A Bit of Solace for 2 Mothers

Friends for nearly 30 years, Mildred White and Jerri Johnson each had a daughter killed by an unknown assailant.

They helped each other cope with the pain of the brutal slayings, five years apart. Both hoped for years that justice would be done for their girls.

White and Johnson also worked hard to raise their slain daughters’ children. Each had left behind a son and daughter.

On Saturday, the bowling league partners learned that the same man, suspected serial killer Chester Dwayne Turner, 37, is believed to be responsible for both daughters’ deaths.

“Never in our wildest, wildest dreams would I have ever thought that the same person took our children,” Johnson said at a news conference called by Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton to release details of the case.

Police say they have linked Turner by DNA evidence to the slayings of 12 women between 1987 and 1998, concentrated in a 30-block swath of South Los Angeles along Figueroa Street.

Authorities say they suspect that the Locke High School dropout and onetime pizza deliveryman may be responsible for six or more additional slayings in the area and in other jurisdictions. Bratton said he expected the district attorney to charge Turner this week with 10 homicides.

Turner is serving an eight-year sentence in state prison for rape.

The Figueroa corridor slayings were part of a backlog of hundreds of unsolved cases in South Los Angeles until detectives linked them through DNA analysis.

The same evidence that implicated Turner exonerated a mentally disabled janitor who had spent nine years in prison after he was wrongly convicted of two of the homicides.

White’s daughter, Annette Ernest, was found by motorists Oct. 29, 1987, along the dirt shoulder at Grand Avenue and 106th Street. She had been raped and strangled.

Johnson’s pregnant daughter, Andrea Tripplett, was found April 2, 1993. She had been killed in the same manner as Ernest and left in a vacant building in the 7000 block of South Figueroa.

Like many grieving parents, White said she often called detectives, hoping for a hint of a break in the case. Like so many others, she was told there were no suspects.

“I had gotten to the point where I stopped draining myself emotionally and stopped calling for information,” White said.

The two grieving mothers would talk about the killings, wondering why there were no answers and understanding each other’s loss in “the little things we say,” White said.

But life went on. There were jobs and mortgages and motherless grandchildren to raise. The women also helped each other get through other tragedies.

Johnson’s son was killed in a robbery and her grandson was shot to death in her driveway, the third member of her family to be killed.

The women also shared lighter moments. They would see each other on league nights at bowling, a passion they have shared for three decades.

They talked on the phone, visited each other’s homes and did what “what friends do.”

On Friday, they talked for two hours at White’s home without a hint of what was to come next. Then Saturday morning, Johnson picked up the newspaper and saw that her daughter’s death was linked to the Turner case.

She also thought of her friend.

“When I saw the Los Angeles Times with all the names on it, I knew her daughter’s name was Annette but I didn’t know her last name.”

Johnson called White to ask.

White said the last name was Ernest. “I said, ‘Sit down.’ ”

The events added another chapter to their long friendship and provided closure for both women.

“This has been a stress on us, and now it’s over as far as who did it? Why?” White said. “We’ve talked together, cried together and we’ve been friends.”