EP. 255 - VIRGINIA: A COLD CASE SOLVED AFTER 29 YEARS: THE MURDER OF ROBIN WARR LAWRENCE

Warning. The following podcast is not suitable for all audiences. We go into great detail with every case that we cover and do our best to bring viewers even deeper into the stories by utilizing disturbing audio and sound effects. Trigger warnings from the stories we cover may include violence, rape, murder, and offenses against children. This podcast is not for everyone. You have been warned. For two whole days, no one had heard from Robin Lawrence. Her husband was away and called after call to her house when unanswered. So on Sunday, November 20th, 1994, Robin's best friend Lori drove over to her house to check on her. The newspapers had piled up at the front door. Lori knocked. She rang the bell, but no answer. So from there, she went around to the back of the house. There, the screen on one of the windows had been cut, along slit straight down the middle. Seeing this, Lori was frightened, but she knew she had to go inside. When she crawled through the window, the house was quiet. She called out first Robin's name, then her little girls. And after a moment, she heard a sound. Two-year-old Nicole came walking down the hallway. She was still in her pajamas, a pacifier in her mouth. Lori picked her up and started towards Robin's room, with every step the dread grew. And when she finally reached the doorway, she saw the blood. This is the story of Robin Lawrence. I'm Courtney Browin. And I'm Colin Browin. And you're listening to Murder and America. [Music] [Music] Robin War was born on November 23rd, 1956, in Ithaca, New York. But she grew up about an hour north in Syracuse. Her parents, Robert and Jesse War, had both grown up in Memphis, Tennessee, in the years of Jim Crow. A time in a place where they couldn't sit at the front of a bus, where they could only go to the zoo on Thursdays. Robin's father had served in World War II, and eventually the family had settled in Syracuse. And there, Robert became the first black common counselor in the city's history, serving from the late 60s into the 70s. Robin's home life was stable, and from the time she was small, she loved to draw. At nine, she'd already won a drawing competition at the Everson Museum, in Art Museum in downtown Syracuse. It was the first of several prizes she'd be awarded over the next few years. She graduated from nodding him high school in 1974, then headed to Carnegie Mellon, where she earned a degree in fine arts. Not long after, she landed a commission most artist's only dream of. She was asked to design the very first medal for the Martin Luther King Jr. non-violent peace prize. And the first person to ever receive it was Rosa Parks. For the wars, this was personal. Rosa Parks was the woman who, in Montgomery, had refused to give up her bus seat. The spark that helped bring down the very system Robin's parents had been raised under. And now the war's own daughter, the artist, had designed the medal placed in Rosa Parks' hands. From a childhood at the back of the bus to that, for Robert and Jesse War, no commission could ever have meant more. It was the medal Robin would be best known for. But it wasn't the only one. For Robin, art wasn't just commemorative medals and medallions for a number of corporations and institutions. Her work, struck in metal, passing into the hands of people who'd never know her name. She'd done the rare thing most artists never get to do. She'd built a life out of what she did best. Robin was a tall athletic woman with dark hair and a friendly smile. And she truly made the most of her life. She skied, swam, played golf, and she danced, taking modern dance classes well into adulthood. She was an artist to her core, a painter, and a graphic designer. Her loved one said she was a gentle soul who loved animals. And she had a way of putting people at ease. And making them feel special, her niece Lauren was just eight when Robin died. But she remembers her aunt clearly, saying "She always made me feel so loved and she helped me express myself." Ask anyone who knew Robin, and you heard the same thing. She was one of the good ones. By the mid 1980s, Robin was living in Connecticut, an marriage that was already coming apart. And in 1986, while she was visiting a mutual friend in Washington, DC, she met a man named Ollie Lawrence. They spent the whole weekend together biking and playing tennis and getting to know each other. Ollie would remember it as a fun couple of days. He thought Robin was beautiful, but she was married, and soon enough the weekend came to an end, and Robin went back home to Connecticut. However, the following year, Robin's marriage ended in divorce. It was 1987. She was still in her early 30s, and she was looking for a fresh start. As luck would have it, her friend Lori Lindbergh wanted a fresh start too, so together, Robin and Lori decided to start a new chapter and move to Washington, DC. The two had met years earlier in dance class back in