Los Angeles (CNN) Lonnie David Franklin, Jr., a one-time garbage truck driver and LAPD garage attendant, was found guilty Thursday of murdering nine women and one girl over a span of three decades, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in California history. 
 
 Jurors took less than two days to convict Franklin of all charges against him, including the attempted murder of a woman who survived a 1988 attack. He was dubbed "The Grim Sleeper" because of a 13-year gap between slayings attributed to him. 
 
 Franklin, who has close-cropped hair and wears glasses, stared straight ahead and remained silent during the several minutes it took the court clerk to read the verdicts. 
 
 Family members of the victims, who had been cautioned by the judge to refrain from displays of emotion, quietly comforted and congratulated one another with each passing "guilty." Some nodded their heads in approval. 
 
 The trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court will now go to the penalty phase, beginning May 11, in which jurors will be asked to decide whether Franklin, 63, should be put to death for his crimes. Prosecutors disclosed Wednesday that two more women — one he was convicted of raping and another he attempted to kidnap and rape in Germany while in the U.S. Army in the 1970s -- may testify during the penalty phase of his trial. 
 
 Outside the courtroom after the verdicts were read, Samara Herard, sister to Franklin's youngest victim, 15-year-old Princess Berthomieux, said she was not surprised at the killer's lack of reaction. 
 
 "He doesn't value life," Herard said. "He doesn't care." 
 
 Herard said she was grateful for the jury's decision. But she prefers to think of her sister not as a victim, but as the person she was before she encountered Franklin. 
 
 "I want to remember the sweet little girl who had her whole life in front of her," she said. 
 
 'They are all premeditated' 
 
 The verdict follows a three-month trial featuring the testimony of 61 witnesses. Prosecutors portrayed Franklin as a sexual predator who killed his victims, then dumped their bodies like the trash he was paid to collect. 
 
 "He did it over, and over, and over, and over and over, and over," Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman told jurors during closing arguments. "All of the murders in this case are first degree. They are all willful. They are all deliberate. They are all premeditated." 
 
 Lonnie David Franklin Jr., the accused "Grim Sleeper." 
 
 Franklin's defense attorney, Seymour Amster, told jurors during his closing that the government's case was "circumstantial" and lacked the evidence required for a conviction. He suggested that an unnamed relative of Franklin's committed the killings, but offered no proof. 
 
 "The lack of evidence in this case compels you to find Mr. Franklin not guilty," he told jurors. 
 
 The lawyer also issued an apology for his own behavior during the trial, which was marked by moments of visible frustration and terse exchanges with the judge and prosecutor. He at one point said, "We now have no defense," following an unfavorable ruling by Judge Kathleen Kennedy. 
 
 "Just do your job," Kennedy told him. 
 
 'Body dumps' 
 
 Jurors clearly were not swayed by the defense Amster ultimately put on. 
 
 Police linked Franklin to the crimes in 2010 using DNA technology that did not exist when the initial killing spree occurred in the 1980s, according to prosecutors. Their case was built on that DNA evidence, including Franklin's saliva on many of his victims' breasts, along with ballistic evidence and the testimony of a surviving victim. 
 
 Silverman spent much of her closing arguments walking jurors through evidence in the case, including DNA, which she acknowledged can be "very tedious." 
 
 She spoke of astronomical odds — in the quadrillions and quintillions — that DNA collected from victims and crime scenes belonged to someone other than Franklin. 
 
 She noted the common characteristics between many of the crime scenes in which victims were found in alleys and dumpsters in South Los Angeles, all of them within a few miles of Franklin's home. Most wore disheveled clothing suggesting they'd been re-dressed and moved. They carried no identification. 
 
 Each of the crime scenes bore one or more characteristics of a "body dump," in which a victim is killed in one location and discarded in another, Silverman told jurors. 
 
 A surviving victim 
 
 The prosecutor also cited the testimony of a surviving victim who she said "provides a blueprint for the murdered women who cannot speak and can't tell you what happened." 
 
 That victim, Enietra Washington, testified that Franklin coaxed her into his orange Pinto in 1988 and, without warning, pulled out a handgun and shot her in the chest. She remembered Franklin climbing on top of her and a camera flashing as she lost consciousness. 
 
 He pushed her out of the moving car, assuming she was dead, Silverman said. 
 
 When detectives searched Franklin's house two decades later they found pictures of Washington hidden behind a wall, Silverman told the jury. 
 
 The prosecutor also reminded jurors of a videotaped police interrogation of Franklin, played during the trial, in which she said the accused killer did not appear surprised about the allegations against him. He laughed at times and called one victim "fat" and another "butt ugly" as detectives showed him photos. 
 
 "They're staring up at him — and he's laughing in their faces," Silverman said of the defendant. 
 
 DNA evidence to the rescue 
 
 Franklin had been charged with killing 10 victims, ranging in age from 15 to 35, from 1988 to 2007. He was also charged with the attempted murder of Washington. 
 
 The first spree began in the summer of 1985 and seemingly ended three years later. Police did not know his identity at the time but had linked seven slayings to the same .25-caliber handgun. 
 
 The then-unknown killer apparently fell dormant for years. Decades later, in 2007, LAPD homicide detectives got word from the department's forensic lab of "case to case hits" linking one person's DNA to unsolved slayings in 2002, 2003 and 2007, according to Detective Dennis Kilcoyne. 
 
