They call it the golden age of DNA testing, and this year, two cases that police thought would never be solved finally cracked open. But the answers were nothing anyone expected.
August 1990, Houston. A white Honda Civic sits abandoned at the end of a cul-de-sac on the city's edge. The keys are in the ignition, a woman's purse is on the floorboard, and blood is smeared down both doors. What detectives find in the woods beyond that car would become known as the Lovers' Lane murders, and the case would go cold for over three decades, broken only by a DNA hit decades later.
November 1991, Placer County, California. A devoted young mother vanishes mid-morning while cleaning her sister's house, leaving her infant daughter crying in a high chair and her purse the only thing missing. There's no sign of struggle. No witnesses. Just a single cigarette butt on the walkway. When her body is finally found weeks later, the medical examiner makes a discovery more chilling than the murder itself.
Two cases. Two killers who were never once on police's radar. And two breakthroughs driven by DNA technology that didn't exist when the crimes were committed.
TW: sexual assault, murder, kidnapping, brief references to violence against a child, and suicide.
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SOURCES
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TRANSCRIPT
Cold cases can sit on shelves for years without answers, but this year we’ve seen some amazing advancements in cases police thought would never get solved. They’re actually calling it the golden age of DNA testing
I want to tell you about two of those cases today, and the outcomes were NOT what police were expecting at all, so you’re going to want to watch the whole way through
As always, welcome back to heart starts pounding, I’m your host Kaelyn Moore.
August 24th, 1990 was a HOT Friday in Houston, Texas. Temperatures approached triple digits even at 5pm.
That’s when, on the undeveloped western edge of the city, a security guard for an isolated corporate building noticed the first of three weird things that day.
There was a white Honda Civic, parked—with its windows rolled down but no one inside at the end of a cul de sac by the woods just beyond the office park.
The security guard peered into the vehicle and saw the keys still in the ignition, and a woman’s purse on the passenger floorboard. It was odd that someone would leave their car, and their purse, unsecured like that. He looked around and saw no one—and so he made note of the vehicle and then went about his patrol.
But then, About three hours later, just after the sun had set, the security guard made his rounds again and noticed the car was still parked in the cul-de-sac. And something inside him said that he should call the police, just to be safe.
Houston police officers soon arrived on the scene, and the first thing the responding officers did was run the vehicle’s plates. And thats when they found the second weird thing.
Earlier that day, the owner of the Honda Civic, a young man named Andy Atkinson , had been reported missing.
Ok, this was no longer a car that needed to be towed, this was potentially a crime scene. So the officer started doing a closer visual inspection of the car. And that’s when he saw the third weird thing.
There was blood on the passenger door. blood that had oozed down the side of the seat. The officer glanced over to the driver’s side and saw more blood on the door handle. The driver’s seat was in a fully reclined position, the rubber floor mat was pushed out of place, and the visor had been pulled off its hinges, as though someone had tried to hold onto it while being yanked from the car.
The officer radioed headquarters and detectives were at the scene within the hour. And so was a woman named Shane. She told police she was the sister of the woman who the purse belonged to, Cheryl Henry.
And it was as the police started talking to Shane, that a picture of the night before started to take shape.
That night, August 23rd, Shane said Cheryl had plans to meet the vehicle’s owner, Andy, at a popular dance spot called Bayou Mama’s.
Andy and Cheryl had been dating for a few weeks. When 22-year-old Cheryl Henry returned home to Houston that June, after college, she wasted no time laying the bricks for her next steps in life. She immediately got a summer job, while she and her sister, Shane, began apartment-hunting.
the last thing she expected, during this busy period, was to be swept off her feet by a guy.
But that’s exactly what ended up happening. And that man was Andy Atkinson.
Andy, who was 21, was new in town—fresh from Fayetteville, North Carolina. He worked part-time at Gold’s Gym, where Cheryl worked out, and it was Cheryl’s friend Gretchen—who happened to be dating Andy’s best friend, Craig—that introduced the two of them.
