She watched the killer for a long time, waiting for exactly the right moment. So much depended on the little things, like making him believe you were not in a special hurry to talk to him, even if you had been able to think of little else for the last month.
Julissa Trapp stood in her sergeant's office at the Anaheim Police Department, cradling what might have been her 100th cup of coffee since the case began, huddled with a team of other cops around the closed-circuit monitor with its bird's-eye view of the interview room down the hall.
On the screen, Steven Gordon's face was a pale smudge. He was a slight-looking man in his mid-40s, hunched forward slightly in a wheelchair as the minutes passed, maybe just a bit chilly. The thermostat had been turned down to the mid-60s in there, so that at the right moment she could offer the illusion of friendship in the shape of a blanket.
Around her department, Trapp was considered a master interrogator. She honed the art of what could only be described as weaponized empathy. Once, she interviewed a man accused of molesting his 8-year-old niece. "I think you understand me," the man had said, and began caressing her hand as he confessed. She resisted the urge to yank it away; the man went to prison.
To walk into an interrogation room was to play a character, she liked to say, and for Steven Gordon, she'd have to figure out exactly the right one. A mother? A sister? A female friend willing to listen? In her closet that morning, she had debated carefully about what color to wear, and had chosen an emerald green top calculated to project approachability _ but also strength.
She had decided that she would go in unarmed, and would sit as close to Gordon as possible, without the barrier of a desk between their bodies. His hands were free, and he could lunge at her. Would her reflexes be sharp enough, considering she hadn't slept much in weeks? It might be 15 or 20 seconds before help came. She was willing to take the chance.
Around 10 a.m., after keeping Gordon waiting for 30 or 40 minutes, she announced, "Here goes nothing." She walked down the hallway to the interrogation room. She paused outside. She crossed herself, and walked in.
"Hi, Steven," she said.
Gordon's face was bland, forgettable, without outward menace. He said he was sore _ a surveillance truck had knocked him off his bicycle as he tried to flee the day before _ but otherwise fine.
After reading him his Miranda rights, Trapp opened with a standard gambit _ she gave him a chance to blame his co-defendant, Franc Cano. She was not going to tell him that Cano had refused to speak to her.
"I honestly feel that you've kind of been given a dirty deal on this whole thing," Trapp said.
"Is this where the good cop/bad cop comes into play?" Gordon asked.
A longtime felon, Gordon seemed to grasp the game immediately. Trapp knew it would be over in a second if, like Cano, he lawyered up. Still, for reasons she didn't yet fully understand, he seemed willing to participate.
"You were very upset last night," she said.
"Should've just let them shoot me instead of running."
"You know that's not true."
Hundreds of years of experience were crowded into her sergeant's office, watching Trapp work _ local cops, state agents, FBI. But she was glad to be alone in the room. To her, one suspect, one detective was ideal. She wanted as little space between herself and the killer as possible. Closer was better _ but it would give him a chance to study her, and she felt his pale blue eyes moving over her face, probing for weakness or deception or hints of judgment.
The killer soon gave her an opening. He wanted to talk about how much he hated his parole and probation officers. He had tried desperately to get authorities to remove his ankle monitor, but they kept hassling him, lying about him, getting him violated on claims he had associated with Cano.
Even as he raged about this, he admitted that he and Cano had cut off their monitors twice and fled the state _ once to Alabama, in hopes of seeing a NASCAR race, and once to Las Vegas, where they walked the Strip and rode roller coasters. Gordon continued in this vein for a while, there in a room that was slightly chilly by design. At about the 15-minute point, Trapp slipped this in:
"Are you cold? Did you want a blanket?"
"Yeah, if you don't mind."
He wrapped himself in the blanket and, as the interview progressed, seemed to retreat further and further into it. Gently and patiently, she elicited more details about his life.
He'd been working at Boss Paint & Body for about three years. He said he had a daughter, and Trapp knew that in the early 2000s, when the girl was 4, Gordon had kidnapped her along with his estranged wife, whom he had threatened with a Taser. He was charged with raping his wife during the abduction, but he emphasized that a jury had acquitted him of the charge. And, he insisted now, he had never hurt his daughter.
"I know you didn't," Trapp said. He had just been trying to keep his family together.
"Just didn't go about it the right way," Gordon said.
Trapp saw an opportunity, but it meant gambling a sliver of painful personal information. Now and then, she would surrender personal details for use as interrogation-room currency. A lot of cops are loath to do this _ they don't want to give a bad guy any opening to taunt and menace. They don't wear wedding rings on the job, or carry their kids' photos, much less share their deepest griefs. Trapp was different, closer in philosophy to a novelist or actor for whom wounds are material.
"I get where you were coming from," she said. "I unfortunately can't have children, but I can only imagine what it would feel like."
Building on this authentic detail, she added a fictional flourish.
"I tried to adopt and the kid kind of got taken from me, and I didn't think I was gonna make it," she said. "So I can't even imagine what it felt like for you to be losing your daughter."
She told him he was a caring person.
"Steven, a mistake was made and you got pulled into this," she said.
She told him they needed to get to the truth together.
