Given the task definition and input, reply with output. In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.


  
 Authorities missed an opportunity years ago to catch the suspected Grim Sleeper serial killer and end his alleged rampage before the final known victim was slain because his DNA was never collected as required under a 2004 law, according to interviews and records reviewed by The Times. 
  
 Lonnie David Franklin Jr.’s genetic profile was supposed to be added to the state’s DNA data bank of offenders because he was on probation for a felony when voters approved Proposition 69, a sweeping expansion of the state’s DNA collection authority. 
  
 The Los Angeles County Probation Department was tasked with obtaining DNA samples from tens of thousands of local offenders who were on probation when the law went into effect in November 2004. But by the time the agency began collecting DNA, Franklin was no longer under its supervision. 
  
 Thousands of other offenders may also have avoided providing a sample during the same period, officials said. More than a year later, the Grim Sleeper struck again. A homeless man found the body of Janecia Peters on Western Avenue in South Los Angeles on New Year’s Day 2007. 
  
 The 25-year-old had been shot and covered with a garbage bag. DNA tests helped link her killer to other slayings by the Grim Sleeper dating to the 1980s. Her mother, Laverne Peters, said the failure to collect Franklin’s DNA reinforced her belief that authorities could have done more to catch the serial killer sooner and prevent her daughter’s death. 
  
 “Her life could have been possibly saved,” Peters said. “That’s the part I’m going to think about a lot — if only.” Franklin, 57, was charged last week with 10 murders committed during two separate periods. The first, from 1985 to 1988, claimed the lives of seven women. 
  
 The next period began in 2002 with the slaying of 15-year-old Princess Berthomieux. A year later, the body of Valerie McCorvey, 35, was discovered in the Westmont area of the city. DNA collected from the crime scenes linked those two slayings to one of the earlier killings. 
  
 The California Department of Justice compares DNA from unsolved cases against its database of offenders once a week, resulting in an average of 300 to 400 cold hit matches each month. But the comparisons never produced a match for the Grim Sleeper killings. 
  
 In 2007, the LAPD created a task force of detectives to work exclusively on the crimes. The team painstakingly followed lead after lead, sometimes using unconventional tactics in an effort to solve the killings. At one point, police collected DNA samples from men arrested for soliciting prostitutes in the hopes of finding a genetic match to the assailant. 
  
 In the end, Franklin was arrested after a “familial search" of state DNA records indicated that a convicted felon was probably related to the killer. Franklin is the felon’s father. LAPD Det. Dennis Kilcoyne, who heads the department’s task force, said police could have linked Franklin to the crimes sooner had his genetic sample been in the state’s DNA data bank. ||||| Missing the Grim Sleeper by a Hair LAPD stakeout in 1988 was three houses away from suspect Lonnie Franklin Jr.'s home 
  
 Soon after LAPD Detective Rich Haro got the call in 1988 about a woman clinging to life at Harbor-UCLA hospital, he learned that telltale markings on a .25 caliber slug dug from her chest matched those from bullets fired by a serial killer who had slain Debra Jackson, Henrietta Wright, Thomas Steele, Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, Mary Lowe, Lachrica Jefferson and Monique Alexander. 
  
 Thrilled to have a hot lead, Haro interviewed the groggy survivor, Enietra Margette Washington, in her hospital bed. 
  
 A month later, when Washington could sit up, Haro drove her through the rough streets of South Los Angeles looking for the spots where a charming, well-spoken black man had struck up a conversation with her, taken her for a ride, stopped at his uncle's house to get money, then, blocks away, pulled a gun and shot her. 
  
 PHOTO BY TED SOQUI Lonnie Franklin Jr. lived here at 1728 West 81st Street, three doors from home police staked-out. Wrong address: Police staked out 1742 West 81st Street, never realizing that Grim Sleeper suspect Lonnie Franklin Jr. lived just three doors away. 
  
 Washington told Haro how, after being shot, she was jolted back to consciousness by a flash of light to find the man raping her — and photographing her with a Polaroid camera. The attacker shoved her from his car and left her for dead. She remembered that he drove an orange Ford Pinto that "looked like a Hot Wheels car" with a tricked-out interior. 
  
