Convicted murderer in Placer County cold case sent to prison for rest of his life
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- A judge sentence James Lawhead Jr. for the 1991 murder of Cinthia “Cindi" Wanner.
- A forensic lab identified Lawhead as the cold case suspect using DNA evidence.
- Lawhead’s sister, Terry Lawhead‑Steele, was convicted for helping her brother hide.
Cinthia “Cindi” Wanner’s family spent the past 35 years in anguish not knowing who killed her.
On Tuesday, some of her family watched a judge sentence the man who kidnapped the Rancho Cordova mother in 1991 from her sister’s Granite Bay home, sexually assaulted the woman and strangled her.
“This was a crime that shocked our community,” Deputy District Attorney David Tellman said in court. “She was stolen from that home, and she was taken and abused.”
Then, Placer Superior Court Judge Raymonn DeJesus ordered James Lawhead Jr., 64, to spend the rest of his life in prison without parole for Wanner’s murder.
The 35-year-old mother of two was kidnapped, her body found more than two weeks later among trees in a remote area near Foresthill.
Wanner’s Placer County 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.
Terry Lynn Lawhead-Steele, 71, of Southern California, Lawhead’s sister, was arrested in April in connection with the cold case. Last month, she pleaded no contest to a felony charge of being an accessory to a crime.
Lawhead-Steele spent more than a month in jail awaiting prosecution. On Tuesday, the judge sentenced her to time already served in jail in accordance with a plea deal with prosecutors. DeJesus also ordered her to serve two years of probation. At the request of prosecutors, the judge ordered Lawhead-Steele to stay away from the victim’s family and not try to contact them.
The court always allows the families of crime victims to speak in court before defendants are sentenced.
Tellman told the judge that Wanner’s family, who were supportive of the plea agreement, chose not to speak in court Tuesday. But some of them watched the sentencing hearing via a court video call.
The prosecutor told the judge that he hopes Lawhead’s sentencing provides Wanner’s some solace and allows them to move forward with their lives.
Lawhead and his sister only spoke briefly in court Tuesday morning to answer questions from the judge.
Prosecutors said Lawhead-Steele helped her brother hide from authorities for the past 20 years after he failed to register as a convicted sex offender. They also said she helped her brother evade investigators a few months ago after he was identified as the cold case suspect in Wanner’s murder.
Not long after Lawhead was returned to Placer County to face murder and kidnapping charges in Wanner’s death, he was questioned by investigators in the cold case.
Tellman, who prosecuted Lawhead and his sister, 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 investigators he murdered Wanner because “he wanted to know what it would feel like to kill.”
Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire said Lawhead forced upon Wanner’s family a severe amount of “cruelty and callousness”
Granite Bay kidnapping
Wanner was cleaning her sister’s Granite Bay home in November 1991 when she was kidnapped. Lawhead knocked at the door, brandished a gun and ordered her to leave the home with him, according to the prosecutor.
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. A quail hunter in the area spotted her body a few weeks later.
Gire said Lawhead he hopes the sentencing offers her family an “ounce of healing” knowing the murder case is now over, that they don’t have to endure a lengthy trial and thatLawhead will never be free again.
“Every time there are conversations about this case, it opens those wounds once again,” Gire said about Wanner’s family after Tuesday’s sentencing. “They have been incredibly resilient, incredibly brave, have represented the best of humanity in the dark moments in this case.”
Gire told reporters his office was fully prepared to prosecute Lawhead through trial, but he “admitted defeat early in the process.” He said they are relieved Wanner’s family doesn’t have to relive her death in court.
Cold case suspect found in Arizona
When authorities used DNA to identify Lawhead as the suspect in Wanner’s murder earlier this year, 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.
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.”
On Tuesday, the sheriff said he’s never seen in his 36-year career an arrest result in a conviction and a sentence of life in prison without parole in a span of a few months. Woo offered his condolences to Wanner’s family for going through an “unimaginable” pain for than three decades, and he lauded the prosecutors for ending this murder case so quickly.
“This is a very serious abduction, rape and murder of an innocent woman out of her home with a toddler left crying in the highchair,” Woo told reporters after the sentencing. “A very heinous crime that shook this community.”
Avoids death penalty
Tellman, the prosecutor, said in court that Lawhead agreed to a deal with the DA’s Office 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.
In May, Gire told The Sacramento Bee that special circumstance allegations against Lawhead made the case against him eligible for the death penalty. But Gire had not yet made a decision at that time on whether his office would seek the death penalty against Lawhead.
Tellman said Lawhead avoided the death penalty because the plea agreement resulted 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.
California has not executed a prisoner since 2006, but the death penalty remains legal and is still pursued in select cases. Even if the death penalty was imposed, Lawhead would have remained in prison for the rest of his life unless California’s moratorium on the death penalty were to be lifted and capital punishment resumes.
In a hearing last month, Lawhead’s defense attorneys told the judge that their client was aware he was giving up his right to a preliminary hearing and a trial, and they had no doubt he was mentally competent. They told the judge Lawhead was adamant he wanted an early resolution in the murder case.
This story was originally published July 14, 2026 at 11:12 AM.
