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LA Weekly's Christine Pelisek, who broke the story about LA's very own serial killer, the "Grim Sleeper," got an amazing exclusive with Enietra Margette (fake name), the one person who survived his attacks that left 11 people dead over a 20-plus year span. Margette tells how she was walking to a friends house in 1988 when a man in an orange Ford Pinto with a white racing stripe on the hood began talking to her.
From inside, the driver, a black man in his early 30s, asked her if she wanted a ride. He looked neat. Tidy. Kind of geeky. He wore a black polo shirt tucked into khaki trousers. She declined the offer. He kept asking her. She refused again, thinking, “I like chocolate milk, but he wasn’t my type.”
“He told me, ‘That is what is wrong with you black women. You think you are all that,” she says. The two traded friendly barbs back and forth. But his comment, which she took as a playful diss, prompted her to change her mind. Just 30, she enjoyed hitchhiking in those days, and accepted his offer of a ride for a few blocks to her friend’s house. Despite the drug violence raging in neighborhoods around her, it wasn’t neat-looking strangers who had her concerned. “It wasn’t a worry,” she recalls.
So she got in, but soon discovered he may have mistook her for a well-known prostitute--something she was mistaken for a few days earlier too. He eventually shot her, sexually assaulted her and left her for dead. The strong woman that she was, she got up and struggled to get to her friends house to get help. She was sent to the hospital and survived after a three week stay there. The bullet in her chest was recovered and police soon discovered the ballistic markings matched that of other killings. But Margette was kept in the dark that she was the only witness to the notorious serial killer until recently.
