California 1994 Double Cold Case That Nobody Could SOLVE for 32 Years

California 1994 Double Cold Case That Nobody Could SOLVE for 32 Years

Tonight we begin with a major break in a decades-old cold case. An 80-year-old man is in jail tonight accused of killing two Stockton men more than 30 years ago.  Donald Lee Clark now faces two counts of murder in a case dating back to 1994.  At about 3:00 in the morning of May 23rd, 1994, Stockton police arrived at the Spanos Park construction site on Thornton Road and found two 23-year-old men dead.

One was inside the security trailer bound, gagged, and shot once in the back of the head. The other lay outside under a section of chain-link fence that had been knocked flat. He had been run over by his own car. The car was found burning 3 miles away. DNA was recovered from the scene. The killer’s profile sat in the system for 32 years without a single match because the man had no criminal record anywhere the cops could think to look.

The man who killed them was living 5 miles from the trailer the entire time. His name was Lawrence Lower. Everyone called him Larry. He was 23, a criminal justice student at San Joaquin Delta College engaged to a woman named Monica Granados. His best friend, Eugene Cates, was also 23. The family called him Peanut.

 Eugene also studied criminal justice at Delta and was also engaged. They had been friends since they were boys aiming at parallel futures in law enforcement and families they were planning to start. Larry had taken the Stockton Police Department entrance exam and was waiting for the process to move forward. While he waited, he worked overnight shifts as a security guard.

 The job was at the Spanos Park construction site at the 10,000 block of Thornton Road, a new housing development being built on open ground south of Bear Creek High School on the developing northwest edge of Stockton. Where a neighborhood stands now. In 1994, there was only open ground and construction. The trailer where Larry worked was a small portable office at the edge of the property surrounded by construction equipment, partially built houses, and the chain-link fencing that marked the perimeter.

After dark, the nearest occupied homes were hundreds of yards away. There were no streetlights on the undeveloped lots and no regular traffic on Thornton Road after midnight. Headlights turning onto the road from the nearest intersection would have been visible long before a car reached the site. It was the kind of place that was easy to guard during the day and easy to approach without being seen at night.

Larry started his overnight shift on the evening of May 22nd. Eugene finished his shift at the Chevron station on Benjamin Holt Drive where he worked as a cashier and a maintenance worker and drove out to the construction site sometime after midnight. He had passed the tests to become a state corrections officer and was waiting for a placement, but for now he was pulling shifts at the gas station to keep money coming in.

 Stopping by Thornton Road had become his routine. Larry’s shift ran through the boring hours and Eugene had nowhere else to be. He would park near the trailer, sit with Larry, and the two of them would talk until the sun came up. It was the kind of thing best friends do when one of them is working a job in the middle of the night and the other one has time on his hands.

At some point in the early hours of May 23rd, somebody else arrived at the site. The attacker went into the trailer. Larry was restrained, his hands bound behind his back. Then he was gagged. Then a single shot was fired into the back of his head. He was alive when his hands were tied.

 He was alive when the gag went into his mouth. The execution was methodical, controlled, the work of someone who had planned what he was going to do before he showed up at Thornton Road. Eugene was outside the trailer when he was killed. He had been hit by his own car. The attacker had driven it through the chain-link perimeter at the edge of the property, run Eugene down on the way out, and left him on the ground under the collapsed section of fence.

At first, the cops at the scene weren’t sure whether Eugene had been shot, run over, or both. The fence had been knocked flat by the impact of the car driving through it, and Eugene was found underneath with the section of fencing partly covering him. That same car had been driven off the site.

 It turned up 3 miles from Thornton Road, abandoned and burning. The attacker had used Eugene’s vehicle as a weapon, then moved it across town and set it on fire to destroy whatever evidence might have been inside. The restraints, the use of Eugene’s car as a weapon, the burning of the vehicle 3 miles away, none of it pointed at a crime committed in the heat of an argument.

Somebody had come to the construction site with a plan and the patience to see it through. Stockton police interviewed everyone connected to either man, co-workers at the Chevron station, fellow students at Delta College, family members, friends, and people who had been on or near Thornton Road that night were all contacted.

 Detectives looked at the Spanos Park development itself, scanning for labor disputes, property fights, personal grudges, or anyone who had a beef with the construction project. They looked at the families and the social circles. Nothing pointed at anyone in either victim’s life. Robbery was ruled out almost immediately. Nothing appeared to have been taken from the trailer or from the bodies.

 The two men had no enemies that investigators could find, no criminal records, and no involvement in any of the things that usually get people killed like that. Two young men who wanted to be cops were executed at a construction site at 3:00 in the morning, and the people who had known them best could not explain why.