Cheryl and Andy immediately hit it off. Cheryl found Andy charming, funny, and handsome—and it was an added bonus that he was also in really good shape. Pretty soon, the pair were smitten with each other.
Cheryl and Andy had another commonality they found endlessly amusing. Both of them worked at gentleman’s clubs. You know—topless bars. Andy sometimes worked the door at the club his father managed, a place called Dream Street. And Cheryl worked at Rick’s Cabaret.
They couldn’t stop laughing about this. What a time it was to live in Houston.
Gretchen and Craig planned to join them for a double date, but that afternoon, Gretchen told Cheryl they’d changed their minds and were going to spend the night in—so, Cheryl and Andy planned to meet up with them at their apartment, after Bayou Mama’s.
Cheryl’s sister Shane stepped in as Gretchen and Craig’s substitute, and she even volunteered to drive, so early in the evening, Cheryl headed to Shane’s apartment and the two got ready for their night out, with Cheryl opting for a sleek blue dress. And then just after 8 o’clock, they set out for Bayou Mama’s—blasting AC/DC on the car radio the whole way there.
Andy was already at the club when they got there and not long into the night, Shane began to feel like a third wheel as she watched Cheryl and Andy paw each other practically the entire time.
Shane periodically felt compelled to blurt out “Get a room, you guys!” And by around 11pm, Shane decided to call it a night, so she left, assuming Andy would drive Cheryl home after they stopped by Gretchen and Craig’s apartment.
The next day, Shane called Cheryl at work—only to find out Cheryl hadn’t shown up for her shift. Shane was confused. It wasn’t like her sister to skip out on work.
Shane called Gretchen to check if she or Craig had seen Cheryl and Andy the previous night, like they had planned, and Gretchen told Shane they’d never shown up. They assumed the pair had simply made different plans. And, you know… maybe they woke up and decided to go to the beach or something.
But Shane didn’t think so. Cheryl had just gotten this job. She wouldn’t ditch it for a beach day, especially not without calling in. Cheryl was reliable and mature and she took her adult responsibilities very seriously.
Something was wrong.
Shane began to panic.
Shane called the Houston Police and filed a missing person report.
That night, Shane got the call that Andy’s car had been found on the far west end of town, out in the boonies. It was in an area known as a lovers’ lane—a desolate spot where couples like to go to make out and fool around.
Shane called her mom, her brother, and her father, and they all drove out to the spot where the car had been parked.
By the time the family members got there, the area was already crawling with police—and before long, dog handlers arrived with their search dogs.
Cheryl’s family members took everything in—and it didn’t look good. They saw the blood inside the car. The blood on the door handle, on the seat. It looked like there had been a violent struggle.
They saw cigarette butts outside the car, which indicated to them that Cheryl and Andy, who both smoked, had been hanging out in the area for a while before… something suddenly happened.
The search continued well into the night as Cheryl’s family stood by, feeling helpless and full of dread. Suddenly, right before midnight, the family members heard the search dogs barking and noticed that all the law enforcement personnel at the scene were moving toward the area where the dogs were carrying on.
Officers had found Andy’s golf balls and golf clubs scattered throughout the woods, all leading to Cheryl’s nude body.
Her throat had been slashed. In three different places. She had clearly struggled with her killer. She was found face down, nude, with her hands bound behind her back—and she had been hidden beneath some wooden boards. And strangest of all, there was a $20 bill near her body.
She was covered up; concealed—which is the kind of behavior that killers often exhibit when they know their victims.
Which begged the question, Was Cheryl killed by someone she knew?
Notably, Andy was nowhere to be found when the police located Cheryl’s body. Could Andy have done this? After all, they’d only known each other for a few weeks.
Now the search was becoming a manhunt for Andy.
Detectives secured the crime scene, as analysts processed it and collected evidence, while the search fanned out into the woods as investigators looked for clues as to where Andy may have gone.
And then, just after the sun rose, the search ended.
They had found Andy Atkinson, sitting up against a tree. Or rather, he was… tied to the tree—with his hands bound behind his back, and his throat slashed so deeply he was nearly decapitated.