Connecticut, and now they were roommates, starting over in a new city. Robin landed a job at Merchants Tire over in Manassas, where she became their director of advertising, and it wasn't long before she and Ollie picked up right where that weekend had left off. Ollie was a soft-spoken man with a mustache and brown eyes. A successful executive who had rise to become Vice President of Human Resources at US Air, he'd been through a divorce of his own. So, when things between him and Robin turned serious, they didn't rush to the altar. Instead, they bought a house together on Recycle Lane in Springfield. A green frame home tucked onto a quiet wooded cul-de-sac, about halfway between his office and hers. They had lived together first, before making anything official. And before long, over a dinner at a restaurant in downtown Washington, he asked her to marry him. And on New Year's Eve in 1989, they did just that. Right there in the living room of the house on Recycle Lane, in front of an intimate gathering of family and friends. Red Ribbons ran the length of the foyer. Deep red point set is filled the room. Robin wore a blush-colored brocade jacket and a chiffon skirt, a scarf draped at her neck. Ollie wore a black tuxedo with a gray paisley bow tie, a red rose pinned at his lapel. There was music, laughter, and the clink of glasses. Robin's mother Jesse never forgot the sight of them that night, and later said, "It was very lovely, very touching. They just seemed to be bubblingly happy." Three years into the marriage that happiness grew. Robin and Ollie had a daughter named Nicole. But Nicole's start in the world was a frightening one. As an infant, she needed a liver transplant, a major surgery for a baby who'd barely begun her life. And a transplant isn't a one-time fix. It's the start of a lifelong routine. To keep her body from rejecting the new organ, Nicole would need an anti-rejection medication every single day on a strict schedule for the rest of her life, especially in the early years. That meant frequent checkups and blood draws, and a close watch on every fever. Because the very drugs protecting her liver also left her more vulnerable to infection, skipped too many doses, the body can turn on the organ keeping it alive. For Robin and Ollie, that became the rhythm of raising Nicole, the medication, the appointments, the monitoring, but it was all worth it. Nicole was the light of their lives, and luckily she made it through. By the fall of 1994, Robin and Ollie had been married almost five years, and they'd built a beautiful life together. They were two people who'd gone through a divorce, settled now into a home of their own on Reseka Lane, with a two-year-old daughter, Nicole. They were past the worst of her medical scares, and she was growing healthily. They liked the simple things. Fixing up the house, weekends in the yard, dinners at home. Inside, the walls were hung with Robin's own paintings, vivid and full of color, along with the African masks she loved. It was the home of an artist, and it was, in every ordinary way, a very good life, and they expected to grow old in it. There was a lot to look forward to. It was the week before Thanksgiving, and a few days, the whole family would pack up and drive north to Connecticut for the holiday. Robin's birthday was right around the corner, too, and her father was already planning on one big dinner to celebrate both at once, a house full of family, the people she loved, all in one place. Robin was excited for the celebration, but first came an ordinary Friday, November 18th, 1994. That morning, Ollie was up early for a flight he had to catch. US air was sending him down to the Bahamas, on business, and he headed out before the sun was even up. Robin got out of bed soon after, fed Nicole, and greeted their nanny who walked through the door. Soon after that, Robin drove to her job at Merchants Town. and menaces. It was a normal day. Phones ringing, co-workers stopping by her desk. And when the work day was done, there was still a full evening ahead. Robin came home and took Nicole out to run some errands. The two did a little shopping as the November light faded. Around 6.30, she dropped the nanny off at the metro station to head home for the night. And after that, it was just the two of them, Robin and Nicole. By the time they pulled onto Recycle Lane, it was dark out. Robin carrying Nicole inside, and flipped on the lights. And from there, they completed their normal evening routine. Dinner, a bath, zipping Nicole into her pajamas. Before long, Nicole was asleep. And the house went quiet. Outside, the whole cold assack had gone still. A quiet Friday night, in one of the safest corners of northern Virginia, nothing bad ever happened there. But sometime that night, someone came to the house on Recycle Lane and Robin Lawrence would not live to see the morning. Down in the Bahamas, all he was trying to reach his wife. On Friday night, he called the house. It rang and rang with no