Steven Dean Gordon

Steven Dean Gordon was born on February 3, 1969, in Lynwood, California, but his family moved to Norwalk shortly after his birth. He spent most of his childhood and youth in poverty, and due to some health problems, Gordon had to skip one year of school. While at school, he was considered unpopular and occasionally bullied due to his short stature, which led him to develop an overtly aggressive demeanor and a Napoleon complex. While he initially pleaded guilty to the charge, he later retracted it, which resulted in a guilty verdict and a sentence of 15 months imprisonment. Gordon insisted on his innocence, claiming that he had only pleaded guilty because his girlfriend threatened to break up with him if he didn't, and that his sister had made the accusation up. He lured his daughter into his car with the promise of giving her candy, then threatened Lewis with a stun gun and forced her inside. After tying up and gagging her, Gordon drove out of the state to Nevada. A few days later, Lewis managed to lower his guard by pretending to forgive him, whereupon he allowed her to call her parents. Upon learning of her whereabouts, Lewis' parents informed the authorities, who located them and arrested Gordon. He was subsequently charged with two counts of kidnapping, with one charge of rape supposedly committed against his wife being dropped due to lack of evidence. In April 2002, Gordon was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. Gordon was paroled in February 2010, but was forbidden from approaching his family or places where children gathered, and had to wear an ankle bracelet monitor. After his release, Gordon contacted Ian Pummell, his supervisor, and using the fact that they were friendly during his incarceration, he was offered a job at a local auto shop. Whilst working there, Gordon met 23-year-old Franc Cano. Meeting Franc Cano Cano, a native of Compton, was born on July 22, 1986. Like Gordon, he grew up in an impoverished household and suffered from health issues such as chronic asthma and eczema as a child. Due to this, he was frequently bullied by other children in the neighborhood, who spread rumors that he had HIV. In 1994, his family moved to a trailer park in Garden Grove. In 2006, Cano was caught molesting his nine-year-old niece during a visit to his relatives' house to play video games, after which they called the police. According to police reports, when questioned, he told the officers that he was sexually frustrated because he was a virgin and was unpopular with girls. The following year, he pleaded guilty to one count of child sexual abuse and received a 2-year prison sentence. After serving 16 months, Cano was paroled in October 2009, and like Gordon, was prohibited from approaching both his relatives and children and had to wear an ankle bracelet monitor. Owing to these circumstances, he moved into a motel in Anaheim, with his parents paying his rent. Despite their age difference, Gordon and Cano soon became close friends. As he had issues finding a place to live, Gordon resorted to sleeping in his Toyota 4Runner, and after learning that his new friend had the same issue, he invited him to sleep in the car as well. Being unemployed, Cano often visited the auto shop where Gordon worked and shared his lunch, which was brought to him daily by his parents. Some of Gordon's co-workers suspected that the pair were in an intimate relationship, but Gordon denied it, insisting that they were just close friends. In 2010, the pair cut off their ankle bracelets and fled to Alabama, where they were quickly caught by federal agents. They repeated this tactic again in 2012, before boarding a Greyhound bus bound for Las Vegas, where they spent the following two weeks relaxing and having fun at the Circus Circus casino. On May 8, they were tracked down and arrested for a parole violation, with Cano being sentenced to 10 months in federal prison while Gordon was sentenced to eight in state prison. Upon being released the following year, Gordon and Cano began to spend more time together, and as they were now left jobless and homeless, began to travel around. == Exposure ==

On April 11, 2014, Gordon and Cano were arrested in Anaheim on murder charges. This stemmed from an investigation launched on March 14 of that year, after local police received a call from a recycling center whose employees had discovered the body of a woman among a pile of trash on a conveyor belt. The victim was identified as 21-year-old Jarrae Nykkole Estepp, a sex worker from Oklahoma City who had arrived in the state just days prior. Not long after, investigators from Santa Ana contacted their colleagues in Anaheim and launched a joint investigation into the disappearances of three other women: 34-year-old Josephine Monique Vargas (last seen October 24, 2013), 28-year-old Martha Anaya (last seen November 12, 2013) and 20-year-old Las Vegas native Kianna Rae Jackson (last seen October 6, 2013). Fingerprints were found on a used can of foam, and an examination determined that it belonged to a resident of Anaheim who worked as a plastic window installer. On the day Estepp's corpse was supposedly dumped inside, the man was installing windows on a storefront next to the auto shop where Steven Gordon worked. While reviewing a database of sex offenders with ankle bracelet monitors, the investigators learned that both Gordon and Cano were at each respective location when each respective victim disappeared, which included the dumpster. In late April 2014, during an interrogation that lasted more than 13 hours, Gordon confessed to committing five murders, but as he could not remember the fifth victim's name, her identity could not be established. Initially, he provided investigators with two different versions of how things had transpired: in the first one, he insisted that he premeditated the killings and that Cano had minimal involvement, as he did not know what would happen once they got into the car. This greatly angered Gordon, who subsequently attacked, raped and killed her. In addition, another piece of evidence was a transcript of text messages that was seized from both men's phones. In late November 2014, both Gordon and Cano were charged with the four murders in a preliminary hearing. == Trial and imprisonment ==

From the beginning, it was decided that Gordon and Cano would be tried separately. The former's trial began on November 16, 2016, with him firing his state-provided attorney and instead choosing to represent himself. Shortly before the trial's beginning, the Orange County Prosecutor's Office offered a plea deal: in exchange for pleading guilty to the murder charges, they would drop the rape charges and not seek the death penalty, but Gordon rejected their proposal. The prosecution's main evidence at trial were the DNA test conducted on Estepp's body; computer records of the ankle bracelet monitor information and a print of the text messages exchanged with Cano, during which the pair discussed their victims, as well as how to kidnap and murder them. On December 15, Gordon was found guilty on all counts by jury verdict, but remained calm and unresponsive during the proceedings. Gordon himself praised the jury for their decision, refused to ask for leniency from the court, and expressed apparent remorse for his actions. In April 2017, Anaheim police claimed to have identified Gordon's fifth victim. In his original statements, he had claimed that she was a black sex worker the pair had picked up in Compton in mid-February 2014, and that she was short, slender, in her early 20s, with black hair and several tattoos. After investigating many missing persons reports, the potential victim was identified as 19-year-old Sable Alexandria Pickett, who was declared missing on February 14, 2014. According to her family, Pickett had graduated from Compton High School in 2013 and planned to enlist in the Army, but after she was rejected, she left home and became a sex worker in the Compton area. == See also ==