Orlando, Florida- from www.orlandosentinel.com – Convicted murderer Steve Giddens was a free man for just 16 days before, according to detectives, he killed again.

The body of Chandra Gwen Nobles, a blond, blue-eyed 40-year-old, was found behind a strip club on South Orange Blossom Trail around 9 a.m. Jan. 30. She had been strangled.

A homeless person collecting aluminum cans found her corpse next to a trash bin behind Cleo’s strip club, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Plastic trash bags covered her body.

The killing went unsolved for months. Then on Aug. 3, a DNA match led homicide Detective Vance Voyles to Giddens. He was arrested before dawn two days later at his rented Kissimmee home.

Giddens, convicted of killing a Polk County prostitute in 1980, now sits in the Orange County Jail. He is charged with first-degree murder in Nobles’ slaying.

Detectives have released few details on Nobles’ death. There was a struggle, and she lost some fingernails in the fight. It’s likely she was killed elsewhere and dumped at the club, sheriff’s records show.

Investigators said Nobles, who also went by her maiden name, Chandra Moore, was a dancer who worked at area clubs but not at Cleo’s. Criminal records show she was arrested in the past on prostitution and drug-related charges.

Giddens was a registered guest at the hotel where Nobles was last seen, records show. It’s not clear whether Nobles agreed to sex with Giddens in exchange for money the night she was killed.

Nobles’ death ended her struggle with drug addiction and prostitution, friends said. She lost custody of two children, a boy and girl, years before she died. At times she would be clean, but it never lasted, friends said.

“She was always battling,” said Nobles’ mother, Victoria Moore, who lives in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth near Guam. “It’s just a cycle.”

Few knew how to find Nobles when she was alive because of her transient, high-risk lifestyle, and many learned of her death only after reading the Orlando Sentinel, including her mother.

“She had a heart of gold and wanted to help people,” said friend Vicki Hansen, who met her through a church program in St. Petersburg when Nobles was off drugs. “She was a beautiful woman … people would stop and stare at her.”

At one point Nobles asked Hansen to care for her young son. She provided foster care until the boy was adopted in 2005. Nobles’ daughter was raised by her father’s family at that point, Hansen said.

Family and friends say Nobles was an actress in the 1990s who made cameo appearances in such hit TV shows as “Baywatch” and “Married … With Children.” In 2009, Nobles kept an online blog about her days in Hollywood.

But Nobles was stabbed and raped during an attack while living in California, family members say. She lost an eye and suffered a mental breakdown afterward.

That’s when her life began to spiral out of control, said Pat Smith, Nobles’ sister.

“I was always very proud of her,” Smith said. “It’s a shame.”

The circumstances in Nobles slaying are eerily similar to those of the 1980 murder of a 24-year-old Haines City woman whom Giddens admitted killing.

Around 2 a.m. Oct. 18, 1980, Joni Sue Crocker left a Haines City bar with Giddens and drove him to an orange grove northeast of the city near Baker Dairy and Powerline roads.

Crocker agreed to sex with Giddens in exchange for a gram of cocaine, Polk County Sheriff’s Office records show.

At some point the two got into an argument, and Giddens strangled Crocker with her bra. He left her partially nude body in the grove, with the bra wrapped tightly around her neck. He stole money and drugs from Crocker’s car, then abandoned the vehicle about two miles from the crime scene, records show.

In the nine years after Crocker’s murder, Giddens was accused of several sexually motivated crimes, police records and newspaper reports show. There were no convictions.

The Polk native, who once worked as a roofer, was finally jailed in 1989 after a robbery and vehicle-theft conviction. It was during that prison stint that Brian Rall, who was a Sheriff’s Office cold-case homicide detective in 1993, reopened the Crocker case.

Rall, now a captain at the Haines City Police Department, said when he reopened the case, all evidence pointed back to Giddens. He confessed during a prison interview.

Giddens pleaded to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 35 years in 1995. Gain time allowed him out early. Department of Corrections records show Giddens received no visitors during his time in prison.

He left Hardee Correctional Institution south of Lakeland with $100 and a bus pass Jan. 14.

Nobles was dead 16 days later.