A man has pleaded guilty to the kidnapping and killing of a Granite Bay mother more than 30 years ago, marking a major development in a long-unsolved Placer County cold case. James Lawhead Jr. admitted to the crime, bringing a measure of resolution to a case that had remained open for decades.
The victim was Cindy Warner, who was abducted from a home back in 1991. According to investigators, when she was taken she left behind her 11-month-old child, who was found alone in a high chair, a detail that has long underscored the cruelty of the crime.
Warner's body was found three weeks after she disappeared, in Forest Hill. The discovery confirmed that the abduction had ended in her death, and the case went on to remain unsolved for many years as investigators worked to identify who was responsible.
The charges Lawhead faced were serious, covering kidnapping, rape and murder. By pleading guilty, he has admitted responsibility for the abduction and killing that had gone unanswered for more than three decades, closing a case that had weighed on the community and the victim's family.
The breakthrough came through DNA evidence, which authorities used to identify Lawhead as the suspect in the decades-old case. He was arrested in Arizona in April, with the genetic link providing the connection that investigators had been seeking for years to tie him to the crime.
Lawhead is now set to be sentenced in mid-July. Under the terms described, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole, an outcome that would keep him behind bars for the rest of his life for the 1991 killing of Cindy Warner.