70-calendar year-old Nevada guy billed in 40-yr-outdated Monterey County cold scenario murder

SEASIDE — A Nevada person has been billed with the 1982 murder of 5-calendar year-old Anne Sang Thi Pham, the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office environment declared Thursday.

Robert John Lanoue, 70, of Reno was taken into custody this 7 days and is at present remaining held in Nevada pending his extradition to California. Lanoue is charged with 1 count of to start with-diploma murder, in accordance to the DA’s Place of work, with special circumstance allegations that he murdered Pham even though committing kidnapping and a lewd act on a child underneath the age of 14.

Pham originally went missing on the early morning of Jan. 21, 1982, while walking to her kindergarten course at Highland Elementary Faculty. Her entire body was learned two days later on in what was, at the time, Fort Ord house around South Boundary Street. An autopsy discovered she experienced been strangled.

Her murder prompted an investigation by the U.S. Army’s Legal Investigations Division, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Seaside Law enforcement Department, but at some point went cold.

In 2020, Seaside police investigators — in conjunction with the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office Chilly Situation Endeavor Drive — reopened the case, distributing things of proof from the circumstance for DNA testing. The DA’s Office launched its Chilly Scenario Activity Power two a long time back to bring clean eyes and technological know-how to neighborhood investigations remaining unresolved.

Earlier this calendar year, the task pressure acquired a $535,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, Business of Justice Systems, Bureau of Justice Support to assist forensic screening and investigative activities in the prosecution of chilly instances the place DNA from a suspect has been recognized.

A new style of DNA tests not formerly out there to before investigators discovered Lanoue as the suspect in Pham’s murder.

“Funding from the U.S. Department of Justice grant enabled the Cold Circumstance Endeavor Drive to seek justice in Pham’s situation,” the DA’s Workplace claimed in a press launch.

Lanoue was 29 a long time old at the time of the murder and lived in Seaside.

The Pham scenario is 1 of a number of Seaside law enforcement experienced the chance to revisit with support from the Chilly Situation Job Drive, an endeavor that has, so significantly, arrested and charged five folks with 6 distinct homicides during Monterey County occurring among 1981 and 2017. Among people reopened, performing Seaside Law enforcement Main Nick Borges said in an interview with The Herald before this 12 months that the Pham scenario “is just one of the most disturbing cold instances we have experienced.”

In times of her killing, Pham’s older brother sat down with a Monterey Herald reporter and talked about his minimal sister, her shyness and her sensitivity. At the beginning of the faculty 12 months, Pham’s mom would walk her to university just about every day. But at some position Pham told her mom, “Stay household, mother. I can walk by myself,” recounted her large brother, Kheu Van Pham.

Kheu Van Pham instructed the Herald reporter that his minor sister was shy, but really sensitive to the requires of others. For occasion, if her father would open up a pack of cigarettes, she would quietly provide him an ashtray.

Her mother and father have been refugees from Vietnam when the nation fell to North Vietnamese forces in 1975. Her father, Tuong Pham, was a South Vietnamese soldier who escaped with his spouse and small children on a 60-foot boat filled with 200 persons when the U.S. remaining. Pham was the to start with of their small children to be born in the U.S.

The relatives had moved to Seaside so Tuong Pham could make a residing as a fisherman. 4 several years immediately after transferring to the Monterey Peninsula, their daughter was murdered.

Investigators attained a warrant for Lanoue’s arrest on July 6.