Eventually Cheryl and Andy were taken to the medical examiner’s office, where the medical examiner found that whoever killed Cheryl had sexually assaulted her first. Near where her body was placed, police had found the blue dress she wore the previous night, as well as her bra and underwear. The underwear looked as though it had been cut off of her with a sharp instrument.
The case became known as the Lovers Lane murder
Now, there were two competing thoughts about this crime. The way Cheryl was hidden, the intimacy required to commit a knife attack, made it seem like the couple was killed by someone they knew.
But police noticed that Cheryl had been tied up far more than Andy, was it possible that she was targeted? Or, could this have been a serial killer targeting lovers lanes, like the Zodiac killer?
Well, 1990 was a very different time. Officers didn’t have access to the same types of DNA testing that we have today. Now, a rape kit was collected on Cheryl, but it sat in an evidence locker for years. And this case went cold almost immediately because there weren’t many leads to follow.
A year passed. Then two. Then a decade; a decade without a single new development.
The only lead, really, was in March of 2001, 11 years after the crime, when investigators received a strange handwritten letter from an anonymous sender.
The envelope was addressed to the “Homicide Division” of the Houston Police Department. In the spot where the return address would usually go were only the names Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson.
In the letter, the sender wrote:
If you want to know who killed C. Henry & A. Atkinson, it will cost you $100,000.
Reply [in the] Houston Chronicle Personal Column. [On] Monday 3-12-01 only.
A lawyer will be hired to make sure you play straight.
Signed: Anonymous.
This letter didn’t lead anywhere, it was probably some weirdo’s desperate attempt to make a bit of money off of the tragedy.
By October of 2007, the families had probably lost hope. Nearly two decades had passed with no news. But then, there was a development.
The crime lab in Houston ran the DNA from Cheryl Henry's rape kit. And there was a match—
—not to a specific suspect, but to another unsolved crime: a home invasion rape that occurred in June 1990, two months before the double murder.
It was just after 2am on June 20th, 1990, two months before Cheryl and Andy’s murders, when the victim left her job at Gigi’s Cabaret—a topless bar in west Houston—and headed to her boyfriend's house to crash. Her boyfriend, an airline pilot, was out of town as he often was, so she sat alone in the living room, unwinding on the couch with a box of takeout food. When the woman finished eating, she walked upstairs to retire for the night when suddenly, her boyfriends door opened and a stranger walked out
She took one look at him and knew right away she was in trouble. This intruder was wearing a fishnet stocking over his head—as he wielded a long-barrelled gun in his gloved hands.
The stranger asked the woman where her boyfriend was—but he referred to her boyfriend by name, as if he knew him.
The man then held the pistol against the woman’s head and cocked it, forcing her to comply with him as he bound her hands behind her back with duct tape, stole cash from her purse, and then duct-taped her eyes and mouth before tossing her on the bed and pulling a pillowcase over her head. He then forced himself on her.
When the man was done, he warned the woman that he might stick around the house for another hour or so—or he may only be there for another five minutes. Who could say? So she’d better lie on the floor and be still, or else.
When the woman finally freed herself to phone for help, she discovered that the man had disconnected the telephone and hid the receiver under the mattress.
The woman would later sit down with a forensic artist and describe what she could recall seeing through that fishnet stocking, which was: a white male in his thirties—about six feet tall, with olive skin, and possibly a mustache. And it looked like he might have been wearing a security guard uniform.
DNA was taken from this case and catalogued. But just like the Lovers Lane murder, it sat in a police case file for decades without any new information, until 2007 when it was confirmed that whoever committed this crime, almost certainly killed the couple at lovers lane.
And now, they had a sketch of this person.
In 2008, police released this composite sketch and the news that this unsolved home invasion rape had been linked to the murders of Henry and Atkinson.
But this didn’t help the case, at least not right away. No one came forward saying they had seen this man at Lovers Lane or with Cheryl and Andy. A major piece of the puzzle had been fonud, but without any witnesses who could help identify this man, it seemed like the puzzle may never be completed.
