The mountain grew relentlessly, 7,000 tons of garbage hauled up the switchbacks every day to be unloaded and crushed and pulverized. Matter dissolved into its atoms, urged along by science, and the mountain grew.


When she got to the top of the Olinda Landfill at Orange County’s northern tip, Det. Julissa Trapp thought it was possible, just maybe possible, to do what she and her partner had come for: Find the bodies of four murdered women they believed were buried somewhere on the 565-acre site.

They gave the landfill engineers the dates:

Kianna Jackson, vanished Oct. 6, 2013.

Josephine Vargas, vanished Oct. 24, 2013.

Martha Anaya, vanished Nov. 12, 2013.

Jane Doe, vanished Feb. 14, 2014.

The landfill engineers performed careful calculations, and told police where they would need to look. The bodies were probably somewhere within a three-acre range in a northwest section, 18 to 25 feet deep.

Orange County Waste & Recycling officials at the Olinda Landfill, where Anaheim police believed four women’s bodies might be buried. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

With growing dismay, Trapp watched the choreographed dance of the big machines — the unloading trucks, the shoveling dozers, the crushing tractors with steel-spiked wheels, all mobilized for war against inconceivable volumes of trash.

Trapp thought, “There’s just no way.” It was April 2014, and some of the bodies were already half a year down. Finding a single bone would be an extreme long shot.


The FBI said it had had no luck in similar efforts. It would cost at least $12 million — about a tenth of the Anaheim Police Department’s annual budget. And because nobody could be absolutely sure the women were here, they might have to search a second landfill 60 miles away. There would be no dig.

For Trapp, finding the women was about more than collecting evidence. She wanted to return them to their mothers. As she drove back down the mountain, she was already thinking about how she’d tell them.

::

As trial approached in State vs. Steven Gordon in late 2016, a schoolteacher friend invited Trapp to speak to her second-grade class in Riverside County. It was a welcome distraction from the grimness ahead. For this visit to Ronald Reagan Elementary School, she staged a crime scene based on the book “If You Give A Mouse a Cookie.”

To find the cookie thief, they had to follow clues — crumbs and mouse prints. She explained that her job was like that. She was a police officer, and a certain kind of police officer known as a detective, and a certain kind of detective who helped when people had died. She caught bad people.

The second-graders wanted to know: Had she ever arrested anyone? Yes. Had she used her gun on anyone? No. Was she afraid of the bad people? No.

There was a strange symmetry to it. She had been talking to a room full of students when her buzzing cellphone drew her into the case more than two years earlier.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Larry Yellin makes his opening statement to the jury in the murder trial of Steven Gordon in 2016. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

Back in Orange County, pretrial motions were underway. Gordon was charged with four rapes and murders, though only one body had been found. As lead detective, Trapp would sit at the prosecution table next to Assistant Dist. Atty. Larry Yellin in Superior Court in Santa Ana.

Gordon’s conviction never seemed in doubt. He claimed to want the death penalty, and the evidence looked ironclad: texts, confession, ankle-monitor tracks, and DNA in Estepp’s body that the lab had matched to his.


The real question was how bizarre the trial would become, with an erratic and furious defendant determined to represent himself and driven by a logic only he grasped.

Steven Gordon the murderer might have wanted punishment, but Steven Gordon the lawyer wanted to punish the justice system he had long raged against. Trapp thought he was playing a power game, seeking ways to assert himself. This was his stage, and he had a surprise: He wanted his 13-hour confession suppressed.

Legally, the confession was on shaky ground because of its peculiar provenance. After Trapp had Mirandized him, Gordon had announced, “I can’t talk to you,” but, no, he didn’t want a lawyer — he wanted to die. He then spent half a day explaining how he’d abducted and killed five women. But now he argued he should have been Mirandized twice.

‘What am I, the serial-killer whisperer?’ Det. Julissa Trapp

Judge Patrick H. Donahue agreed. The confession was out. Trapp took it hard. Ample evidence linked Gordon to the other murders, but the confession was central to building the case that he’d killed Martha Anaya. Trapp thought of how she’d explain it to Anaya’s mother.

“I remember just feeling a huge sense of like failure and responsibility to her, like, ‘I failed you, I’m so sorry,’” Trapp would say.

Gordon asked to see Trapp privately, and Trapp sensed he wanted to gloat. He asked if she was mad. “I’m not mad at all,” she lied. At least the mothers wouldn’t have to hear what he said during those 13 hours — he had done them all a favor.