 Detectives were unable to match the killer's DNA to any known samples contained in databanks. The department formed a task force that soon discovered the killings in the 2000s were connected to the unsolved spree in the 1980s, Kilcoyne wrote in a statement submitted to a congressional subcommittee investigating the use of DNA in so-called cold cases. 
 
 In 2008, detectives submitted crime scene DNA from both sprees to the California Department of Justice, asking them to conduct a "familia search" to determine if a close relative of the unknown killer was in a state databank of convicted felons' DNA. 
 
 The search came back negative. 
 
 But a second attempt, conducted two years later, yielded a hit, Kilcoyne wrote. It matched the DNA to a recently convicted felon. 
 
 The criminal's father turned out to be Franklin, according to authorities. 
 
 The pizza plan 
 
 Detectives placed Franklin under 24-hour surveillance and came up with a plan to obtain a sample of his DNA. 
 
 An undercover officer posed as a waiter at a local restaurant and collected a pizza crust left behind by the suspect. DNA taken from the crust matched DNA left by the suspect in multiple murders, Kilcoyne wrote. 
 
 Franklin was arrested in July 2010. 
 
 When police raided his South Los Angeles home, they discovered photos and videos of dozens of unidentified women. Police have since accounted for the identities and whereabouts of some of the women, but others remain unknown. 
 
 Silverman called Franklin a "serial killer who was hiding in plain sight." 
 
 "Science in 2010 finally caught up with the defendant for the crimes he committed since the 1980s," she said shortly before the case went to the jury. "All of the evidence in this case proves the defendant is guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. There is no other plausible explanation." 
 
 Police Chief Charlie Beck, in a statement, said he hoped the verdict would bring "some closure for these families." 
 
 After Thursday's verdict, reporters crowded around relatives of the victims. Herard, Berthomieux's sister, kept her composure as she spoke about Princess in front of a throng of TV cameras. 
 
 Moments later she embraced Kilcoyne, the LAPD detective who played a pivotal role in the investigation. 
 
 "Thank you so much," she whispered again and again to him, tears welling in her eyes. ||||| More than 30 years since the bodies of young women started turning up in alleyways and garbage bins in South Los Angeles, attorneys are set to give opening statements in the long-awaited "Grim Sleeper" trial on Tuesday.The families of the victims say they've been waiting decades for this trial to begin.Monique Alexander, 18, walked out of her South L.A. home in 1988 to go to the store. Her dad, Porter Alexander, says he can't stop replaying that scene in his head."What happened that day? Why couldn't she come home? Who kept her from coming home?" he asks himself. He was 48 when his daughter was killed. He's now 75.Fourteen years later, Lonnie Franklin Jr., the so-called "Grim Sleeper," allegedly raped and murdered a 15-year-old girl named Princess."It was very challenging for me, even being a woman of faith, to even have me question my faith because you know what she went through. How could you let this happen to her?" said Princess' sister, Samara Herard.Franklin, 63, is accused of killing nine women and a teen girl between 1985 and 2007, tossing their bodies like trash in alleyways. The "Grim Sleeper" nickname was coined because of an apparent 14-year gap in the murders between 1988 and 2002.Cold-case detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department arrested the auto mechanic in July 2010 after his DNA was connected to more than a dozen crime scenes. An officer posing as a busboy at a pizza parlor got DNA samples from dishes and utensils Franklin had been eating with at a birthday party.Since Franklin's arrest six years ago, the families of the victims have traveled to every pretrial hearing but the case has languished in court due to repeated delays."There's people that have passed away. This thing took a long time," Herard said.Porter Alexander says he hopes the trial will subdue his nearly three decades of angst. He says he wonders if he had sheltered Monique too much or failed to make her street smart."That girl meant everything to me," he said.The families of the victims also hope that the trial will remind the community that predators are always out there."I just hope and pray that this kind of thing won't happen anymore because no one deserves that," Herard said.The "Grim Sleeper" was among at least three serial killers who stalked Los Angeles-area women during a crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. His trial is expected to last up to four months.
– With a guilty verdict Thursday, the Grim Sleeper officially became one of the "most prolific and enduring serial killers" in California history, the Los Angeles Times reports. Lonnie Franklin Jr., 63, was convicted of murdering 10 women, one only 15 years old, between 1985 and 2007 in South Los Angeles. A jury will now decide whether Franklin receives life in prison or the death penalty. Franklin, a former garbage collector and police garage attendant, would kill his victims and leave them partially clothed or naked in alleys and dumpsters near his home, according to CNN. He was tied to killings in 2010 using new DNA technology. The AP reports a cop posing as a busboy got Franklin's DNA off pizza crusts and napkins following a birthday celebration. It matched saliva found on the breasts of many of the victims. More than 60 witnesses testified during the three-month trial. A surviving victim (Franklin was also found guilty of attempted murder) recalled Franklin luring her into his car, abruptly shooting her in the chest, then getting on top of her. The last thing she remembered before passing out was a camera flash. She said he pushed her out of the car when he thought she was dead. A number of Franklin's victims were prostitutes or drug addicts; all of them were black. The murders never gained the attention received by other slayings in California, and many blamed police indifference for them going unsolved. Families of the victims, many in tears, were present when the verdict was read. "He doesn't value life," CNN quotes the sister of Franklin's 15-year-old victim as saying. "He doesn't care." Prosecutors believe they have evidence of at least five more victims.