Robert John Lanoue was placed in custody on Saturday, July 9, after California investigators said that a new look at DNA evidence implicated him in the 40-year-old murder case of a kindergartner.
The 70-year-old Reno native was in Nevada's Washoe County Detention Facility based on allegations that he violated a condition of parole and is a wanted fugitive for the Seaside, California murder of 5-year-old girl Anne Pham, according to the area district attorney and jail records.
Bond for Lanoue was listed at more than $1 million, according to NBC News. The Monterey County, California, district attorney's office announced his Nevada arrest on Friday, explaining in a statement that a new type of DNA testing not previously available to earlier investigators identified the defendant as the suspect in Pham's murder.
Pham's remains discovered at Fort Ord
The office said that Lanoue was 29 and lived in Seaside when Pham vanished on January 21, 1982, on her walk from her home to nearby Highland Elementary School. Prosecutors have charged the defendant with one count of first-degree murder and special circumstance allegations of kidnapping and committing a lewd act on a child under the age of 14.
Details about the sexual nature of Pham's case, as well as more information about any possible motive, were not revealed by authorities. It is not clear whether Lanoue has retained legal representation with regard to the Pham murder case. Public defenders in California and Nevada did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Pham's remains were found a couple of days after she was last seen going to school. They were discovered at Fort Ord, a facility that was used by the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1994, according to Law and Crime.
No arrests were made in the days and weeks following the discovery of Pham's body, with the case going cold after. The district attorney's office said on Friday that progress in its investigation was boosted when a newly formed Cold Case Task Force worked with Seaside police to reopen Pham's case in 2020.
The office also pointed to the U.S. Department of Justice providing a $535,000 cold case grant as a factor. According to D.A.'s investigators, the money is helping to cover the cost of DNA testing at private laboratories for a number of reopened probes.
Astrea Forensics helped in solving Pham cold case
The office also thanked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a University of California, Santa Cruz biomolecular engineering professor, and two private laboratories for their help with the Pham murder case.
One of those laboratories is Astrea Forensics of nearby Santa Cruz. The lab states on its website that it uses the latest technology, which is often off-limits to others as a result of patents, to reconstruct difficult genetic profiles that connect cases to suspects.
Astrea Forensics states that those crucial profiles, which might not have materialized in the past, can even come from highly degraded remains. The lab's technologies are particularly adept for capturing ultrashort DNA fragments, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel. These fragments are lost to traditional methods but are the most common DNA type in rootless hair and other degraded samples.
