Pretty Bad Girls 

Defendant Jillian McIlvenna was getting woozy beneath the harsh lighting of Department 21 in San Francisco's Superior Court. Doe-eyed behind dark-framed glasses, she blinked, as if that would obscure the view. But it was all still there. The formless orange jumpsuit. The judge in his bright purple tie. All the devastated families, including that of the dead man. The most dreadful people in view, though, were the other two young women in orange. Kimberly Gutierrez and Felicia Mehrara.

The three of them had shared everything — their apartment, their clothes, their men. Even their beds. All had come from broken families, eventually becoming what investigators called "throwaways," the catch-all term for girls on their own at a young age. Struggling to support themselves and their drug-addled lifestyle, the teenagers had become close and built a family of their own. But in court on April 3, the three exchanged only arctic stares. Murder tends to have that kind of effect on friendship.

It had been five years since the girls lured Eugene Gorenman to the edge of San Francisco, from where he would never return. The 26-year-old Russian software engineer had encountered them on a drive home from a party, then followed them to Fort Funston, a wind-whipped beach locale and former military base. A jogger later found Gorenman's body with a fatal gunshot wound to the head, his jeans pockets turned out. His silver Mustang was abandoned in the Bayview. The only sign of life was found in Gorenman's credit card, which continued to make purchases at gas stations, a cellphone store, and a nail salon.

Those purchases soon became valuable clues in a sprawling San Francisco police investigation that stretched over the Bay Area, filling dozens of notebooks, requiring hundreds of interviews, and taking two nerve-wracking years to unravel. It also involved the U.S. National Park Service, the South San Francisco police, and the FBI, to whom the execution-style shooting suggested the Russian Mafia.

But the real culprits were even more glamorous than that: a trio of femmes fatales, one white, one Latina, and one multiracial. Young, beautiful, and, to varying degrees, responsible for the brutal killing of a man they hardly knew. Now it was time for them to be sentenced and shipped off to state prison, but before that, the victim's parents had something to say.

"The killers not only took away our son, but they destroyed our entire family," the Gorenmans had written for police Inspector Holly Pera to read aloud. Because Eugene had been their only son, the family name would end with him. The statement alternately eulogized the fallen son and excoriated the girls, to whom it referred as "vicious animals" and "human filth."

"They belong in hell," Pera read. "They don't deserve any pity regardless of their age or socioeconomic status." In closing, the statement instructed the girls to "remember that as long as you live, God will punish you wherever you are. Signed, Eugene Gorenman's parents."

Jillian listened with her head down, and turned over the words in her mind. He had been their only child. Since the murder, she says, she had never heard Kim or Felicia express regret. On the other hand, Jillian told police from the start that she felt horrible about what happened, and before her sentencing, she stood to address the Gorenman family. Her statement turned out to be less an apology than a final declaration of innocence.

"They can think ill of me all that they will," she said. "Anyone who knows me and knows my heart knows that I could never have knowingly beared witness to such a heinous crime."

In a small conference room tucked away in the bowels of the San Francisco county jailhouse, Jillian McIlvenna sits forward with her elbows perched on the table, ready to tell her story one more time. Although she's put on a few pounds since her incarceration, her long chestnut hair, mocha-colored eyes, and bow-shaped lips apparently have some of the guards doing double-takes.

In here, she's "as good as could be expected," she says, considering that protective custody — which keeps her safe from her also-jailed former friends — affords her just 30 minutes a day for exercise. That's especially tough for someone like Jillian.

During her childhood in Potrero Hill, she was charming but relentlessly disruptive — the picture of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "I couldn't keep myself out of trouble," she says. "And I can't get my head in the books." That's not to say she isn't smart. In fact, Jillian believes she has a photographic memory.

Her parents divorced soon after she was born, and although she spent her first four years living with her mother, Deborah Latham, her father, Rand McIlvenna, eventually got custody.

Latham had three more children, who were all eventually taken out of her custody. "Anything she can become addicted to, she does," Jillian says. "She lies. She cheats. She steals."

Latham denies all of this. She says that although she tried drugs a few times, her problems stemmed from her unwise selection of drug-addicted, abusive men and a failure of "the system" to protect her. Jillian remembers spending the summers with her mom, only to return to her father emaciated and sunburned.

