The body of a young woman came down a conveyor belt at a recycling plant in Anaheim on March 14, 2014. Police identified her from a tattoo on the back of her neck: Jarrae Nykkole Estepp, twenty-one, from Oklahoma City, who had arrived in California only days before. A fingerprint on a can of foam dumped with her led to a window installer who had been working that day on a storefront next to the auto shop where one of the monitored men worked. Then they searched a database of registered sex offenders who were wearing electronic monitors, and found one man whose tracker had placed him where all four of the women who had recently vanished were last seen.
That was Franc Cano. Detectives turned to Steven Dean Gordon after a search of Cano's phone showed the two men texting constantly. On the night Estepp died a message went from Gordon's phone to Cano's saying it was the best one yet. DNA from Estepp's body matched both of them.
Gordon was born on February 3, 1969 in Lynwood, California and grew up poor in Norwalk, a short boy who was bullied and grew aggressive. He finished Santa Fe High School in 1988 and went to work as a handyman in the fast food outlets at Disneyland, where he met Lanai Lewis and played on the company softball team. In 1992 his sister accused him of molesting her son. He pleaded guilty, tried to withdraw the plea, was convicted of lewd and lascivious acts with a child under fourteen and served fifteen months, and he has always said the accusation was invented. He married Lewis on February 22, 1995, and they had a daughter two years later; he carried mail at night for the Orange County Register and washed cars by day.
The family moved to Riverside, and by his wife's account he grew volatile, threatening suicide and talking of hiring someone to kill him for the life insurance. She left in 2001 and divorced him. That August he repainted his car, changed its plates, lured their daughter into it at a Riverside church with a promise of candy, forced his ex-wife in at the point of a stun gun, tied her up and drove to Nevada. She talked her way into a phone call to her parents, police found them, and in April 2002 he was convicted on two counts of kidnapping and sentenced to ten years; a rape count was dropped. Paroled in February 2010 with an ankle monitor, he got a job at an Anaheim auto shop through a supervisor he had known in prison, and there he met Franc Cano, who was twenty-three.
Cano was born in Compton on July 22, 1986. In 2006 his family caught him molesting his nine-year-old niece; he pleaded guilty the next year, a conviction some accounts date to 2008, and was paroled in October 2009 with a monitor of his own. Both men were registered sex offenders, both were homeless, and for a time they slept together in Gordon's Toyota 4Runner.
They had absconded together twice before. In 2010 they cut off their monitors and fled to Alabama, where federal agents soon caught them. In 2012 they did it again, took a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas under false names and spent about two weeks at the Circus Circus casino before they were arrested on May 8; Cano got ten months in federal prison and Gordon eight in state prison. When they came out they were jobless and homeless, and they drifted together.
By 2013 Gordon was living in a recreational vehicle in an industrial part of Anaheim. The two men drove around looking for women, and that is where they brought them. Kianna Rae Jackson, twenty, from Las Vegas, was last seen on October 6, 2013; Josephine Monique Vargas, thirty-four, on October 24; Martha Anaya, twenty-eight, on November 12. Jarrae Estepp was twenty-one. All four had ties to prostitution. Only Estepp's body has ever been found.
They were arrested in Anaheim on April 11, 2014. In a round of questioning in late April that lasted more than thirteen hours, Gordon confessed to five killings, one more than he would be charged with, but could not remember the fifth woman's name, and she has never been identified. He said he lured the women into his car with Cano in the back seat and drove to a vacant lot near the auto shop, where both men assaulted and strangled them. He gave two versions of Cano's part: in one Cano barely knew what was coming, in the other he was a full accomplice.
Both men were indicted on four counts of murder with special circumstances and four of forcible rape. The rape charges against Gordon were later dropped. He was tried alone, represented himself, and a recorded interview in which he described his part in the killings was played to the jury. He blamed the authorities as much as himself, telling the court he had no defense and that he had put people on the stand who were as responsible as he and his co-defendant were, because they had not done their jobs.
He was convicted on December 15, 2016 of four counts of first degree murder, with the special circumstances of multiple murder and murder in the course of a kidnapping.
During the penalty deliberations a juror told the others she could not vote for death. Judge Patrick Donahue interviewed her and said he believed she was not honoring her promise to decide on the evidence. Gordon, conducting his own defense, asked for her removal, and gave his reason: if she stayed and the other eleven voted for death, the case would be overturned on appeal, and he did not want that. Minutes later the jury announced that it had reached a verdict. It recommended death.
He was sentenced on February 3, 2017. He smiled as he came into the courtroom, which was full of the women's families, and then apologized, saying the words were hollow next to what the women had been through but that he was sorry. The mother of one of them said she still had sleepless nights.
Cano was tried separately and had pleaded not guilty. In December 2022, eight years after the arrests, he pleaded guilty to all of it and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
No decision on Gordon's automatic appeal has been published. The case is cited in reporting about the failures of the monitoring system: two men were being tracked by the state throughout, and the record of that tracking is what convicted them.