Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 180. Two Cold Cases Police Thought Would Never Be Solved (And How They Were Cracked This Year)

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. 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.  CW:  sexual assault, murder, kidnapping, brief references to violence against a child, and suicide. Subscribe on⁠⁠ Patreon⁠⁠ to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠⁠ Tik Tok⁠⁠ and⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠ for a daily dose of horror.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Salas Health. I have been booking lots of doctors appointments lately, and it can be such a headache. You can spend hours on hold with insurance. You can be bounced between doctors who clearly aren't talking to each other. I mean, I see it in my life now, and I have a grandmother with Alzheimer's, and it's hard for her to go to the doctor and advocate for herself. Having a solace advocate would be such a game changer. Solace connects you with dedicated healthcare advocates, registered nurses, and healthcare

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As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. You know, they say that we're in a golden age of DNA testing. More and more cold cases are being solved this year, some 40, 50, even 60 years old. Today, I want to tell you about two of those cases, high-profile murders that went unsolved for decades. And I want to tell you about the way police finally cracked them. I also want to ask you guys, what is the high-profile cold case in your area that you would want to see solved this year? Make sure you comment wherever you listen to episodes. And before we dive in, I just wanted to mention that we have a bonus episode out that we just did for Patreon and Apple podcast subscribers.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Route 66, and subscribers wanted me to do a deep dive into some of the darkest stories along the route. Think scary, mysterious ghost lights, a brothel full of women who kill their clients. and the oldest cold case in New Mexico, a very terrifying disappearance that to this day no one can explain. Again, that's over on Patreon and Apple Podcasts if you want to listen. There's also a free trial on both if you want to try it out and listen to some episodes. But okay, let's get into today's episode. August 24th, 1990 was a hot Friday in Houston, Texas.

Temperatures approached triple digits even at 5 p.m. And that's when on the underdeveloped 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 the cul-de-sac near the woods, just beyond where the office park was, the security guard peered into the vehicle and saw that the keys were still in the ignition, and a woman's purse was on the passenger floorboard. It was really odd that someone would leave their car and their purse unsecured like that.

He looked around, he didn't see anyone, and so he made a note of the vehicle and then just went about his patrol. But then, about three hours later, just after the sun had set, the security guard made his rounds once again, and noticed that the car was still parked in the cul-de-sac. And something inside of him said that he should call the police just to be safe. Houston police officers soon arrived on the scene, and immediately they ran the vehicle's plates. And that's when they noticed the second weird thing. Earlier that day, the owner of the Honda Civic, a young man named Andy Atkinson, had been reported missing. Okay, this was no longer just a car that needed to be towed.

This was potentially a crime scene. So the officer started doing a closer visual inspection of this 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, and the rubber floor mat was pushed out of place, and the visor had been pulled off of its hinges,

as though someone had tried to hold onto it while they were 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 that she was the sister of the woman who the purse belonged to, a woman named 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 23, Shane said that Cheryl had plans to meet the vehicle's owner, Andy, at a popular dance spot called Bayou Mamas. 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. Now, the last thing she expected during this busy period of her life was to be swept off of 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, and pretty soon the pair were completely smitten with each other. Cheryl and Andy had another commonality that they found pretty much endlessly amusing, but both of them worked at gentlemen's clubs.

They were also known as topless bars. Andy sometimes worked the door at the club that his father managed, a place called Dream Street, and Cheryl worked at Rick's Cabaret. They would laugh about this all the time. I mean, what a time it was to be living in Houston. Gretchen and Craig, their friends, planned to join them for a double date that night.

But that afternoon, Gretchen told Cheryl that they had actually changed their minds and were going to stay in for the night, so Cheryl and Andy planned to meet up with them at their apartment after they went to Bayou Mamas. Cheryl's sister, Shane, ended up stepping in as Gretchen and Craig's substitute, and she even volunteered to drive everyone,

so early in the evening, Cheryl headed to Shane's apartment and then the two got ready for their night out. Cheryl opted for a sleek blue dress and then just after 8 o'clock they set out for Bayou Mama's blasting ACDC on their 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 she was a third wheel. So at around 11 p.m. She decided to call it a night. 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. That wasn't really like her sister

to skip out on work. So Shane called Gretchen to ask if she or Craig had seen Cheryl and Andy the previous night like they had planned, and Gretchen told Shane that they had never shown up. They had assumed that Cheryl and Andy just made different plans. But Shane didn't think that this was the case. Cheryl had just gotten her job. She wouldn't ditch it for, say, a beach day or to play hooky, especially not without calling in. Cheryl was reliable, mature, and she took her adult responsibilities really seriously. Something was definitely wrong, and Shane was now beginning to panic. She called the Houston police, and that's when she filed a missing person's 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 actually

