Police reopen 40-year-old case
SEASIDE >> A 40-year-old cold case involving the murder of 5-year-old Anne-Sang Thi Pham, who was strangled to death and dumped in brush in Fort Ord in 1982, has been reopened.
A law enforcement collaboration between Seaside police investigators and the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office’s Cold Case Task Force announced on Wednesday they had reopened the case. Very little information is being released, with law enforcement citing the need to keep most aspects of the investigation confidential so as not to impair the case.
Deputy District Attorney Matthew L’Heureux, who heads up the Cold Case Task Force, on Thursday declined to comment on whether new physical evidence has been uncovered or whether individuals have come forward. When asked if new DNA analysis was a factor in reopening the case, L’Heureux would only say that “DNA is something we look for in any case.”
The task force has received a grant for more than $500,000 for testing during investigations.
While Anne-Sang’s parents are both deceased, L’Heureux said her living siblings have been notified that the case has been reopened.
Neither L’Heureux or acting Seaside Police Chief Nicholas Borges on Thursday would say whether a suspect or person of interest had been identified. In a press release issued Wednesday, Seaside police would only say that new leads had recently surfaced.
Anne-Sang was walking to her kindergarten class on the morning of Jan. 21, 1982, when she was abducted and murdered. Her body was discovered a couple of days later in what was at the time Fort Ord property near South Boundary Road. An autopsy revealed she had been strangled.
Her murder had been investigated by the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Seaside Police Department, but eventually went cold.
“This is one of the most disturbing cold cases we’ve had,” Borges said in an interview with The Herald on Thursday. “Going through all our files, it’s clear there is a monster involved. And while I can’t get into specifics, there is a lot of evidence and I am hopeful we can bring justice for that beautiful little angel.”
Within days of her killing, Anne-Sang’s older brother sat down with a Monterey Herald reporter and talked about his little sister, her shyness and her sensitivity. At the beginning of the school year, AnneSang’s mother would walk her to school every day. But at some point Anne-Sang told her mother, “stay home, mom. I can walk by myself,” recounted her big brother, Kheu Van Pham.
Kheu Van Pham told the Herald reporter that his little sister was shy, but very sensitive to the needs of others. For instance, if her father would open a pack of cigarettes, she would quietly bring him an ashtray.
Her parents were refugees from Vietnam when the country fell to North Vietnamese forces in 1975. Her father, Tuong Pham, was a South Vietnamese soldier who escaped with his wife and children on a 60-foot boat filled with 200 people when the U.S. left. Anne-Sang was the first of their children to be born in the U.S.
The family had moved to Seaside so Tuong Pham could make a living as a fisherman. Four years after moving to the Monterey Peninsula, their daughter was savagely murdered.
The Cold Case Task Force at the DA’s Office was formed a couple of years ago when retired Monterey Assistant Police Chief Bill Clark approached the office offering to volunteer to help solve cold cases, L’Heureux said. Clark is a member of the team investigating the Pham case.
The current case is not the first time that Borges has worked on cold cases with the task force. In 2013, when he was a detective, Borges made an arrest in another cold case in collaboration with the task force. In that case 19-year-old Christopher Lopes was fatally stabbed during a brawl in 1969 in Seaside.
That case was at the time 40 years old and the district attorney at the time, Dean Filippo, dropped charges against the suspect in part because a lot of the evidence had been destroyed over the course of decades and many of the investigating officers and even the pathologist had died.
Last year, Borges, with assistance from other members of the task force, arrested a suspect in a 1995 cold case involving the murder of Lloyd Perkins in Seaside. And in 2020 Borges and L’Heureux, with the help of other task force members, worked on the case of Christina Williams who was raped and murdered in a military neighborhood in Seaside in 1998. Her killer, Charles Holifield, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
L’Heureux heads up the task force with assistance from another deputy district attorney. The rest of the team are investigators with the DA’s Office.
In the Pham case, L’Heureux said the DA’s Office and Seaside police have an open file policy of sharing all the information and evidence available with each other. Borges said the department has opened up its database to DA investigators and has even set up space in the department for investigators to work.
Borges said he is optimistic that Seaside police and the DA’s Office will be able to bring Anne-Sang’s killer to justice.
“We have quite a bit of evidence that existed from the onset of the case,” Borges said. “I want to solve every cold case we have. There is nothing more rewarding than giving the family a sense of justice by being able to tell them here is the person who killed your loved one.”