Man accused of murder in 1991 cold case makes first Placer court appearance
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- James Lawhead Jr. made his first appearance in Placer Superior Court.
- Lawhead was arrested in Arizona as a suspect in a 1991 Granite Bay cold case.
- Lawhead is accused of kidnapping, raping and killing Cinthia Wanner.
A man on Monday made his first appearance in Placer Superior Court after authorities arrested him as the suspect in a 35-year-old cold case in which a woman was kidnapped from a Granite Bay home, sexually assaulted and killed in a brutal attack.
More than a week after his arrest in Arizona, James Lawhead Jr., 64, appeared for his arraignment in connection with the November 1991 disappearance and killing of Cinthia “Cindi” Wanner.
Lawhead, wearing an orange jail uniform, stood behind protective glass in a holding area for incarcerated defendants. He wore handcuffs linked to shackles around his waist.
The Placer County District Attorney’s Office formally charged Lawhead with murder and kidnapping in Wanner’s death, along with two special circumstance allegations alleging he killed her during the commission of rape and kidnapping.
Judge Eugene Gini granted a request from Lawhead’s court-appointed attorney to postpone the arraignment until May 19. He did not enter a plea Monday.
Gini ordered that Lawhead remain ineligible for bail, for now. His defense attorney can ask for a bail review hearing at a later date.
Lawhead was taken into custody April 24 in the driveway of his Bullhead, Arizona, home. He spent nearly a week in the Mohave County Jail while awaiting extradition.
On Thursday, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office sent two of its deputies and a detective on a sheriff’s plane to pick up Lawhead at an airport in Kingman, Ariz., for a flight back to Placer County, where he was booked into the Auburn jail.
On Nov. 25, 1991, Wanner was cleaning her sister’s Granite Bay home when she was kidnapped. The 35-year-old Rancho Cordova mother was taken by the suspect, leaving behind her 11-month-old daughter in a high chair, where she was later found crying and alone.
Wanner was sexually assaulted and left to die among trees in the Foresthill area, where her body was found more than two weeks later.
The murder suspect remained unidentified until earlier this year, when analysts at a forensic lab in Contra Costa County identified Lawhead as the suspect using DNA evidence collected from the 1991 homicide.
At a news conference a week ago announcing Lawhead’s arrest, Placer County Sheriff Wayne Woo said investigators searched for Lawhead, but the wanted suspect seemed to have “just disappeared” in 2005. They couldn’t find any records for him.
The Sheriff’s Office had produced a video about the cold case identifying the suspect and was about to release it, hoping the public would help investigators find Lawhead.
In the meantime, sheriff’s investigators contacted law enforcement agencies in other states with access to facial recognition technology. Woo said a crime analyst from the Scottsdale Police Department in Arizona used the technology and found a match in a state Department of Transportation database. That information led investigators to the Bullhead home.
The sheriff said Lawhead had been living, investigators believe, under a false name at the Arizona home owned by his sister, Terry Lawhead, 71, of San Clemente in Southern California.
Woo said Terry Lawhead was arrested last Saturday in Lancaster County, South Carolina, on suspicion of being an accessory to a crime, accused of helping her brother avoid authorities. He said investigators believe she had been communicating with her brother.
It was unclear when Terry Lawhead would be brought back to California to face the accessory charge in Placer County.
This story was originally published May 4, 2026 at 2:34 PM.