That is, Until late 2025—when police received a tip from someone who claimed to have a potential lead on the decades-old murders. The tipster suggested that police look at a man named Floyd William Parrott. A man who had never, not once, been on their radar for this crime.
There’s not a lot of public information on this tip. Like if this was a deathbed confession from someone, someone who was related to Parrot, someone who just wanted to get this off their chest, 35 years later.
And so, maybe they were skeptical, but I’ll give them credit where credit is due, they quickly started looking into this tip. And that quick look into Floyd Wiliam Parrott instantly elevated him as someone investigators needed to follow up on.
Detectives learned that Parrot had been arrested in Harris County, Texas, in 1988, and sentenced to probation for impersonating—or parrotting, Ironically—a police officer. And this made investigators think of what the woman in the second case had mentioned. That the perpetrator was dressed like a security guard.
That same year, Mr. Parrott was also convicted on weapons charges.
In May 1990, he was arrested—once again for impersonating a police officer. This was just three months before Cheryl and Andy were murdered. He was freed on bond, and then in June—the same month that still-unsolved home invasion rape occurred—a separate woman accused Parrott of sexually assaulting her, though the case didn’t go anywhere. Unfortunately, like so many of those cases.
But this is where I get mad, because if her sexual assault case was taken seriously, and if Parrott was arrested- which he already had a long rap sheet, those murders would not have happened.
And his crime spree just continued. In 1996, he was found in possession of a counterfeit driver’s license—where the name he was using was that of a police chief in a neighboring county.
That same year, Parrott was again arrested for impersonating a cop when he used a car with emergency police lights to pull over a couple on the highway. For that crime, he was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison. But, and here’s a pop quiz for you all. How many of those years do you think he served until he was paroled? Well if you guessed three, you’d be correct.
That same year, Parrot was once again accused of sexual assault. And this time, police collected a rape kit and had his DNA. This confirmed he had had sexual contact with the victim—sexual contact that Parrott insisted had been consensual.
But this also meant that Detectives reviewing the case in 2025 discovered that Floyd’s DNA was still in the system.
So they immediately ran the DNA profile from the Henry/Atkinson case against the sample taken from Floyd Parrott decades earlier.
And that’s when the decades-long hunt for Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson’s killer finally came to an end. The DNA matched. Floyd William Parrott was the murderer.
Police tracked down Parrott, who was now 64 years old and living in Lincoln, Nebraska. And in late March of this year, 2026, authorities arrested him and charged him with capital murder—36 years after the crime.
This was a huge deal, but unfortunately, not everyone was around to celebrate. The breakthrough came too late for Cheryl Henry's mother, Barbara Craig, and Andy Atkinson's father, Garland Atkinson. They both died in 2024, the year before the tip was called in — but Cheryl's sister Shane , Cheryl's father Robert Henry, Andy's mother Ann Fowler, were alive to hear the news. Shane said that she couldn’t believe it was real after 35 years of NOTHING.
But Parrott’s time in jail would be short-lived, just like the other time he went to jail.
On April 28th, literally as we were researching for this episode, this is the second time in like 2 months where there’s been a huge update on a case as I’m writing an episode, jailors in Lancaster County, Nebraska—where Parrott was awaiting extradition to Texas—found Floyd Parrott unresponsive in his cell.
He was soon pronounced dead. And it appeared he took his own life.
To say its frustrating doesn’t really describe the extent of this. His entire life was committing crimes and getting away with them, and then the moment he’s actually caught, he’s left unsupervised and is able to avoid any sort of consequence. Though, the reactions from the family were mixed
Andy’s mother said she was glad he was dead, and Shane actually was relieved there wouldn’t be a trial. Trial meant reliving the trauma that she had worked so hard for over three decades to process. It would mean hearing every detail of her sister’s death all over again, and so maybe just knowing who it was was closure enough.
After his arrest, police in Houston were flooded with calls from new victims coming forward to describe their own encounters with Parrott, and now investigators are convinced there are even more victims out there yet to be connected to him.