answer. He figured Robin was already in bed, or maybe stepped out for a bed. He told himself he would try again later. Saturday, he called again, but still nothing. And it's there where he begins to worry. It wasn't like Robin to be out of touch like this. So he called Robin's close friend, Lori Lindbergh, and told her he couldn't get a hold of her. That weekend, Lori tried calling Robin too. A friend's call about her upcoming birthday. What are we gonna do for your birthday? She asked on the voicemail. But she never heard back. That night, the worry pushed Ali to do the only other thing he could do from a thousand miles away. He called Fairfax County 911. Here is part of that call. My name is Ali Lawrence. And I'm away on business. He and I have been able to reach my wife over the last couple of days. I'm just concerned. And wonder if whether someone could maybe go by there or see if, you know, there is something unusual. But Ali was about to learn that his location in the Bahamas made that welfare check. More complicated. Okay, sir, usually the process is if you're calling from a different location than where your family is. We have to let you go through the Bahamas police. Please don't have to do that. All you have to do is call them up there. And because that's the procedure here. What Ali didn't know, what none of them knew was that the only person still alive inside that house was his two year old baby girl, Nicole. By Sunday morning, Ali still hadn't heard from Robin. He needed someone to go to the house and lay eyes on her. And from a thousand miles away, the only person who could was a friend. So he called Lori again. Would you mind going over to the house and checking on her? Lori agreed. She brought a friend with her, a woman named Carlin, and the two of them drove over to Risescalaine. From the street, the green framed house looked exactly the way it always did. Nothing out of place, quiet, ordinary. But when they reached the front door, they saw something concerning. The newspapers were piled up on the steps. Nobody brought the men. Still, Lori stepped past the papers and knocked on the door. They waited for a few moments, holding their breath, hoping to see the door fly open, Robin greeting them with that familiar smile. But nothing, they knocked several more times. However, there was no sign of Robin not willing to give up just yet. They made their way around back, looking for a way into the house. And there on one of the windows, they saw that the screen had already been cut along slid, straight down the middle. Lori's heart was pounding. Everything in her wanted to turn around and call someone. But her friend, Carlin, was steady. "We're going in," she said. After a little work, they got the window open. Together, they took a deep breath and climbed through. As they stood inside the Lawrence family home, the house was dim and silent. The family room and kitchen opened up in front of them. Off to the left, a hallway ran down towards the bedrooms. They started calling out, Robin, Nicole, no one answered. And then down the hall, something moved. A small shape, slowly coming towards them. It was Nicole, Robin's little girl. She was two years old, still in her pajamas, a pacifier in her mouth. She wasn't crying. She wasn't making a sound. She just walked towards them. Her eyes huge, her face blank. They didn't know it at the time. But Nicole had been alone in that house for two whole days. Upon seeing her, Carlin scooped her up and told Lori, "You go find Robin." So Lori went. She slowly walked down the hall towards the primary bedroom at the end. The door was open. And before she even reached it, she could see inside. Blood spattered across the walls. It pulled on the floor. Dark and long-sense dried. She was completely overcome with fear. She didn't go inside the room. She couldn't bring herself to take one more step forward. Instead, she turned on her heels and ran back to Carlin and Nicole. The three of them left the way they came in, back through the window. From there, Lori quickly ran to the house next door, where a man was working in his garage. She struggled to find the words. Before uttering, "I need to call the police." Soon after, the first officers pulled up to recess a lane. Behind them came the crime scene detectives. One was Mark Garmin. A quick look around the exterior of the home showed him exactly how the killer had gotten in. The back deck, the window with the slit screen, the same window Lori had climbed through to find her friend. As Garmin stepped into the house, he walked down that same hallway towards the primary bedroom. Then he stepped inside. And immediately, he could tell that Robin put up a hell of a fight. As you know, Blood helps tell a story, and it appeared as if the attack took place while Robin was lying in bed. Upon waking up and realizing what was happening, Robin and her attacker struggled around the room, leaving crimson red bloods better all around. Her body was found on the floor of