U.S. authorities arrest man charged with murder in Nation River Lady case

A Florida man charged with murder in one of Canada’s best-known cold cases has been arrested by American authorities and made his first court appearance earlier this week.

Rodney Nichols, 81, had been charged with murder by Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) last fall in the death of Jewell Parchman Langford, a woman from Tennessee who disappeared in Montreal in 1975.

For decades, she was known only by the moniker “Nation River Lady” as authorities struggled to identify her.

Sources told Radio-Canada Wednesday that Nichols was in the custody of U.S. authorities.

The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed by email that Nichols made his first court appearance on Tuesday, but did not answer questions about when he was arrested or the status of an extradition request.

Langford was found dead floating in the Nation River after she was dropped from a bridge on Highway 417 between Montreal and Ottawa in 1975.

She had been reported missing to Montreal police at the end of May that year, after she was last seen toward the end of April.

Earlier this month, a source told Radio-Canada a “link was never made” between Langford’s disappearance in Montreal and the body found near Highway 417 in Casselman, Ont., on May 3, 1975.

She was only recently identified with the help of forensic genealogy.

According to court documents, OPP formally charged Nichols with her death last September. Nichols was a well-known rugby player among English-speaking fans of the sport in Montreal’s west end.

Nichols is currently a resident of Hollywood, Fla., where he was subject to an extradition request by Canadian authorities.

The victim’s niece and spokesperson for the Parchman family, Denise Chung, told Radio-Canada she was relieved an arrest had finally been made.

Extradition request

Robert Currie, professor of transnational criminal law at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, previously told CBC authorities on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border are likely motivated to bring a case of this nature to a swift conclusion.

Currie said in this case, Canada’s Department of Justice would have made a request under the treaty to the U.S. State Department, which handles such international matters for the U.S. government.

“The extradition treaty between the two countries is set up to do exactly this — to have a person who is suspected of committing a crime in Canada extradited here from the U.S.” Currie said. “So there don’t appear to be any barriers to extradition at the at the moment that I can see.”

Barring legal delays in Florida, where Nichols lives, the only other potential hurdle was the man’s advanced age, Currie said.

Sometimes, he said, people resist extradition on the grounds they are too old or too sick and it would inhumane to extradite them.

But the Canadian prison system is able to “reasonably” accommodate seniors with health problems, he said.