Although this one doesn’t have that happy of an ending, it really has been a renaissance period for closing cold cases. And that’s something we can all celebrate.
Nearly every region in America, it seems, has at least one notorious cold case, like the Lover’s Lane murders in Houston, and it’s been a cathartic time for survivors and loved ones, and an exciting time for investigators and true crime aficionados like you and me, to see these mysteries cracked thirty, forty years on.
In Placer County, California just north of Sacramento—no case has haunted the community more than the one I’m about to tell you about, which occurred not long after the Lover’s Lane murders in Texas.
It was the Monday before Thanksgiving, 1991; a quarter past one in the afternoon.
Bob Wanner of Sacramento had just picked up his four-year-old daughter from preschool, and now he had one more errand to run. His in-laws recently moved into a new home. And Bob had agreed to pick up some wood from their old house and lug it over to their new one.
Bob knew that his wife, Cindy, was already at the house, which was owned by her sister Susan and her husband Phil. They paid Cindy to house-clean once a week, and so Bob expected to see Cindy there, along with their infant daughter, whom Cindy had taken with her.
He pulled up to the house and walked up to the front door, with his little girl in tow and a pile of wood in his hands.
He set the wood down and rang the bell, expecting to hear Cindy’s footsteps approaching the door, but—all Bob could hear was the baby crying from inside.
Bob rang the bell again and waited—and again, no one came.
He went to try the front door, and it was unlocked,, and there at the dining room table was his and Cindy’s infant girl, crying in her high chair.
Bob called out for Cindy as he moved through the house from room to room. In the bathroom, he found her cleaning supplies. But Cindy was nowhere to be seen. It was like she had abruptly ‘up and left’ in the middle of cleaning.
But why would she leave the baby unattended?
That’s when the phone rang. Bob picked up. It was his brother-in-law, Phil.
“Where’s Cindy?” Bob asked.
But Phil was just confused. He and Susan had just seen Cindy less than an hour ago—at the house. She had been there all morning, cleaning—and as far as he knew, Phil said, she’s still there. What about the backyard?
Bob said he didn’t see her there or anywhere else in, or around, the house.
It was at that point that Bob hung up with his brother-in-law and called the Placer County Sheriff’s Office.
Detective Bill Summers soon arrived at the house and met with Bob, before proceeding to look around. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary or disturbed, nothing indicated any violence or any kind of struggle had taken place. Cindy’s shoes were still there, along with her coat. And her car was still parked outside. The only thing missing was her purse.
At first, the detective wondered if Cindy may have been discontented and simply walked away from her life.
But Bob shot that notion down pretty quickly.
35-year-old Cindy Wanner was a devoted mother of two, happily married and deeply religious. She and Bob had moved to NorCal from Denver, Colorado a year and half earlier, after Bob’s company shut down and put him out of work. When Cindy became pregnant with their second child, Bob began looking for work in Sacramento, where her sisters lived—and he soon secured an engineering job there.
Bob and Cindy settled into a home in the bedroom community of Rancho Cordova, not far from Cindy’s sisters, and were full of hope for the future.
But, he said, Cindy struggled to make ends meet and couldn’t seem to find work. In fact, she had recently asked officials at her church if they could help her find a job, explaining that Ashley, her baby, needed ear surgery, and Cindy was scrambling to come up with the money to pay for it. The church donated a box of clothing so that Cindy could have a garage sale and raise the funds.
Meanwhile, Cindy’s sisters paid her to clean their houses once a week while she continued to look for full-time work.
By late afternoon, the crime scene investigator finished processing the house for clues, but there was…. nothing. Well, almost nothing—save for a single cigarette butt on the walkway outside. Which they mostly ignored, but that caught Bob’s attention
No one in the house smoked, nor did Cindy Wanner. Could it be a clue? The CSI dusted the butt for fingerprints. None appeared.
Susan and Phil returned to their house that afternoon to find it being treated like a crime scene.
