DNA Analysis Links Inmate to 12 Slayings

The victims were all women, their bodies found mostly in one South L.A. swath. The accused is serving time in state prison for rape.

By Andrew Blankstein, Richard Winton and Jill Leovy | Times Staff Writers

October 23, 2004

A onetime pizza deliveryman now in prison for rape is suspected of being one of the most prolific serial killers in Los Angeles history after police used DNA to link him to the slayings of 12 women over more than a decade.

Los Angeles police allege that Chester Dewayne Turner, 37, preyed mostly on women he encountered along Figueroa Street in South-Central L.A., raping and strangling them, then dumping their bodies.

FOR THE RECORD:
Suspected serial killer —An article in the Oct. 23 California section about a series of killings allegedly linked to Chester Dewayne Turner said the body of Diane Johnson, 21, had been found in the 1000 block of South Grand Avenue. She was found in the 10200 block of South Grand Avenue.

Some of the women were homeless, living on the streets where they were attacked. At least two had prostitution convictions. Others were passersby.

Until police identified Turner, a mentally disabled janitor spent nine years in prison, wrongly convicted of three of the murders.

Turner is expected to be charged next week with 10 of the killings, capping the first phase of a continuing investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department's cold-case homicide unit. He is a suspect in at least a dozen other Los Angeles slayings, say detectives.

Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, declined to comment on the case before it is filed.

The killings took place between 1987 and 1998, mostly in the 30-block stretch of motels and apartments that runs south from Slauson Avenue along Figueroa Street — an area notorious for prostitution, drug crime and violence.

Many of the cases had languished unsolved for years, buried among hundreds of open homicide cases that have backed up in the area.

David Allen Jones was wrongly convicted in 1995 for three of the murders, according to police and court records. Jones, 44, served nearly nine years in prison before he was released in March after DNA tests exonerated him in two of the cases and implicated Turner. In the third, no DNA evidence had been preserved.

Turner, a Locke High School dropout born in Arkansas, has been in and out of prison for years on various convictions, including theft and drug possession. He is serving an eight-year sentence in the Sierra Conservation Center state prison in Jamestown, east of Stockton, for a 2002 rape.

During the span in which the killings occurred, Turner moved often, bouncing between prison, skid row missions, girlfriends' apartments and the home of his mother and grandfather, a few blocks from Figueroa in South L.A.

His alleged victims ranged in age from their early 20s to late 40s, but most were around 30. Some were prostitutes, and several had struggled with drug addiction and lived on the streets.

Their deaths drew virtually no attention when they happened, and the paperwork on them might easily have remained filed in archives among hundreds of other old, unsolved homicides.

Then 41-year-old Paula Vance was killed Feb. 3, 1998.

A security guard found Vance's partly naked body in the back of a downtown Los Angeles business. The Alexandria, Va., resident had been raped, then strangled, the killing recorded on a grainy surveillance videotape.

Det. Cliff Shepard of the LAPD's Central Division played the tape on a big-screen television at the Paul's TV-King of Big Screen store and at Paramount Studios. But the killer's form remained indistinct — a dark shadow and little more.

The images stayed with Shepard. When he transferred to the newly formed cold-case homicide unit in 2001, he took Vance's case with him.

For a while, there were no new leads. But last year, he and his partner Det. Jose Ramirez finally got the department's backlogged crime lab to test microscopic extractions from Vance's body. The samples were entered into a state database of DNA from convicted violent felons.