in an area that was known to locals as Lovers Lane. It was a desolate spot where couples liked to go make out and fool around. Shane called her mom, her brother, and her father, and all of them together drove out to the spot where the car had been parked. Now, by the time that the family members got there, the area was already crawling with police. And before long, there were dog handlers that arrived with their search dogs. Cheryl's family members took everything in,

but they knew that it didn't look good. They saw that there was the blood inside the car, the blood on the door handles and on the seat. They definitely could tell that there had been some sort of violent struggle inside of the car. They also saw cigarette butts outside the car, which to them indicated that Cheryl and Andy, who were both smokers, had been hanging out in the area for a while before and then something suddenly happened and probably caught them off guard. The search continued well into the night as Cheryl's family stood by feeling, really helpless and full of dread, and suddenly, right before midnight, the family members heard the search dogs start barking,

and they noticed that all of the law enforcement personnel at the scene were moving towards the area where the dogs had definitely alerted on something. Officers had found Andy's golf balls and golf clubs scattered throughout the woods, but they seemed to make almost an arrow that led to Cheryl's nude body. Cheryl's 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 found near her body. She was covered up, concealed, which police noted was the kind of behavior that killers often exhibit when they know their victims, which immediately begged the question, was Cheryl killed by someone she knew? Notably, Andy was nowhere to be found when the police located Cheryl's body.

And they started to wonder if Andy could have done this. After all, I mean, the couple had only known each other for a couple weeks. So now the search was becoming a manhunt for Andy. Detectives secured the crime scene as analysts processed it all and collected evidence while the search fanned out into the woods as investigators looked for clues

as to where Andy might have gone. but then just after the sun rose, that search ended. They had found Andy Atkinson sitting up against a tree, or rather he was tied to a 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 Cheryl's body was placed,

police had found the blue dress that 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 eventually became known as the lover's lane murder because of where it happened. Now, there were two competing theories about this crime. The way that Cheryl was hidden, the intimacy required to commit a knife attack, made it seem like the couple was killed by someone they knew.

But there was also the fact that Cheryl, had been tied up far more than Andy. Was it possible that she was targeted, or at the end of the day, you know, could this have been a serial killer that was targeting lover's lanes, kind of like the Zodiac killer did? Well, 1990 was a very different time than today.

Officers didn't have access to the same types of DNA testing that we have these days. A rape kit was collected on Cheryl, but it sat in an evidence locker for years. In this case, for as gruesome and horrifying and shocking as it was, went cold almost immediately because there just weren't a lot of leads to follow. A year passed, then two, then eventually a decade without a single new development. Really the only lead that came up in that time was in March of 2001,

and that was 11 years after the crime had taken place, when investigators received a strange handwritten letter from an anonymous sender. The envelope was addressed to the homicide division of the Houston Police Department, and in the spot where the return address would usually go were the names of Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson. And in the letter, the sender wrote, quote, If you want to know who killed C. Henry and A. Atkinson, it will cost you $100,000.

Reply in the Houston Chronicle Personal Column on Monday, March 12, 2001 only. A lawyer will be hired to make sure you play straight. Signed anonymous. Now, this letter didn't lead anywhere. It was honestly probably some weirdos, desperate attempt to make a bit of money off of this 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 to their shock, there was a match. Not to a specific suspect, though, but to another unsolved crime, a home invasion rape that occurred in June of 1990, two months before the double murder. It was just after 2 a.m. on June 20th, 1990, when the victim left her job at Gigi's Cabaret, which was a topless bar in West Houston, and headed to her boyfriend's house to crash.

Her boyfriend, who was 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 boyfriend's door opened and a stranger walked out.

