The Digital Leash: Serial Murder Under Government Supervision

0:00 Two registered sex offenders, both wearing GPS ankle monitors, both under active government supervision. And while the system was technically watching every move they made, they killed at least five women. Today, we're going inside the case that broke one of the biggest myths in corrections. There's a body on a conveyor belt.

0:43 March 14, 2014, East and a Hime recycling facility. Doctors are sorting through a mountain of garbage rolling past them on a fast-moving belt when they see her. Jaree Nicole Eastep, 21 years old, a young mother originally from Oklahoma, discarded in the trash like she was nothing. As devastating as it is, it is also a mistake. The one thing that went wrong for two men who had been running a very clean operation for five months. This up until that Friday morning, nobody had noticed anything at all. Let's go back to the beginning. Steven Dean Gordon grew up in Linwood, California. He was a small kid.

1:24 He was sick all the time, held back a year in school and he was bullied for most of his childhood. And it's the kind of bullying that either breaks you or it turns you into something mean. For Gordon, it went the second direction. By 1992, he had his first conviction for Lude and LaVaceus acts on a child under 14. He eventually tried to build something resembling a normal life. Married a woman named Lewis in 1995, had her daughter named Kayla in 1997. He worked two jobs. But the financial stress and the instability ate through the domestic routine pretty fast. He started making threats, talking about suicide. At one point, discussing how to fake his own death so his family could collect on his life insurance.

2:08 Which, as far as schemes go, that's a lot of effort. Lewis left him in 2001 and got a protective order. Gordon's response to that was to repaint his car, swap the license plates, follow the family to a church in Riverside and show up on Sunday morning with a stun gun. He kidnapped his ex-wife and their four year old daughter in August of 2001, bound and gag Lewis, drove them both to Nevada. He was convicted of two counts of kidnapping in April 2002 and sentenced to 10 years, paroled in February 2010 with a GPS ankle monitor and restrictions on where he could go and who he could associate with.

2:50 Frank Caino was born in Compton in 1986, 17 years younger than Gordon. Chronic asthma, severe exema, a child defined by isolation. Kids in his neighborhood spread rumors that he had AIDS at HIV. His family moved to a trailer park in Garden Grove when he was about eight, but by then the social damage was already settling in deep. In 2006, he was caught molesting a nine year old niece at a family gathering. During the police interview, he talked openly about being a virgin, about his complete inability to connect with women. But the loneliness that had been eating him up for years, he pleaded guilty in 2007 served 16 months and was paroled in October 2009 with his own GPS ankle monitor and a lifetime sex offender registration requirement.

3:41 These two meet at an Anaheim auto body shop where Gordon had landed work through a former supervisor. The connection was immediate and completely pathological despite the age difference there. One was aggressive, dominant and looking for someone to control. Caino was younger, sickly, socially invisible and looking for some protection. Co-workers thought they were in a relationship. What they actually were, more precisely, was two people whose worst qualities locked together like something out of a criminology textbook. Both homeless, both living out of Gordon's Toyota 4 runner, both wearing ankle monitors, were prohibited by the terms of their release from associating with each other.

4:25 And nobody caught it. The federal system watched Gordon. The state system watched Caino. Nobody's software was comparing notes. There were no proximity alerts, no cross agency flags. The GPS trackers knew exactly where both of them were every minute and the two systems were completely blind to each other. They had also already demonstrated what they thought of those ankle monitors. In November 2010, Caino physically cut his off and Gordon walked away from his parole supervision early. They made it to Alabama before anyone caught them. Back to prison, back out, and then in 2012, they cut the monitors off again, boarded a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas under false names and spent two weeks there before federal agents tracked them down.

5:11 Both times, the consequence was basically a return to the same electronic monitoring program. Keeping these two had shown their hand multiple times and the house kept dealing them back in. By October 2013, they had developed a system. They were living in an RV parked behind the auto body shop at Anaheim. They'd figured out that municipal trash pickup ran on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So they went hunting on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Commercial bins would be emptied before decomposition at time to alert anyone. One would drive. Caino hid in the back seat. When a woman got in, Caino came forward.

5:53 Keana Jackson was 20 years old from Las Vegas visiting Santa Ana. Taken October 6, 2013. Her mother Kathy and grandmother Diane later spoke about what it meant to lose her before she got to watch her little brother grow up. Josephine Vargas was 34. Santa Ana resident. Taken October 24. Martha Ania was 28. A mother Taken November 12. Her 12 year old sister would later say in court, quote, "She also told me not to talk to strangers. Now, I realize why." Sable Pickett was 19. Taken from Beach Boulevard in Anaheim on Valentine's Day 2014. For years, she had no name attached to the case.