McIlvenna and his family were unquestionably a more stable and positive influence, if slightly alternative. Their business, the San Francisco–based Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, provides graduate-level courses.

As a teenager, Jillian's troublemaking got her booted out of various public schools, until she eventually landed at the Urban Pioneer Experiential Academy, a now-defunct charter school. The students were taken on camping and rock-climbing trips, during which she developed a love for the outdoors. After she graduated, she enrolled in Emeryville's National Holistic Institute to study massage therapy.

By that time, though, Jillian had developed a reliance on marijuana and its ability to "take the edge off." She had also declared herself a lesbian. She lived with her maternal grandparents in Berkeley; her family encouraged her to avoid San Francisco and concentrate on finishing school.

But Jillian went back to the city anyway, and that was when she met Kimberly Gutierrez and Felicia Mehrara. Both young women were out on their own by the age of 15. Child Protective Services told investigators that Felicia was an orphan who had lost her parents to AIDS and a brother to the prison system; she eventually became a prostitute. Kimberly — whom everyone calls Kim — was estranged from her father, whom she referred to as a drug dealer in a police interview, and had been raised by her mother, Socorro Gutierrez, who has a long arrest record and has been in and out of jail for drug and battery offenses. "I've had it pretty tough, and I don't really trust anybody," Kim told police. Eventually, Kim's mother was unable to care for her, so Kim entered foster care, where she met Felicia. The two regularly ran away from their group homes.

One night in 2003, Jillian and Kim wound up at a mutual friend's birthday party, where Kim immediately got Jillian's attention. She had delicate features and jet-black hair that cascaded down her back, and although there was no denying her extraordinary beauty, she was covered in bruises and fighting with everyone. "She was this little loudmouth girl," Jillian says. "I hated her right away."

That didn't last.

For months, Jillian and Kim bumped into each other around the city, and with each meeting Kim's guard seemed to slip a little. Jillian found herself drawn to the dark, unruly girl, and it turned out they had a lot in common. Both were living outside San Francisco and felt isolated from their friends. Both had mothers with issues. Kim's undesirable upbringing appealed to what Jillian calls her "counseling instinct," and beyond that, there was a lot about Kim that fascinated her. Kim fascinated just about everyone.

Solemn, secretive, and a skilled manipulator, Kim usually acted much older than 16, but if the situation called for it, she could also act much younger. Her ability to control people and situations was remarkable.

Soon after they became friends, Kim and Jillian began pretending they were in a lesbian relationship. One afternoon in 2004, during the initial period when gay marriages were performed in San Francisco, the two went to City Hall to get hitched. The purpose of this, Jillian says, was to emancipate Kim, who was a ward of the court. Because Kim was so young, the girls needed a consent form from her mother, who agreed to sign in exchange for $20, Jillian says. (A record of the marriage could not be located.)

Jillian and Kim moved into a small apartment in Daly City, where they slept in the same bed and eventually became lovers, according to Jillian. Kim told the police inspectors that although she was bisexual, she and Jillian remained platonic. Kim's lawyer, Tony Tamburello, says Jillian has difficulty telling fantasy from reality.

He may have a point. Although Kim tended to steal from or otherwise manipulate people she encountered, Jillian chose to believe their relationship was deeper than symbiosis. They often had thought-provoking, meaningful conversations. "With me it was different," Jillian still insists.

She also happened to be paying the rent, which came from her grandparents, odd jobs at the institute, and massage gigs. Months later, she realized her bank account had been mysteriously drained. "It was all going up Kim's nose," Jillian told police.

In early 2004, Jillian and Kim decided to move to a larger home in east San Bruno, a suburban area south of San Francisco known for cheap rent and methamphetamine addicts. They found a three-bedroom, $1,300-a-month apartment beside a tattoo shop and a pizza parlor. It quickly became a nonstop party.

All kinds of people came and went, buying and selling and doing drugs as much as they pleased. Two of the visitors were Felicia Mehrara and Marjorie Quispe, an impressionable young Peruvian girl who began hanging out with the faster crowd of girls in defiance of her strict and traditional mother. Jillian remembers that some nights, all the girls would sleep in the same California King bed. In the morning, Jillian would often prepare them all an egg-and-cheese croissant breakfast.

