Alleged serial killers Franc Cano and Steven Dean Gordon pleaded not guilty at their arraignment today to raping and killing four women in Anaheim and Santa last year and this year.
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Steven Dean Gordon and Franc Cano Have Arraignment Delayed for Alleged Serial Killings
GPS tracking devices Cano, 27, and Gordon, 45, wore as paroled sex offenders played a role in implicating them in the murders of four women and being suspected in the slaying of a fifth and possibly more, authorities revealed last month.
The named victims the pair is accused of killing are:
* Kianna Jackson, 20, of Las Vegas, who came to Santa Ana for a court hearing on four misdemeanor charges of prostitution and loitering to commit prostitution in October 2013, but she stopped responding to her mother's text messages soon after she arrived in Orange County.
* Josephine Monique Vargas, 34, of Santa Ana, who was last seen Oct. 24 after leaving a family birthday party to go to a store. She had been known to frequent an area of Santa Ana notorious for drug use and prostitution.
* Martha Anaya, 28, of Santa Ana, who asked her boyfriend to pick up their 5-year-old daughter so she could work on Nov. 12 then stopped responding to his messages later that night. She'd frequented the same area of Santa Ana.
* Jarrae Nykkole Estepp, 21, of Oklahoma, whose nude body was found March 14 on the conveyor belt of an Anaheim rubbish and recycling facility. A couple weeks earlier, she had become a regular on a strip of Beach Boulevard in Anaheim long known for prostitution.
Cano and Gordon will remain in custody without bail pending a June 6 pretrial hearing. The Orange County District Attorney's office is considering whether to seek the death penalty against the pair, who face four counts of murder and rape, with special circumstance allegations of murder during the commission of a rape, multiple murders and lying in wait.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.