6:35 Gordon knew her name. He just kept it. And then, Jere E. Step. The person I mentioned at the very beginning of this story, Taken March 13, 2014. The next morning, she turned up on the conveyor belt. Something had gone wrong with the disposal, the system that had worked four times over had failed on the fifth. Detective Jelissa Trap caught the case. She was at that time the only female homicide investigator in the Anaheim Police Department. And she had spent years in sex crimes before moving to homicide, which gave her a very specific set of instincts for this. Her team ran a retroactive GPS search, which registered sex offenders monitoring devices placed them near the recycling facilities resource routes on the night East have disappeared.

7:22 Frank Kano's tracker put him at her last known location. Gordon's federal tracker mirrored Kano's movements exactly, across every single murder. The digital leash that had done nothing to stop these men had documented everything they did. On April 11, 2014, police moved on the auto shop. Somehow Gordon sensed they were coming, pulled off his ankle monitor, grabbed a backpack, and tried to leave on a bicycle. Officers tackled him. Kano was arrested without incident. After being arrested, Kano immediately asked for a lawyer. Gordon agreed to talk. What followed was 13 and a half hours with Jelissa Trap.

8:03 And it became one of the most remarkable interrogation stories in recent true crime history. Gordon was intelligent, deeply controlling, and constantly watching her face for any sign of judgment. Trap later said that Gordon described the killings the way that someone would describe ordering a pizza. Just completely flat. If she flinched, though, if she even swallowed hard at the wrong moment, the interview ended. So she didn't flinch. She didn't do anything. She drew on her own personal history, her own grief, to build something in that room that felt like a genuine connection, not because she had any sympathy for what he had done, but because getting him to talk was the only way those women got acknowledgement of what happened to them.

8:49 He confessed to all four murders, and then he looked at her and said, "You're missing one." Valentine's Day, a fifth woman. He could not or would not give a name. Trap spent years on it, missing person's databases, cell tower records, GPS logs from February 14, 2014. A bail bondsman eventually pointed her toward a woman who had missed her court appearance. The description matched. Trap contacted the family. Her name was Sable Pickett, 19 years old from Compton. Her remains were never recovered, but her family did get an answer. In a trial in late 2016, Gordon fired his public defender and represented himself, saying "only cowards hide behind their attorneys."

9:34 He conceded guilt from his opening statement until the jury he deserved to die. What he actually wanted was the platform. His argument was that he and Kano had repeatedly shown who they were, repeatedly walked away from supervision with minimal consequence, and the correction system had essentially cleared the path for them. The jury convicted him on December 15, 2016, after one hour of deliberation. He was sentenced to death on February 3, 2017, and is currently being housed at San Quentin, as California appeals process runs its course. Frank Kano pleaded guilty in December 2022, "Life without parole." The victim's families asked prosecutors not to pursue a second death sentence.

10:18 They had already waited long enough. Melissa Trap moved to cold cases. She bought a rosary during each search for sabre tickets and prayed until she had a name. She has since solved at least one 40-year homicide. Five women. Keana. Josephine. Martha. Sable. Jere. The GPS was running the entire time. This was for listening to 10-minute murder, "Bingeable True Crime Stories." My name is Joe. I'm the host, and yeah, I'm still dealing with this cold thing, and I appreciate you, suffering through it with me.

10:59 Here's an email, "Subject. A Recommendation Machine." Hey, Joe. I've recommended your podcast enough times that my friends have stopped asking me what I'm listening to, because they already know the answer. A couple of them are listeners now, too. So I guess this is my apology and my accomplishment. Random question. What's something that you've really gotten into in the last year that surprised you? Jessica in Bloomington, Indiana. Jessica, thank you for listening. First of all, thank you for sharing the podcast with your friends. I really appreciate that, and thank you to your friends that are new listeners to the podcast. That means a lot, too. And something that I've gotten into in the last year that surprised me.

11:39 I don't know. I'm kind of a creature of habit, so I do the same things pretty often. But one thing that I have started doing is pickleball. I haven't played a whole bunch, but I've played a little bit enough to know that I'm going to continue to keep playing. I just don't have a ton of time to do it, but I really enjoy pickleball. I'm not good at it. I suck. It's like, to me, it's like ping pong on a larger scale, if that makes any sense. If you've never played pickleball, it's kind of like ping pong, but just larger. You get a little bit of cardio in while you're doing that. It's fun, but I suck at it, and I feel like at any moment I'm going to roll my ankle and break my body in half or something.

12:20 I don't have like a middle gear. It's either I'm not playing or I'm playing wide open. So yeah, I'm a minress on the pickleball court. And that may be the widest thing I've ever said in my entire life. Hey, if you're a new listener to this podcast, welcome. Get comfortable. Back and listen to the hundreds of backlog episodes for you to listen to, and also catch up on the new ones as they come out. They usually come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, usually twice a week. Sometimes I try to throw in the third one if I've got time to do that, but wherever you're listening right now, make sure you hit subscribe. And if you're enjoying the podcast, share it with your friends and your family. And that's it.

13:00 That's your episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.