Gordon had another move. He wanted to give Trapp a second confession, provided the prosecutor dropped the rape charges. Gordon knew he was going back to prison, and he knew from experience the contempt other inmates had for sex offenders. Maybe this was his logic; maybe he just relished the power of being able to strike a bargain.

The district attorney agreed to his terms. Again Trapp sat with the killer, and again he confessed, this time in a bare-bones version that minimized his role in the sexual violence.

Steven Gordon represented himself at his trial. He blamed parole and probation officers for not watching him and his co-defendant, Franc Cano, more closely. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)


During trial, Gordon was escorted in and out of the courtroom by bailiffs, and sat with a court-appointed investigator at the defense table. Gordon wore thick glasses and slicked-back hair. He was angry and unpredictable, and unsuccessfully complained to the judge that he should be able to stand during trial.

Extra bailiffs were summoned after a fellow inmate reported that Gordon had become fixated on a member of the jury panel, a blond woman in her 20s. “He’s going to go after a juror,” the inmate said. “That’s why he wants to stand.”

There was also fear that Gordon might attack the detective who had done more than anyone to put him there. Trapp sat only a few feet away, and bailiffs asked if she would consider leaving her service Glock outside the courtroom, just in case. She refused. Bailiffs soon sensed that Trapp had a special rapport with Gordon, that she alone seemed able to calm him down when he raved and paced in the holding cell.

She thought, “What am I, the serial-killer whisperer?”

Once, she requested a favor. She asked him to specify where he had abducted Kianna Jackson. Without a body, her mother wasn’t convinced she was dead — maybe Gordon had been lying all along, and had sold her to sex traffickers. With a pencil he drew a map on lined yellow paper and handed it through his cell bars.

::

Gordon had no coherent defense, but was obsessed with making two main points: that he was not as bad as co-defendant Franc Cano, and that the incompetence of their government supervision had allowed the killing rampage to happen.

Gordon alternately referred to Cano as “my friend” and “that little bastard.” He insisted Cano was responsible for bite marks on Estepp’s body, that Cano had stomped on her neck, that Cano was a predator with no conscience. He was irate when Cano, who was awaiting his own trial, predictably took the 5th and refused to testify for him.

Steven Gordon, left, and Franc Cano, both registered sex offenders, were forbidden from associating with each other. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

When Gordon put his former parole and probation agents on the stand, he harangued them for ineptitude. He told them that if they’d just watched him properly, if they hadn’t let him associate with another known sex offender, the victims would be alive.

The men were forbidden from associating with each other. And yet nobody had bothered to compare Gordon‘s and Cano’s ankle-monitor GPS tracks, which showed they had cruised the prostitution corridors of Santa Ana and Anaheim together regularly for months, even as women kept vanishing.


Gordon asked a federal probation officer why he hadn’t compared the tracks, and got this reply: “I didn’t see a need.” Neither had the state parole agent.

Gordon’s dual roles — legal strategist in his own defense, and scourge of incompetent government — soon found themselves at odds. He wanted to elicit testimony about the criminal history that had put him under failed government supervision in the first place, but with only his bare-bones confession in evidence, the rules curtailed him. His frustration showed as he questioned Trapp.

And so, to everyone’s surprise, Gordon announced midtrial that jurors should hear his 13-hour confession after all. In fact, he’d introduce it himself.

Trapp sat poker-faced on the witness stand as the confession was played. She did not want to give Gordon the pleasure of seeing that it affected her. She had a direct view of the victims’ mothers as they listened. They had been warned against emotional outbursts, and Trapp watched them cry silently.

Some of them were clutching rosary beads she had given them, which she had had blessed at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.

Kianna Jackson’s mother, Kathy Menzies, left, and grandmother Diane Menzies deliver a victim impact statement during the sentencing of Steven Gordon. (Jeff Gritchen / via Associated Press)

::

“Every piece of it, every horrible thing known and unknown — and a lot is unknown — that happened to these women is by Gordon and Cano,” Yellin told jurors in his closing argument.

“They didn’t bring it on themselves, those girls, those women. The probation department didn’t do it, the parole department didn’t do, his ex-wife didn’t do it. The man in the moon didn’t do it — he did it.”

