Steven Dean Gordon Sentenced to Death for Killing Four Orange County Women
He and Franc Cano were registered sex offenders wearing GPS ankle monitors. Three of the women have never been found.
Published
Steven Dean Gordon smiled as he walked into the Santa Ana courtroom on Friday, February 3, 2017. The room was full of the families of the four women he had kidnapped and killed, and before the day was out Orange County Superior Court Judge Patrick H. Donahue had done what Gordon himself had asked for since his trial began: he sentenced him to death. Gordon, 48, of Anaheim, a registered sex offender, had been found guilty by a jury on December 15, 2016, of four counts of special-circumstances murder, with enhancements for kidnapping and multiple murders. On December 21 the same jury had voted for death. The judge confirmed it and ordered him taken to death row at San Quentin.
The four women were Kianna Jackson, 20; Josephine Vargas, 34; Martha Anaya, 28; and Jarrae Nykkole Estepp, 21. According to the district attorney's office, Gordon took Jackson from Santa Ana on October 6, 2013, Vargas on October 24 and Anaya on November 12, and Estepp from west Anaheim on March 13, 2014. Each was driven to the same paint and body shop in Anaheim, where Gordon and another registered sex offender, Franc Cano, both homeless, camped out behind the building. Authorities said the women had ties to prostitution.
Both men wore GPS ankle monitors as conditions of their supervision, and the devices were what undid them. On March 14, 2014, Anaheim police were called to a recycling plant in east Anaheim, where a woman's body had turned up on a conveyor belt. Detectives identified her as Jarrae Estepp, ran a GPS check of registered sex offenders, and found Cano. Gordon was identified soon after, and the case widened to the three women who had vanished in Santa Ana the autumn before. Their bodies have never been found.
Gordon fired his public defender and represented himself, and he never asked the jury for mercy. "If you kill four people like this in cold blood, you deserve to die," he told them. "I believe that." He admitted taking part in most of the abduction murders but insisted Cano had been the one who hunted down and killed the women, and he blamed the parole and probation officers who had been supervising them both.
At sentencing he spoke again. "I am sorry for everything," he said, and then conceded that the apology was hollow beside what the women had gone through. "I truly am sorry. I know it doesn't mean anything, but I am sorry." He wiped away tears as the mothers took their turns. Herlinda Salcedo, speaking through a translator, said Martha Anaya had been a responsible mother who left two children behind. "Every day when they ask about their mother, I tell them their mother is another star in the sky," she said. She also read a statement from Martha's 12-year-old sister: "She also told me not to talk to strangers, now I realize why." Priscilla Vargas told Gordon she could never forgive or forget him, "But I hope God will." Kathy Menzies said her daughter, Kianna, would not see her younger brother graduate from high school that year, and that she still missed Kianna's "crazy, quirky" text messages. Jodi Estepp-Pier, Jarrae's mother, said watching her daughter's killer through the trial had been hard. "She was beautiful, and I'm so glad you can never do this to another woman ever again."
Franc Cano, then 30, had been indicted alongside Gordon by the grand jury on October 2, 2014, on four counts of special-circumstances murder and four counts of forcible rape, and prosecutors were seeking the death penalty against him too. On the day Gordon was sentenced, Cano was still awaiting trial, and he had not been convicted of anything. Gordon's sentence carried its own uncertainty: California had the largest death row in the country but had not executed anyone since 2006.
What this story covers. The sentence, the dates of the indictment, verdict and penalty vote, the charges against Franc Cano, the victims' ages and the dates and places they were taken, the discovery of Jarrae Estepp's body and the GPS check, and the words of Herlinda Salcedo, her daughter's sister and Jodi Estepp-Pier come from the Orange County District Attorney's press release of February 3, 2017. Gordon's courtroom statements, the other family statements, his trial remarks, and the note on California's death row come from the CBS News and Associated Press report of the same day; the judge's name and the order sending Gordon to San Quentin come from KTLA's report of the Los Angeles Times story. The account of how the women were taken and killed is the prosecution's case as proved against Gordon; against Cano it was, at this date, an accusation only. Reports differ on Martha Anaya's age (28 in the district attorney's release, 27 in the Los Angeles Times); the release is followed here.
Sources
- Registered Sex Offender Sentenced to Receive Death Penalty for Special-Circumstances Murder of Four Women After Kidnapping the Victims, Orange County District Attorney's Office
- Calif. sex offender who killed 4 women while on GPS is sentenced to death, CBS News / Associated Press
- Convicted Orange County Serial Killer Sentenced to Death, KTLA (Los Angeles Times report)
Related News
- December 15, 2016: Steven Dean Gordon Found Guilty of Murdering Four Orange County Women