Yesterday, March 20, Monterey County Superior Court Judge Jennifer O’Keefe sentenced Reno, Nevada resident Robert John Lanoue, 72, to 25 years to life in prison, plus 31 additional years, for the 1982 murder of 5-year-old Seaside resident Anne Pham, who Lanoue abducted while she was walking to Highland Elementary School.
The Weekly reported Lanoue's arrest in 2022, which was made possible through the work of the county District Attorney’s Office Cold Case Task Force in collaboration with Seaside Police Department to reopen the case.
Lanoue, who was 29 at the time of the murder, was in the Army, stationed at Fort Ord. Per a statement from the DA's Office, he lived on Luzern Street just 0.1 miles from Pham's house, and he also had a child that attended Highland Elementary, but investigators found no evidence the families knew each other.
Pham's body was found two days later on Fort Ord, with evidence she'd been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. It was later shown she'd been raped and sodomized.
When a Cold Case Task Force investigator questioned Lanoue in July 2022, he remembered picking Pham up as she was walking to school, but not anything else, saying he may have blocked it from his memory. He did admit to a history of sexually assaulting young girls.
This is how the case was cracked, based on evidence submitted by the CCTF and Seaside PD, per the DA's statement: "Lanoue was identified as a suspect after DNA testing was performed on a rootless pubic hair found on Pham’s remains. Astrea Forensics of Santa Cruz performed whole-genome sequencing on the hair that resulted in a DNA profile capable of being used to search genetic genealogical databases. A forensic genetic genealogist with Parabon NanoLabs identified 'Lanoue' as a possible last name of the suspect. Further research by members of the Cold Case Task Force identified Robert John Lanoue as the likely suspect."
The statement also adds that a $535,000 cold case-related grant in 2021 from the U.S. Department of Justice provided critical funding to "support forensic testing and investigative activities in the prosecution of cold cases where DNA from a suspect has been identified."
Seaside Police Chief Nick Borges, who has been chasing down cold cases since he first became a Seaside officer more than 20 years ago, told the Weekly in 2022 that early that year he'd had a picture of Pham blown up, framed and put on a tripod that he put at the entrance of the department’s lobby.
He had a feeling the case would finally be solved.