her. reporter: priscilla went to the santa ana police department, filled out a report. but they didn t really do anything to look for her. reporter: so she did. nothing was going to stop me from looking for my daughter. nothing or no one. reporter: and it was pure chance when priscilla ran into another mother desperate to find her daughter. martha, 28 years old and a mother herself, who just vanished one day. translator: there s no way she would have left. to just say i m going and i m leaving everything behind. reporter: so martha s mother herlinda and priscilla went together up and down the boulevard. we made thousands of flyers. me and her were on our mission to find our daughters. reporter: but no sign of their daughters anywhere. detective trapp collected their portraits, hung them on her office wall, and she stayed awake, and prayed in her
connect to my victims. reporter: unusual? maybe. that a detective should lean on her profound catholic faith to help solve crimes. but julissa trapp does. cases don t always get solved in 48 hours, you know? surprise, surprise. they take time and they take work. and that little rosary helps you. it does. reporter: if she could solve this case, she d give that rosary to the dead woman s family. but first she had figure out who she was. from just one identifying mark on her neck. a tattoo, jodi. was that her name? reaching now, detective trapp pulled up the anaheim police department s database of tattoos. yes, they have one, descriptions of tattoos collected from anyone they encounter. and what do you know, there was a match. but her name was not jodi, it was jarrae. jarrae estepp.
last outgoing call. at 7:00pm the night before. how far away would it have been? 20 miles. reporter: but that s all the detective knew. a week gone by, everyone at hardy windows was cleared. so no suspects at all. detective trapp went to church, said her rosary, worried, prayed, and wondered. i had heard a story on the news that there was three missing prostitutes in the city of santa ana. which is right next door, basically? right next door, yes. reporter: what if this wasn t the killer s first time, or last? coming up, four young women in two neighboring towns now missing or dead. was there a link? we were like, what are the odds that they re related? when good & evil continues. with every attempt to free itself,
Transcripts for MSNBC Dateline Extra 20191209 05:53:30 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
reporter: in an attempt to make sense of it all, kathy asked detective trapp and her partner bruce linn to drive her to the place where the killers had picked up kianna. you wanted to go this last spot. why? may i ask why? kind of because it was, like, the last known spot that she was at, that i was told she was alive at that spot. so kind of a closure, you know, just to see where she was at when before they took her. reporter: about broke her heart to do it. take this tour of her daughter s last hours. i think this is the dead-end street that gordon and cano entered and turned around and somewhere in in here was where she was at. this little intersection right here is where she was at. reporter: just an ordinary place, but so painful.