How a single strand of rootless hair helped crack the 1982 murder of a 5-year-old girl

On a rainy morning in January 1982, Anne Pham got ready for school and walked alone to her kindergarten class a few blocks away from her home in Seaside, California.

She never made it to school.

Her body was found two days later, dumped among bushes in Fort Ord, a former U.S. Army base east of Seaside. The five-year-old was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and strangled, law enforcement said.

The murder remained unsolved for decades until the Seaside Police Department and the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office Cold Case Task Force reopened the case in 2020 and submitted evidence to new DNA testing.

A rootless strand of hair and genetic genealogy helped Monterey County authorities identify and charge Robert John Lanoue, 70, of Reno, Nevada, with first-degree murder in Pham's killing.

On July 6, investigators obtained a warrant for Lanoue's arrest. He's currently detained in Nevada pending extradition to California. Public records didn't list a lawyer for the suspect.

40 years later: Nevada man arrested after authorities reopen cold case of 5-year-old killed in 1982

Lanoue, a registered sex offender in Nevada, was 29 at the time of the Jan. 21, 1982 murder and lived near Pham's home in Seaside, Monterey County District Attorney’s Office said.

Pham's family fled Vietnam by boat in 1975 and eventually settled in California. She was one of 10 children and the first in her family to be born in the U.S., according to a 1982 article in the Monterey Herald.

Pham liked going to school and her mother walked her to her kindergarten class at the beginning of the school year, the Monterey Herald reported. But she convinced her mother she could go on her own.

She died four years after her family moved to Seaside.

"Our office really takes cases seriously, even cases that are many decades old," said Monterey County Assistant District Attorney Lana Nassoura. "We're hoping, as technology continues to progress and improve over the years, that it's just going to help us as an investigative tool to be more effective and being able to solve and prosecute cases."

A DNA breakthrough

The crack in the case came from a piece of evidence from the original investigation — a single rootless strand of hair one centimeter long.

Kelly Harkins Kincaid, chief executive of Astrea Forensics, said investigators called on the forensic services company to test the evidence. The lab extracted DNA from the hair and sequenced it.

Rootless hairs, Harkins Kincaid said, were long considered "junk" because getting enough DNA from the shaft wasn't considered possible.

"The DNA fragments that are contained within the shaft of hair are so short that most DNA extraction methods purify them away," Harkins Kincaid said. "With next generation sequencing, we're actually just trying to observe every single molecule that's possibly there, every single one of them all at once — millions and millions of fragments."

After sequencing the DNA, the lab generated a genotype file ready to upload to genealogy databases, Harkins Kincaid said.

CeCe Moore, chief genetic genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs, was then able to establish a genetic network in which a unique French Canadian surname popped up: Lanoue.

"Once I provided that information to the detective, he was able to identify a neighbor of Anne's with that name, that surname, so he gave me the man's name and I built a family tree," Moore said. "When you can connect multiple matches on both sides of someone's family tree, that makes the potential identification really high confidence."

After getting Moore's lead, authorities investigated further and ultimately made the arrest.

"This is the first time anyone's ever been arrested using this very innovative groundbreaking technique" developed by Astrea Forensics co-founder Ed Green, Moore said. "It should set precedent for this technique."

Deputy District Attorney Matthew L'Heureux said that, though Monterey County authorities have used genetic genealogy in previous cases, "only on a few occasions where it's actually ended up going to court."

"As far as the technology that was used in this case, it is something that is relatively new, and it's something that we are just beginning to work with and start using in cold cases that we're investigating," L'Heureux said.

Moore said advancement in genetic technology and genealogy "can provide answers quicker" and emphasized the collaboration between law enforcement, Astrea Forensics and Parabon NanoLabs that went into breaking Pham's case.

In "any violent, intimate crime, it's almost impossible not to leave DNA behind," Moore said. "If you rape somebody, stab somebody, strangle someone, you're leaving your DNA behind, and we will identify those people now."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Cold case: How DNA from 1 cm of hair helped solve a 1982 murder