The Southside Slayer's Second Reckoning

There is a photograph that stays with you, once you have seen it. It was taken sometime in the 1970s, at what appears to be a backyard gathering somewhere in Los Angeles — the kind of warm, ordinary afternoon that nobody thinks to memorialize until later, when they wish they had more of them. A woman stands at the edge of the frame, laughing at something just out of view. She is older, her hair silver, her posture the kind of upright that speaks to a life lived with intention. She does not know she is being photographed. She is simply, completely, herself.

Investigators at the Los Angeles Police Department's cold case unit would come to know photographs like that one very well. They would study the faces of women who had been gone for thirty years, women whose murders had been filed into folders and boxes and eventually into a kind of institutional sorrow — cases that detectives suspected they might never solve. And then, quietly, in the early years of the twenty-first century, science began to speak where witnesses had long fallen silent.

What it would say about a man named John Floyd Thomas Jr. would stun even the veterans among them.

To understand what was taken, you first have to understand what was there. The women who would be linked to Thomas by prosecutors were, to a one, elderly residents of the Los Angeles area — women in their sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties who had built lives in neighborhoods on the city's southside and surrounding communities. They were women who had survived decades of American history, who had raised families, kept homes, maintained friendships, attended churches. They were women who, in the ordinary calculus of daily life, represented no conceivable threat to anyone.

Ethel Sokoloff was eighty years old. Maybelle Hudson was seventy-eight. Meriam Dodd was in her eighties. So was Evalyn Dodd. Anna Elzinga was eighty-one. Mary Ransom was sixty-five. Flossie Lee Thomas — no relation to the man who would be charged with her death — was sixty-two. These were the women. These were the names that cold case detectives would carry with them through years of painstaking work, names they would repeat to themselves like a kind of obligation, a promise not to let the passage of time become an excuse.

The murders had occurred across a span of years stretching from the mid-1970s into the 1980s. The pattern, when investigators eventually assembled it, was deeply unsettling in its consistency. The victims were elderly women, many of them living alone. They were found in or near their homes. They had been strangled. Beyond that, the cases had languished — not for lack of care, but for lack of the tools that simply did not yet exist. DNA typing was not a practical forensic reality in America until the late 1980s, and even then, the technology required time and resources and, crucially, a known sample to compare against a crime-scene profile. Without a suspect, a profile is just a set of numbers sitting in a database, waiting.

For years, that is exactly where things stood.

John Floyd Thomas Jr. was, by the time investigators began to close in on him, a man in his late seventies living in the Los Angeles area. He had a prior criminal history — a 1971 rape conviction for which he had served time and eventually been released. That conviction, and the biological evidence connected to it, would become essential. But in the years between his release and the moment cold case detectives began taking a hard look at him, he had moved through the world without apparent further legal consequence. He had, to all outward appearances, become unremarkable.

That unremarkability is one of the things that makes cases like this one so difficult to absorb. The violence that prosecutors would allege Thomas committed — and that a jury would ultimately find him responsible for — unfolded against a backdrop of ordinary city life. Neighborhoods changing, residents aging, detectives rotating through assignments, files accumulating. No one connecting the dots. Or not yet.

The cold case unit at the LAPD had been working through old homicide files with renewed intensity in the early 2000s, applying modern DNA analysis to biological evidence that had been collected decades earlier and preserved, sometimes imperfectly, through the intervening years. It is painstaking, often discouraging work. Many samples degrade beyond utility. Many cases yield nothing new. But sometimes — and this is the thing that keeps investigators going — sometimes the science holds. Sometimes a swab taken from a crime scene in 1978 still carries enough genetic information to tell a story.

In the cases connected to what prosecutors would describe as a pattern of predatory violence against elderly women, that is precisely what happened. Biological evidence recovered from multiple crime scenes was analyzed and produced DNA profiles. Those profiles were then run through state and federal databases. And at some point in that process — the exact timing and sequence forming part of the documented investigative record — a match was identified. The DNA pointed to John Floyd Thomas Jr.

His 1971 rape conviction meant his DNA profile was already in the system. That prior entry into the criminal justice apparatus — one that he had served his time for and perhaps believed was behind him — became the thread that unraveled everything.

Detectives working the case would have moved carefully at that stage. A database hit is a starting point, not a finish line. It needs to be corroborated, contextualized, built into a case that can withstand the scrutiny of a courtroom. Investigators gathered additional evidence, reviewed the original case files, spoke with surviving family members, and documented the connections between Thomas and the neighborhoods where the victims had lived. Court records indicate that the investigation was thorough and methodical — the product of years of work, not a single eureka moment, but a slow and deliberate accumulation of evidence.