The motive was a blank space that investigators could not fill, and 32 years of work would not fill it either. The DNA recovered at the scene went into the system. In 1994, the FBI’s national database stored profiles from convicted offenders across the country. If the man at Thornton Road had ever been convicted of a serious crime in any state, the database would have flagged a match. It did not.

The killer had no record that required a DNA submission. His profile sat in the system as an unknown, a sequence of markers pointing at a man nobody could put a name to. The case went cold. The file stayed open with the Stockton Police Department, and cold case detectives kept it in rotation, chasing tips that led nowhere, and pulling the file out when a new lead came in.

Around the same patch of ground where the construction site had been, the housing development was finished, the trailer was hauled away, the fence was replaced, and the open land of 1994 filled in with houses. New cars drove down Thornton Road past the spot where the trailer had stood, and the people in those cars had no idea what had happened there.

Larry and Eugene were buried next to each other in Lodi, in a cemetery just outside Stockton. Best friends in childhood, side by side in death. Eugene’s sister, Donna Whitlach, became the person in the family who carried the case forward. She stayed in contact with the Stockton Police Department.

 The phone calls went out when the anniversary came around. They went out when nothing at all was happening. Donna told reporters her brother was pure, a good kid, the kind of person who was kind and funny  and focused on succeeding at what he wanted to do. He was her mother’s baby, she said. She missed him.

 She would give her life for him if she could bring him back. Eugene’s mother died first. His father died about 4 years before the arrest. Neither of them lived to hear an answer to the question that had hung over the family since the morning of May 23rd, 1994. The case sat where the original investigators had left it, and the years went on.

In the spring of 2026, the call Donna had been waiting for finally came. The Stockton Police Department had a name. They had a DNA match. They had identified the man who had killed her brother and his best friend. The family was told the case had been solved, that an arrest was coming, and that the suspect had been living in Stockton the whole time.

Donna and Joni made plans to be in the courtroom for the arraignment. Joni Morrow was Donna’s daughter, born into a family that had been shaped by the loss of an uncle she had never known. She grew up calling him Uncle Peanut, the same name that everybody in the neighborhood had used while he was alive.

 She knew his story from holidays where someone was missing, from photographs on the wall, and from her mother’s voice when the name came up. Joni later told ABC 10 that her uncle was kind of like a brother to her. Eugene had been a very charismatic, very happy man with a lot of friends. He was becoming a man, she said, and had recently accepted the corrections officer job.

 His whole dream, in her words, was taken from him. All he had wanted to do was do good. Her family had spent decades asking why. Monica Granados was engaged to Larry. She was 23 the morning he didn’t come home from his security shift, and she was 55 when an 80-year-old was wheeled into a courtroom in Stockton and charged with his murder.

The 32 years between those two ages were the years she was supposed to spend building a life with the man she loved. She was waiting for him to come home on the morning of May 23rd, 1994. He never did. She later told reporters, “Larry was the kindest person she had ever known. He had the biggest heart in the room, a man who cooked and cleaned and looked after the kids in his family.

None of what happened, she said, was supposed to happen. The man who had killed Larry and Eugene was alive the whole time in the same city as the families. He used their streets and shopped in their stores. He grew old while Larry and Eugene stayed 23. For 32 years, the two families carried the same loss from the same night.

They went to the cemetery in Lodi when the dates on the calendar came around. Detectives changed and the years stacked up. Eugene’s parents died with the question unanswered. The friends Larry and Eugene had made at Delta College graduated, started careers, and raised families of their own. The headstones in Lodi stayed where they had been put in May 1994.

In April 2025, the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors approved the creation of a cold case task force. The vote came after months of work by District Attorney Ron Freitas and Sheriff Pat Withrow, who had been pushing for a dedicated unit to attack the county’s backlog of unsolved cases. The two had signed a formal partnership and cooperation agreement the previous October.

Supervisors allocated $500,000 in funding from Proposition 69, a voter-approved measure that directed a portion of collected DNA penalty assessments toward forensic investigation. San Joaquin County had more than 600 unsolved cases on its books, including homicides, sexual assaults, and missing persons with suspicious circumstances.

The new task force was charged with reopening as many of them as it could. Investigators pulled the oldest and most promising files first. Cases with preserved DNA that had never been tested with modern technology went to the top of the list. The Lowair and Kates double murder from 1994 was among the first cases the team picked up.

Investigators sent the preserved DNA evidence to Astrium, a private forensic laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas, that specialized in pulling profiles from old and degraded samples. The lab had been used by law enforcement agencies across the country on cold cases that had defied identification for decades. Astrium used a process called forensic-grade genome sequencing to develop a detailed genetic profile from the 1994 evidence.

