LA's serial killer-rapist: "Grim Sleeper" (video)

HBO; Margaret Prescod (sotrueradio); Frank Stoltze; CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly

(HBO) Community activist Margaret Prescod pushes LAPD in "Tales of the Grim Sleeper."

 

The "Grim Sleeper" is the nickname for an accused serial killer in Los Angeles, California, believed to be responsible for at least [190] murders [many more based on unsolved photographic evidence], one suspected, and one attempted murder in L.A. since 1985.

The attacker was dubbed the "Grim Sleeper" because he appears to have taken a 14-year slumber from his crimes, from 1988 to 2002. [That's when he was in jail.]

(ABC News/Nightline, Dec. 21, 2010) 180 photographs taken by the serial killer suspect show new potential victims that are unaccounted for, but the LAPD is not worried. Using its slang, "no humans involved."

Chief suspect [military trained and convicted military-rapist] Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 57, worked as a [mechanic for the LAPD and city] garbageman during this period, suggesting he may have taken advantage of his employment and hidden his victims in a landfill.

On July 7, 2010, Franklin was arrested [because his son had been DNA tested and accused but was too young to have done the killing, which then pointed the finger at one of his relatives].

The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office charged him with ten counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and special circumstance allegations of multiple murders in the case.

(The LipTV) Grim Sleeper serial killer documentary-maker Nick Broomfield

A grand jury indictment was issued on March 23, 2011. Franklin has been in jail since his arrest awaiting trial; the large volume of evidence in this case, some dating back 30 years, has caused a lengthy pretrial discovery.

The trial was originally scheduled to begin on June 30, 2015. [It concluded today, May 5, 2016 thanks in part to the tireless work of community organizer and KPFK radio host Margaret "Sojourner Truth" Prescod].

In May 2015, Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy delayed the trial until September 9 after Franklin's defense attorney requested more time to test several pieces of evidence. [Today at 1:00 pm it was announced that he was convicted on all counts.]

CONVICTED: Lonnie Franklin guilty
Frank Stoltze (KPCC, scpr.org, May 5, 2016)

He picked them up off the street at night and offered them rides. Instead, he shot and sexually assaulted them, dumping their bodies in back alleys and trash bins. Two of the women were strangled to death.
 

The trial featured gruesome crime scene photos of the women as well as long explanations of DNA and ballistics evidence.

One woman survived. In gripping testimony during the trial, Enietra Washington described being shot in the chest and sexually assaulted by a man she believed was Franklin in 1988.

For years, detectives "struggled" to solve the murders. [They didn't get much done during this "struggle," not so much as warning the public of the possibility that a serial killer was on the loose in LA.]

Family members accused the [racist] LAPD of giving their loved ones short shrift because they were poor and black.
 
A 2008 article in the LA Weekly chastising the LAPD for failing to publicize that fact that a serial murder was on the loose in South LA helped prompt the department to step up its efforts.

Defense Attorney Seymour Amster makes his final arguments in the "Grim Sleeper" serial murder trial in LA Superior Court against defendant Lonnie Franklin Jr. on May 2, 2016. The jury listened to the grisly details of how nine women and a 15-year-old girl were killed over two decades (Mark Boster/AFP/Getty).

.

After a three month trial, an LA jury today found Lonnie Franklin Jr. guilty of 10 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder for a series of killings that started in 1985 and spanned three decades.
 

Franklin -- nicknamed the "Grim Sleeper" because of an apparent 13-year break in the murders -- [little known during his crime spree because police failed to tie the crimes together or show the least concern when they did recognize the pattern of evidence] immediately becomes one of L.A.’s most notorious serial killers.

 

Now, the jury will be asked to decide on a punishment. Prosecutors are asking for the death penalty. In California, only a jury can hand down capital punishment after a hearing in which the defendant can argue instead for life in prison. That hearing is slated for May 12.

Worked for the LAPD 
Franklin, 63, a former mechanic for the LAPD who worked as city garbage collector, preyed on young black women in South LA. Some were prostitutes. Others struggled with drug addition. More

The Way of Waking Up (video)

AlanWatts.com; Wisdom Quarterly

(Chasefukuoka61) What does it mean to awaken? This short movie is narrated by Alan Watts. Background music by Kitaro, "Endless Water" and "Tree," from the album "Ki" or without music.

"So then here's the drama. My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there is the central self. You could call it 'God.' You could call it anything you like. And it's all of us. It's playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever everywhere and anywhere.

And it's playing the game of hide and seek with itself. It gets lost, it gets involved in the farthest out adventures. But in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself. And when you're ready to wake up, you're gonna wake up. And if you're not ready, you're going to stay pretending that you're 'poor little me.'"

The Joyous Cosmology
Alan Watts (psychedelic-library.org)
"T0 BEGIN WITH this world has a different kind of time. It is the time of biological rhythm, not of the clock and all that goes with the clock. There is no hurry. Our sense of time is notoriously subjective and thus dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of interest or boredom, and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of routines, goals, and deadlines.

Here the present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a dancing present -- the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower.

There is therefore time to perceive every detail of the movement with infinitely greater richness of articulation. Normally we do not so much look at things as overlook them. The eye sees types and classes -- flower, leaf, rock, bird, fire -- mental pictures of things rather than things, rough outlines filled with flat color, always a little dusty and dim.

