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. ||||| Most highly anticipated trials in Los Angeles — O.J., Phil Spector — take on a carnival-like atmosphere. The Grim Sleeper trial, on the other hand, promises to be something quite different. It will be grim, it will be hard to watch, it will be depressing. And it will be a journey back to 1980s South L.A., when crime was raging and crack cocaine flooded the streets. 
 
 Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman delivered her opening remarks today in the long-delayed trial of Lonnie Franklin Jr. Franklin stands accused of killing 10 women and attempting to murder one more, in a spate of grizzly murders that became known as the Grim Sleeper killings, a reference to an apparent 13-year hiatus. 
 
 All 11 of Franklin's alleged victims were young, African-American women (six were in their 20s, three in their 30s, one was 18 and one was 15). Most, according to Silverman, were heavy cocaine users, and many had turned to prostitution. 
 
 “[Their] addiction caused these women to be extremely vulnerable,” Silverman said in her opening statement. “This was a perfect opportunity for someone who knew the streets and alleyways by heart. 
 
 Someone who knew where the drug-addicted women and prostitutes would congregate. … It was the perfect time for a serial killer to roam the streets of Los Angeles.” 
 
 The seven women who were killed between 1985 and 1988 were all found shot to death with the same .25-caliber automatic weapon. Their bodies were discovered in alleys and in dumpsters, without identification, covered with debris — an old mattress, a piece of carpet, a trash bag — “dumped like trash,” Silverman said. 
 
 Dozens of family members were in the audience for the trial’s first day. Many were visibly disturbed as Silverman showed, on a projector, graphic photographs of the murdered women as they were found. Some of the family members could be heard sobbing as Silverman talked. 
 
 In November 1988, a 30-year-old woman named Enietra Washington was offered a ride, in an orange Pinto, by a man she says was Franklin. He told her he needed to make a stop, parked on a residential street (the street where, according to prosecutors, Franklin himself lived), returned, started driving again and, without warning, pulled out a gun and shot Washington in the chest. According to Silverman, he then sexually assaulted her, took a Polaroid photograph of her and finally threw her out of his moving car. 
 
 Miraculously, Washington survived. She will testify at Franklin’s trial, which is expected to last three months. The sole surviving victim, according to Silverman, "provides a sort of blueprint for what happened to victims who can’t speak." 
 
 LAPD set up a task force in 2007 to investigate three murders — one in 2007, one in 2003, one in 2002 — that DNA evidence showed were all committed by the same man. The task force later linked the killer to the seven murders in the 1980s, as well as the rape and attempted murder of Washington. 
 
 Detectives ran the unique DNA profile against a database of convicted criminals. Though they found no exact match, they found a partial DNA match to Franklin’s son, Christopher Franklin. That helped the task force zero in on the elder Franklin as a suspect. 
 
 In order to get Franklin’s DNA, a detective went undercover as a busboy at John’s Incredible Pizza in Buena Park, where Franklin was attending a kids birthday party. The detective bussed Franklin’s plate, which included a half-eaten pizza crust, some cake and a fork. They say DNA retrieved from the plate matched the unique DNA profile of their suspect. They arrested Franklin soon after. 
 
 When LAPD searched Franklin’s house, they discovered more than 1,000 photographs of women, many with their eyes closed. One of the photographs was a Polaroid of Washington, in a car, appearing to have been shot in the chest. 
 
 The other photographed women, some of whom LAPD is still trying to identify, have led to speculation that Franklin had more than 11 victims. But prosecutors won’t be allowed to mention the other women in the first phase of the trial. 
 
 If convicted, the 63-year-old Franklin could face the death penalty. 
 
 Throughout the proceedings, Franklin, a former city garbageman, sat stoically, staring straight ahead, his head still, seemingly uninterested in Silverman’s soliloquy. He wore a neatly pressed powder-blue shirt, a light blue tie his lawyer had brought for him, navy blue slacks, white socks and black slipover Vans with white letters reading “LA COUNTY.” 
 
 His attorney, Seymour Amster, opted not to give an opening statement, though he may still do so after the prosecution rests its case.
– 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.