‘Guilty’: Cold case defendant takes DA’s plea deal in 1991 Placer County murder
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- James Lawhead pleaded guilty to first‑degree murder in the 1991 death of Cinthia Wanner.
- A forensic lab identified Lawhead as the cold case suspect using DNA evidence.
- Lawhead will be sentenced to life in prison without parole next month.
A man arrested two months ago as a suspect in a Placer County cold case unexpectedly pleaded guilty Tuesday to first-degree murder in the 1991 death of a Rancho Cordova mother who was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and strangled.
James Lawhead, 64, pleaded guilty to the murder of 35-year-old Cinthia “Cindi” Wanner. She was kidnapped from her sister’s Granite Bay home before her body was found more than two weeks later among trees in a remote area near Foresthill.
Wanner’s murder investigation went unsolved for 35 years, with no arrests or suspects identified. Earlier this year, analysts at a forensic lab in Contra Costa County identified Lawhead as the suspect in Wanner’s murder using DNA evidence found on the woman’s body.
“The conviction brings a measure of accountability to one of the most notorious cold cases in Placer County history,” prosecutors said in a Placer County District Attorney’s Office news release.
Terry Lynn Lawhead-Steele, 71, of Southern California, Lawhead’s sister, was arrested in April in connection with the cold case. She also appeared in court Tuesday. She pleaded no contest to a felony charge of being an accessory to a crime. Prosecutors said she helped her brother hide from authorities for the past 20 years after he failed to register as a convicted sex offender and that she helped him evade investigators after he was identified as the suspect in Wanner’s murder.
Lawhead-Steele, who was being held in jail on $1 million bail, agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors that will result in two years of probation. She was expected to be released Tuesday from the Placer County Jail. She has been in custody since April 25 and will be sentenced to time already served in jail.
She and her brother are scheduled to return to court July 14, when they will be formally sentenced.
Judge Angus Saint-Evens ordered Lawhead-Steele to remain in California until her sentencing hearing and notify probation officials of where she is staying. Her attorney told the judge she will be staying with a friend in the Sacramento area until her sentencing next month.
Life in prison without parole
Lawhead’s arraignment had been postponed twice before, so he was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday morning in Placer Superior Court.
Deputy District Attorney David Tellman, the prosecutor in the murder case, told the judge that Lawhead agreed to a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty to the murder charge along with admitting to special circumstance allegations that he killed Wanner during the commission of rape and kidnapping. Prosecutors agreed to drop a felony kidnapping charge as part of the plea deal.
Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire told The Sacramento Bee that the special circumstance allegations against Lawhead make the case against him eligible for the death penalty. Gire had not yet made a decision on whether his office would seek the death penalty against Lawhead.
On Tuesday, Tellman said Lawhead is avoiding that process since the plea agreement will result in a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Lawhead also agreed to waive his right to appeal the conviction. The prosecutor said Wanner’s widowed husband was aware and supportive of the plea deal.
Lawhead, standing behind protective glass in the courtroom, only spoke briefly in Tuesday’s hearing. He pleaded “guilty” to the murder charge and waived his right to compel the prosecution to present evidence and testimony in a preliminary hearing and a subsequent trial.
His defense attorneys told the judge that he was aware he was giving up his right to a preliminary hearing and a trial, and they had no doubt about he was mentally competent. They told the judge Lawhead was adamant he wanted an early resolution in his criminal case.
The prosecutor said they handed over to the defense a “voluminous” but “organized” amount of discovery evidence several days after Lawhead’s first court appearance on May 4. On that same day, the District Attorney’s Office also offered the plea deal to Lawhead.
Not long after Lawhead was returned to Placer County to face murder and kidnapping charges, he was questioned by investigators in the cold case. Tellman said Lawhead was informed of his right to remain silent, and then he admitted to investigators that he kidnapped Wanner, raped and killed her and stole and used her ATM card.
The prosecutor said Lawhead told the investigators that he murdered Wanner because “he wanted to know what it would feel like to kill.”
Granite Bay kidnapping
Wanner was cleaning her sister’s Granite Bay home in November 1991 when she was kidnapped. While detailing the facts of the case on Tuesday, Tellman told the judge that Lawhead knocked at the door, brandished a gun and ordered her to leave the home with him.
Wanner was taken by the suspect, leaving behind her 11-month-old daughter in a high chair, where she was later found crying and alone.
The prosecutor said Lawhead held the woman at gunpoint as he drove her to a remote area of Placer County, where he raped her and strangled her. Tellman said a quail hunter in the area spotted her body a few weeks later.
After Lawhead was identified as the suspect in Wanner’s murder, investigators searched for him. Placer County Sheriff Wayne Woo said the wanted suspect seemed to have “just disappeared” in 2005. They couldn’t find any records for him, even though he had been ordered by a court to register as a convicted sex offender.
The Sheriff’s Office produced a video about the cold case’s identified suspect. Sheriff’s officials were about to release the video, hoping the public could help investigators find Lawhead.
Wanted suspect found in Arizona
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 a home in Bullhead, Arizona, where authorities found Lawhead on April 24 and arrested him.
Investigators believe Lawhead-Steele had been communicating with her brother. Tellman said he had been living under the false name of “Vincent Reynolds” at the Arizona home owned by his sister. Investigators questioned her about her brother’s whereabouts in March.
“She still denied any knowledge, said she hadn’t seen or heard from her brother in over 20 years and that he may have possibly been dead,” the sheriff said in a news conference in April.
The day after her brother was arrested, Lawhead-Steele, who lives in San Clemente in Southern California, was arrested in Lancaster County, South Carolina. She was extradited about a month later and brought her back to California.
Lawhead-Steele had lived in the Sacramento area up until four years ago, when she moved to Southern California to spend her retirement. Danielle Keller, her defense attorney, said in court that her client has a son and two grandsons who live in South Carolina, where she was visiting when she was arrested.
Keller said Lawhead-Steele has no previous arrests or criminal convictions. The defense attorney said Lawhead-Steele spent about four weeks in jail custody, forced to sleep on a makeshift bed on the floor because the jail cell was too crowded in South Carolina.
Her brother was a convicted sex offender and had been released from prison 10 months before Wanner was killed.
The sheriff said Lawhead was sentenced to spend 19 years in prison for brutally attacking a 71-year-old grandmother and raping her 11-year-old granddaughter in 1980 in Sacramento County. He said Lawhead had broken into the home and beat the grandmother “nearly to death.”
Woo said Lawhead was released from prison after serving 11 years of his sentence, despite a state psychiatrist classifying Lawhead “as a mentally disordered sex offender who was not amenable to treatment.”
This story was originally published June 16, 2026 at 11:40 AM.
