Placer County detectives closed a 35-year-old cold case Monday when they arrested 64-year-old James Lawhead Jr. in connection with the 1991 rape and murder of Cindy Wanner.
Wanner was 35 years old and had brought her 11-month-old child along while she cleaned her sister’s home in Granite Bay, California, on November 25, 1991. When her husband arrived to find her later that day, her car, shoes, and coat were still at the house. The baby was strapped into a high chair, crying. Wanner was gone. A hunter found her remains three weeks later in Foresthill, about 35 miles away, near the Tahoe National Forest. She had been raped and strangled, and investigators believed her killer had kept her alive for some period of time before killing her. The case went cold.
What makes the arrest striking isn’t just that it happened at all.
Lawhead had been out of prison for only 10 months when Wanner disappeared. He had served 11 years of a 19-year sentence for a 1980 case in which he broke into a home, beat an elderly woman, and raped an 11-year-old girl. The Placer County Sheriff’s Office classified him as a high-risk, mentally-disordered sex offender. After his release, authorities now believe he found Wanner and abducted her with little struggle.
He didn’t leave Northern California quickly. In 2002, he was arrested in Placer County for failing to register as a sex offender. Three years after that, he faced an outstanding weapons charge in the city of Lincoln. Sometime after that, he ran. He changed his name to Vincent Reynolds and left California entirely.
Recent DNA analysis in the Wanner case pointed to Lawhead, but detectives couldn’t find him. The Placer County Sheriff’s Office had actually prepared a video to ask the public for help locating him. Before they released it, the Scottsdale Police Department in Arizona sent a tip: facial recognition technology had flagged the suspect.
Last Friday, Lawhead was arrested at a home in Bullhead, Arizona, belonging to his sister. SFist, which covered the case in detail, reported on what investigators found inside.
“Our detectives flew out there immediately upon his arrest and served a search warrant, seizing numerous items of evidence from the home, including multiple loaded firearms staged throughout the house, and a bag that had his clothes, $15,000 in cash, and a burner phone,” Placer County Sheriff Wayne Woo told reporters at Monday’s press conference.
The firearms staged around the house suggest he expected trouble. The cash and burner phone suggest he expected to run again.
His sister, 71-year-old Teri Lawhead of San Clemente, was arrested separately in Lancaster County, South Carolina. She has been charged as an accessory for allegedly helping her brother evade investigators.
Cold cases don’t often close this cleanly. DNA technology has sharpened what detectives can do with decades-old evidence, and genealogical DNA databases have helped break open cases across the country that once seemed permanently unsolvable. Facial recognition, which carries real civil liberties concerns in other contexts, is what cracked this one. The Tahoe National Forest area where Wanner’s body was found is remote enough that without a direct lead, Lawhead might have lived under his assumed name indefinitely.
For Wanner’s family, the arrest comes 35 years after they left a child in a high chair and never got an explanation. The baby who was crying that day in Granite Bay is now in their mid-30s. Wanner’s husband has lived with that November afternoon for more than three decades. Whatever a criminal case can offer a family that has carried that kind of grief since 1991, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office delivered it to them on a Monday in late April, more than 34 years after a hunter found her in the hills above Foresthill.