San Joaquin County arrests suspect in 1994 Stockton double homicide

An 80-year-old Stockton man has been arrested in the 1994 double homicide of Lawrence Loehr and Eugene Cates, closing one of San Joaquin County’s most stubborn cold cases with a murder charge that followed decades of silence.

Loehr and Cates were both 23 when they were killed in the early morning hours of May 23, 1994, at a construction site on the 10000 block of Thornton Road in north Stockton. Police were called around 3 a.m. after an assault report and found both men dead. Loehr, who was working an overnight security shift, was discovered inside a security trailer after being bound, gagged, and shot in the back of the head. Cates had stopped by after finishing work at a Chevron station, and investigators said his vehicle was used to smash through a chain-link fence before the killer fled. The car was later found burned about three miles away.

The brutality of the scene has long set the case apart. Nothing appeared to have been stolen, and robbery was ruled out as a motive, leaving investigators with a double homicide that offered few obvious answers and no quick path to accountability. The victims’ futures made the loss even sharper. Both were criminal justice students at San Joaquin Delta College, both were pursuing careers in law enforcement, and later reporting said both were engaged to be married.

Authorities say the breakthrough came after renewed work by the Stockton Police Department, the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office, and the San Joaquin County Cold Case Task Force. That task force was formally created through a partnership agreement signed in October 2024 and approved by county supervisors in April 2025. In 2025, investigators submitted evidence from the original case to Othram in The Woodlands, Texas, where scientists used forensic-grade genome sequencing and forensic genetic genealogy to develop a SNP profile that helped identify the suspect.

Donald Lee Clark, a lifelong Stockton resident, was arrested on April 22, 2026, by the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office and the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force. He was arraigned in Stockton on April 24, 2026. Prosecutors have said the case is eligible for the death penalty.

For more than three decades, the killings of Lawrence Loehr and Eugene Cates lingered in Stockton memory because the victims were young men on the edge of public-service careers, cut down in a crime that looked deliberate from the start. The arrest of Clark did not undo that loss, but it finally gave the case a named suspect and a courtroom path after 32 years without one.