She took one look at him and knew right away that she was in trouble. This intruder was wearing a fishnet stocking over his head and he wielded a long-barreled 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

onto the bed and pulling a pillowcase over her head. And then he forced himself on her. When the man was done with the attack, he warned the woman that he might stick around the house for another hour or so, or he might be there for only another five minutes. Who could say? So she better lie on the floor and be still or else. When the woman finally freed herself to call 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 man's fishnet stocking. And it was that he was most likely a white male in his 30s, about six feet tall, he had all of skin, possibly a mustache, and it looked, at least to her, like he might have been wearing a security guard uniform. DNA was taken from this case and cataloged, but just like in the Lover's Lane murder, it sat in a police case file for decades without any new information until 2007, when it was confirmed that whoever had committed this crime almost certainly killed the couple at Lover's Lane. And now they had a sketch of this guy. 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 necessarily help the case, at least, Not right away. No one came forward saying that they had seen this man at Lovers Lane or with Cheryl and Andy at any point that night. A major piece of the puzzle had been found, but without any witnesses who could help identify this man, it seemed like the puzzle may never be completed. That is, though, until late last year, 2025, when police received a tip from someone who claimed to have a potential lead on the decades-old murders. The tifster suggested that the police look at a man named Floyd William Parrott, a man who had never, not once, been on their radar for this

crime. And there's not a lot of public information on this tip. Like, if this was maybe a deathbed confession from someone, or maybe it was someone who was related to Parrott, or maybe it was just someone who wanted to get this off of their chest 35 years later. And so maybe the police were skeptical about this, but I'll give them credit where credit is due. They quickly started looking into this guy. And that quick look into Floyd William Parrott instantly elevated him to someone investigators needed to follow up on. Detectives learned that Parrott had been arrested in Harris County, Texas in 1988 and sentenced to probation for impersonating, or parroting, 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. And that same year, Parrot was also convicted on weapons charges. In May of 1990, he was arrested once again for impersonating a police officer, and that was just three months before Cheryl and Andy were murdered. He was freed on bond, and then in June, the same month that the still-unsolved home-invasion rape occurred, a separate woman accused Parrott of sexually assaulting her. Though that case didn't go anywhere, you know, unfortunately, like what happens with a lot of those cases. And this is where I get really mad doing the research because if her sexual assault case was taken seriously, if Parrott was arrested, which he already had a long rap sheet, the murders would have

never happened. And his crime spree really just continued from there. 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. And that same year, Parrott was again arrested for impersonating a cop when he used a car with emergency police lights to pull over a car. couple on the highway. For that crime, he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison, but here's a pop quiz for you all. How many of those 20 years do you think he served until he was paroled? If you guessed, three, you would be correct. And in 1996, before he was arrested for that crime, Parrott was once again accused a sexual assault. And this time, police did collect a rape

kit, and so they had his DNA. This confirmed that he had sexual contact with the victim, even though he insisted that it was consensual. But this also meant that the detectives, reviewing the case in 2025, discovered that his DNA was still in the system labeled with his name. So they immediately ran the DNA profile from the Henry Atkinson murder against the samples that were taken from Parrott decades earlier. And that is when the decades-long hunt for Cheryl Henry and Andy Atkinson's killer. finally came to an end. The DNA was a match. Floyd William Parrott was indeed the murderer. Police tracked him down and he was now 64 years old and living in Lincoln, Nebraska. And in late March of this year, 26, authorities arrested him and charged him with capital murder

36 years after the crime. This was a huge deal. But, you know, unfortunately, not everyone was around to celebrate. The breakthrough came too late for Cheryl Henry's mother, Barbara Craig, Also, 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, and Andy's mother, Anne were all alive to hear this news. Shane said that she couldn't believe it was real after 35 years of nothing on the case. However, Parrot's time in jail would be short-lived, just like the other times that he went to jail. on April 28th, literally, as we were researching for this episode.

I mean, seriously, this is like the second time in two months where there's been a huge update on a case as I'm writing an episode. But jailers in Lancaster County, Nebraska, where Parrott was awaiting extradition to Texas, did find Floyd Parrott unresponsive in his cell. He was soon pronounced dead, and it did appear that he did take his own life. To say this is frustrating doesn't really describe the extent of it. 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 families were a little mixed on this.

Andy's mother said that she was glad he was dead. And, you know, Shane was actually relieved that there wouldn't be a trial. I mean, trial means reliving the trauma that she had worked so hard over three decades to process. It would also mean hearing every detail of her sister's death all over again. And so maybe just knowing who the perpetrator 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 that there are even more victims out there yet to be connected to him. Although this case doesn't have that happy of an ending, it really has been a renaissance period for closing cold cases.

And I think that's something that we can all sell. celebrate. Nearly every region in America, it seems, has at least one notorious cold case like the Lovers Lane murders in Houston. I'm actually curious if you're listening what the one is in your area. I feel like everyone has one of these. This has been a cathartic time for survivors and loved ones. It's also been an exciting time for investigators and also true crime aficionados like you and me to see these mysteries cracked 30, 40, 50 years on. And in Placer County, California, just north of Sacramento. No case has haunted a community more than the one I'm about to tell you about, which occurred not long after the lover's lane murders in Texas.