(HummingbirdSage) an excerpt from "Do YOU do it, or does IT do you?" (Disc 3) MORE

But here the depth of light and structure in a bursting bud go on forever. There is time to see them, time for the whole intricacy of veins and capillaries to develop in consciousness, time to see down and down into the shape of greenness, which is not green at all, but a whole spectrum generalizing itself as green -- purple, gold, the sunlit turquoise of the ocean, the intense luminescence of the emerald.

I cannot decide where shape ends and color begins. The bud has opened and the fresh leaves fan out and curve back with a gesture which is unmistakably communicative but does not say anything except, "Thus!" And somehow that is quite satisfactory, even startlingly clear. The meaning is transparent in the same way that the color and the texture are transparent, with light which does not seem to fall upon surfaces from above but to be right inside the structure and color.

Which is of course where it is, for light is an inseparable trinity of sun, object, and eye, and the chemistry of the leaf is its color, its light. But at the same time color and light are the gift of the eye to the leaf and the sun. Transparency is the property of the eyeball, projected outward as luminous space, interpreting quanta of energy in terms of the gelatinous fibers in the head.

I begin to feel that the world is at once inside my head and outside it, and the two, inside and outside, begin to include or "cap" one another like an infinite series of concentric spheres. I am unusually aware that everything I am sensing is also my body -- that light, color, shape, sound, and texture are terms and properties of the brain conferred upon the outside world.

I am not looking at the world, not confronting it; I am knowing it by a continuous process of transforming it into myself, so that everything around me, the whole globe of space, no longer feels away from me but in the middle. This is at first confusing.

I am not quite sure of the direction from which sounds come. The visual space seems to reverberate with them as if it were a drum. The surrounding hills rumble with the sound of a truck, and the rumble and the color-shape of the hills become one and the same gesture.

I use that word deliberately and shall use it again. The hills are moving into their stillness. They mean something because they are being transformed into my brain, and my brain is an organ of meaning.

The forests of redwood trees upon them look like green fire, and the copper gold of the sun-dried grass heaves immensely into the sky. Time is so slow as to be a kind of eternity, and the flavor of eternity transfers itself to the hills -- burnished mountains which I seem to remember from an immeasurably distant past, at once so unfamiliar as to be exotic and yet as familiar as my own hand."

Zen Buddhism with Alan Watts (Sunday radio)

Roy (of Hollywood) Tuckman, KPFK FM, Pacifica Radio, Wisdom Quarterly

The Book by Alan Watts is a stunning essay on “the taboo against knowing who you are.” In particular, he offers a devastating critique for any looking to “change the world” (Illustration: Randal Roberts/Ianmack.com).

What's the meaning of American music and life? (More)

Alan Watts Sundays, 8:00 am PST, 11:00 am EST
KPFK (90.7 FM), Los Angeles or listen worldwide
For more than 40 years Alan Watts has earned a reputation as one of the foremost interpreters of Zen and Eastern philosophies for the West. Listen free online.

Beginning at the age of 16, when he wrote essay for the journal of the Buddhist Lodge in London, he developed an audience of millions who were enriched through his books, recordings, and lectures on radio, television, and in public appearances.

In all, Watts has written more than 25 books and recorded hundreds of lectures and seminars, all building toward a personal philosophy he shares candidly and joyfully with his and listeners throughout the world.

His overall works have presented a model of individuality and self-expression that can be matched by few philosophers. The three main sources for Alan Watts tapes and information are:

• Pacifica Radio Archives (800) 735-0230, pacificaradioarchives.org
• MEA (866) 492-8446, wattstapes.com
• Electronic University (800) 96-WATTS, alanwatts.com
  

More can also be found at: alanwatts.net and alanwatts.com

• Message from the Interim Program Director about Tuckman
  

Ancient Maya: First American Buddhists

BOOK: How the Swans Came to the Lake:
A Narrative History of Buddhism in America

(Shambhala Publications, 492 pp., 1986)

WISDOM-BOOKS.COM SYNOPSIS: Far more than a history of Buddhism's arrival and growth in America -- a development which led to the sudden rise of the ancient Mayan culture -- this highly readable account is packed full of interesting stories and anecdotes, and includes a wealth of material on the spread of Buddhism to the West from the time of Alexander the Great onwards.

This book gives the definitive treatment to the impact Buddhism has had on American thought, and it is a goldmine of information on early Buddhism in Europe. It covers the early Western Buddhist pioneers, plus those who profoundly influenced and paved the way for its appearance in the West.

Included are: the Greeks in India, King Ashoka; the Gnostics; Sir William Jones and the Royal Asiatic Society; Emerson and Thoreau; Whitman and Walden; Edwin Arnold; Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society; the Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities in the States; the Pali Text Society; the World Parliament of Religions; D T Suzuki; Sokei-an; Nyogen Suzuki; Alan Watts; Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Beat Poets; Shunryo Suzuki; Philip Kapleau; Chogyam Trungpa; Tarthang Tulku; Geshe Wangyal; Thomas Merton; Jack Kornfield; Joseph Goldstein and Thich Nhat Hanh; and many others.

"Heroic in scope and of undeniable importance" -- L.A. Times.

iRead excerpts on Amazon