From Disneyland Employee to Serial Killer—The Shocking Double Life
From Disneyland Employee to Serial Killer—The Shocking Double Life
Speaker 1: On March fourteenth, twenty fourteen, workers at a recycling plant
in Anaheim, California, would agust when they discovered something that
stopped them in their tracks.
Speaker 2: They thought they saw a mannequin on one of the
conveyor belts, and upon closer inspection, they realized this was
a human body.
Speaker 1: The victim was identified as twenty one year old Jerray Eastep,
a sex worker from Modesto, California.
Speaker 3: I think that this was a person who probably sadly
wrong place at the wrong time because of the nature
of her group.
Speaker 1: As police linked the killing to the disappearance of another
three missing women, Stephen Dean Gordon, a convicted pedophile, was
named as the prime suspect.
Speaker 4: Stephen Gordon is one dangerous individual. He's molested children, He's
an abductor, He's an all round predator.
Speaker 1: Gordon had formed a dangerous friendship with another sex offender,
and the pair had been on a deadly rampage.
Speaker 5: I believe he's evil because he looked these women in
the eyes, he saw them take their last breath, and
still that didn't make him feel guilty enough to stop
doing that.
Speaker 1: Stephen Dean Gordon had been unveiled as one of the
world's most evil killers. In February twenty seventeen, Stephen Dean
Gordon was sentenced to death for the murder of four
sex workers in California. His crimes had begun twenty five
years earlier, when Gordon had been working at a family
amusement park, but beneath a facade he was hiding a
ghastly secret. It was his own sister who went to
the police, accusing the twenty three year old of molesting
her son.
Speaker 6: He's convicted. He's given fifteen months in jail and is
a registered child molester.
Speaker 1: Over two decades on from his initial conviction, detectives investigating
the murder of twenty one year old sex worker Jerray
Eastep had linked Gordon to her death.
Speaker 7: It was a huge story and the media was all
out there. I can remember getting the call a body's
been found on a conveyor belt at a trash recycling facility.
Speaker 6: Gordon realizes that the net is beginning to close around him,
and he to leg it and cuts off his GPS
tracker device again and gets on a bicycle and leaves
where he's working.
Speaker 1: Officers needed to act first to prevent any more women
being murdered at the hands of Stephen Dean Gordon. This
killer's story begins on the third of February nineteen sixty
nine on the West coast of the United States of America.
Speaker 2: Stephenden Gordon was born in nineteen sixty nine in Lynwood, California,
and when he was a small child with his family
to Norwalk, California, both in southern California.
Speaker 6: It was a pretty itinerant childhood. Originally they were in
one county and then they moved to another.
Speaker 2: Santa Feck is a very suburban area south of Los Angeles,
very middle class, working class area. He went to high
school there.
Speaker 4: It seems that he was quite a sickly child. He
seemed to have a lot of health problems. It said
that he was bullied at school because of that.
Speaker 3: Doesn't sound like he's ever really made any real connections,
never really had a good circle of friends who he
could count on for support, and just really had low
self esteem as a result.
Speaker 1: Gordon's ongoing health issues also had a detrimental effect on
his academic life.
Speaker 7: He missed an entire year of school due to illness,
and when he graduated from high school, he chose not
to go any further in terms of education.
Speaker 2: When Gordon finished high school, he went to work as
a handyman at a large amusement park in the area.
While Gordon was working at this amusement park, he developed
a relationship was one of his coworkers.
Speaker 1: The park was a world famous attraction, popular destination for
families with children.
Speaker 8: Gordon had been working.
Speaker 1: There for four years before he faced a run in
with the law in the early nineties.
Speaker 7: His sister accused him of sexually assaulting her child.
Speaker 1: At first, Gordon admitted to the crime against his own nephew,
but then he went on to say he was actually innocent.
Speaker 3: He claim and his girlfriend had been the one to
force him to actually even plead guilty when he didn't
do anything at all.
Speaker 2: After that, he threatened his sister's life for filing those
charges against him.
Speaker 8: Gordon was twenty three years old at the time.
Speaker 4: It was a strange thing to do, but if he
was sexually attracted to children, it may have been difficult
for him to get access to any children other than
members of his own family. So maybe he had a report.
Speaker 9: You know, the.
Speaker 4: Child knew him. He was able to maybe threaten the child.
Speaker 7: To keep quiet.