her bedroom. The phone laid right beside her, the cord cut. There was a deep, gaping wound in her neck, wounds on her back, her legs, and on her hands, and what Garmin called the "unbelieveable amount" of defensive wounds. It was clear that Robin had grabbed a blade with her bare hands trying to stop it, but it was the smaller things around the room that Garmin couldn't shake. There were bloody tissues scattered across the floor and around Robin's body. As it turns out, these were not left behind by Robin's killer. As detectives looked at the scene, it was heartbreakingly clear that after Robin was murdered, two-year-old Nicole had stumbled into her mommy's room. There on the floor, she found her bloodied and unmoving. Nicole was too young to understand death. She only knew that her mommy was hurt and that she wouldn't get up. So she had done the only thing a baby knows how to do. She brought her mommy some tissues to try and clean up the blood. Detective Garmin would later say, "Even at that age, kids know what blood is, and that blood comes from wounds and cuts, and they know that mom puts tissues on them or band aids. I think she was trying to stop the blood," end quote. Also near Robin's body were empty baby bottles, and the two days that Nicole was left alone. With her mother's body, she didn't eat or drink anything. Detective Garmin believed that when Nicole got hungry, she brought the empty bottle to her mom's body, hoping that she would get up and feed her. It was the most heartbreaking scene they had ever worked. And from the very beginning, all the signs were pointing to the fact that Robin was murdered by someone close to her. She had been stabbed 49 times. This type of overkill is usually seen, with someone who has an intense personal rage towards the victim. Even further, there were no signs of sexual assault, and there was nothing of value missing from the home. There was cash still in the bedroom, there was jewelry, none of it had been touched. In fact, nothing in the house was taken at all. This was no burglary, no crazed sexual predator. Meaning, whoever killed Robin Lawrence had come into that house to do one thing, to murder her. All the detectives said the same thing, quote, "We do not believe that this was a random attack." Now, something else detectives noticed was that the killer did not leave behind a single fingerprint, not on the window, not in Robin's bedroom, or any room within the house. But one piece of evidence would catch their eye. In the bathroom, hanging on the shower door was a washcloth. Detective Garmin noticed it right away. He said, quote, "a small brownish stain." There was blood on both sides of the cloth, and there was a real possibility it wasn't Robin's. The detectives suspected that it was the killer's blood. In a struggle that violent, attackers can sometimes hurt themselves, either by the victim fighting back, or even the knife slipping in their hands, slicing it. As the detectives examined the washcloth, they were pretty confident it was the killers. They collected it and put it in an evidence back. But this was 1994. DNA technology was still in its early days, so they had no way to put a name to it, not yet. The same day that Robin's body was found, her best friend Laurie got Nicole to a hospital. Two days alone in that house had left her dehydrated. But the real danger was the one you couldn't see. For two days, no one had given Nicole the medication that kept her body from rejecting the liver keeping her alive. The daily doses her parents had given her without fail since she was a baby. But somehow, against all odds, she pulled through. Again. But at the hospital, there was still one more thing Laurie had to do. Someone had to call Robyn's parents. The officers asked her to do it, so Laurie picked up the phone and dialed the number. Laurie would later say that when Robyn's dad answered the phone, she said something along the lines of "Robyn's dead". A sentence that was almost impossible for her to say aloud. But what came next was even more heart-wrenching. Laurie's mom was listening to the phone call. And in that moment, all you could hear was wailing. Laurie described it as a "primal anguish". She would later say, "That's probably the most horrible thing that's happened to me. It's calling." After the phone call ended, Robyn's father then had to tell the rest of his children that their sister was gone. His daughter Mary and his son Robert Jr. For Mary, the words wouldn't land as real. After the words Robyn is dead, it was like a nightmare, she said, "Your world shattered". And almost immediately the questions began. The police came to the family with the one they always asked. Did anyone have a reason to hurt Robyn? A grudge? An enemy? Anyone at all? To Mary, the answer was obvious. Of course, the answer is no. Robyn was loved by everyone. They couldn't think of anyone who would want to hurt her. So police wanted to talk to the person closest to Robyn. Her husband Oli, who was rushing