SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) – Late at night, the two convicted sex offenders exchanged text messages debating whether to kill their next victim or spare the life of the pretty, young woman they had picked up just hours before.
“I thought the next one, you were going to go at it,” read the message that popped up on Steven Gordon’s cellphone, according to testimony from a custodian of mobile phone records before a Southern California grand jury.
“I can’t,” read the reply from a phone authorities say was being used by co-defendant Franc Cano. “Cat is beautiful.”
The messages are part of an at-times harrowing read of a recently unsealed 335-page transcript of grand jury proceedings held to indict Cano, 28, and Gordon, 45, on four counts of special circumstances murder and rape in the deaths of four women during a months-long killing spree. Only one of the victims’ bodies was found.
The transcript provides a close-up look at how police pieced together evidence to pin the disappearance last fall of three women with a history of prostitution and the discovery of a dead woman’s body at a trash sorting facility months later and miles away on two homeless sex offenders wearing electronic monitoring devices when the killings occurred.