Speaker 1: Gordon was convicted and sentenced to fifteen months in prison.
The twenty three year old was also registered as a
child molestor.
Speaker 7: When he was released, he tried to live a somewhat
normal or law abiding.
Speaker 1: Life, despite blaming his girlfriend for making him admit to
the crime in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 8: The couple went on to get married.
Speaker 2: By in nineteen ninety seven. They have a daughter, and
two years later, in the late nineties, they moved to Riverside, California.
Speaker 3: There were a lot of problems in their marriage and
just in his life in general. He was becoming more
and more irritable as the days went on because of
variety of financial and domestic issues.
Speaker 7: Shoes.
Speaker 6: His wife is trying to keep him going. He's threatening
to kill himself or hire a hit man, of all
unlikely things, to kill him so that she can get
the insurance money. It's slightly bizarre.
Speaker 4: I think this shows how out of control he felt
in life, how powerless to influence things, certainly to his
own advantage. Everything was a drama, a catastrophe for him.
Speaker 7: Things slowly started to unravel in their marriage. His wife
noticed that he had a terrible problem with anger. The
smallest thing would get him upset, and she'd had enough.
By two thousand and one, she took their daughter, She
left him, and she felt for divorce. When the divorce
proceedings started, there was an order in place that he
was not to have contact with his wife or daughter.
Speaker 1: Gordon violated that order in August two thousand and one
by turning up where he knew they would.
Speaker 8: Be when they go to church.
Speaker 6: He tempts the daughter into his car, which is repainted
and put new false number plates on, and essentially he
abducts them. Fairly terrifying in every way.
Speaker 1: Gordon lured his daughter in with sweets, then threatened his
ex with a stun gun, forcing her to get into
his car.
Speaker 6: He ties the wife up and subjectives to some kind
of ordeal.
Speaker 7: He let us guard down at one point and he
allowed his wife to make a call. She called her
parents and they, of course called police.
Speaker 6: It doesn't take long for the police to arrive, and
indeed Gordon is charged with two counts of kidnapping wife
and daughter.
Speaker 1: Stephen Dean Gordon was found guilty and sentenced to ten
years in prison. He would go on to spend eight
of those years behind bars and in February twenty ten.
Speaker 8: He was released.
Speaker 1: The forty one year old headed to Orange County, California,
an area with high rates of homelessness and poverty.
Speaker 7: And Home and Santa Anna are the two most populated
cities in Orange County. In twenty thirteen, three women completely
disappear off the streets of Santa Anna. The first one
disappears about twenty days later, Another woman disappears about twenty
days after that, another woman disappears. They're all from Santa Anna.
They all worked as prostitutes.
Speaker 6: No one certain does anything's happen to them. They could
just have decided to give up, or go to another
state or do something different.
Speaker 1: The first woman to be reported missing was twenty year
old Keanna Jackson.
Speaker 7: She was originally from Willits, California, in the Northern California area.
She did go to college after high school, but after
one semester, she decided she wanted something a little more
exciting and she moved to Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: Whilst living in Las Vegas, Keanna started earning money by
becoming a sex worker.
Speaker 2: In October twenty thirteen, Kianna Jackson took a bus from
Las Vegas to the Anaheim area, so that she could
attend a court date for a previous prostitution charge.
Speaker 6: She checks into a hotel on her way to court.
She never gets to court. She disappears literally into thin air.
Speaker 7: Her mom at the time said she didn't know her
daughter was working as a prostitute. She filed a missing
person's report with police, but police said to her that
she's an adult, so really, our hands are tied. There's
not much that we can do.
Speaker 2: The lifestyle of a sex worker is transient by nature,
and they often move around, and they don't have any records,
and they don't sign a lease for an apartment. They
often live on the street, and it's very difficult to
know whether one of these missing women has just gone
on the run or whether some harm has come to them.
Speaker 1: Seventeen days after Keana Jackson went missing, on October the
twenty third, twenty thirteen, another sex work had disappeared from
the streets of Santa Anna. Thirty four year old mother
of three, Josephine Monique Vargas.
Speaker 3: She had just attended birthday party of a family member
and then said she was going to walk to the
store to pick up some items, but they never saw
her again. Initially her husband thought that she was still
with her family, and then her family thought she was
with her husband, so there was a little bit of
a delay before reporting that she was missing.
