A US serial killer dubbed the "Grim Sleeper" and convicted of murdering nine women and a teenage girl should face the death penalty, a jury in Los Angeles has decided.

The jury had been asked whether Lonnie Franklin Jr, 63, who was convicted of 10 murders, should face the death penalty or life in prison.

The verdict must be formerly upheld by a judge at a sentencing hearing in August.

Franklin, a former bin man, became known as the Grim Sleeper because of an apparent 14-year gap between two spates murders, although police have since claimed to have connected him to other unsolved killings.

He targeted women, some of whom were prostitutes or cocaine addicts.

Following a three-month trial, he was convicted on 5 May of shooting seven women to death between August 1985 and September 1988, then strangling a 15-year-old girl and strangling or shooting two other women in a second round of killings between March 2002 and January 2007.

The jury also convicted Franklin of attempted murder for an attack on an 11th victim, Enierta Washington, who survived being shot in the chest, raped, pushed out of a car and left for dead in 1988.

Ms Washington testified against him at the trial.