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That's Kachava, k-a-c-a-v-a-com code HSP. 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 the new one. Bob knew that his wife, Cindy, was already at the house, which was owned by her sister Susan and Susan's 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 he 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 inside of the house was a baby crying. Bob rang the bell again and he waited and again no one came to answer the door. So he went to try the front door himself and he found that it was unlocked. And there, at the dining room table, was his infant daughter 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 found. It was like she had abruptly up and left in the middle of cleaning and left her daughter there. But why would she have left her baby

unattended? And that's when the phone rang. Bob picked it up, and it was his brother-in-law, Phil. where's Cindy? Bob asked. But Phil was just as 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 that 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 take a look around for himself. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary or even disturbed. Nothing indicated any violence of any kind

or a struggle had taken place in the house. Cindy's shoes were still there along with her coat and her car was still parked outside. The only thing missing was Cindy's purse. And so at first, the detective wondered if Cindy might have been discontented and simply walked away from her life. But Bob quickly shut that notion down. 35-year-old Cindy Waner was a devoted mother of two.

She was happily married. She was deeply religious. She and Bob had moved to NorCal from Denver, Colorado a year and a half earlier after Bob's company shut down and put him out of work. When Cindy became pregnant with her 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 community of Rancho Cordova,

not far from Cindy's sisters, and they were full of hope for their future. But, he said, Cindy did struggle to make ends meet and couldn't seem to find work. In fact, she had most recently asked officials at her church if they could help her find a job, explaining that her baby needed ear surgery and Cindy was scrambling to come up with money to pay for it.

The church donated a box of clothing so that she 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 investigators finished processing the house for clues, but there was nothing. Well, almost nothing, save for a single cigarette butt on the walkway outside, which investigators mostly ignored. But that caught Bob's attention. No one in the house smoked, nor did Cindy Wanner. Could this be a clue? scene investigators dusted the cigarette butt for fingerprints, but nothing appeared.

Susan and Phil returned to their house that afternoon to find that it was being treated like a crime scene. They talked to Detective Summers and recalled that Cindy first arrived at the house around 8 a.m. with her baby and her cleaning supplies, and they left a little while after that, leaving her and the baby there alone. But they dropped back in just before noon, just for a little while and headed back out around 1230. At the time they left, Cindy was feeding the baby and her high chance. at the dining table, which was right where Bob found the baby when he got to the house less than an hour later. So, sometime between 1230 and 1.15 p.m., something happened to Cindy. Detective Bill Summers was now investigating this as an abduction, even though there was

really 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 Waners' 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 just to rule them out as suspects. Police said that Cindy had no known enemies, so it was obvious to look at the two men closest to her, but both of them passed these tests. For the family of Cindy, there was little to give thanks for. on Thanksgiving 1991.

They could only hope and pray that Cindy was okay and would turn up soon. Maybe all of this was just a big misunderstanding that 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 $40 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 it was lost forever. Investigators were so frustrated by this. And so was Cindy's family. Why did the bank take so long, nine whole days, to share this information with investigators? So, I mean, detectives on the case racked their brains wondering where they could 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 bludgeon 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 convict. who had escaped from the Solano County jail earlier in that month. And then, on Saturday, December 14th, a machinist named Kelly Price was quail hunting in the mountains about 30 miles north 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 50 feet from the road. Kelly called the Placer County Sheriff's Department whose deputies recovered the body and immediately noticed that the tattoos were similar to tattoos Cindy Wanner's family described in the missing person's report. Within a day, a positive identification was made. This was Cindy.

The same crime scene investigators who had processed Cindy's sister's home on the day that she disappeared also collected evidence at the scene, lifting these green wolf fibers and metal flaking from Cindy's body that they just didn't know where they came from. The medical examiner would later find that Cindy tragically had been sexually assaulted and was strangled to death. But what was probably the most chilling was not necessarily how Cindy died. That was disturbing enough. It was when Cindy had died. Because Cindy's body showed very little signs of decomposition. The medical examiner determined that even though she was abducted 19 days earlier,

it did appear as though 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 really disturbing find. One of the plastic bags contained dirty magazines, a pornographic videotape, and four empty beer cans. And also inside of that bag, the crime scene investigator found green wool fibers and metal flakes, which, when examined under a microscope, identical to the fibers and flakes found on Cindy's body. Whoever had killed Cindy had most likely also disposed of those beer cans, the dirty magazine,

and the videotape. The crime scene investigator was also able to lift fingerprints from the beer cans and the videotape. Detectives uploaded the fingerprints to APHIS, the computerized fingerprint database, but they didn't get any matches. The Christmas holidays came and went, and there was no break in the case beyond this. Susan continued to live in the house where her sister was abducted, always wondering if Cindy's killer was in the area.

