When a young woman’s body was found at a trash-sorting plant, Anaheim Police Department homicide Det. Julissa Trapp promises the victim’s mother she would find the killer.
The Times’ Christopher Goffard, creator of “Dirty John,” examines a series of Orange County killings and a detective’s quest to solve them.There had been dozens of dead ends … and then one improbable fingerprint that led them to the door of an innocent man, who led them to an alley, which made them gamble on an idea that had initially seemed crazy … and suddenly she was at the center of a case involving 75 cops from seven agencies.
It’s a mental map of what the jaded call “Anacrime,” the crowded city of 350,000 that encircles Disneyland. It’s a map of long business strips that sprang up more than half a century ago and were sidelined by history, the wide boulevards dotted with disappearing relics of indigenous California weirdness — space-age car washes, gaudy neon signage, kitschy theme motels.
He told her to get experience in gangs, family crimes or sex crimes. She worked all three. In sex crimes, she won detective of the year. In gangs, her partner rode alongside her in silence for weeks, the implicit message being: Prove you belong here. She developed some nicknames, like Hurricane Julie, which referred to the force she became in the thick of a case, and The Cape, because she flapped around like one, trying to hang on to the neck of a suspect twice her size who objected to his arrest.
Kianna Jackson disappeared on Oct. 6. She had just turned 20. She had grown up in Northern California’s logging country, left home in her late teens and had been living in Las Vegas with a man her family came to believe was a pimp. She had just taken a Greyhound bus to Santa Ana. It would be months before police got a warrant for Jackson’s cellphone records to determine where it had last pinged.This was Josephine Monique Vargas, 34, who stayed with family when she wasn’t at a Red Roof Inn with her husband. Her nickname was “Giggles” because her laugh was irrepressible, even in church. She had a crack cocaine habit, and had lost her children to child protective services. She worked the area around 1st Street.
“Whenever she needed help spelling something she would always tell me, she’s like, ‘Why do I need Google if I have you? You like know everything,’” Melody would recall. “So she would always make me feel good about myself. She would always make me feel smart and she knows I’m going to be something. She always told me, ‘When I’m old you better take care of me.’”
Herlinda Salcedo, Martha Anaya’s mother, asked for a meeting with the Santa Ana police chief and pleaded for his help. She says she was told that her daughter was probably enjoying herself in Las Vegas. The downtown headquarters of the Anaheim Police Department — a red-brick building that cops call the Barn — has been a second home for Det. Julissa Trapp for most of her life.she drinks the most expensive whiskey she can afford, and likes to throw axes. Occasionally, she swims with sharks off the coast of La Jolla. She’s a devout Catholic who prays at every meal and goes to Mass faithfully.
In the early 2000s, when she was still Julissa Rios, the Anaheim Police Department gave her a new partner, a burly SWAT cop of German ancestry. They rode in icy silence. Anaheim Police Det. Julissa Trapp and her husband, Eric, a lieutenant at the department, are food enthusiasts who like to prepare lavish five-course meals for friends.
The doctors retrieved her eggs, fertilized them and implanted them. She got pictures of the growing embryo. The pregnancy failed. They tried another doctor, and this time she carried to eight weeks. She went into her bedroom closet with a bottle of tequila and raged at God. Looking through baby-name books, they decided that if it was a girl, she’d get to pick the name. A boy, and Eric would pick, provided her mother could pronounce it. She heard a heartbeat, but carried for just 10 weeks.She went into the closet again. It felt as though a basic compact with her creator had been broken.
Her buzzing cellphone interrupted her talk about 11:15 a.m. A text from the homicide-squad secretary. She looked at it and cut her talk short. She thanked the students, politely excused herself and walked swiftly to her car. The detectives decided to collect trash in a wide radius around the body — 20 to 30 feet in each direction. They were looking for addresses that might lead them to the trash bin she had been left in.
He had worked murders with Trapp for more than two years, wearing a suit and tie and short-brim fedora. The camaraderie was instant, and by now they could sometimes read each other’s thoughts with a glance. At the office, their cubicles were a few feet away, and they liked to get each other’s attention by launching spongy ping-pong balls at the other’s head.
Linn’s approach to his job was informed by his years hunting fugitives, where he had been a step removed from the victims’ families. The suspect was his focus. The heart of the sex trade in Anaheim was a few blocks west — a mile-long north-south stretch of Beach Boulevard vice cops called the Track. It’s a wide street that bisects the city’s far western corner. To the north it spills into Buena Park, close to Knott’s Berry Farm. To the south, it turns into the city of Stanton.
For years, Trapp had worked undercover here when vice needed her as bait during John stings. At first, she dressed for the role in fishnets and heels. Then she shifted to a look more in sync with the streets, hair unwashed, flip-flops, tank top. She’d approach cars on the driver’s side, so she could see if the man behind the wheel had a gun, or a partner.Sometimes she’d use a line from “Pretty Woman.
Management at the Anaheim Lodge on Beach Boulevard kept some of the belongings left behind in Room 217 by Jarrae Estepp. He was the father of Jarrae Estepp’s 2-year-old son, and — according to her family — had been acting as her pimp. Her mother said they met when she was a 17-year-old high school student, and “she was just sucked into his lies and manipulations.”
Trapp got him on the phone. She begged for his help. He insisted he was neither Jarrae’s boyfriend nor pimp. “I got a female,” he said. “That’s just the mother of my child.”
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