They talked to Detective Summers and recalled that Cindy first arrived at the house around 8am, with her baby and her cleaning supplies, and they left a short time later—leaving her and the baby there alone. They dropped back in just before noon, just for a short while, and headed back out around 12:30. At the time they left, Cindy was feeding the baby in her high chair at the dining table. Which was right where Bob found her when he got to the house less than an hour later. So, sometime between 12:30 and 1:15pm—something happened.
Detective Bill Summers was now investigating this as an abduction—even though there was no evidence to point him in that direction, or in any other direction. But it was the most logical explanation at this point for Cindy’s disappearance.
That evening, the Wanners’ church pastor came out to the house to meet with and console Bob —who by this point was sobbing uncontrollably, and lying in the backyard with his face in the dirt.
In the days ahead, Bob and Cindy’s brother-in-law Phil took polygraph tests, to rule them out as suspects. Police said Cindy had no known enemies. So, it was obvious to look at the two men closest to her. But, both of them passed the tests.
For the family of Cindy, there was little to give thanks for on Thanksgiving 1991. They could only hope and pray Cindy was okay and would turn up soon. Maybe this was a big misunderstanding they could all laugh about. But days turned into weeks, and there was no news.
It wasn’t until December 4th that investigators got a potential break. Cindy’s bank contacted them to report that Cindy’s check card had been used—three hours after she disappeared. Someone had withdrawn forty dollars from a gas station ATM, just down the road in Citrus Heights.
According to the bank, the ATM at that particular location had a video camera—and so the transaction should have been caught on tape. Detectives immediately reached out to the managers of the gas station for the footage.. But… they were too late. They learned that the footage from that day had already been taped over—and lost forever.
Investigators were frustrated. And so was Cindy’s family. Why did the bank take so long—nine days—to share this information with investigators?
Investigators racked their brains, wondering where to look next. They began exploring the possibility that Cindy’s disappearance might be linked to the killing of a 27-year-old woman named Suzette Willis, who was found bludgeoned to death near a creek in Roseville, four days before Cindy disappeared. They also wondered if there might be a link between these crimes and some convicts who had escaped from the Solano County Jail earlier in the month.
And then, on Saturday, December 14th, a machinist named Kelly Price was quail-hunting in the mountains, about 30 miles northeast of Granite Bay, when he stumbled upon something just off the road: it was the body of a woman, nude except for a bra, dumped in some brush about fifty feet from the roadway.
Kelly called the Placer County Sheriff’s Department, whose deputies recovered the body and immediately noticed tattoos that were similar to tattoos Cindy Wanner’s family described in the missing person report.
Within a day, a positive identification was made. This was Cindy.
The same CSI who had processed Cindy’s sister's home on the day she disappeared also collected evidence at the scene—lifting green wool fibers and metal flaking from Cindy’s body.
The medical examiner would later find that Cindy had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. But what was perhaps most chilling was not how Cindy died—which was disturbing enough—but when.
Cindy’s body showed very little sign of decomposition. The medical examiner determined that though she had been abducted 19 days earlier It appeared Cindy was kept alive for up to two weeks after she disappeared.
Deputies started thoroughly searching the area around where Cindy’s body was found, including tearing through garbage bags in a garbage dump a few hundred feet away, and that’s where they made a disturbing find: one of the plastic bags contained dirty magazines, a pornographic videotape, and four empty beer cans. And also inside that bag, the CSI found green wool fibers and metal flakes—which, when examined under a microscope, looked identical to the green fibers and metal flakes found on Cindy’s body. Whoever killed Cindy had most likely also disposed of the beer cans, the dirty magazine, and the porno.
The CSI was also able to lift fingerprints from the beer cans and videotape. Detectives uploaded the fingerprints to AFIS, the computerized fingerprint database. Nothing came back.
The Christmas holidays came and went without a break in the case.
Susan continued to live in the house where her sister was abducted, always wondering if Cindy’s killer was still in the area; maybe living in or visiting the neighborhood to relive the thrill. She watched as people passed her house, hoping to identify the killer, but she never did.
