An 81-year-old man with dementia was arrested at his nursing home after he confessed to the cold case murder of his girlfriend nearly 50 years ago, court documents say.
An 81-year-old man suffering dementia is now in jail after being charged with the cold case murder of his girlfriend, who disappeared in 1975, according to court documents.
Rodney Marvyn Nichols is being held at the Federal Detention Center in Miami, pending extradition to Canada, where he is charged with murder, authorities said. He had lived in Montreal with Jewell Parchman Langford when the woman went missing, police said.
Nichols was arrested late last month at a nursing home in Hollywood, Florida, where he has lived for the last three years, officials said.
Nearly 50 years have passed since Langford vanished in Montreal. Her remains were only identified last month, using DNA technology not available at the time. Not long after Langford went missing, a woman's body was found face-down in a river west of Montreal, but police didn't know it belonged to Langford.
The unsolved slaying of the unidentified woman became one of Canada's most notorious cold investigations, with the case coming to be known as the "Nation River Lady."
Two weeks ago, Canadian authorities announced they had finally identified the "Nation River Lady" after exhuming her body and using DNA records to identify her relatives.
Officers with the Ontario Provisional Police had previously flown to Florida to interview Nichols at the North-Lake Retirement Home where he resided. Accompanied by FBI agents, the law enforcement officials questioned Nichols in February 2022, when he allegedly said he “had to come clean” and confessed to killing Langford.
But in a motion filed Wednesday, federal public defender Bernardo Lopez questioned the validity of that alleged confession, saying Nichols suffers from profound dementia, needs daily medication and is confined to a wheelchair.
"There are serious questions as to whether he has any real idea of what is transpiring from day to day," the motion says. Attorney Lopez is seeking bail for the elderly man.
“The Federal Detention Center is no place for someone with Mr. Nichol’s frailties and vulnerabilities,” Lopez said in his motion for bail.
When Langford disappeared, Nichols told local police she had left after they had an argument and was traveling across Canada on a road trip, authorities said. He later told investigators she had called him from the road, and asked him to meet her, but he didn't go, police said.
Authorities believe she was already dead at that point, and that Nichols was deliberately misleading them, investigators now say.
Federal prosecutors have not yet filed a response to the public defender's motion, according to online court records posted Wednesday.
According to the complaint filed by U.S. federal prosecutors, investigators knew Nichols had mental impairments and had conducted a mental capacity test on the elderly man before questioning. The investigators found Nichols to be verbal and capable of recollection, the complaint said.
Nichols' public defender called the mental capacity test “laughably inept” and said in his motion that it fell far short of legal requirements that suspects must be aware of their rights before questioning, and must knowingly and voluntarily waive those rights before an interrogation.
Inside Edition Digital has reached out to Lopez and the federal prosecutor in the case, but has not heard back.
An extradition hearing for Nichols is scheduled for Sept. 26, according to federal court records.
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