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Steven Dean Gordon Found Guilty of Murdering Four Orange County Women

Jurors deliberated for about an hour. GPS ankle monitors had tied Gordon and his co-defendant to the women's last known locations.

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Illustration of an empty jury box with gray chairs in a wood-paneled courtroom, a water pitcher on the counsel table. Not the actual courtroom.

The jury in Santa Ana needed about an hour. On Thursday, December 15, 2016, an Orange County jury found Steven Dean Gordon guilty of four counts of special-circumstances murder, with enhancements for kidnapping and multiple murders, in the deaths of four women. As the verdicts were read, the women's relatives held hands in the courtroom and closed their eyes. Some trembled; some cried. Gordon, 47, a registered sex offender who had fired his public defender and represented himself, showed no emotion.

The women were Kianna Jackson, 20, Josephine Monique Vargas, 34, and Martha Anaya, 28, who went missing in Santa Ana in late 2013, and Jarrae Nykkole Estepp, 21, whose body was found at a recycling center in Anaheim in March 2014. All four, authorities said, had links to prostitution. Only Estepp was ever found, and it was her body that broke the case open. Investigators traced the men through the GPS ankle monitors both were required to wear, which placed them at the women's last known locations. At the time of the killings, according to grand jury testimony, Gordon was living in an RV in an industrial area of Anaheim, where the women were brought, and he wore his monitor during at least three of the murders.

He did not deny it. The jury watched a recorded interview in which he confessed to the police his role in the killings. He and his co-defendant, Franc Cano, 30, had both been registered as sex offenders after separate convictions for lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14, Gordon's in 1992 and Cano's in 2008; Gordon also had a kidnapping conviction from 2002. Police believed the two men had known each other since at least 2010, when Cano cut off his monitor and fled to Alabama and was arrested there with Gordon. Two years later, police said, both cut off their devices and took a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas under false names, and federal agents arrested them two weeks later. Both men had been charged with rape as well as murder, but prosecutors dropped the rape charges against Gordon without explanation.

Outside the courtroom Jodi Estepp, Jarrae's mother, spoke to the Associated Press. "I can't say it's justice but it's peace. It's a little bit of peace," she said. She believed her daughter's death had not been in vain, because her body had led to the men's capture. "I just wish they would have let her go," she said. "It's difficult to say, very difficult to say... but their killing her got closure for those other families, and they can't kill again."

The verdict made Gordon eligible for death, and the penalty phase was set to begin the following Monday, with the same jurors deciding between death and life in prison without parole. The district attorney's office had announced a year earlier, on December 11, 2015, that it would seek his execution. Cano, who had pleaded not guilty, was being tried separately; his next court date was December 29.

On December 21 the jury recommended death, and on February 3, 2017, the judge imposed it.

What this story covers. The verdict, the hour of deliberation, the scene in court, the victims' names and ages, the GPS evidence, the grand jury testimony about the RV, the confession, both men's earlier convictions and flights, the dropped rape charges, Jodi Estepp's words and Cano's status come from the Associated Press report of December 15, 2016. The counts and enhancements, the date of the death-penalty decision, the penalty recommendation and the sentencing date come from the Orange County District Attorney's release of February 3, 2017. The killings are described as the jury found them against Gordon; against Cano, at this date, they were an accusation only.

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