 Inside Haro's LAPD car, driving up and down the streets, Washington spotted a small, neat Spanish bungalow on West 81st Street and excitedly cried out, "This is the house!" 
  
 It was the home of Othus White, a now-deceased neighborhood fixture who often hosted a game of cards or dominos on his front porch in the shade of an evergreen tree. After work, friends and locals dropped by to enjoy a beer with the affable White. 
  
 Police canvassed nearby houses, where a neighbor said she had seen a rust-colored Pinto parked on the street. The LAPD quietly set up a surveillance team kitty-corner from White's home in a closed-down business on Western Avenue that is now an abandoned church. 
  
 For a month, teams of police watched and waited from inside the cold, darkened storefront. In that era, police had to call in on a pay phone and type up their reports on electric typewriters. Any clue took far longer to check out than it would today. 
  
 "We probably exhausted all the leads," Haro recalls today, eight years after he retired. "There were a lot of things we did." 
  
 But one thing, they missed. 
  
 The home of Othus White, the center of the LAPD stakeout for a full month in 1988, was just three doors away from the home of Grim Sleeper suspect Lonnie David Franklin Jr. 
  
 White's house on West 81st Street was number 1742. Franklin's is number 1728. 
  
 Until Franklin's arrest last week, police never knew that they nearly had the suspect more than two decades ago, or that he slipped away allegedly to kill again. 
  
 Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, supervisor of the Grim Sleeper task force, says much remains unknown about how close police got to the Grim Sleeper in 1988, and why they never knew. 
  
 "I don't believe they knocked on Franklin's door," Kilcoyne says. "I don't know." 
  
 Police say Franklin, 57, went on to kill three more people in the 2000s — Princess Berthomieux, Valerie McCorvey and Janecia Peters. 
  
 "We were that close?" says Donnell Alexander, the brother of victim Monique Alexander, a teenager who vanished in September 1988 after asking her dad if he wanted anything from the liquor store, and never returned home. "He was right there, under my nose." 
  
 Donnell Alexander has attended every press conference and vigil since L.A. Weekly broke the story of the secret task force in 2008. The Weekly was the first to inform the victims' families that their daughters and sisters had been murdered by a serial killer — information that the LAPD, for reasons former chiefs William Bratton and Daryl Gates never fully explained, chose not to share with the families. 
  
 Says a shocked Yvonne Bell, victim Lachrica Jefferson's aunt, "He lived right next to me!" during the 1988 LAPD investigation that focused on White's home. Yet she does not recall being questioned by police at that time. 
  
 Says Kilcoyne: "We were very close, but not close enough, honestly." His only explanation is, "We had nothing to push us over the edge." 
  
 Lost in the fog of faded memories is whether Franklin was ever directly questioned by police, though he lived just three doors away. 
  
 Did they knock on his door? Did he sweat it out? 
  
 "We talked to hundreds of people," says Haro, who still seems moved when talking about the efforts the police undertook. "Today, you have DNA and Facebook and information on YouTube. Back then we had to rely on fliers and going to midnight roll calls" at police stations to find new clues that might be related. 
  
 Some critics of this long saga would argue that if a white woman or a middle-class victim had been shot in the chest, people throughout the community would have been warned back then that a serial killer was afoot. 
  
 Activist Margaret Prescod, a well-known Los Angeles radio host, demanded in the mid-1980s that police set up a task force to address other killings. At the time, a rash of murders were thought to be by one person, dubbed the "Southside Slayer." Her efforts led the Los Angeles City Council and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to offer a $35,000 reward. "Our job was to let the people know there was a serial killer out there," Prescod said a few years ago. |||||

The alleged serial killer known as the Grim Sleeper could have been stopped two years earlier if the police had collected his DNA. Lonnie David Franklin should have been added to a DNA database under a 2004 law called Proposition 69, finds the LA Times. He wasn't—apparently because it took the cops too long to get organized. "If only,” laments the mother of one of the victims. “Her life could have been possibly saved.” Tragically, it wasn't the only time investigators narrowly missed Franklin. In 1988, the LAPD staked out a house just three doors down from the suspected killers' home, reports LA Weekly. "We were very close," says one of the detectives on the case. "But not close enough." Click here for more on the case.