Maybe living in or visiting the neighborhood to relive the thrill, she watched as people passed her house, hoping that one day she would identify the killer, but she never did. On January 27, 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, and investigators were struck by the similarities in the two cases immediately. Like Cindy Wanner, Veronica was found almost completely nude except for her bra. Also like Cindy, Veronica had tattoos, and those were what initially identified her. Like Cindy, she had left two young children behind, and like Cindy, it seemed like 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. And at first, investigators considered that these cases may be connected, but by summer, they told reporters that they no longer believe that to be the case. 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. And meanwhile, Cindy's case was turning cold. Calls from tipsters were coming in every few weeks, but none of them led to a break in the case. Bob, who was Cindy's widower, grew angrier and angrier the more he thought about Cindy's bank sitting on that 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, which was the bank. But unfortunately, in August of 1993, a judge threw that case out. Nothing was happening in Cindy's case. But a very disturbing pattern was continuing. This episode is brought to you by Rula. We use insurance for our physical health without thinking twice. So why is that? is it so hard when it comes to mental health? Rula partners with over 100 insurance plans and the average copay is just $15 a session. And they don't just match you with the first therapist. Rula considers your goals and your preferences to connect you with licensed in-network therapists who are actually the right fit because there's nothing worse than going through the process

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lever in therapy, but finding the right therapist can feel like its own obstacle. Honestly, it can be the thing that keeps you from getting help in the first place. I remember not knowing where to start and feeling so overwhelmed by the whole process. Who takes my insurance? Who's going to be the right fit? And what is this actually going to cost me? Those obstacles usually turn people away from getting help. Well, that's why I want to tell you about Alma. Alma has a network of over 26,000 therapists nationwide and 98% of them accept insurance. You can browse their directory without even making an account and use filters to find someone who actually fits your needs. Clients with insurance pay $20 on average,

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Shop now at performance.ca. 3-day sale. Driven by Performance Auto Group. Once later, a 27-year-old school teacher named Sherilyn Hawkeley 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 of a minivan with a length of rope near her body. Reporters asked Placer County investigators if the murder was linked to Cindy Wanner's, and detectives just weren't sure. There were similarities they

acknowledged, there were also differences. Cindy had been kept alive for many days in an unknown location, probably the killer's home, Sherilyn had been killed in her vehicle, and years would pass without Cindy, Veronica, or Sherilyn, or Suzette Willis's case, seeing any new developments. And as far as investigators were concerned, there was no apparent connection. In 2002, detectives returned to Cindy's case and decided to try and extract DNA from from what little evidence they had. The best candidates were the beer cans from the garbage dump and the cigarette butt that was found outside of 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. 16 more years passed after that. But then, in April of 2018, there was a seismic event in criminal justice. The notorious Golden State killer who had sexually assaulted more than 50 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 DiAngelo.

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, we know that the Golden State Killer's M.O. was pretty different. He would break into houses most often in the middle of the night and he would usually confront sleeping couples in their beds. He would attack them in their homes and then he would leave. Wanner had been abducted, held for a period of time, and then her body had been dumped.

Also, D'Angelo bludgeoned and sometimes used a fire. firearm on his victims, Wanner had been strangled. But, you know, killers have been known to change their MOs over time. Maybe that was a possibility. And now police were wondering if Cindy Wanner had been a victim of the Golden State killer. Well, in 2025, investigators would officially have their answer. Using the latest technology, technology that was not available in 2002, investigators were finally able to extract DNA and develop a DNA profile from biological evidence

that was left over in the Cindy Warner case. This did not match Joseph DiAngelo, though, the Golden State killer. But it did match someone else. And once again, it was another person who was never on the police's radar for this crime. It was another sex offender, a 64-year-old man named James Lawhead Jr. This was a man who had gone to prison in 1981 and honestly should have never been released. The crime that had landed him in jail when he was just 19 years old, was he had broken into a Sacramento home after peeping on the occupants through the window,