When it was his turn to speak, Gordon told jurors his intentions had been “beyond evil,” and asked them to convict. But he downplayed the evidence against him — the GPS tracks, the texts, the DNA — in service of a self-congratulatory point: He wouldn’t be on trial if he hadn’t decided to cooperate.

“Take away my interviews with Det. Trapp and me admitting my responsibility, this case in my opinion is beyond weak,” Gordon said.


Jurors decided he should die.

::

‘You don’t know what you took from me. Nothing could ever replace her. At this moment I can never forgive you.’ Priscilla Vargas, Josephine Vargas’ mother

Throughout the trial, Trapp kept company with the four mothers. Some of them asked if she knew what it was like to lose a child. She told them she had lost hers before they were born.

One by one, at the formal sentencing, the mothers stood before the judge to speak. There were no fathers.

“Every day when they ask about their mother, I just tell them their mother is another star in the sky,” said Martha Anaya’s mother, Herlinda Salcedo, speaking of her motherless grandchildren.

“You don’t know what you took from me. Nothing could ever replace her. At this moment I can never forgive you,” said Josephine Vargas’ mother, Priscilla Vargas, addressing Gordon.

“I will never see my daughter and she will never see her family,” said Kianna Jackson’s mother, Kathy Menzies.

“I watched my child come into this world.… He took the life right out of my life. He left me with pain and sorrow,” said Jarrae Estepp’s mother, Jodi Estepp-Pier.

The judge asked Gordon if he had anything to say.

“Well, I am sorry for everything, but those are hollow words compared to what those women went through,” he said.


Steven Gordon at his sentencing. Jurors decided he should die. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

Trapp and Yellin had a grim joke that by the end of it, they were Gordon’s only friends. She shook Gordon’s hand when it was over. She told him she thought death was the right sentence, and that she expected to be there when they executed him, but the verdict didn’t bring her any joy.

Soon afterward, at the gym, Trapp ran into the schoolteacher friend whose second-grade class she’d recently visited. The friend ran to the car and came back with a binder of handwritten thank-you notes. Trapp opened the binder, and found one note that said:

“Dear Detective Trapp: First of all, you are very smart and have pride. Last, you are a problem solver. Clearly, you are awesome.” By such gestures a detective stayed afloat, amid so much darkness.

::

After the trial, a reporter visited Gordon in jail and asked about his marathon interview with Trapp. He was about to get on a bus to the death house, and Trapp had helped to send him there, and yet he somehow thought of himself as the winner of their duel. He smiled a little and said, “I played her.”

There was more Trapp wanted to learn from Gordon — about other killings she thought he might be involved in, and about Cano, who has pleaded not guilty to the murder and rape charges and is still awaiting trial, represented by the public defender’s office.

‘I feel like every time I’m alone with him, he sucks a little of my soul.’ Det. Julissa Trapp

When she drove to see Gordon in San Quentin, the killer used the chance to gloat about how he’d beaten her in court. How he got the judge to toss the confession.

“I feel like every time I’m alone with him, he sucks a little of my soul,” she would say. “You’re diving into a darkness and the quicker you get out, the better.” She decided she would break her rule about interviewing people alone. From now on, she decided, she would bring another cop.

Seeing him made it hard to sleep. She found herself dreaming of the courtroom holding cell where he was kept during the trial. In the dream, he reaches through the cell bars to shake her hand, just like he did after the sentencing. She puts out her hand. He pulls her toward him. He has a knife. She feels wetness spilling from her throat, and she wakes up.


::

In late 2017, a year after Gordon’s trial, doctors found a uterine mass inside Julissa Trapp, and she had a hysterectomy. “There’s a finality to that,” she would say. “The dream is gone.”

In her garage were two enormous bins full of school report cards, notes, essays, book reports, track shoes and trophies. She’d been collecting them her whole life, hoping to share them with her kids, and now most of it went into the trash.

It was time to bury a certain long-cherished notion of who she was going to be, but it was also a chance to honor a promise to the child she’d been, for among the belongings was a grade-school report in which she told herself that she would one day climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Her husband was game, and so a woman who had been camping exactly once announced to co-workers that she was going to climb Africa’s tallest peak, and some people forgot who she was and made the mistake of wagering against her.

She was the only woman among the porters and guides and other climbers, about 40 in all, as they climbed for six, 10, 14 hours a day. She watched the helicopters cross overhead to rescue the weak and the unlucky. Will that be me tomorrow?