back home as fast as he could. As we mentioned, he had spent the weekend in the Bahamas, on a business trip, away from home just as everything came apart. By the time the news reached him, Robyn was already gone. When he landed at Washington National, Fairfax County detectives were there waiting for him. But they didn't take him home. They took him straight in for questioning. And there, as it sank in, that the wife he had kissed goodbye days earlier was dead, stabbed in their bedroom while their little girl sat alone in the house. Oli Lawrence broke down and cried. In the days that followed, the family gathered to bury Robyn. The service was held on a Saturday afternoon at the Pope funeral home in Forestville, Maryland. And the people came. Family who'd traveled down from Connecticut in New York, friends and co-workers from Merchants Tire, the people who'd known Robyn as an artist, a dancer, a neighbor. They came to mourn a young woman taken in the one place she should have been safest, her own home. But none of them could see her one last time. The casket stayed closed. There would be no open casket goodbye, not after what had been done to her. Robyn's sister Mary said, "That was hard for me, because I never got a chance to see her one last time. I always wanted to be able to say goodbye and see her." In other words, Robyn was laid to rest at Washington National Cemetery, and in place of flowers, the family asked for something that said everything about who they were, even then, donations to help children with liver transplants. Children like the little girl Robyn had left behind. In the weeks that followed, the house on Recescaline was more than Oli could bear. He couldn't go back. He and Nicole moved out right away to Alexandria, a dozen miles away, and within 16 days of Robyn's murder, he put the house up for sale. He would later say, quote, "I really struggled with going back," end quote. But for Robyn's parents, it was the opposite. The house wasn't something to flee. It was the last place their daughter had lived, and they felt that being inside of it kept them close to her. They had come down from Connecticut the night she was found, and while in town, they stayed in Robyn's room, all the way into December. Before they finally went home, they did one last thing for her. They went into Robyn's bedroom, and made it up the way she would have wanted it. A new comforter, and paisley pillow shams, as if she might still come home to it. It was there goodbye. Jesse said, quote, "I had the sense that I wouldn't come back. It was all just very silent." In the meantime, investigators turned to the person they so often turned to first, the husband. Two days after the funeral, detectives interviewed Oli. He told them where he'd been the weekend Robyn was killed. The Bahamas, a weekend, nearly a thousand miles from Rasika Lane. And they didn't just take his word for it, they flew down and checked for themselves. He'd been on the flight he was supposed to be on, he'd been at the hotel he was supposed to be at, the alibi held. In addition, investigators figured from the beginning that Oli did not likely kill his wife. In fact, near Robyn's body there were hairs. Researchers that didn't belong to Robyn or Oli, longer than either of theirs, but even so, they kept him on the suspect list. In the back of detectives' minds, they began to wonder if Oli somehow orchestrated his wife's murder. With him and the Bahamas, he would have had the perfect alibi to get someone else to do it. But, throughout their investigation, detectives learned more information that raised their suspicions of Oli. As it turns out, for 14 years, on and off, the grieving husband had been having an affair with a woman named Marvajine Boyden. She worked in employee relations at the airline, the same human resource division that Oli ran. The affair had spanned his entire marriage to Robyn, five years of it, and suddenly the case looked very different. Here was a husband living a double life, a wife stabbed over and over in what looked like a jealous rage. A husband out of the country, when it happened, with a clean alibi and not a drop of blood on him. Two investigators, who already believed that Robyn was killed in a personal attack, it was almost too neat. Maybe Oli hadn't held the knife himself, but maybe he didn't need to. Instantly, both Oli and his mistress became investigators' prime suspects. But through all of it, Oli kept telling them that they had the wrong guy. He was frustrated. He repeated to the detectives that while everyone was staring at him, quote, "the real murderer is getting further and further away." But from here, investigators started looking into his mistress, Marvajine Boyden. They discovered that before Oli's trip to the Bahamas, he actually asked her to join him that weekend. However, Marvaj said no, tracing her way about detectives learned that on November 18, the day Robyn was killed, Marvaj spent the day at a work seminar in North Carolina. Before