After 34 years, officials have arrested a suspect accused of kidnapping and killing a doting mother in Northern California, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office announced this week, marking a major breakthrough in a gruesome cold case that’s haunted the community for decades.
On Nov. 25, 1991, 35-year-old mother Cindy Wanner suddenly vanished from her home in Granite Bay, leaving behind her shoes, coat and car. When her family returned to the house and realized she was gone, they found her 11-month-old child unattended and crying in a high chair by the dining room table. There was no “rational explanation” for her disappearance, news outlets reported at the time, leading authorities to believe that foul play was involved.
About three weeks later, a quail hunter made a disturbing discovery: About 40 miles away in a remote, wooded area outside Foresthill, Wanner was found strangled to death and wearing only a bra. According to the autopsy, she was alive for up to two weeks after her kidnapping.
Wanner’s case became one of the most “heinous, notorious” cold cases the county has ever seen, officials said in a press conference Monday. But after more than three decades of unanswered questions, authorities say they finally “arrested the monster responsible for this crime”: James Lawhead Jr., a 64-year-old convicted sex offender who was allegedly on the run and living in his sister’s home in Bullhead City, Arizona. In 1981, Lawhead was sentenced to 20 years in prison for attempting to kill a 71-year-old grandmother with a vacuum cleaner tube and sexually assaulting her 11-year-old granddaughter. He was released in 1991, the same year that Wanner disappeared. Then, in 2005, Lawhead vanished too.
This month, however, detectives who believed he assumed a false identity were able to identify him using facial recognition technology. On Friday, they arrested him in the driveway of his sister’s home. As of Monday, Lawhead is waiting to be extradited to Placer County, where he currently faces murder and kidnapping charges. Placer County officials say that it’s unclear whether Lawhead committed more crimes during his 20-year disappearance, and encourage other departments to revisit unsolved cold cases.
“This is one of the most notorious and heinous cold cases we have here in Placer County. We’ve never given up pursuing justice for Cindy and her family, we hope this is a small step in the healing process,” said Placer County Sheriff Wayne Woo in the April 27 Facebook post. “This breakthrough and arrest reflect the commitment of our office to solve cases; it’s why we pin on the badge and take the oath to serve.”