It was a single nucleotide polymorphism profile containing hundreds of thousands of markers, many more than the standard set used in the national database. With a profile that detailed in hand, the work shifted to genetic genealogy. The profile was uploaded to public ancestry databases. Astrium’s in-house genealogy team built a family tree outward from the partial matches that came back.

 Distant cousins, second cousins, anyone who had voluntarily uploaded their own genetic data and who shared enough markers to suggest a relative. Those matches pointed at one family line. From there, the work moved off the ancestry sites and onto a research desk. The team pulled census data, marriage certificates, and death records, and worked the tree forward and backward through generations, cutting branches that didn’t fit the geography of 1994 Stockton or the timeline of the crime.

The lines converged on one man. He was living in Stockton, 5 miles from where the construction site had stood, at age 75. He had drawn no investigator’s attention in 32 years. His name had never appeared in the Lower and Kates case file. He was in the same city the entire time the families were waiting for the phone to ring.

The next step was confirmation. Investigators needed a reference sample from the man himself to compare against the profile from the 1994 evidence. Detectives, the new cold case task force, and the US Marshals worked together to obtain one. The reference sample was compared against the profile from the 1994 crime scene. The two matched.

On April 22nd, 2026, members of the United States Marshals Fugitive Task Force arrested him at his home in Stockton. He did not resist. Officers drove him to the San Joaquin County Jail and booked him on two counts of homicide. Clark had been 48 the night of the murders. He was 80 the day investigators put him in handcuffs.

The arrest came 32 years and 11 months after the murders, nearly to the day Larry and Eugene had been killed. His name was Donald Lee Clark. In May 1994, Clark was about 48 years old, living in Stockton. He had no known connection to Lawrence Lower or Eugene Kates. He didn’t work at the construction site or at the Chevron station, and he wasn’t a friend, neighbor, or acquaintance of either man.

No witness had ever placed him near either victim. No evidence connected him to the Spanos construction project or to anyone employed on the Thornton Road job. He had been a complete stranger. Why a 48-year-old man drove to a construction site in the middle of the night, tied up a 23-year-old security guard, and shot him in the back of the head? That question has never been answered.

 Neither has the question of why he ran the best friend down with his own car, or why he set that car on fire 3 miles away. Not in 1994. Not in 2026. The man who knew kept it to himself. On April 24th, 2026, Clark was arraigned at the San Joaquin County Superior Court in Stockton. He entered the courtroom in a wheelchair, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, and said nothing during the proceedings.

A judge read the charges against him. Two counts of murder with special circumstance allegations for multiple killings, firearm enhancement, and use of a deadly weapon. The special circumstances made the case capital eligible. If convicted, Clark would face either the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole. Bail was denied.

 A public defender was appointed. His next court date was set for June 1st, 2026. Outside the courthouse, District Attorney Ron Freitas held a press conference. San Joaquin County did not have an expiration date on justice, he said, and the office would follow the evidence wherever it led, for as long as it took. The families of Eugene Cates and Lawrence Lowehr had waited 32 years for the day, he said.

 He called it an agonizing, long time to wait, and added that justice may have been delayed, but it had never been forgotten. He hoped the day marked the beginning of the closure the families had been looking for. Freitas thanked the Cold Case Task Force, the Stockton Police Department’s Cold Case Detectives, the California Department of Justice Bureau of Forensic Se

rvices, the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force, and the team at Authram for the work that had led to the arrest. Monica Granados spoke briefly outside the courthouse. She had been inside for the arraignment, watching from the gallery while the man accused of killing her fiance was wheeled in. She said she had waited a long time for the moment, and she hoped justice would be as swift as the death of her fiance had been.

Larry, she said, had been a good guy with the biggest heart. Life had been rough in the years since, and none of what happened was supposed to happen. Joni Morrow stood with her mother after the proceedings. The journey ahead would be emotional, she told reporters, but her family was dedicated.

 They would be there every step of the way through what was coming, she said, for the trial and for whatever followed it. Donna Whitlatch ran back inside the courthouse before the building emptied. She wanted to meet a woman who had been involved with one of the victims 30 years earlier and had stayed away from the family for all the years since.

The two women found each other in the hallway, and they hugged. It was the first time the two of them had been in the same room since 1994.    The moment happened where the cameras did not see it. Outside, the families stood together while the district attorney spoke about the work that had led to the arrest.

Clark said nothing in the courtroom about what had happened in 1994. He has not entered a plea. The case is moving toward trial, and prosecutors say he could be sentenced to death. A 23-year-old security guard was tied up inside the trailer he had been paid to protect. His best friend stopped by to keep him company and never left.

32 years later, an 80-year-old man whose name had never appeared anywhere in the case file was wheeled into a Stockton courtroom and charged with both murders. The construction site is now a finished neighborhood. The trailer is gone. Larry and Eugene are still in Lodi. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments.

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