SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – A registered sex offender has been charged with murder in a 40-year-old Northern California cold case, according to prosecutors.
The Monterey County District Attorney's Office on Friday said that 70-year-old Reno, Nevada resident Robert Lanoue has been charged with murdering Anne Pham, a 5-year-old Seaside resident whose remains were discovered two days after her disappearance in 1982.
Lanoue allegedly lived in Seaside at the time of the killing. Prosecutors connected Lanoue – who registered as a sex offender in Nevada after he was convicted of possessing visual pornography of a children under 16 years old, using a minor younger than 14 years old to produce pornography and lewdness with a child under 14 years old – to the crime through a "new type of DNA testing not previously available to earlier investigators," the District Attorney’s Office said in a release.
Pham disappeared on Jan. 21, 1982 while she walked to her kindergarten class at Highland Park Elementary School. Two days later, her body was found at the since-closed U.S. Army post, Fort Ord.
Just after the 40th anniversary of Pham’s disappearance, the Seaside Police Department and Monterey County District Attorney's Office announced in January they were reopening the case. On Jan. 24, one day and 40 years after Pham was found, Monterey County District Attorney Jeannine Pacioni announced a $535,000 Department of Justice grant for the office’s cold case task force to use "DNA technology in cold-case investigations and prosecutions."
Lanoue, who faces a first-degree murder charge and special circumstance allegations he killed Pham while committing kidnapping and a lewd act on a child under the age of 14, remains in Washoe County Sheriff's Office custody in Nevada.
The 70-year-old is being held on $1.02 million bond as a fugitive from justice in another state upon complaint and warrant, according to sheriff's records. Lanoue appeared in Washoe County court on Friday morning for a probable cause hearing, court records showed he is scheduled for an extradition hearing at 9:30 a.m. on Monday.
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