A Nevada man was arrested in the January 1982 death of a 5-year-old California girl, and authorities say DNA testing helped solve the 40-year-old cold case.
Robert John Lanoue, 70, of Reno, Nevada, has been charged with the murder of Anne Pham, the Monterey County district attorney’s office announced on Thursday.
On Jan. 21, 1982, authorities said Pham was walking to her kindergarten class at Highland Elementary School in Seaside, California, when she disappeared. Two days later, her remains were discovered at Fort Ord, a former U.S. Army base in use from 1917 to 1994 just east of Seaside.
No arrests or leads were made immediately following Pham’s death, and the case went cold. In 2020, the case was reopened by the district attorney’s newly formed Cold Case Task Force, alongside the Seaside Police Department.
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Investigators submitted items of evidence for DNA testing and using “a new type of DNA testing not previously available to earlier investigators,” Lanoue was named a suspect. It was found that Lanoue was a 29-year-old Seaside resident at the time of Pham’s death. Interim Seaside Police Chief Nick Borges told KION-TV Lanoue lived “about a block and a half away” from Pham.
“It’s a very strong case. DNA has a large part, genealogy has a large part and circumstantial evidence, in this case, is extremely powerful,” Borges said.
Authorities obtained a warrant for Lanoue’s arrest, and he was detained Wednesday. He was in custody in Nevada pending extradition to California, authorities said.
Lanoue is charged with one count of first-degree murder and special circumstance allegations that he killed Pham while committing kidnapping and a lewd act on a child under the age of 14.
The district attorney’s office thanked the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division; Ed Green, a biomolecular engineering professor at University of California, Santa Cruz; and the labs Astrea Forensics and Parabon NanoLabs for assistance in the investigation.
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