Sole survivor of the Grim Sleeper

LA Weekly updates the Grim Sleeper story with the tale of a survivor:

Early on Sunday, November 20, 1988, the E.R. doors crashed open at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance. A woman had been sexually assaulted and shot, and the bullet that tore through her chest had collapsed her lung and made it nearly impossible to breathe. As workers rushed the blood-drenched victim, Enietra Margette, to surgery, she could hear scattered bits of conversation between two relatives who had raced to her side at the hospital, her aunt and uncle.

Gasping for breath, she was surprised to see Superman himself peering down at her. Superman -- a doctor who looks like the late superhero actor George Reeves -- leaned close to inform Margette that he had to place a tube in her chest. "I asked him if I was going to die. He said, 'I don't know.'"

That bloody night almost 21 years ago is pivotal in helping to solve one of the greatest murder mysteries ever to face Los Angeles police: that of the Grim Sleeper serial killer. Margette, his only known survivor, is Exhibit 1. Or perhaps that honor goes to the smashed bullet dug from her torso -- a .25-caliber hunk of metal partially flattened after striking her chest bone, and now a crucial piece of evidence in LAPD's hunt for the killer.