Speaker 7: The family of Josephine Vargas got out there on the street.
They had missing persons flyers with Josephine's face on it,
and they were putting these flowers up all around the neighborhood.
Speaker 6: She's disappeared, they realize, and police acknowledged that there's been
no activity on her credit card or on her bank card.
Speaker 8: She's just gone.
Speaker 1: Fellow sex worker twenty seven year old Martha and Nyah
had seemingly known the missing woman ten years on. Martha's
eldest daughter, Melody, recalls that time.
Speaker 5: She did mention to me, one of my friends is missing.
I believe that friend might have been Josephine Monique Vargas
because it was around the time that you know that
she had gone missing. I was twelve years old, my
sister was four, about to turn five. My mom was
very close in age. I mean, she was only fifteen
years older than me, so I feel like we would
be able to joke around a lot.
Speaker 7: She's like a best friend.
Speaker 1: Twenty days after Josephine went missing on the twelfth of
November twenty thirteen, Melanie's mother, Martha, sent a text message
to her boyfriend before going out to work that day.
Her family were unaware of what Martha was doing for work.
Speaker 5: We grew up in Santa Anna. I mean Santana's known
to be like, not the greatest city in Orange County.
I would say that back then, Harbor was known to
have a lot of prostitution.
Speaker 1: Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana was where many sex workers
would wait for business. Martha and Ayah was one of
these women and felt safe being on the streets there
at night.
Speaker 5: One time, me and my mother were walking. It was
around like eight o'clock at night, and I was like,
you don't ever get scared walking alone that night, And
She's like no, because I know how to fight.
Speaker 7: She wasn't scared of anything.
Speaker 1: When Martha didn't turn up the day after she'd messaged
her boyfriend about going to work, her family knew something
was wrong. Martha would message her mother, Linda regularly throughout.
Speaker 8: The day.
Speaker 9: Casado, okay, y, no they have maybe I want to
sing mammas.
Speaker 1: Linda then had a tough decision to make how to
tell her twelve year old granddaughter that something was wrong.
Speaker 5: I had gotten home and my grandma was sitting at
the table and she was crying, and I was like,
why is she crying. Finally she told me, I haven't
heard from your mom all day.
Speaker 3: To be.
Speaker 8: Okay.
Speaker 9: Soon mast is about to see that I'm with hobn
Modestasia the Stabuscando Sumama Durante says missus.
Speaker 3: Martha was last seen in Santa Ana as well. It
was really sad because the family had just had a
very typical day with her before.
Speaker 7: They were running errands.
Speaker 3: Everything seemed normal, but she left her home without her
belongings and was never found again.
Speaker 1: Martha and Ayah's family started posting flyers around the area.
In the space of five weeks, three sex workers had
disappeared from the streets of Santa Ana.
Speaker 8: None of them had been found.
Speaker 5: Very strustful to not know what had it happened to
your loved one, the specialisty, your mom, who you're used
to seeing every day. We did have that mind that,
you know, there was a possibility that she wasn't with
us anymore, but we did have hope.
Speaker 1: On March fourteenth, twenty fourteen, in Anaheim, the neighboring city
to Santa Anna, workers at a recycling plant were shocked
to discover something unusual on one of the conveyor belts.
Speaker 6: It's an extraordinary thing to happen, but it's clearly a body.
It's clearly a woman, and she's clearly met up an
untimely end.
Speaker 1: Local reporter Eileen Freurr remembers finding out about the discovery.
Speaker 7: That was big news. That was big attention because it's
not often you have a body dump in Anaheim, So
I think that's what gathered the attention.
Speaker 1: Investigators struggle to identify who the woman was. The body
didn't belong to any of the three missing sex workscase.
A tattoo on her neck was checked against a database
held by police.
Speaker 7: It wasn't until the detectives started investigating and doing really
good police work to make that connection and identify the
body as being that of Dre Easestep.
Speaker 2: Dre eas Step twenty one, originally from Adesto, California, was
living in Anaheim, and she had a previous prostitution arrest
in Oklahoma.
Speaker 3: Jay was somebody who also frequented the Southern California area
and was known for her sex crimes and was actually
well known to the police.
Speaker 1: For this reason, Jiray east Step was now the full
sex worker known to have gone missing from the area
in five months.
Speaker 8: The four cases were now thought to be linked.
Speaker 6: Now the police are looking at something more than simply
isolated incidents in this area.