"It was so much fun there," Felicia told Inspector Pera. "I mean, here were these two teenagers with their own place. It was a party house. I was there all the time."

There were some things about the apartment that weren't so fun, though. Inside it, people's cash and credit cards tended to vanish. Also, Kim — who was clearly the boss — became violent at times.

Kim was especially cruel to Marjorie, but as it turned out, she had three things Kim liked: a steady income from her job with Comcast, a driver's license, and wheels. The girls would often go out driving and "kick it."

But kicking it, apparently, sometimes included what the girls referred to as "milking," or meeting strangers and persuading them, in various ways, to hand over money, weed, food, or whatever else. Although Jillian says this practice was harmless, it certainly didn't stay that way. Eventually, milking gave way to robbery, and robbery to murder.

Eugene Gorenman was the kind of guy who saturated his life with activity. An outstanding student, he graduated high school at 16, finished his degree at UC Berkeley four years later, then made an easy transition to a job as computer engineer with PG&E. He was also the kind of person who made more plans on a Sunday night than most people did for an entire weekend.

The handsome bodybuilder had a side job as a party promoter for Russian throwdowns and beauty pageants, which kept him constantly on the go. But he wasn't too busy for his steady girlfriend of six months, Marina Skorobogatov, a soulful, attractive woman whom friends say he planned to marry.

On the night of March 28, 2004, Gorenman ate dinner with friends at an Olive Garden, met up with more friends, then attended a Russian party on Turk Street. Though he took off around midnight, he wasn't quite ready to go home. He decided to take the scenic route past the ocean back to his home in the Western Addition. On Fulton Street, his silver Mustang pulled up next to Marjorie Quispe's red Toyota. Marjorie, Kim, Jillian, and Felicia were all inside.

Their night, thus far, had been pretty typical. In the early evening, they had milked a guy named Henry, who let them smoke his weed at Lake Merced. He had also presented Marjorie with a white orchid, which the girls immediately regifted to her mom.

At Marjorie's house, Jillian says she remembers overhearing the word "gat" in a hushed conversation between Felicia and Kim. At the time, she says, she didn't think much of it.

When they hit the road again, Kim — as always — rode shotgun, and guided Marjorie's driving. At one point, Felicia made a phone call, and Kim directed Marjorie up a winding road in Daly City. At a house, Felicia got out and returned with a small black pouch. Jillian claims to have had no knowledge of what was inside that pouch or what Kim planned to do with it until later.

She did know that Kim loved to drive other people's cars, particularly without their owners' supervision, and she also knew Kim had recently attempted to rob someone. While driving around the previous week, the girls had encountered an Asian woman with a white leather jacket and purse. Kim unsuccessfully tried to rob the woman and repeatedly kicked her in the face, Jillian says, then justified it by saying, "I knew that bitch."

When Kim saw Gorenman's convertible, her eyes seemed to sparkle, Jillian remembers. The girls engaged him in a pretend race down the street, and finally they directed him to follow them to Ocean Beach. When they arrived, bonfires were raging on the beach.

"See what you can get out of him," Jillian remembers Kim saying, and that was pretty much how it always went. They'd meet a guy, and Kim would assign somebody to milk him.

Jillian got out and began "conversating," and Gorenman — who seemed friendly and open — immediately offered to share some grapes, apples, and pears he had just purchased. Despite his munificence, he didn't come off as sexually interested, Jillian says, which led her to conclude that he was gay.

They talked about how great it was to live in San Francisco, and eventually the subject of Fort Funston came up. Gorenman had never been there, and said he hoped to go sometime to see the hang gliders. Jillian suggested they check it out now.

He followed the girls' Toyota south to Skyline Boulevard, which slices between Lake Merced and the ocean. They parked at the gate, and everyone but Marjorie got out, Jillian says, because she wasn't feeling well.

As Jillian's story goes, she and Gorenman trudged ahead on the path, surrounded by sand dunes and ice plants beneath the shining moon. They went to the hang gliding lookout, then continued up to Battery Davis, a cliffside former military munitions site, and then into a wide tunnel. Felicia and Kim hung back, whispering to each other, Jillian remembers. Eventually, she says, she and Gorenman began to feel uneasy. Jillian told him that the girls expected him to give them things, and he offered to buy dinner.