On January 27th, 1992, a few months later, a 19-year-old Sacramento mother of two named Veronica Martinez left for the local grocery store and never returned home. On March 8th, a hiker found her headless corpse, wrapped in plastic, dumped in a ravine along Highway 49 in El Dorado County. Investigators were struck by the similarities immediately.
Like Cindy Wanner, she was found almost completely nude except for her bra.
Like Cindy, she had tattoos, and those were what initially identified her
Like Cindy, she had left two young children behind.
And like Cindy… it seemed that her killer had kept Veronica alive for weeks following her abduction.
In fact, the medical examiner ruled that Veronica had been dead for only about seven to ten days before she was found—and yet, she had been missing for a month and a half. Her head, which had been severed with a razor-sharp instrument, was never recovered.
At first, investigators considered that the cases may be connected. But by summer, they told reporters that they no longer thought so. Instead They had turned their focus to Veronica’s married boyfriend and his wife, whom they had questioned at length but weren’t able to build a case against.
Meanwhile, Cindy’s case was turning cold. Calls from tipsters still came in every few weeks—but none of them led to a break in the case.
Bob, Cindy’s widower, grew angrier and angrier the more he thought about Cindy’s bank sitting on the information about the ATM transaction for nine whole days—all the while Cindy was most likely still alive and possibly could have been saved.
That anger finally reached a breaking point when Bob Wanner retained an attorney and sued Wells Fargo, Cindy’s bank.
But In August of 1993, a judge threw the case out. Nothing was happening in Cindy’s case, but a disturbing pattern was continuing….
Two months later, a 27-year-old schoolteacher named Cherilyn Hawkley disappeared from the elementary school where she taught, on a Friday afternoon after class. Two days later, on Halloween, police found her strangled to death about a mile away from the school. They found her inside her minivan, with a length of rope near her body.
Reporters asked Placer County investigators if the murder was linked to Cindy Wanner’s.
Detectives weren’t sure. There were similarities, they acknowledged. But also differences. Cindy had been kept alive for many days, in an unknown location—probably the killer’s home. Cherilyn was killed in her vehicle.
Years would pass without Cindy, Veronica, or Cherilyn—or Suzette Willis’s cases—seeing any new developments. And as far as investigators were concerned, there was no apparent connection..
But In 2002, detectives returned to Cindy’s case and decided to try and extract DNA from what little evidence they had—the best candidates being the beer cans from the garbage dump, and the cigarette butt from the walkway outside the home.
Using the most advanced technology that was available in 2002, crime lab techs tried their best to develop a DNA profile from those items, but—they were unsuccessful.
Sixteen more years passed. But then, in April 2018, there was a seismic event in criminal justice. The notorious Golden State Killer, who had raped more than fifty people and killed over a dozen in California, from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, had just been identified and arrested.
California’s most infamous unidentified serial killer now had a name: Joseph James DeAngelo. And he had close ties to Placer County. He had lived there in the late 1970s, and since 1990, he worked as a truck mechanic at a supermarket distribution center in Roseville.
Suddenly, Cindy Wanner’s case was back in the conversation, because DeAngelo was being looked at as a possible suspect.
However, DeAngelo’s m.o. was different. He broke into houses, most often in the middle of the night, and would usually confront sleeping couples in their beds. He’d attack them in their homes and then leave. Wanner had been abducted, held for a period of time, and dumped.
And DeAngelo bludgeoned, and sometimes used a firearm. Wanner was strangled.
But killers have been known to change their m.o.s.
Had Cindy Wanner been a victim of the Golden State Killer?
In 2025, investigators would have their answer.
Using the latest technology–technology that wasn’t available in 2002–investigators were finally able to extract DNA and develop a DNA profile from biological evidence in the Cindy Wanner case.
It did not match Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer.
But it did match someone else. And once again, it was someone who never was on police’s radar for the crime. another sex offender: a 64-year-old man named James Lawhead, Jr.
This was a man who went to prison in 1981 and, honestly, should never have been released.