Speaker 1: Although only one body was found, the fate of the
other three women seemed clear, and.
Speaker 7: It wasn't long after that police were piecing together that
there was a serial killer involved, and then then it
blew out of everybody was covering it.
Speaker 2: Now that the police think they have a murderer of
sex workers, the natural investigative avenue is to go back
and look at other male sex offenders that are living
or frequently living, frequenting or working in those areas where
these sex workers have gone missing.
Speaker 1: With the exact locations that women were picked up, unknown
officers would struggle to narrow down whether any particular sex
offenders were involved. A breakthrough in the investigation gave them
a much needed lead.
Speaker 2: Police examined some of the rubbish that was found around
Jurrey's party on that conveyor belt.
Speaker 7: Investigators also found a tube of cocking with fingerprints on it.
They ran the fingerprints that came back belonging to a
window installer. They brought them in for questioning, and he said,
you know, after finishing a job, he would often throw
the waist in a trash band in Anaheim, right next
to a paint an autobody shop.
Speaker 1: When police looked at which registered sex offenders had frequented
that location, a name immediately came up.
Speaker 8: Frank Cardo.
Speaker 6: Frank Krno was born in nineteen eighty six in California.
He had akima and asthma as a child of the sickly.
The family are not rich. They moved to a trailer
park in nineteen ninety four. They're not conventional suburban.
Speaker 7: Frank Carno was also a convicted child predator, a convicted pedophile.
Speaker 6: Something is going on in Karno's mind and believe it
or not. In two thousand and six, at the age
of twenty, he molests his nine year old niece.
Speaker 2: When the police arrived, Knell told police that he molested
his niece because he was sexually frustrated, he was a virgin,
and he was unpopular with girls.
Speaker 1: Frank Carno had pleaded guilty to one count of child
sexual abuse and received a two year sentence. After being
in prison for sixteen months, Karno was released on parole
in October two thousand and nine. Now, in April twenty fourteen,
four and a half years after his release for the
child abuse conviction, Karno had been linked to the body
found on the conveyor belt at the recycling plug.
Speaker 7: He had been in the area of that trash ben
and he had also been in the area where dre
E Stepp's cell phone last pinged the last call that
she made.
Speaker 1: Investigators wanted more evidence that Karno was involved before they
could bring him in for questioning.
Speaker 7: They have Karno under surveillance and they also get the
permission to wiretap his cell phone so they can listen
to the calls. They can look at his text messages,
and what the police say they discover is just chilling.
Speaker 1: The text messages found on Frank Carno's phone showed that
he hadn't been acting alone. In the four and a
half years since his release from prison. Karna had struck
up a bond with another sex offender, and what they
had done together in that time was truly horrific.
Speaker 2: When the police did their analysis, they realized that Frank
Cano was in the same area as each of for
missing women when they went missing.
Speaker 1: Text messages uncovered on Carno's phone revealed that if he
was the killer, he wasn't acting alone.
Speaker 7: The conversations between him and another man, many many conversations, texts,
and the text messages detail their hunt. They're hunt for women.
Speaker 1: Investigators were able to identify the second man. He was
another convicted sex offender, forty five year old Stephen Dean Gordon.
Speaker 4: Stephen Gordon is one dangerous individual. He's not even like
a single offense predator. He's molested children, He's an abductor,
He's an all round predator.
Speaker 1: But how had these two sex offenders become friends? Twelve
years before Jiray Eastep's body was found and Kanno had
been identified as a suspect, Stephen Dean Gordon had been
sent to jail for kidnapping his wife and daughter. After
serving eight years of his sentence, Gordon was released from prison.
Speaker 2: In February of twenty ten. Gordon is released from prison
on parole with several restrictions, one that he can't go
near his family, two that he must wear an ankle
monitoring bracelet and three that he can't be present anywhere
where children gather. And also he had to register as
an official sex offender.
Speaker 3: He was on the Sexual Predators registry. He had to
wear a GPS tracker. He clearly had to check in
multiple times with his parole officer a month.
Speaker 7: It's very hard for registered sex offenders to find a
place to live to find work because they're very limited
on where they can be. So he manages to get
our jobs at this Paint not a Body shop in Anaheim,
he lived as a transient. Really, he had no place
to live. The people at that Paint Not a Body
Shop allowed him to sleep in his vehicle out in
the back of the business.
