2 accused in killings had fled state before
SANTA ANA, Calif. — Two sex offenders charged with raping and killing four California women while wearing GPS monitors had escaped parole supervision and left the state together more than once in the four years before their most recent arrest, The Associated Press learned Friday.
Steven Dean Gordon, 45, and Franc Cano, 27, were arrested together out-ofstate in 2010 and 2012 after escaping parole supervision, according to public records and officials. They were again together when they were arrested in April and charged with working in tandem to sexually assault and murd e r four California women, raising questions about the effectiveness of their parole supervision.
Earlier this month, Senate P resident Pro Te m Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, asked the inspector general of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to review the monitoring of both men, as well as to review the overall monitoring of sex offender parolees and, in particular, homeless parolees. Both Cano and Gordon were homeless.
“It’s awful. It makes me furious,” Jodi Pier-Estepp, the mother of victim Jarrae Nykkole Estepp, said Friday when told of the earlier arrest. “If California was doing their job, my daughter would still be alive and so would those other girls.”
In 2010, Cano cut off his GPS device and fled to Alabama, where he was arrested with Gordon, said Luis Patino, spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Parole records obtained by the AP under a state Public Records Act request show he and Gordon were sent back to prison for five months.
The two repeated the feat again two years later, when both clipped off their electronic ankle bracelets and took a bus to Las Vegas using assumed names. They stayed at the Circus Circus Hotel & Casino for two weeks before they were arrested, according to court documents.
Both men pleaded not guilty last week in Orange County to raping and killing Estepp and three other women.
Defense lawyers representing Gordon and Cano now and the lawyers who represented them at the parole board hearing in 2010 did not return phone messages or emails seeking comment Friday evening.
The GPS devices are not intended to prevent crime among those wearing them and parole agents would have no way of knowing the two were together, said Patino, the corrections spokesman.