Jillian thought maybe that gesture would sate Kim, particularly when Kim caught up to them, asked his name, then gave hers. That was surprising, because she never told strangers her real name. Jillian hoped that meant no harm would come to Gorenman, but then she noticed Felicia and Kim were wearing gloves.

The next thing Jillian remembers is crouching to tie her shoe, then looking up just in time to see Kim's arm extend toward Gorenman, just a few feet from his head. There was a flash of light as the gun went off. "He fell so fast," she recalls. "In movies, you see people fall, and it seems so slow. He was on the ground in seconds. I was in shock."

Then, Jillian says, Felicia and Kim crouched beside him, rummaged through his pockets, and took his car keys, wallet, and all the cash he had — a mere $30. Jillian later told three people three different reasons Kim had shot Gorenman instead of just holding him up. One: She was too afraid to hit him with the gun. Two: She wanted to see what it would feel like to kill somebody. Three: She got jealous of his interaction with Jillian.

Getting back to the car is a blur for Jillian, although she does recall falling in the sand, only to be ordered by Kim to "get the fuck up." In the story she told investigators, once they arrived back at Marjorie's Toyota, Jillian got in, and Kim tossed the gun onto Jillian's lap. Then Kim and Felicia drove off in Gorenman's Mustang.

In the car, Marjorie asked Jillian where Gorenman had gone. "Don't worry about it," Jillian told her. "He's staying here." Marjorie apparently didn't find out the truth until months later, when the cops knocked on her door.

The two cars caravanned to the Bayview, where Kim parked and removed the Mustang's license plates. Then they continued driving, parked the car in an alley, and emptied its trunk. Kim, Marjorie, and Felicia then ate Gorenman's fruit, according to Jillian, who claims to have watched in disgust.

The girls then drove back to Daly City in the Toyota, where Felicia may have returned the gun.

Kim and Jillian continued the crime spree at the home of Bruce and Rebecca Laighton, parents of a guy named Ben, whom both Kim and Jillian had bedded. Jillian says she was hesitant to defy Kim right after she had just killed somebody, and robbing the Laightons was something they'd been planning for a while.

In fact, the last time Kim slept with Ben, Jillian had stolen his keys and made copies with the intent to later break into his parents' home and steal weed.

The morning after the murder, Kim and Jillian robbed the Laightons' home of $3,000, Giants season tickets, a digital camera, and enough weed to keep them high for a month. Jillian says that while Kim gathered the loot, she merely smoked a joint on the couch. She needed to smoke really bad, she remembers, because Kim's behavior was growing more disturbing by the minute. Kim apparently showed no remorse whatsoever, and shut down any attempts at conversation about the murder. Kim paid for a nail appointment with Gorenman's credit card, and even slept in the newly purchased bedsheets they had taken from his trunk.

Shortly after the murder, Jillian remembers hearing a new Alicia Keys song, "Diary," on the radio. The lyrics immediately caught her attention: "I won't tell your secret/Your secret is safe with me/I won't tell your secret/Just think of me as the pages in your diary." She says she felt sick and turned off the radio. She knew she'd never be able to keep this secret.

In the lobby of the homicide department at the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant, the south wall displays more than 50 wanted posters containing pictures and descriptions of suspects. The suspects vary in age, appearance, and ethnicity, but there is one element common to nearly all of them: They're men.

"It's unusual to have a female defendant," said Inspector Pera, seated at a conference table with her partner, Joseph Toomey. "We had three."

Making the case even less common was the fact that the female perpetrators didn't know their victim beforehand. That complicated the case, and explains why Pera and Toomey had so much trouble initially finding leads.

The crime scene and the body contained no helpful evidence — not even the bullet itself, which had apparently exited Gorenman's right eye. He had no criminal record and no apparent enemies. He didn't live a high-risk lifestyle, which meant the inspectors would have to pursue almost every imaginable avenue. Maybe his girlfriend had a jealous ex-boyfriend? Maybe all the chatter from friends about the Russian Mafia had some merit?

Nope. "We were shut down," Toomey said.