"What you say your name was?" he asked.
"Julie."
"Julie?"
"Yeah."
"I can't talk to you."
"Would you rather talk to somebody else?"
"I don't want to talk to anybody."
Gordon said that every attorney he'd ever had had screwed him over. From now on, he'd represent himself. And so, about 50 minutes into the interview, he was lawyering up _ and the lawyer was himself.
Trapp thought: It's over. That's that. There would be countless unanswered questions. But now Gordon said he needed some air. Trapp and her partner, Bruce Linn, wheeled him outside to the patio, where Gordon said this:
"I'll tell you guys everything you need to know as long as I get the death penalty. Other than that, I'm gonna be quiet. That's the way it's gonna be."
He wanted it in writing from the district attorney. He didn't want a trial; he didn't want appeals.
"None of that crap," he said.
There was zero chance the state of California would grant Steven Gordon's demand for a speedy death. It had been more than eight years since the state last executed anyone, in 2006, and that prisoner had waited on death row for 24 years.
But to tell Gordon this straight-out might shut him down, and so Trapp played for time, and sent for Assistant District Attorney Larry Yellin. It was Saturday morning, and Yellin was on a softball field. As they waited for him to show, Trapp made small talk. Gordon was a fan of country music. So was she.
"My friends used to make fun of me because obviously I grew up in Anaheim and I'm Mexican so I guess I should be listening to like hip-hop and stuff," she said. "And no, I started listening to country when I was 16. But that's when like Garth Brooks was big, and Trace Adkins and Faith Hill."
The conversation meandered to cars. She said she wanted a 1976 Chevy pickup but didn't know what she'd be getting into, a pose of cluelessness designed to flatter him.
"Being a chick, not knowing a lot about cars, I think I need one that's, like, already done, you know, because I don't know how to work on cars, and I think I'm gonna get screwed if I try to repair it little by little," she said.
"You're not gonna paint it pink, are you?"
"No, no, no, I think red."
"Cops love red."
She asked him if he had many friends besides Cano.
"Don't hang out with anybody, really," he said. He was fixated on suicide. If he was to do it, he'd put a hose in the tail pipe and turn on some music.
"If somebody wants to end their life, what does anybody care?" Gordon said. "I mean, maybe that person is just that unhappy."
At lunchtime she had Mexican food brought in. Gordon said he had met Cano in 2010, at the parole office. Cano, who was 5-foot-2, had asked if he could sit down and charge his ankle monitor from an electrical cord.
"I'm like, damn, this guy is a kid," Gordon said.
"And he looks a lot younger than his age, too," Trapp said. "He can pass for a teenager."
He said Cano was naive. He thought everyone was his friend. Once, at the parole office, Gordon had confronted a man who'd asked Cano what he'd done time for.
The anecdote told Trapp that Gordon felt protective of the younger, smaller man. She was not going to volunteer that she knew they were lovers.
Near the end of the fourth hour, Yellin showed. Gordon reiterated that he wanted the death penalty. He didn't want those stupid anti-capital punishment groups dragging out his appeals and persuading stupid judges to keep him alive.
"How long am I gonna have to wait?" Gordon said. "If you're gonna tell me 10, 50 years, I'm not gonna do that."
Yellin said he would have to leave to research the question. It might take a while, he said _ it was a Saturday, after all.
Alone again with Gordon, Trapp explained her philosophy about working homicides. Some of the victims were gangbangers, criminals, cold-blooded killers themselves. But to their families, they mattered.
"That mother hurts like any other mother," he said.
Mention of mothers seemed to make Gordon think about Cano, and he began to cry.
"There's a kid downstairs that needs his mom," Gordon said.
In the middle of the fifth hour, she began to press him about the dead and missing women. She put photographs in front of him. Kianna Jackson. Josephine Vargas. Martha Anaya. Jarrae Estepp.
Gordon rearranged them in the order of their disappearance.
"I don't know how or why it started," Gordon said. "I picked up a lot of girls and I never did anything like this. I just paid them."
He admitted that he picked up Estepp and took her back to what he called "his spot," behind the auto-body shop. They had sex, he said.
"And she sprayed me in the face with Mace and I don't know what happened after that. I went, I went crazy."
"So what happened next?"
"I hurt her."
"Can you tell me how you hurt her?"
"I strangled her with my hands."
He said he picked up Kianna Jackson. They went back to his spot. They had sex. He strangled her.
"Did she go in a trash can?"
"They all did."
She sensed him watching her closely _ every tremor on a face she tried hard to make into a mask. More than once, he would stop his account to ask her what her expression meant. Nothing, she said. She pressed him to keep going. He said he strangled Josephine Vargas. He said he strangled Martha Anaya.
"Why won't you tell me what trash can you put them in?" Trapp asked.
"What does it matter? For you, what does it matter?"
Near the end of their seventh hour, Trapp asked him why he had left Cano out of his account of the killings. Gordon announced that he was not an idiot _ he knew Cano's GPS tracks connected him to the missing women. His story began to shift, incorporating Cano but only as a passive observer.
Trapp told him that Cano said they had taken turns.
