Hillside Strangler, the Night Stalker or the Freeway Killer, all infamous Southern California predators. There was nothing to capture or focus the public’s imagination. Women were raped, strangled and dumped in vacant lots and stairwells like so much worn-out furniture.
The women, for the most part, were black, drug-hobbled prostitutes who worked the street corners and hot-sheet motels in the notorious south side, the black part of town known for misery, gangs and spectacular violence.
Jeanette Moore, a prostitute, said she was close to some of the victims. She said the women who work along Figueroa Street, where the police say Mr. Turner did his killings, knew there was a serial killer at work.
“There had to be, but the police never asked nothing,” she said while standing on the corner of Figueroa and 84th Streets, her place of business for the past 22 years. The rain tinged her knee-high boots. She nervously lighted a cigarette.
“They never investigated nothing,” she said. “I knew half those girls. I know the man’s face. If it was in the better neighborhoods, you could be sure somebody would be asking questions. But it was here, so nobody cared.”
The editorial page of The Los Angeles Times agreed, calling the general attitude indifferent. “It was simply one more example of how the rest of the city had grown inured to the slaughter in South Los Angeles,” one editorial read.