and he brutally beat the 71-year-old woman who lived there with a metal object. He bound and gagged her after she lost consciousness. Then he sexually assaulted the woman's granddaughter, who was just 11 years old. And then before he left, he stole $20 from the elderly woman's purse. Lawhead later admitted that he had intended to kill the older woman, and he actually did assume she was dead until learning after his arrest that she had survived. While he was awaiting trial for this crime, a psychiatrist evaluated him and diagnosed him as a mentally disordered sex offender who was, quote,

not amenable to treatment. The judge sentenced him to 19 years and eight months in prison. He ended up serving only 10 of those, and that meant that he was out by the time he was just 29 years old. So in January of 1991, Lawhead was released from prison. And before the end of that year, Cindy Warner 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 this guy. and they soon realized that there had been no trace of him since 2005. They started wondering if he was living somewhere under a different name. So detectives contacted his 71-year-old sister, a woman named Terry, who told them that she had no idea where her brother was, and she hadn't 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 amongst law enforcement and is very controversial, to say the least. With facial recognition technology, you can upload an image of someone like from cell phone video or CCTV and it can scan the face and connect it to mugshots. I have a little bit more information on it here.

So 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 in 2025 was commercial software sold to departments with Clearview AI being the most notorious vendor.

So Clearview operates on a database of billions of photos that have been scraped from the internet, social media, public web pages, anywhere that a face appears, and it makes it both a very powerful tool and also something that is legally radioactive. Clearview built its database without anyone's consent. You're probably in there, I'm probably in there,

and that has triggered major litigation. In 2025, there was a $51 million nationwide class settlement that involved Clearview AI stemming from claims that its automatic collection and storage of biometric data violated privacy laws like Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act. This all sounds very scary and very ethically dubious, but they try to make us feel better by saying facial recognition when it's used, a hit is only a lead, it's not proof. Police cannot, in theory, apply for an arrest warrant based solely on the results of a facial recognition database. So that being said, the detectives shared the images that they had of Lawhead from the early

1990s through 2005, and one of those agencies, the Scottsdale Police Department, soon contacted Placer County to report that they had 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, who claimed she didn't know where he was. So Vincent Reynolds of Bullhead City, Arizona was in fact James Lawhead Jr. Police in Arizona staked out the home and waited until Lawhead stepped outside, and then they swooped in and arrested him in his driveway.

When they later executed a search warrant inside of his home, what they found was horrible. Lawhead had staged multiple loaded firearms throughout the house and had packed in a parent getaway bag containing clothes, a burner phone, and $15,000 in cash. It was like he knew that someone would be coming for him, like maybe his sister told him. 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 Sherilyn Hawley all remain unsolved.

And at the end of the day, we still don't really know exactly what happened to Cindy. That could be stuff that comes out during trial. was she held afterwards what happened to her in that time that she was being held? And also is her case connected to any of the other women that went missing in the area? That is still a part of this case that needs to be solved, but we do have the person responsible for Cindy's death. And at least there's a little bit of closure in that. It has been a wild time in forensics over the last few years. And tools that we have access to have really exploded in their usefulness and cases are being closed left and right.

And because of that, I actually want to end this episode by sharing something that 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 very, very, very good advice

that I just wanted to share with you all. She said, you should never stop calling about cold cases. She told me it takes families following up constantly, working with officers, but also 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 that law enforcement officers take on. But if you call and you ask questions, it might just lead to someone's case being pulled off the shelf and dust it off.

And maybe a piece of evidence gets retested for fingerprints or DNA. You just never know. So that is my advice to you. Stay annoying. That's all I have for you this week. I also wanted to give a shout out to the researcher, writer that helped me with this episode. Paul Haynes, he helped Michelle McNamara's book, I'll be Gone in the Dark, get finished on the Golden State Killer. So he's really one of the experts on that case.

And so I was glad that we were able to talk about Joseph DiAngelo's case in this episode as well. Huge shout out to him. You can join me here next week for another episode. I will have one every single week for you guys. I'm so excited to dive into more with you all. And I'm really excited to see what else gets solved this year. I'm going to be doing more episodes on cold cases getting solved as, you know, these cases get closed. The technology, all of that is so interesting to me and I hope it's interesting to you as well.

But that's all I have for today. I'll see you next time. And until then, I guess stay annoying. Heart source pounding is written and produced by me, Kailmore. Heart source pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs, additional research and writing by Paul Haynes. Sound design a mix by Red Room Creative. special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, and the team at WME.

Have a heart pounding story or a case request. Check out heartsets pounding.com.