Speaker 1: It was while working at the auto shop that Stephen
Dean Gordon met twenty three year old Frank Krno. Karo
was also a registered child molester and he too had
to wear a GPS ankle monitor.
Speaker 6: He you have two men, one much older, one seventeen
years older than the other, A strike up what will
become an absolutely extraordinary friendship.
Speaker 3: I think they bonded a lot over their childhood difficulties.
Kano also suffered from multiple health issues as a child
and was also extensively bullied.
Speaker 7: They were both outsiders. They both didn't feel like they
were part of a.
Speaker 3: Unity, and I think even more so than their possibly
shared perversion for sexual predator behaviors.
Speaker 1: Gordon was living in a car at the back of
the auto shop where he worked, and with Karnos struggling
to find accommodation, Gordon invited him to live in the
vehicle with him.
Speaker 4: They both had problems building a stable life for themselves.
They were both borderline homeless the nature of their offending.
I mean they were ostracized from their family networks. They
shared this, you know, feeling that the world was against them.
Speaker 3: Conno and Gordon lived in a car together for quite
a bit of time. On the one hand, that could
really stress a relationship, even if you really liked the person.
But on the other hand, it's also a certain type
of bonding.
Speaker 8: Their clothes.
Speaker 1: This relationship led them to make a risky decision together.
Speaker 6: Gordon mcconnoe are so close and they obviously identified with
one another with the given their track records, but they
also want freedom, and in twenty ten, they both cut
off their GPS tracking devices and leave for Alabama.
Speaker 2: Those ankle bracelets give almost an immediate notification when they're
cut off, and so they didn't last long on the
rut and ultimately were apprehended by federal agents in Alabama.
Speaker 7: They got caught, of course, they were brought back. They
did some time.
Speaker 1: Gordon and Carno were both sent back to prison for
five months for breaking the terms of their parole, but
that didn't make them change their ways, and in twenty twelve,
two years after fleeing for Alabama, they repeated the same technique.
Speaker 2: Gordon and Cano do the same thing they do again.
They remove their ankle bracelets and they take off.
Speaker 3: This time they escaped to a very family themed hotel
in Vegas and basically partied it up there.
Speaker 2: They were ultimately found at a casino in Las Vegas
that kind of specializes interacting families and children, unlike most
of the other hotels and casinos in Vegas.
Speaker 8: It's not a.
Speaker 2: Coincidence that these two sex offended ended up at the
one hotel in Vegas that's known to have a bunch
of children running around.
Speaker 3: Being that they both have a history of molesting and
being a predator to children. It was probably a place
that they both felt very stimulated by because there were
so many children around and families around, and this is
another person for each of them that could share that
perversion with and could understand you and wouldn't judge you.
Speaker 1: It was two weeks before the authorities finally tracked the
two sex offenders down on this occasion. On the eighth
of May twenty twelve, both Gordon and Karno were arrested
for breaking the conditions of their parole.
Speaker 6: They're both sentenced to peerians in jail. Karno gets ten
months and Gordon gets eight, one in state prison, one
in federal. In a way, that's the cementing this extraordinary
intense relationship between these two men.
Speaker 1: Karno and Gordon were back on the streets in early
twenty thirteen, and the criminal pair were quickly reunited.
Speaker 2: They hook up and start spending much more time together,
and they start traveling around together.
Speaker 7: They're back out. They're still wearing GPS ankle bracelets to
be monitored. In Gordon's case, he was being monitored by
federal probation and in Kano's case, he was being monitored
by state parole agents.
Speaker 1: As part of their parole restrictions. Both men were ordered
to stay away from other sex offenders, including each other,
but as their GPS devices were being monitored by different agencies,
Gordon and Kano constantly being in the same location as
each other wasn't flagged.
Speaker 3: Kano and Gordon were basically living in their own altered
reality because they were spending almost all of their time
exclusively with one another.
Speaker 7: And they really bounced off of.
Speaker 3: One another in terms of their ideas and their beliefs,
And here's this person basically justifying that what you're thinking
and what you're planning is okay and maybe even welcomed,
which is really scary because.
Speaker 7: They found some kind of community with one another.
Speaker 8: Now, after the discovery of Jerrai E.
Speaker 1: STEP's body, Kano's text conversations with Gordon provided the police
with an insight into the relationship between the two predators.
