for six months, kathy menzes hoped for news, waiting for a calm or a tech or dreading a knock at the door. which if april, 2014, is what happened. my heart suffering when they came. i knew right away it wasn t going to be good news. reporter: no not good news at all. anaheim police told her that two men, frank canno and steven gordon, were now under arrest for the murder of her daughter and three other young women in orange county. what were you like that night? i just wanted to sleep. i wanted to like go to sleep and wake up and pinch myself. reporter: and make it a different world? exactly. reporter: detective julissa trapp wanted to speak with both men, of course. but canno lawyered up, so she
jackson just 30-years-old she disappeared five months before jerree s death. her mom is kathy menzes. she was always a fun loving child, always made you laugh. reporter: that silly grin, she loved her dog, her little brother, playing softball. then it started happening. she was kind of getting typical you know teenage and high school came getting around the older kids she kind of got a little worse. reporter: how d you cope with that? just one day at a time. i loved her as much as i could. it was about the only thing. reporter: after high school, quinna went to high school about a three-hour ride from home. year later, she moved to las vegas. though, far from home now, she got closer and closer to her mom. she would call me effort, text message. reporter: just a fun, loving daughter. yeah. i didn t think anything was
envisioned. it wasn t a dirty, dark, nasty, gross area. reporter: kathy found some piece in that, the knowing, the seeing, but why quinna s life was taken? it s so much harder to comprehend. i don t think i ll be able to accept it. it s hard. it s hard. reporter: criminal trials are one way to grieve and find answers and with a confession on tape, the trial of steven gordon looked like a formality or so the prosecutor might have hoped. then the judge made that ruling. oh boy. a suspected serial killer turns the case against him upsidedown. coming up it s the piece that brings everything together and now it s gone. when dateline continues. who do you think takes more pride
it s frustrating knowing that they re here and we can t bring them home, that it s like for the one thing that the mothers want and i get it and to not be able to do that, it feels it s incomplete. reporter: does it drive you crazy? yes, it does. reporter: kathy menzes knows logically, her duties must be dead, how to truly accept it without her body? i would go there today and start digging, if they would let me. reporter: it matters, doesn t it? it does matter. reporter: to get her back? yeah. reporter: you give birth to them, you got to see it through to the end? yeah, exactly. reporter: in an attempt to make sense of it all, kathy asked detective trapp and her partner to drive her to the place where the killers had picked up quinna. you wanted to go to this last spot. why in may i ask why? kind of because it was the
work circuits. reporter: prostitutes? first i was, okay, no, that can t be. reporter: then the truth came crashing down, undeniable. quinna had missed a scheduled court date in santa ana for a prostitution charge. wait a minute, you talked with her every day, texted her all the time in. exactly. reporter: and you knew nothing of this secret life? no, nothing. reporter: what does it feel like to hear that in. heart breaking. reporter: when she heard kathy s story, detective trapp began to think she was on to something. then she discovered that just two-and-a-half weeks after quinna disappeared, there was another one, josephine monique vargas. she had a beautiful personality. they used to call her giggles because she always made people laugh. reporter: josephine s mother priscilla had been on the local news searching for her daughter for months, after she left a family bar-b-que telling them she was going for groceries.