Chester Dewayne Turner strangled at least fourteen women in a narrow corridor of South Los Angeles between 1987 and 1998. He was convicted of ten murders in April 2007 and sentenced to death, and convicted of four more in 2014. He is on California's death row. His case also produced one of the clearest miscarriages of justice in this archive.
He was born in Warren, Arkansas on November 5, 1966 and moved to Los Angeles as a child. He worked as a pizza delivery driver and lived intermittently in shelters and on the street, around Figueroa Street and Western Avenue.
Almost all the women were Black. Most were dependent on crack cocaine and several were working as prostitutes. One, Regina Washington, was pregnant, and the unborn child was counted as a further victim at trial. The bodies were left in alleys, on rubbish piles, and beneath a mattress in a disused building.
The women named in the record are Diane Johnson, twenty-one; Annette Ernest, twenty-six; Anita Fishman, thirty-one; Regina Washington, twenty-seven; Andrea Tripplett, twenty-nine; Desarae Jones, twenty-nine; Natalie Price, thirty-one; Mildred Beasley, forty-five; Paula Vance, twenty-four; Brenda Bries, thirty-nine; Tammie Christmas; Debra Williams, thirty-two; and Mary Edwards, forty-two.
The series overlapped in time and place with Lonnie Franklin's, and both ran through a period in which, on the LAPD's own later account, the deaths of women in that part of the city were not investigated as they should have been. Two separate series in the same corridor, and neither was read as a series for years.
David Allen Jones, a janitor with an intellectual disability, was convicted in 1995 of three murders that were Turner's. The conviction rested on a confession he had been led into. He served eleven years. He was released in 2004 after DNA cleared him and matched Turner, whose profile had entered the state database following an unrelated conviction. The same mechanism that has closed a number of cases in this archive, arriving here more than a decade late for the man in prison for them.
Turner was convicted in April 2007 of ten murders and sentenced to death on July 10, 2007. In 2014 he was tried for four further killings, convicted, and sentenced to death a second time. Fourteen convictions stand.
The number is not what makes the case notable. What makes it notable is that a series of killings in South Los Angeles ran for eleven years, put an innocent disabled man in prison for eleven more, and was resolved not by investigation but by a database hit.