Speaker 6: They examine the phone records between the two men, and
in particular, they come up with the chilling remark that
Gordon sends to Krno in the wake of the Step killing.
This is the best one yet.
Speaker 1: In the text messages, Gordon and Krno referred to the
women as cats or kitties.
Speaker 7: Gordon thought Jerrey was beautiful. He said kat is beautiful
in one of his texts, he didn't want to kill her.
The text messages between the two are just chilling as
they decide whether she's going to live or die.
Speaker 3: I think in some ways Kanno and Gordon referring to
the women that they hunted and killed as kitties. It
was that sort of feeling of predator and prey, so
kitty being innocent prey, and again that feeling of establishing
dominance and power over these women. Also, I think just
points again to the fact that they very much did
not really view these women as human beings. They did
not have any respect for them, so almost treated them
like the animals.
Speaker 1: It was clear that two men may have been preying
on women together before raping and murdering them. Police needed
to act first. They apprehended Frank Carno and then tried
to find Stephen Dean Gordon, but Gordon seemed to know
they were coming for him.
Speaker 2: Police are closing in on the body shop where Gordon works.
Gordon senses this, removes his ankle bracelet, hops on his
bike and takes off fleeing from the police.
Speaker 1: A dangerous sexual predator was on the run from the law.
Stephen Dean Gordon had a history of removing his GPS
ankle monitor and fleeing to other states. The police needed
to locate their suspect before he disappeared for good.
Speaker 2: The police catch up with them less than a quarter
mile away. We tries to jump off the bike.
Speaker 7: He doesn't make it very fary, flies over the handlebars,
and the arrest him.
Speaker 1: Gordon was taken to the station for questioning. Fellows suspect
Frank Carno was waiting for a lawyer and therefore not
talking to the police. Investigators may have expected the same
reluctance to answer questions from Gordon.
Speaker 6: After initially saying I don't want to talk, he embarks
on what amounts to the most extraordinary confession, thirteen and
a half hours of conversation in which he goes into
the most elaborate detail of what he and Karna have
done to their victims.
Speaker 7: They started to hunt down women, in particular prostitutes. They
would be cruising up and down Beach Boulevard in Orange
County and looking for the victims.
Speaker 2: Gordon tells police how he would pick up the woman
in his car while Canau was hidden in the back seat.
Once they were in the car, Canau would come up
from the back seat overpower the women. They would then
take the car and drive the women in the car
behind the auto body shop where they were kind of
camping out, where the women would then be raped by
the two of them. Gordon described how Canau would strangle
the women and he would punch them in the stomach
to make sure the air got out quicker so that
they would die quicker.
Speaker 7: They kidnapped them, they raped them, they killed them, and
they threw their bodies out.
Speaker 1: During the interrogation, Gordon seemed to revel in sharing the
details of the full murders.
Speaker 2: There were times where he would get frustrated with the
police for asking him questions about the victims out of order,
and he would actually physically rearrange the photographs of the
women that they laid out for him so that they
were in the order in which he abducted and murdered them.
He was actually showing almost a sick pride in what
he had done by correcting them and getting it right,
because he knew he wanted them to get it right.
Speaker 1: There was another shock in store for investigators when Gordon
revealed some unexpected information.
Speaker 7: He also during that time, brought up a fifth victim.
He said, you're missing one. The Anaheim police detective said,
you know, she didn't want to show shock, but she
was shocked. Everyone was shocked because they didn't know that
there was another person missing.
Speaker 6: No one knows who that was or where it was.
There's no evidence and again snowbody.
Speaker 1: Only one body had been found, but with Gordon's confessions,
investigators were sure that all four missing women had been killed.
Frank Carno and Stephen Dean Gordon were both charged with
four counts of murder. Melody Anayah remembers being given news
about her mother Martha.
Speaker 5: As soon as I found out how my mom was murdered,
I couldn't help but to picture like her last moments.
Speaker 7: It just made me very angry.
Speaker 5: I had read about how she was the one that
fought the most for her life, and the flashbacks of
her telling me I know how to find like I'm okay,
like nothing's going to happen to me came into my
head and it made me think, like, wow, you never
really think this kind of stuff is going to happen
to you, but there's always that chance.
Speaker 1: One of the hardest things Linda had to do was
to tell Martha's five year old daughter the truth.
Speaker 7: John Timpo tu mamastan mixico he yea.