Then, two weeks into the investigation, Gorenman's credit card sprang back into action. At Wireless Specialty's on Divisadero, not only was a cellphone purchased with the card, but the buyer also had the nerve to fill out the application using the dead man's information.

After probing into the cellphone's purchase and using a search warrant to obtain all the numbers called by the cellphone, police eventually zeroed in on 21-year-old Edwin Suarez. Although he was evasive at first, claiming to have purchased the phone from "a black guy," he eventually told police that he bought it at the store with a stolen credit card.

Suarez explained that he and two friends had recently hung out at an apartment in San Bruno. He said he stole a bunch of stuff, including some weed, some Giants tickets, and the credit card from a purse. He thought it belonged to someone named Kimberly.

When Pera and Toomey showed up at Jillian and Kim's apartment, the girls lied about everything. Kim said her name was Grace Gutierrez (her sister's name), Jillian said she hadn't been to Fort Funston in five years, and both feigned ignorance of the murder and the credit card. Kim did say she had "associates" who stole things.

From there, investigators showed up routinely at 984 Camino Real, and the girls' stories began to morph and grow. To throw them off, Kim she said she had been warned to keep certain names "out yo fuckin' mouth, bitch," and her reaction when shown a picture of Gorenman was to squeal, "He's cute."

Investigators knew the girls were lying, and eventually began to piece together the truth with information from some guys who worked at the pizza parlor next door. Jillian had apparently talked to them about the murder while high, and she had also spilled to Mark Sanford, a 42-year-old mechanic the girls had recently befriended at the Laundromat.

After the cops began investigating, Jillian remembers, Kim became increasingly violent, and made offhand comments about going on a shooting spree in San Francisco to increase the workload of the police and refocus their attention. Jillian says Kim threatened her life and burned the clothing they had been wearing on the night of the murder. Distraught, Jillian started having nightmares and seizures, and decided to go into hiding with Sanford, who became her boyfriend.

Sanford — who has a long, drug-related criminal history — was eventually arrested again. Investigators were finally able to get to Jillian through him. After she gave a thorough, three-plus-hour interview to the police, she naively expected to go home. Instead, she was placed under arrest for murder, robbery, and car theft.

Because Jillian's statements were transparently self-serving and unreliable, Bob Gordon, the head of homicide at the district attorney's office, wasn't prepared to charge the other girls. Jillian, apparently hoping for a better deal, offered to help ensnare her friends with several phone calls meant to glean confessions. She also cruised by her old apartment in an unmarked police car, wearing a wire and surrounded by undercover police. Kim refused to come out.

Although no new evidence surfaced, a year later a new D.A., George Butterworth, reviewed the case and decided to charge all three girls. Felicia was picked up while walking alone on the street. When the cops arrived at Kim's place, there was a surprise in store. She had given birth to one child, and was pregnant with another.

On March 11, 2008, day two of the pretrial hearing, the prosecution was set to call Marjorie Quispe to the stand. For her cooperation, she was granted immunity from her own testimony, which otherwise would have incriminated her as an accessory in the robbery and murder of Eugene Gorenman.

Before Marjorie could testify, though, Judge Benson wanted to briefly hear from her mother, Maria Theresa Camino. Camino strongly disliked when her daughter hung out with Kim and Jillian, but she also had sympathy for them. "They had nothing," she says. "Nothing and no one." Camino said she'd never forget the time she threw Kim a birthday party, and Kim cried because that night, for the first time in 16 years, she received a birthday cake.

Socorro Gutierrez, Kim's mom, apparently had other ways of demonstrating affection. Camino was taking the stand because Gutierrez had threatened her in the courtroom. "Tenemos que eliminar los ratos," she had said. We have to eliminate the rats.

Before Judge Benson, Camino said she was afraid for her daughter's safety. The judge reprimanded Gutierrez (who denied making threats), but allowed her to stay in the courtroom. On the previous day, the judge had expelled Kim's boyfriend, Oscar Grados, for allegedly threatening Sanford. Grados had said, "The rain will stop soon," which Sanford interpreted to mean, "I was a done deal-y."

There had been other threats, too. Back in 2004, Kim, her sister, and either Jillian or Felicia (Marjorie couldn't remember which) had approached Marjorie at work. She remembers Kim pushing her against a wall. "If you say anything, I'm going to pop a cap in you," Kim had allegedly said.