The crime that landed him in jail then, when he was just 19 years old, was: he broke into a Sacramento home after peeping on the occupants through the window, brutally beat the 71-year-old woman who lived there with a metal object, bound and gagged her after she lost consciousness, and then sexually assaulted the woman’s granddaughter. She was just 11 years old. And Before leaving, he stole twenty dollars from the elderly woman’s purse.
Lawhead later admitted he intended to kill the older woman, and assumed she was dead until learning, after her arrest, she had survived.
While Lawhead was awaiting trial, a psychiatrist evaluated him and diagnosed him as a mentally disordered sex offender “not amenable to treatment.” The judge sentenced him to nineteen years and eight months in prison. Lawhead served ten. Which means he was out by the time he was 29 years old.
In January 1991, Lawhead was released from prison. And before the end of the year, Cindy Wanner was dead.
In 2002, Lawhead was arrested for failure to register as a sex offender in Placer County, and then once again on a weapons charge in 2005.
And it was right around that time that Lawhead seemed to fall off the face of the earth.
So in 2025, Investigators in Placer County were now attempting to locate Lawhead, and they soon realized there had been no trace of this guy since 2005. They began to suspect Lawhead living somewhere under an assumed name.
Detectives contacted Lawhead’s 71-year-old sister, Terry, who told them she had no idea where her brother was, and hadn’t seen or spoken to him in years.
Placer County detectives then began contacting other police agencies—ones that used facial recognition technology, which is just now gaining wider adoption among law enforcement and is incredibly controversial. You can upload an image of someone, like from cell phone video or CCTV, and it can scan the face and connect it to mug shots.
“over two-thirds of police agencies use FRT in some capacity, and federal agencies like the FBI and Secret Service had been using it for years to support criminal investigations. The dominant model was commercial software sold to departments, with Clearview AI being the most notorious vendor. Clearview operates on a database of billions of photos scraped from the internet—social media, public webpages, anywhere a face appears—which is what makes it both powerful and legally radioactiveClearview built its database without anyone's consent, which triggered major litigation. In 2025 there was a $51.75 million nationwide class settlement involving Clearview AI, stemming from claims its automatic collection and storage of biometric data violated privacy laws like Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act. a facial recognition hit is only a lead, never proof. Police cannot apply for an arrest warrant based solely on the results of a facial recognition database”
The detectives shared the images they had of Lawhead, from the early 90s through 2005. And one of those agencies—the Scottsdale Police Department—soon contacted Placer County to report that they’d found a visual match in their State Department of Transportation database.
The matching subject went by the name Vincent Reynolds. And when investigators dug into the address in Bullhead City, Arizona where “Vincent Reynolds” lived, they found out that the owner of the property was… Terry Lawhead. James’s sister.
Vincent Reynolds of Bullhead City, Arizona was in fact James Lawhead Jr.—wanted killer.
Police in Arizona staked out the home and waited until Lawhead stepped outside, and then swooped in and arrested him in his driveway. When they later executed a search warrant inside the home, what they found was horrible: Lawhead had staged multiple loaded firearms throughout the house, and had packed an apparent getaway bag containing clothes, a burner phone, and fifteen thousand dollars in cash. Like he knew that someone would be after him one day and he was planning his escape
Lawhead has since been extradited to Placer County—and his sister Terry has been charged as an accessory.
As of this episode's recording, the murders of Suzette Willis, Veronica Martinez, and Cherilyn Hawkley remain unsolved.
It’s a wild time in forensics, in the last few years the tools we have accessible have just exploded in their usefulness and cases are being closed left and right.
And because of that, I wanted to share something I learned from someone who is involved in a cold case.
When I did the episode on Cynthia Gonzalez, the woman whose case was being worked on by the university students in Arlington, Texas, I talked to her daughter Jessica on the phone. And she had some really great advice that I wanted to share with you all.
Never stop calling about cold cases. It takes families following up constantly, working with officers, putting pressure on investigators, to get these cases solved. A lot of areas don’t have dedicated cold case investigators, these are often passion projects law enforcement officers take on. But if you call and ask questions, it might just lead to someone’s case being pulled off the shelf and dusted off, maybe a piece of evidence being retested for fingerprints or DNA, you never know.