"I can tell you he's lying," Gordon said. Gordon had planned to take the blame if they ever got caught. "'Cause he's a kid. ... He's young, he still has a chance. I don't. I don't anymore."
The conversation was a quietly protracted struggle for advantage, and she knew the outcome would be shaped by intonations, micro-expressions and her moment-to-moment ability to improvise skillfully. If she breathed too hard, he seemed to notice and clam up. He was sensitive to the slightest sign of judgment.
Gordon said that unless he talked, they had nothing on Cano.
"You don't have proof other than me opening my mouth or you saying that Franc is talking to you. You have no evidence. I made sure of that, or you would've been there a long time ago."
She kept asking where he had dumped the bodies, and he kept dodging the question.
"They're never gonna be found, are they?" he said.
She said she would dig for them personally, even if she was only able to find bones. But she needed his help.
"Did they all go in the same trash can container? Or just different containers in that area?"
"Drop all the charges against Franc, I'll tell you what you want to know."
"I can't do that. That's not a decision I make."
Gordon described a relationship with Cano that was not just protective but violently possessive. He'd once kicked Cano in the stomach when he found him with a woman. Once again, he denied that Cano had helped to murder Estepp.
"Not gonna tell on my friend," Gordon said.
Finally, in the middle of their ninth hour, Gordon said he would tell her everything she wanted to know, on the condition he could see Cano.
"I just wanna know if he's all right," Gordon said.
Trapp said she would ask.
The 10th hour, time for dinner. She had Panda Express brought in. They ate together. He talked about how Cano didn't seem to appreciate him.
"I tried so much to help that kid. And just like, took everything I did for granted. That's how I look at it, you know?"
She asked him again where he put the bodies.
"Where I work," he said finally.
This was an important breakthrough, but they were only partway there. She thought the key to breaking Gordon might be his relationship with his co-defendant. Something had struck her about her brief, abortive conversation with Cano the day before _ Cano had shown little to no curiosity about Gordon's plight. Gordon loved Cano more than Cano loved Gordon.
In the squad room, the FBI agent suggested: Why not tell Gordon that Cano refused to talk to him? Trapp thought that would devastate Gordon. She liked it. She thought it might work. She said: "Let's break his heart."
As their 11th hour together was ending, she risked the big bluff.
"Good news is my administration will allow it," she said. "Bad news is Franc doesn't want to see you."
Gordon seemed dumbfounded.
"He wouldn't refuse."
"Well, you also said he wouldn't talk, and he did. I'm sorry."
Gordon stared into empty space as if crestfallen, and seemed to withdraw deeper and deeper into his blanket. He had just taken the blame for a series of murders for a man he loved, who in turn didn't even want to see him.
The silence stretched for more than a minute, and Trapp knew better than to fill it. Finally Gordon cleared his throat, and as their 11th hour turned into the 12th, his love for Cano seemed to curdle before her eyes into rage and hate, and when he began to speak again, she knew the room was finally hers.
"Why don't you tell me how you think it went down?" Gordon said.
Now, in his account, he and Cano were collaborating partners in a series of abductions, rapes, murders and cleanup jobs that grew more methodical and sophisticated as they progressed. They would cruise Anaheim and Santa Ana in search of sex from prostitutes. They knew women would be reluctant to get into a car if they saw two men inside, so one man would drive while the other hid in the back seat.
They would overpower the women and drive them back to the lot behind Boss Paint & Body, a place so dark and isolated no one would intrude. In Gordon's 4Runner truck or RV, he continued, they would take turns raping the women and then hold out the false promise that they'd be released. All of the women cried and begged; some spoke of their kids.
He said Cano would strangle women while Gordon _ at Cano's command _ punched them repeatedly in the stomach, to hasten their asphyxiation. He said Cano would strip the bodies and clip the nails and throw the bodies away. They chose the evening of trash pickups to do their work.
"Just take me back outside so I can make a run for it and you guys can shoot me," Gordon said.
"I can't do that. Thank you for telling me what trash can you threw them in."
"I hope you find them."
It was late. The nightly fireworks above Disney had boomed and faded. As the 13th hour began, she stepped into a hallway full of cops eager to congratulate her.
She brushed past them toward the bathroom. All day she had fought against emotion, bottled up every feeling that might threaten to flicker across her face. But now she stood at the mirror, her makeup gruesome under the sudden flood of tears.
She was heading back into the interrogation room when the FBI agent stopped her. Don't let him see you like that, he said. Don't give him a victory. Take a few minutes.
When she returned, her face clear, she conveyed no impression of the toll the interview had taken on her. She watched the forensic team enter to take Gordon's prints and hair samples and DNA.
Soon there would be a news conference, with inescapable questions: How was it possible that two sex offenders with ankle monitors, under 24/7 electronic supervision, could have committed a series of murders? What went wrong?
But right now Trapp was thinking about how to recover the bodies of the missing women _ a logistical nightmare, but at least she knew enough to get started. And she was thinking about something else Gordon had said _ something she had tried hard not to react to. He had mentioned a fifth victim, a woman who had vanished so completely it had drawn no law enforcement notice at all.
"You're missing one," he had said.
