The murder of Anne Pham

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Today we’re stepping over to California all the way back to 1982 to cover the tragic case of a sweet 5-year-old little girl who wanted to establish her independence by walking to school on her own. Despite the fact that her school was only two blocks away from her home, she sadly never made it & her body was found two days later. Her family waited 4 agonizing decades to get answers & justice after the case was reopened in 2020, thanks to the use of a new type of DNA testing & genetic genealogy.

When considering genetic genealogy, many true crime addicts think back to the 2018 arrest of Joseph DeAngelo, better known as the Golden State Killer, a serial killer & rapist who terrorized residents of California between the 1970s to 1980s. A DNA sample that was left behind at one of the crime scenes on a discarded cigarette butt sat in storage for decades, was uploaded into GEDmatch in early 2018, leading investigators to a then 72-year-old DeAngelo.

But since then, the method has taken off, allowing investigators to help solve cold cases that previously led to dead ends. According to the Forensic Genetic Genealogy Project, by December 2023, use of forensic genetic genealogy has solved 651 cases.

When DNA evidence from a crime scene isn’t a match to one of the over 18 million offender profiles within CODIS, the FBI’s DNA database, investigators can now turn their attention to public genealogy databases to crack cases that were once thought of as unsolvable.

Public genealogy databases such as GEDmatch or FamilyTreeDNA hold millions of profiles & once a DNA sample is uploaded, it shows how the sample is related to other people in the world. This allows genealogists to then build elaborate family trees to ultimately whittle their way down to their suspect. It can be a slow, meticulous process that may take weeks to months, but when it does eventually hit, it makes all of the blood, sweat & tears worth it. Sadly, testing & analysis can cost thousands of dollars per case & many departments are lacking the budget.

Thursday, January 21, 1982 began as a rainy morning as 5-year-old Anne-Sang Thi Pham, who went by Anne, was getting ready to head out for kindergarten at Highland Elementary School in Seaside, California. Anne was one of ten siblings who lived with her parents, Tuong & Nu Lui Pham, at 1520 Sonoma Avenue in Seaside, California.

Growing up in a family with so many siblings, it was Anne’s goal to establish herself as a responsible, independent girl. She pleaded with her mom & her older brother, who normally walked her to school, long enough to eventually convince them to allow her to make the two block walk by herself. As she prepared to walk out the door just before 11 am, she told her mom, Stay home, Mom, I can walk by myself. She closed the door behind her, never to be seen alive again.

Anne’s family fled to the United States from Vietnam in a boat after the war, hoping for a better life. When they arrived, they felt their new home was a paradise compared to what they’d lived through in the Vietnam War.

Anne’s parents originally lived in a small coastal village in North Vietnam where her father, Tuong, initially worked as a fisherman & later as a soldier, fighting for the Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai against the Viet Minh. The family was resettled in South Vietnam after the country was divided in 1954 & Tuong tried to regain his fishing career until he was drafted into the South Vietnamese Army & served an additional ten years.

It wasn’t until 1975 when the South Vietnamese government fell to the Communists that Tuong & his wife & seven children sailed into the South China Sea on a 60-foot boat that was packed with 200 passengers. Two days into their journey, they were picked up by a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier & taken to Guam. The family eventually made their way to Beumont, Texas & Anne was born two years later, the first of the Pham children to be born in the United States. Her parents named her after a church that sponsored the family, St. Anne’s Catholic Church in Beaumont, Texas. Once settled in the U.S., the couple went on to have two more children, bringing them to ten children.

Tuong struggled to provide for his family while living in Texas & he felt that if he lived closer to the sea, he could once again become a fisherman so the family eventually relocated to Seaside. Only months before Anne vanished, her father, Tuong, had been elected president of the Vietnamese Catholic community in Seaside.

Anne was described as a very smart little girl who adored school & each morning before she set off, she got herself dressed & combed her own hair. According to her teacher, Anne always arrived on time for class each day. She was described as independent, contentious, shy & very sensitive to the needs of others. For example, if she noticed her father opening a pack of cigarettes, she would quietly bring him an ashtray, anticipating his needs even at such a young age.

It wasn’t until dinnertime that evening when her large family realized that Anne hadn’t come home from school. When they contacted the school, they were told that she never made it in that day & no one from the busy grocery store along the route to school had seen her either.

Two days later on January 23, military police at Fort Ord, which went on to close in 1994, responded to a tip about possible illegal marijuana being grown on the U.S. Army post. During their search, they discovered Anne’s body beside South Boundary Road in a wooded area near a shooting range about one mile from her elementary school. Authorities determined that she’d been sexually assaulted & strangled to death.

Investigators were baffled since Anne’s school was only just up the street from her home & since she was such a quiet & careful little girl, her family didn’t think she would have approached a car that may have approached her during her quick walk. Even if a person inside a passing car asked her to help them find their dog or offered her candy, her family did not believe she would have stopped. With this information, investigators believed that whatever happened to Anne likely happened very quickly. It was clear that whoever was responsible for Anne’s murder was an absolute monster & with each second that passed, there was someone else out living their life who could be the next potential victim.