With all this in mind, Marjorie took the stand, contradicted Jillian's statements, and hesitantly incriminated them all. Although Jillian had told the inspectors that Marjorie had stayed in the car because she didn't feel well, Marjorie admitted that Kim had ordered her to stay as a lookout, and to call Kim's cellphone if anyone came.

Marjorie also changed her own story on multiple issues. She had told inspectors that when her friends returned to the car, she saw a gun in Jillian's hand, but she recanted that in court. When the prosecutor asked Marjorie if there had been a discussion in the car about hitting the man over the head and taking his wallet, her answer was yes.

"They were all discussing it," she said. "Mostly Kim and [Jillian]. I think it was [Jillian] who said it." When asked about what happened to Gorenman's fruit after the murder, Marjorie said, referring to herself, Kim, and Jillian, "I believe we ate that."

In addition, Marjorie told the courtroom that she and the other girls had ingested some combination of alcohol (possibly Hennessy), weed, and crystal meth that night. That lent no credibility to her already shaky memory. She couldn't recall the model of the car she was driving. She didn't know what time she had been interviewed by investigators just a few days before the hearing. She wavered a lot.

The prosecution wasn't relying on Marjorie's testimony alone, though. One of the pizza parlor guys, Talal Jaber, and Sanford had told cops about how Jillian told them the murder was only supposed to be a robbery. Jaber and Sanford backed off those statements at the hearing, but the damage was done.

When the hearing concluded six days later, the D.A. — perhaps because the girls were so young and the case so complicated — offered plea deals. And the defendants, who would have been looking at 25 years to life if they went to trial (where there was no telling what new evidence might come out), certainly had incentive to accept.

The prosecution believed that Felicia brought the gun, Jillian brought Gorenman, and Kim pulled the trigger. That, combined with the overwhelming amount of evidence Jillian had delivered against herself, determined the varying sentences offered in the plea bargains.

Kim was offered 21 years for voluntary manslaughter and use of a deadly weapon. Felicia was offered eight — six for voluntary manslaughter and another two for providing the gun. Jillian — who had cooperated with police, and who had not provided or used the gun — was offered 11 years for voluntary manslaughter. Marjorie, the lookout, was free to go. She's now engaged, employed, and living a quiet life with her fiancé.

Jillian was shocked and offended to be offered a worse deal than Felicia, who had provided the murder weapon. Still, she took the plea. "I'm terrified by our justice system," she says. "Innocent people get convicted every single day, and I just broke."

At 24 years old, Jillian has been incarcerated since May 5, 2005. She'll be at the county jail for another couple of months, and then she'll be transferred to a women's prison, where she'll be among the youngest and most vulnerable inmates. With credit for time served, she'll be there for about seven years, which, she's quick to point out, is nowhere close to as long as the Gorenmans will be without their son. Still, it's a while.

She'll pass much of her time reading, she says, and is already devouring the Twilight series, about a young woman who falls in love with a vampire. It's not scary, she says, which is the only reason she can read it. She hates scary movies and violence and gore. Sanford backed this up in court: "I get pissed off and smack the cat and she's crying about it," he once announced. She does come off like a softie, and even Pera says she believes Jillian feels genuinely sorry about what happened.

The biggest tragedy of all, Pera says, is clearly that of the Gorenman family. But the situation of the throwaway girls is also tragic. "They are these kids on the street, living adult lives," she says. "Kids that are raised in dysfunctional families like they were have very short childhoods. I think childhood is so painful for them that there's a tendency to want to grow up quicker just to get away."

Although she disputes Marjorie's damning testimony and points out inconsistencies, Jillian does admit she made mistakes. On the night that Kim kicked the woman while attempting to rob her, Jillian says she wishes she had challenged her more about the violence. On the night of the murder, she wishes she had been more alert and less afraid.

Although she owns up to lying to investigators and sugarcoating the story here and there, Jillian still denies having any knowledge that Gorenman would be robbed or shot that night. When asked if she would believe her own story if she heard it from somebody else, she doesn't hesitate. Her voice is unwavering, her big brown eyes intensely focused. "Being through this, I would," she says.

Whether you believe Jillian or not, she certainly seems to believe herself.