A tube of caulking on a trash-filled conveyor belt where a prostitute’s body was found provided the break investigators needed to tie two suspects to her rape-murder and that of three other women in Anaheim and Santa Ana, according to a grand jury indictment transcript released Monday.
Investigators were stumped about the disappearances of three of the victims, and the clues that ultimately helped lead the detectives to transients Steven Dean Gordon, 45, and Franc Cano, 28, came when Jarrae Nykkole Estepp’s body was discovered at a recycling facility in Anaheim on March 14.
The two are also accused of killing Kianna Jackson, 20, of Las Vegas, and Josephine Vargas, 34, and Martha Anaya, 28, both of Santa Ana. Their bodies were never found, and investigators ultimately determined that attempting to excavate the two landfills where they were probably dumped — in Sylmar and Brea — would be too difficult and unlikely to produce results.
Detectives did not even initially know the identity of the body found in the recycling facility, but a tattoo with the name of the 21-year-old victim’s mother helped them solve that part of the puzzle.
Anaheim police Detective Bruce Linn jumped onto the conveyor belt to see how the waste was sifted and analyze the trash around Estepp’s body to see if it yielded clues. A tube of caulking led them to Boss Body and Paint, 3421 E. La Palma Ave., where investigators learned Gordon parked his RV and sometimes worked odd jobs.
And when investigators learned the victim had been raped, Linn and his partner, Julissa Trapp, decided to check for registered sex offenders in the area, Senior Deputy District Attorney Larry Yellin told the grand jury.
A witness told investigators that Cano, also a registered sex offender, would stay with Gordon in his RV, and the records of his movements via a GPS tracking device put Cano near the site of Estepp’s last phone call the afternoon before her body was found, according to grand jury testimony.
At that point, the detectives had a hunch that Estepp’s case may be linked to the disappearance of the three other women, so they checked the victims’ cell phone records.
“Each time, Mr. Cano’s bracelet goes right to where these girls are last seen,” Yellin told the grand jury.
Despite being registered sex offenders, the suspects’ DNA was not in any law enforcement database, Yellin said. That prompted detectives to set up a ruse, asking Cano to come in to answer some questions about a “white guy” he was seen talking to.
The man in question was Gordon, but they did not let on they already knew who it was or that the two men were under surveillance. They collected Cano’s DNA from a water bottle and matched it to the rape kit done on Estepp, according to the grand jury testimony.
Gordon’s DNA was also matched to Estepp’s rape, according to the grand jury testimony.
According to the indictment, investigators also have text messages indicating the two discussed killing Estepp. Gordon was allegedly reluctant to kill her because she was “too pretty,” prompting Cano to remind him that if he didn’t, then he would have to find a way to remove their DNA from the victim’s body, according to the evidence presented to the grand jury.
Cano allegedly suggested “happy hands” to Gordon as a way to solve the problem, meaning strangling the victim.
When Gordon was arrested, he initially tried to take the fall for everything, claiming that in each case, he just wanted to have sex with the victims, but things got out of hand for one reason or another and the killings were “crimes of passion,” according to the grand jury testimony.
At one point during the 13 1/2-hour interview with Gordon, he said he wanted to speak to Cano, but Trapp lied to him and said Cano didn’t want to talk to him, according to her testimony. That “triggered” Gordon to change his tune and say that both of them were along for the picking up of the prostitutes and the killings, according to the detective.
The two paid to have sex with Estepp, and when they were done, Gordon asked Cano to leave and told the victim he wanted her to “make love to him like he was her boyfriend,” according to Trapp’s grand jury testimony.
Estepp “complied,” but when Cano later woke them up and Gordon asked her to do it again, she said she wanted to leave, Trapp testified. The detective said a fight ensued, with Estepp spraying both men with Mace.
“Gordon mentioned that they had a really hard time killing her,” Trapp testified.
Left unanswered in the grand jury testimony is how exactly the two men were allowed to spend time with each other, since it would normally be a violation of the terms of their release. There was about a 10-day period when Gordon was segueing from federal to state monitoring when one of the murders took place, according to the grand jury testimony.
The two defendants also appeared to know how to avoid raising red flags with their monitors as they stayed within the cities they were allowed to frequent.
Cano was convicted in 2008 of lewd and lascivious acts on a child younger than 14, while Gordon has two convictions from 1992 for lewd and lascivious acts on a child younger than 14, as well as kidnapping his estranged wife in 2002.
The men pleaded guilty last year to failing to register as sex offenders in Nevada and were sentenced to time served in custody, according to federal court documents. They both had their cases sent back to Orange County.
The two men had cut off their GPS devices before going to Las Vegas, officials said. They were put on lifetime supervised release and were again tracked with GPS monitors.
— City News Service