Her lungs were scorched, and one of her toenails fell off. She was 10,000 miles from the streets of her hometown and the lost women who had walked them, from the IVF clinics and the cheap motels, from the yellow house she’d fled and the red-brick police building that had helped to save her, and on the sixth day, ascending through thin air and snow, she stood on the western summit, in a place the Masai call the House of God.

She had the climb inked on her body, not long ago. The great mountain joined 11 other tattoos. A Mickey Mouse on her leg from her teens, which she plans to have removed, because it evokes bad memories of a boyfriend she escaped. A series of swallows under her left collarbone, to represent children she conceived but did not bring to term, whose souls she hopes to meet when she dies.

But most of the tattoos — like the mirrored staffs on her wrist and the mysterious numbers on her right arm — she adamantly refuses to discuss. They’re a secret ledger, a zone of inviolable privacy for a woman who is otherwise comfortable revealing so much of herself.

There’s one circumstance is which she might talk about them — one scenario in which she can imagine surrendering even that last strongbox of her inner life. The day might never come, but she would do it for a confession.

::

About Jane Doe #5, she didn’t want to be right.


She had been an ever-present ghost in Trapp’s life since April 2014, when Gordon had told her there was a victim she didn’t know about. He said that he and Cano had picked her up on Beach Boulevard, killed her and thrown her into the trash in February 2014. “A black girl,” he’d said. In her 20s. Real small. A toothpick.

Trapp kept pictures of the victims’ faces on a corkboard by her cubicle at the Anaheim PD, and among them was a dark silhouette where Jane Doe #5’s face should have been. It was a reminder that her work was undone. She saw it when she got to the office and saw it when she left. Trapp hadn’t been able to identify her in time to charge Gordon with her murder at trial.

Alone among her colleagues, Trapp kept photos of victims on the corkboard at her cubicle — including a silhouette representing a fifth woman Gordon claimed he had abducted and killed. (Christopher Goffard / Los Angeles Times)

She didn’t know the young woman’s date of birth. She didn’t know her face. She didn’t know if she had family. She didn’t have any record of her existence, or any trace of its sudden, violent deletion.

Between other homicides, Trapp worked to give her a name through 2014 and 2015 and into 2016, by which time her partners were steeped in other cases and it had become a solo mission bordering on obsession.

She clenched her teeth when people called it “the dead hooker case.” Some asked why she was devoting so much time and effort to a seemingly hopeless errand, especially since the suspects were already locked up. “You don’t understand,” she’d say.

She won detective of the year for a third time, this time for her work on the Gordon-Cano case. As she approached her third decade with a badge, her bosses asked if she’d consider a promotion to sergeant, rotating out of homicide back to patrol.

She liked the idea of a pay hike, but it would mean retiring her beer tap to the squad room cafe mantel, packing up the second-floor desk she had fought so long to sit at, surrendering Jane Doe #5 to someone else.

She told the bosses no. She wasn’t ready. Her husband was used to her all-in working methods, her way of bringing her cases home and bouncing ideas off him at the breakfast table and keeping a notepad on her nightstand. But this one seemed to have taken hold of her with special intensity.

She combed missing persons reports in expanding circles and compiled long lists of missing young women who fit Jane Doe #5’s general description.


She searched methodically for any sign they were alive after mid-February 2014. If they showed up on social media or called family or appeared on an arrest log, she crossed off the names.

A portrait of Sable Pickett, 19, hangs on a wall at Michelle Malveaux’s house in Compton. Pickett vanished in February 2014. (Family photo)

One name, Sable Pickett, she wasn’t able to cross out. Pickett had been 19 when she vanished in February 2014. A bail bondsman had called in the tip — she had been arrested for prostitution in Los Angeles early that month, bonded out and disappeared. She hadn’t shown up in any jails since. She had posted nothing on social media. She was just gone.

Trapp studied the photo attached to Pickett’s arrest warrant. She was black, 5 feet 3, just 103 pounds. She had pigtails. She looked like a kid. She fit the description.

Trapp was trying to prove a negative — that Pickett no longer existed.

Pickett had lived in Compton with her grandmother, Michelle Malveaux, whose living room was a shrine to Jesus, with a gigantic Bible on the coffee table and verses from Scripture painted in big letters on the walls. The family had been waiting in agony for any word from her.

Malveaux said her granddaughter had attended Compton High School and dreamed of joining the Air Force but flunked a math test.