Thomas was arrested in 2009. He was in his late seventies. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office charged him with multiple counts of first-degree murder. For the families of the victims — some of whom had been waiting thirty years or more for any answer at all — the arrest was complicated news, the way news often is when it arrives decades too late. Relief, grief, anger, exhaustion. The knowledge that whatever happened next in a courtroom could not give back what had been taken.

The case that prosecutors presented at trial was built substantially on DNA evidence. According to court records and reporting on the proceedings, the biological evidence linking Thomas to the crime scenes was central to the state's argument. Prosecutors contended that Thomas had targeted vulnerable elderly women, that he had strangled them, and that the DNA recovered from those scenes was his. The defense, as is its obligation, challenged the evidence and the conclusions drawn from it. Thomas did not testify on his own behalf.

The trial unfolded in Los Angeles Superior Court. It was not a spectacle, in the way that some high-profile cases become. It was quiet, in a sense, the way old crimes often are when they finally reach reckoning — the urgency of the original moment long dissipated, replaced by the formal, careful procedure of the law working through what it knows. Families sat in courtrooms and listened to evidence about deaths that had defined the shape of their lives for decades. Jurors heard testimony about DNA and crime scenes and the lives of women who were no longer alive to speak for themselves.

In 2011, the jury found John Floyd Thomas Jr. guilty of multiple counts of first-degree murder. The verdict covered seven victims. The jury also found true the special circumstance allegation of multiple murders, which under California law made Thomas eligible for the sentence that the judge subsequently imposed: life in prison without the possibility of parole. Given Thomas's age at sentencing — he was by then in his late seventies — the practical effect of that sentence was not materially different from a death sentence, though the formal outcome was imprisonment rather than execution. He was, the court had determined, never to be free again.

There were no dramatic courtroom moments recorded in the public accounts of the sentencing. No outbursts, no breakdown. Just the formal language of the law, the weight of seven names, and the closing of a chapter that had been open since the Ford administration.

The conviction has stood. As of the public record available through the time of this account, no successful appeal has overturned the findings of the jury. The legal process that began with a DNA match and culminated in a 2011 verdict has remained intact. John Floyd Thomas Jr. remains in the custody of the California Department of Corrections.

For the families of Ethel Sokoloff, Maybelle Hudson, Meriam Dodd, Evalyn Dodd, Anna Elzinga, Mary Ransom, and Flossie Lee Thomas, the resolution of the case did not arrive in time to change what grief had already done to their lives. Several of the victims' children were themselves elderly by the time the verdict came. Some of the people who had known the victims best were no longer alive to hear a jury say the words. That is the particular cruelty of cold cases — that the solving of them cannot be separated from the awareness of how long it took.

And yet. The detectives who worked those files through the early 2000s, who ran those DNA profiles, who built that case year by year — they understood something important about the nature of their obligation. The law has a long memory, or it should. The women who were killed in those Los Angeles neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s had names and faces and backyard photographs and people who loved them. The fact that the technology to identify their killer did not exist when they died does not diminish the obligation to use it when it finally arrived. The cold case unit honored that obligation. So, ultimately, did the jury.

There is something worth sitting with, in the way this case unfolded. John Floyd Thomas Jr. had, by all accounts, lived for decades in the ordinary world, aging quietly, unremarkable to his neighbors. The violence that prosecutors argued he had committed — and that a jury found him responsible for — receded into the past while he remained present. Meanwhile, the families of seven women carried that violence with them every day. That asymmetry is one of the most persistent injustices embedded in unsolved crimes: the person responsible for the harm moves forward relatively unencumbered while those harmed are anchored to the moment of loss.

The DNA changed that equation. It reached back across thirty and forty years and insisted on an accounting. The science, in that sense, became a form of memory — more precise than human recollection, resistant to the erosion of time, capable of recognizing what the human eye had long since lost the ability to see clearly.

Whether that accounting felt like justice to the families is not something that can be answered from the outside, or perhaps answered at all. Justice is a word that means different things at different distances from the wound. What can be said is that the legal process worked — eventually, imperfectly, decades late — and that seven murders that might have remained permanently unsolved instead found their way into a courtroom, before a jury, and into the settled record of the law.

The women in those photographs — the ones laughing at something just out of frame, the ones caught mid-gesture at family gatherings, the ones who did not know they were being preserved for a future that would hold grief for them — those women have their verdict now. It came late. It came in the particular, formal language of a Superior Court in Los Angeles, with a jury foreman reading counts and a judge pronouncing a sentence. It is not the same as having them back.

But it is not nothing, either. After nearly forty years, it is not nothing at all.