As the youngest of 10 children, five-year-old Anne Pham rarely was alone. So perhaps it’s understandable she was yearning to do something by herself. On the morning of Jan. 21, 1982, she begged her family to let her walk the three short blocks from their home at 1520 Sonoma Ave in Seaside to Highland Elementary School.
“Normally she walked to school with her mom, but on this particular day it was raining and she convinced her mom and older brother she wanted to walk to school herself,” Seaside Police Chief Nicholas Borges told People magazine in February. “She never made it to the school.”
Two days after Anne was reported missing, military police at Fort Ord responded to a tip about a possible illegal marijuana grow on the U.S. Army post. While searching, they discovered Anne’s body. She had been kidnapped, sexually assaulted and strangled. Police had no suspects and no leads.
In 2020, the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office Cold Case Task Force and Seaside Police Department reopened the case. Items were sent for DNA testing, which the district attorney’s office said recently returned a hit to Robert John Lanoue, 70, of Reno. Lanoue was 29 at the time of Anne’s murder and lived just around the corner from the Phams, Borges said. Records show Lanoue is a registered sex offender in Nevada for a 1998 conviction for crimes against a minor in Las Vegas.
On Thursday, the D.A’s office announced Lanoue has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder. He is in custody in Washoe County awaiting extradition to California.
Losing Anne was not the first tragedy for the Phams. According to Borges, the family escaped Vietnam on a boat during the Vietnam War.
“She was a five-year-old little girl in this country to start her life, to make her family proud and to just live the American dream and that in and of itself is just heartbreaking,” Borges told People. “This family fled from Vietnam. They fled from war. The United States of America was paradise for the family.
“So never in their wildest dreams did they think coming here and being in this cute little town, even though it was rough back then, would result in losing their little angel.”