Because Anne vanished on a morning when people would have been traveling to work & school, police tried to enlist the public’s help since they believed that someone must have seen something on the morning that Anne was abducted. Without a doubt, something didn’t look right as the little girl was pulled away from a stranger & maybe once they saw a news report or news article, they would see Anne’s picture & realize what they’d witnessed that day.

In the meantime, the Pham family struggled to cover the expenses of Anne’s funeral as they carried themselves, weighed down with grief. They had been receiving public assistance at the time of her murder until Tuong received the payment for the fishing he did in San Francisco. He eventually borrowed money from his employer to cover partial costs of the funeral & signed a note promising to pay the remaining portion within sixty days. The family also discussed moving since they feared their other children were at risk after Anne’s murder.

Sadly, despite their best efforts, investigators had no leads or suspects & the case quickly went cold.

In 2010 the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office created the cold case task force in order to provide families with closure using new DNA sequencing. As of July 2022 there were over 400 unsolved cold cases in Monterey County alone.

With a recent determination to re-examine unsolved cases, the county’s Cold Case Task force, alongside the District Attorney’s Office & Seaside Police Department reopened Anne’s case in 2020 after they received a grant of $535,000 from the U.S. Department of Justice. When a detective began looking into cold cases that were extremely complex & sensitive, without hesitation, Chief Borges immediately thought of Anne’s case.

Investigators learned that a centimeter piece of a rootless pubic hair that had been found on Anne’s body was sufficient to create a DNA profile that could be used in genealogical databases. The technology is able to capture ultrashort DNA fragments that are lost to traditional methods. Astrea Forensics of Santa Cruz performed a whole-genome sequencing on the hair that resulted in a DNA profile that was capable of being used to search genealogical databases.

Once the forensic genetic genealogist with Parabon NanoLabs was able to establish a genetic network that produced a surname of the suspect. The same name kept recurring, Lanoue. As investigators further searched for a specific suspect who could have been in the area at the time of Anne’s murder, they found the most likely match to be Robert John Lanoue, a then 69-year-old man living in Reno, Nevada.

At the time of Anne’s murder in 1982, Robert Lanoue was 29-years-old, living on Luzern Street in Seaside only 60 feet away, around the corner from the Pham family. While serving in the U.S. Army he was stationed at Fort Ord & one of his children also attended Highland Elementary School where Anne was headed that morning. There is no indication that the families knew each other. The man would have driven by the Pham home every single day, no doubt noticing the ten children playing around the property, seeing them as prey. At the time of her disappearance, Lanoue had never been a suspect.

Police learned that the man was a monster who eventually left the Seaside area & headed to Reno where he spent more than twenty years in prison for sexual offenses & at the time of his arrest, he was in jail on a probation violation. He’s registered as a sex offender in Nevada after he was convicted in 1998 of producing & possessing child pornography & conspiracy to commit lewd acts with a child under age 14. According to records, he is also considered a fugitive of another state.

Further analysis by Dr. Richard Green of UC Santa Cruz & Parabon NanoLabs provided strong evidentiary support that Lanoue was absolutely the person responsible for Anne’s murder.

With this confirmation, investigators went on to interview Lanoue on July 6, 2022 & he admitted to picking Anne up in his car on the Thursday morning she vanished. He indicated that he didn’t remember committing the murder, but acknowledged that he may have blocked it from his memory as a way of protecting himself. He admitted that he had a history of sexually assaulting young girls which his records supported. At this point he was held in custody while he awaited extradition to California.

California investigators obtained a warrant for Lanoue’s arrest on July 6, 2023 & at the time, he was already in prison in Nevada’s Washoe County jail after he was booked on June 8 for a parole violation. He was charged with one count of first-degree murder while committing kidnapping & a lewd act on a child under age 14. During his arraignment he entered a plea of not guilty & was assigned a public defender.

In February 2025 72-year-old Lanoue pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, kidnapping & sex crimes against a child & in March 2025 he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison plus an additional 31 years.

In March, Chief Borges ordered a large cardboard cutout of Anne that he placed in the lobby of his office. When charges were announced, he told his team that they were going to take Annie, as her family fondly called her, to school. He carefully placed Anne’s photo in his car, being sure to not place her in the trunk since that’s likely where she’d been placed in Lanoue’s car when she was killed. He & a group of detectives drove to Highland Elementary School where Anne set out to walk to on the day she vanished, proud that she was old enough to go on her own. They wanted to be sure that on the day her killer was arrested, she made it there.

Sadly, both of Anne’s parents have since passed away, but the cold case team of investigators in Monterey County notified her surviving siblings & the team is incredibly thankful that they were able to bring the Pham family closure after forty long years. Since her parents passed away before justice was served, they were forced to live the rest of their days never knowing who had brutally murdered & raped their 5-year-old baby on her two block walk to school. The team can only hope that Anne’s family will be able to continue to heal now that justice has been served.

Moving forward, it’s the cold case team’s goal to solve each & every case they have since there’s nothing more rewarding than giving a heartbroken family a sense of justice after losing a loved one to violence.

When Anne’s family fled from the war in Vietnam, they were in search of the American dream, viewing their new home as paradise on their arrival. Never in their wildest dreams did they imagine that as they settled into the cute, little town of Seaside, they would lose their precious 5-year-old girl four years later.

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