“Sable was a good girl,” her grandmother said. “She got good grades. She wrote poems. She just got around the wrong people. And then that guy she met …”

The man bought her things she wanted. “The nails excited her. These hairdos. The Louis Vuittons.

“She would come by looking pretty, hair done. ‘Granny, my boyfriend, he get my hair done, my nails done.’ ‘OK.’ Old dumb me, I believed her.”


Sometime in early 2013, soon after she was baptized at a local church, Sable Pickett stood in her grandmother’s kitchen and nonchalantly — even proudly — explained that she had been turning tricks. She said she was an entrepreneur, and it was easy money.

“I said, ‘Sable, you’re not an entrepreneur. Oprah is an entrepreneur.’ Her boyfriend turned her out. She was pretty, chocolate, beautiful smile, good hair, pretty white teeth. I was standing there looking. I said, ‘Sable, You know you can’t come back here if you’re gonna be a prostitute on the street.’ She said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’

“I said, ‘Sable, you know what happens to girls like that. They get hooked on drugs or they get dead, Sable.’ It was like Sable was preparing us. I knew what to expect. You get raped, you get beat, you get hooked on drugs.”

She told police, but police said her granddaughter was an adult and there wasn’t much they could do.

“You can’t whup ‘em. You can’t give ‘em time out. You can’t send ‘em to their bedroom. You just hope and pray that they listen to you,” Malveaux said.

The family had been clinging to theories in the years she had been gone. Maybe she was somewhere on an island, sipping a margarita, wanting some time away. But it made no sense that she wouldn’t call, especially since she made it a point to call her grandfather on his birthday every year.

Pickett’s family wanted to know why a homicide detective from Anaheim kept calling, why she was looking for Sable. They Googled her and found she had worked on the Gordon-Cano case. Was Sable one of the victims?

Sable Pickett’s grandmother, Michelle Malveaux, and mother, Dana Lewis. The family waited in agony to hear from Pickett after she disappeared. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Trapp could only tell them to please call if they heard from her. She wanted to be wrong, even as an awful certainty was growing in her.

If she could get Pickett’s cell number, she could confirm it was pinging off the towers on Beach Boulevard on the day she disappeared, and so she left her card at the door of Pickett’s former pimp, a Long Beach gangster, but knew he wouldn’t call her.


She sent a Facebook message to a woman who had once been arrested for prostitution with Pickett — another long shot. But the woman responded, agreeing to meet Trapp at a Krispy Kreme near USC.

She told Trapp that Pickett had worked Beach Boulevard around Anaheim in 2014, and that she carried a burner phone that she inexplicably stopped answering after Valentine’s Day. “Do you think she was one of the girls who was killed?” the woman asked.

Trapp needed just one trace of Sable Pickett’s DNA to clinch it — one sign that she was inside Steve Gordon’s RV. She hounded the Orange County Crime Lab until she was convinced they hated her. She wanted every sample tested — every one of the 19,078 hairs that were painstakingly removed from the vehicle’s interior. No matches.

She conferred with prosecutors. To get certainty, they had to strike what she called “a deal with the devil.” Gordon and Cano got a grant of immunity for information about the fate of Jane Doe #5. It meant they couldn’t be prosecuted for her disappearance and death.

Trapp will not discuss what the men revealed, and it hasn’t been made public. But she said it was enough to banish any lingering doubts that Pickett was the victim. And so, one day in spring 2017, Trapp drove to the house in Compton where Pickett had stayed with her grandmother. The family knew she was coming and they knew what it was about.

She pulled up, full of dread. It was a pretty house, with a fenced-in yard, with rainbow-colored pinwheels and trees full of angel’s trumpets. She would bring clarity but dispel hope. She half-expected they’d be furious with her for being so tight-lipped with information all this time. They might throw her out, and she wouldn’t be able to blame them.

She walked inside and found the living room crowded with generations of Sable Pickett’s family. They were kind and gracious, and thanked her for not letting Sable be forgotten, and she struggled again not to break her rule about no crying in homicide.

::

Back at her desk, she replaced the silhouette with Pickett’s photo. She never took a victim’s photo down, even after the case was solved, and her gallery of the murdered was approaching two dozen.

Supervisors came around with the same question. Was she ready to move on? She had one less excuse.

“Maybe just a little while longer,” she would say. “I’m not done yet.”