Speaker 8: Pero yeah.
Speaker 9: Pasarons los disdains Muso the Oni where Gezee has again
sin Sumama.
Speaker 1: Gordon's trial commenced on November the sixteenth, twenty sixteen. The
forty seven year old decided to represent himself in court.
Speaker 6: But this time his story changes. He says, no, no,
Karno is responsible for planning this. I was merely following on.
I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't the initiator.
Speaker 7: This is like the ultimate control for Gordon. He's in
control of the courtroom. Everybody's listening to what he has
to say say, everybody's watching him. He can call who
he wants to the stand. To me, it seemed like
he relished in the moment.
Speaker 6: During his trial, Gordon blamed disprobation officers for not keeping
it closer on him and tracking him. He believed that
they should be monitoring me more carefully.
Speaker 2: They both knew that they shouldn't be consorting with each other.
They both knew that was a violation of their parole,
and they kept doing it anyway. For him to confess
to having murdered all these women and then try to
blame all these other people for it is a little disingenuous.
Speaker 1: Melody Aniah, who is now fifteen years old, was living
out of the country during Gordon's trial.
Speaker 5: I really wish I would have attended.
Speaker 7: I had a lot to say.
Speaker 5: He watched women die, so I would have just wanted
to express to him, like how it affected me, just
to let him hear it. I would have just wanted
to let that out and let him know. You know,
I don't have my mom anymore. My little sister doesn't
have her mom anymore.
Speaker 7: Mas grande madri.
Speaker 9: But they're only who especial arenes.
Speaker 1: On December the fifteenth, twenty sixteen, the jury returned their verdict.
Speaker 7: It took jurors just about an hour before coming back
with the decision on Stephen Gordon. Before the jurors came in,
he laughed a little.
Speaker 6: The jury don't hesitate in confirming Gordon's guilt, and in
a most remarkable outburst, he then says to the court
and I quote, if you people like this in cold blood,
you deserve to die. I believe that, and went on.
My actions are evil and horrible, and you're going to
get your justice very shortly.
Speaker 1: On February third, twenty seventeen, Stephen Dean Gordon was sentenced
to death.
Speaker 6: He doesn't complain at all when he's sentenced to death.
In fact, he accepts it. He's sent to death row
in San Quentin in California.
Speaker 5: Gordon he got the death penalty, but obviously to me
and the other families, that's not fair. Like you know,
we're never going to get our loved ones back, It'll
never really be fair.
Speaker 1: Frank Carno was tried separately, and in twenty twenty two
he was handed his punishment.
Speaker 6: Krno finally pleads guilty to the four rapes and murders,
but he's done a deal with the district attorney that
if he confesses and pleads guilty, they won't ask for
the death penalty, so is effectively saying whole life in prison.
Speaker 1: Justice may have been served in the eyes of the law,
but the families were left with unanswered questions.
Speaker 7: The only body that was ever found was Jarre's. Bodies
of the three other women were never found. They are
believed to be in the Brea landfill and in fact,
Martha and Aya's family, that's where they held a memorial
for was at the landfill. That was the last known
place where they believe she is come. Mivida can be
others and dances.
Speaker 9: Issundolor cannot cover.
Speaker 1: During his police interview, Gordon had confessed to an additional murder.
Speaker 7: The fifth victim was identified as Sable Picket, nineteen years
old from Compton, which is located in Los Angeles County.
Her body was never found either.
Speaker 2: People like Gordon are evil. They're just they're killing machines.
They spend their whole lives doing this until they're caught.
That's kind of the easiest way to think of these people.
They're just evil personify.
Speaker 1: Five women lost their lives at the hands of Stephen
Dean Gordon. If he hadn't been caught when he was,
there may have been more victims.
Speaker 5: I believe he's evil because you know, he looked these
women in the eyes, he saw them take their last breath,
and still that didn't make him feel guilty enough to
stop doing that. I'm glad this isn't gonna happen to
any other women. The only thing as selfish as it is,
like I wish it wouldn't have been my mom, the
person that I needed more than anything in this world.
Speaker 1: Stephen Dean Gordon sexually molested a child and then formed
a bond with another child predator. Working together, they acted
out their sick perversions, resulting in abduction, rape, and the
murder of five innocent women.
Speaker 8: Stephen Dean Gordon will
Speaker 1: Forever be known as one of the world's most evil killers.