An 81-year-old South Florida man has been ordered by a judge to be sent to Canada where he’s charged with the fatal strangling of an American woman nearly 50 years ago in one of the country’s oldest and most infamous cold cases.
Rodney Mervyn Nichols, who was arrested in July at his assisted-living facility in Hollywood but was released on bond, must surrender to the U.S. Marshals Service for his extradition to Ontario at a future date, according to an order issued Monday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Jared Strauss in Fort Lauderdale federal court.
In 1975, Canadian police discovered a partially nude woman floating face down in a river west of Montreal — her hands and ankles strapped with neckties, her neck bound with a black coaxial cable wire, and her head covered with a hand cloth, towel and tablecloth. The identity of the woman, Lalla Jewel Langford, 48, would not be known to authorities until 2021, based on a DNA sample of her exhumed body that matched up with her relatives.
Nichols was charged with Langford’s murder, based again on DNA technology along with a confession.
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