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Jury selection begins for man accused of killing girl in 1979

By Bruce Gerstman
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

SAN PABLO - After an evening out drinking in 1979, Linda Bullock returned home to find that her 8-year-old daughter Cannie was missing.

"Candy's robe was lying there in the bed," said Bullock's friend, Debby Fisher, who rushed over in the early morning hours of Aug. 25 after a frenzied phone call from Bullock. "There was blood all over it."

San Pablo police officers found Cannie "Candy" Bullock's lifeless body in the back yard of their home on Dover Avenue. She had been sexually assaulted.

Jury selection is now under way in Contra Costa Superior Court for 62-year-old Joseph Seferino Cordova Jr., the suspect charged with murder and rape in her death.

Cordova has pleaded not guilty. A judge can sentence him to death if a jury convicts him of murder during a rape.

The crime remained a mystery until 23 years later when investigators using DNA from the crime scene matched it with Cordova's. He was in a Colorado prison for convictions of sexually assaulting children.

"I was very happy to pull the case and start reviewing it and put it to closure," said San Pablo police Sgt. Mike Von Millanich, who became the lead detective on the case after the DNA hit.

The Contra Costa district attorney's office charged Cordova in 2002 and extradited him to the county for trial.

Cordova's name never surfaced during the original 1979 investigation, Von Millanich said. The suspect had grown up in Richmond and lived in the area at the time of the attack.

He was one of Linda Bullock's acquaintances who dropped by her home to use methamphetamine, Fisher said.

"He wasn't my friend, but I knew who he was," said Fisher, who was 19 at the time.

San Pablo police in 1996 had focused on another man when Detective Mark Harrison obtained a court order to test the DNA of Bullock's neighbor, William Flores.

Flores had committed suicide in 1983, so the judge ordered the police to exhume his body.

At the time of the killing, police knew Flores from complaints that he chased young girls and made lewd comments to them, court documents say.

Police considered it suspicious that he desperately wanted detectives to include him in the investigation. He admitted knowing Cannie and could not account for his time on the night of the killing, according to Harrison's police report.

Flores' sister said she believed her brother was the killer, Harrison wrote. Flores was often violent and had arrived home the night of the killing with blood covering his shirt, which his mother burned in their backyard.

Flores had told police to check his backyard for evidence related to the killing. However, Flores' DNA did not match sexual assault evidence left at the scene.

Cordova's attorneys have filed pre-trial motions to admit evidence at trial about Flores, suggesting they may try to cast doubt on Cordova's involvement by saying Flores killed Cannie.

Prosecutors say Linda Bullock, 29, was never accused of child endangerment.

Deputy District Attorney Dara Cashman, who is prosecuting Cordova, said police may have decided not to arrest her because they wanted her to cooperate with their investigation.

Also, law enforcement officials look at all of the circumstances to determine if a parent willfully endangered a child, Cashman said. Linda Bullock did not expect that somebody would kill her daughter.

"I'm sure that wasn't crossing the mother's mind," she said.

As she did on the fatal night, Linda Bullock occasionally left her daughter at night alone, Fisher said. Bullock instructed her daughter that night not to open the door for anyone.

"But she would have opened it," Fisher said. "Candy was just a loving child."

The doors and windows showed no signs of a forced entry.

Bullock could not be reached for comment.

Reflecting on the night, Fisher recalled feeling uneasy about leaving with her friend, rather than having somebody stay with Cannie.

"I should not have left with her," Fisher said. "I should never have done that."

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MAN SENTENCED TO DEATH FOR 1979 RAPE, MURDER OF 8-YEAR-OLD GIRL

CBS5
05/14/07

A Contra Costa County Superior Court judge sentenced 63-year-old Joseph Seferino Cordova to death on Friday for the rape and murder of an 8-year-old San Pablo girl 28 years ago.

In January, jurors convicted Cordova of first-degree murder in the commission of a rape and first-degree murder in the commission of a lewd and lascivious act on a child in connection with the August 25, 1979 death of Cannie Bullock.

Jurors came back with a recommendation for execution on Feb. 16, according to a superior court clerk. In the sentence handed down Friday, Judge Peter Spinetta upheld the jury's recommendation for death, according to the clerk.

Cannie's mother, Linda Baum, had left Cannie home alone on the night of Aug. 24, 1979 to go out drinking at a bar in Richmond. When she came home, Cannie was missing and the sheets on the sofa bed where Cannie slept were "all messed up and the mattress was twisted," Baum testified during trial.

Police investigators found the child in the backyard under a bedspread. She had been raped and strangled, a medical examiner testified.

Although Baum knew Cordova at the time, the former Richmond man didn't become a suspect until 23 years after Cannie's murder when DNA from semen found inside Cannie's body was matched to Cordova's DNA through the national DNA database.

Cordova, the son of a Colorado coalminer and deputy sheriff, had been serving a sentence in Colorado state prison for molesting a child. He has been in prison and then in county jail in Martinez for the past 13 years.

During the trial, Cordova told jurors that he would prefer to be sentenced to death because he would get his own cell on death row and he felt he would be safer there than in the general prison population. He also said that the other inmates would be safer as well because if somebody attacked him, he would have to kill them to make sure they wouldn't attack him again.