How Facial Recognition Helped Solve the 1991 Murder of Cindy Wanner

On November 25, 1991, Cindy Wanner went to her sister’s house in Granite Bay, a Sacramento, Calif., suburb, to clean the place up. Hours later, Wanner’s husband and their 4-year-old daughter showed up to the home to pick up her and their 11-month-old infant. He found the baby girl crying in her highchair, but his 35-year-old wife had vanished. She had left behind her shoes and her coat.

He called the police, who found no signs of a struggle. Nearly a month passed before a hunter found Wanner’s body in a remote area about 40 miles from her sister’s home. According to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office, evidence at the scene indicated that Wanner had been abducted and was kept alive for several days before she was strangled to death.

The case remained cold for nearly 35 years until investigators got a hit on DNA collected from where Wanner’s remains were found that did not belong to her, Elise Soviar, a spokesperson for the Placer County Sheriff’s Office, tells A+E Crime and Investigation. Placer County sent the DNA to a forensics lab of a neighboring sheriff’s office that produced a positive identification.

“This piece of evidence existed for years, but it was so small we did not believe we would get a match,” Soviar says. “But as DNA testing technology evolved, we decided to test it, and we got a direct hit.”

The DNA belonged to James Lawhead Jr., who was 30 at the time of Wanner’s kidnapping and murder. He had been released from prison in 1991 after serving an 11-year prison sentence for sex crimes involving a child: In 1980, Lawhead broke into a home, beat a 71-year-old grandmother nearly to death and raped her 11-year-old granddaughter.

Lawhead was not identified as a suspect in Wanner’s kidnapping and death for nearly three decades.

The last time Lawhead was seen in California was in 2005, Placer County Sheriff Wayne Woo said in a news conference in late April.

“We have actually been looking for Mr. Lawhead for quite some time,” Woo said. “We explored all possibilities of what could have happened, whether he was still living under a fake identity, whether he had left the country or whether he was even deceased.”

Lawhead continued to have run-ins with police after Wanner’s murder, including an arrest in 2002 for failing to register as a sex offender in Placer County, Woo said. In 2005, he disappeared after a warrant for his arrest on an outstanding weapons charge. After the DNA match, investigators believed Lawhead absconded to Arizona and lived under an assumed identity as Vincent Reynolds.

In California, some law enforcement agencies, including Placer County, are prohibited from using facial recognition technology to cross-check photos of suspects with other images, so investigators had to seek assistance from police departments in Arizona, Soviar says.

“We can share photos with other law enforcement agencies that use the technology,” she adds.

An analyst with the police department in Scottsdale, Ariz., got a match on Lawhead after finding his photo in the state’s Department of Transportation database under his Reynolds alias, according to Soviar. The analyst also used data from the police department’s license plate reader surveillance system to get a picture of one of Lawhead’s registered vehicles. He was living in Bullhead City, about 241 miles north of Scottsdale.

Police officers in Bullhead City arrested Lawhead in the driveway of his home on April 24, 2026. Authorities seized numerous items of evidence, including multiple loaded firearms staged throughout the house in a bag that had his clothes, $15,000 in cash and a burner phone, Woo said at the press conference.

Lawhead was charged with murder with the special circumstances of kidnapping and rape. In June, he pleaded guilty, waived his appellate rights and accepted a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Placer County authorities also arrested Lawhead’s 71-year-old sister, Terry Lawhead Steele, charging her as an accessory. She told investigators that she had not heard from her brother in more than 20 years, but she owned the Bullhead City property where Lawhead was living. She pleaded no contest and was sentenced to time served with two years of probation, according to court records.

Facial recognition technology has clear upsides when it effectively helps identify the correct suspect, Nora Demleitner, past president of St. John’s College, tells A+E Crime and Investigation.

“It is easy to justify the use of facial recognition technology when it brings a result like [Lawhead’s capture],” Demleitner says. “I think there’s some real advantages when it brings someone to justice who committed a really horrible crime.”

In addition to helping identify criminal suspects, facial recognition technology can spot people barred from certain facilities and assist in locating missing persons or emerging threats, she adds.

At the same time, she cautions that the technology is far from perfect. Image quality, camera angle and lighting can all affect whether a system works, and she points to continuing racial and gender disparities that can cause false matches or missed identifications. In her view, that raises a serious risk when police rely too heavily on a system that can confuse two different people or treat the same person as if they were someone else.

“There is still racial and gender disparity in facial recognition,” Demleitner says. “It may be looking at two pictures of the same person and telling you it's two different people, which is really not helpful. And vice versa, it may be looking at two different people and claiming it's the same person.”

She also flags privacy concerns, noting that thousands of photos of people are available in the public domain than most realize and that those images can be accessed by private individuals, not only by law enforcement.

“Along with that comes the danger of a digital breach,” Demleitner says. “These facial recognition databases are highly valuable. And if they fall into the wrong hands, that's certainly something that would be very distressing.”

Demleitner says lawmakers are now scrambling to regulate the technology, but the result is a patchwork of rules from state to state. “In some states, it wouldn't be enough to have only facial recognition photos to arrest someone,” she says. “In other states, that suffices. In some states, they can only do facial recognition searches for certain types of crimes.”