Her murder went unsolved for 30 years. The suspect vanished under a new alias until now

 

An undated image of Cindy Wanner released by the Placer County Sheriff's Office.

Placer County Sheriff's Office

For more than 30 years, the answer to who killed Cindy Wanner remained much of a mystery to loved ones and law enforcement after she vanished from a Northern California home leaving everything behind, including her baby.

Her sudden disappearance in 1991 rattled residents of Granite Bay, a suburb of Sacramento where the 35-year-old mother of two had gone to clean her sister’s home, investigators said. Wanner’s 11-month-old baby was buckled into a high chair and crying, without her mom, when a relative arrived to the home that day.

An extensive search for Wanner ended three weeks later when her body was found in a remote area about 40 miles from her sister’s home, according to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office.

But many questions remained about who was behind Wanner’s death – and why.

Over the years, law enforcement continued testing evidence without any sufficient results until newer DNA testing technology gave them new hope in finding Wanner’s killer.

Suspect flew under the radar for decades

Detectives recently submitted a “final piece of evidence” from Wanner’s case to a neighboring sheriff’s office forensics lab, which yielded a match identifying James Lawhead Jr., 64, as a suspect, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office said.

While the latest DNA match pointed them to Lawhead finding him became a challenge.

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Investigators looking for Lawhead found no trace of him and “it appeared that he just disappeared since 2005,” Placer County Sheriff Wayne Woo said in a news conference earlier this week.

“We explored all possibilities on what could have happened, whether he was still living under a fake identity, whether he had left the country, or whether he was even deceased,” Woo said, noting the sheriff’s office checked records in both the US and Canada.

Detectives asked other agencies for help and the Scottsdale Police Department, using the Arizona Department of Transportation’s facial recognition system, identified a match, Woo said. The system is typically used to flag fake driver’s licenses, state IDs and suspected identity theft.

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In Arizona, he wasn’t known by his real name. Lawhead went by the name of Vincent Reynolds, the sheriff’s office said, and was living in Bullhead City – near the state’s border with Nevada and nearly 600 miles away from Placer County.