hours away, people from her work reported that she was there, but it was just a one-day seminar. And Marvaj admitted that later that night, she came back home to Virginia and spent the rest of the evening watching TV, all by herself. Which wasn't a good look. Marvaj had no one that could confirm her whereabouts on the night that Robyn was brutally murdered. Marvaj had also known for weeks that Oli would be away, that Robyn would be home alone. And two investigators, she had the motive, so they went back to Oli. If anyone would know what Marvaj was capable of, it was the man who had spent 14 years with her. But his answer didn't point to Marvaj, it pointed away from her. For months, investigators continued to look into the couple. Soon enough, 1994 turned to 1995, winter turned to spring and spring turned to summer, and the entire time, investigators couldn't seem to shake the fact that Marvaj was responsible. Finally, by August of 1995, they got a warrant for two vials of her blood and twenty hairs from her head. All of it to test against the blood and hair found at the scene. But in 1995, getting those results back would take months, sometimes longer. In the meantime, investigators kept their eye on both Marvaj and Oli. Oli stayed a suspect, the husband, the man with the secret. But he never stopped insisting the affair had nothing to do with Robyn's death, and Robyn's own family believed him. Of course, the affair had blindsided them, but not one of them ever thought he was capable of killing her, and he even passed a polygraph. While they continued waiting for the DNA results, detectives dug into Robyn's life. Secret boyfriend, a jealous ex, anyone at all. But there was no one. The detectives even turned to the neighborhood. They pulled the police reports from around Recycle Lane, looking for anyone who didn't fit. And it was in that surge where a name came up. A man who'd been caught before looking into other people's windows. They were able to get a warrant for his blood, too. The DNA results on the bloody washcloth took a whole year to come back. When it finally did, the detectives compared it against every suspect they had. Oli, Marva, the peeping tom from the neighborhood, but to their dismay, none of them matched. The long hairs near Robyn's body never matched anyone either. Just one more thing in the case, they couldn't explain. Every single suspect that had come across their desk had been ruled out. Every lead had run dry. There was no one left to look at. Detectives started to think that maybe they were wrong. Maybe Robyn wasn't killed by someone she knew, or someone that had a vendetta against her. Maybe it was random, but with no other leads they couldn't say, and so the case went cold. Years would pass. Robyn's little girl Nicole was forced to grow up without her mom. In like many cases, the headlines eventually stopped. The detectives who worked it were reassigned. And sadly, life moved on without answers. But as the years passed, the detectives who worked Robyn's case never gave up hope. They knew that year after year, DNA technology was growing stronger. And considering they had the suspects DNA, they hoped that one day it would give them answers. Towards the late '90s, that hope was reignited. Because the FBI officially launched the National DNA Index System, which allowed police departments It's all over the country to compare. paired DNA profiles of convicted felons. If Robin was killed at random, then it was more than likely her killer's DNA would be somewhere in that national database. So they uploaded the DNA profile from the blood they found on that washcloth and waited for a match. But sadly, it never came. Whoever killed Robin Lawrence had never been arrested. He wasn't in the system. His blood was sitting right there in a Fairfax County evidence locker and it pointed to a man who had no criminal record at all. For investigators and Robin's loved ones, it was heartbreaking. In the years right after the murder, her family did everything a family could do. They put up rewards. They continued speaking to the media, trying to keep her name out there. And in the beginning, everyone believes that the answer is coming, that any day now the phone will ring, someone will talk, the case will break open. But for Robin's family, that didn't happen. And they watched as the world just moved on. Every November, as everyone gathered with family and celebrated for the holidays, Robin's loved ones couldn't ignore that empty seat at the table before they knew it five years had passed, then 10 and then 20. And by then, that hope they had in the beginning was long gone. Throughout those years, the topic of Robin's murder became so painful that her loved ones couldn't even talk about it anymore, who was only eight years old when she was murdered, told CBS that she stayed close with Robin's daughter, Nicole. But Nicole rarely spoke about her mom, saying, quote, "I didn't want to ever bring it up because I didn't want to make her anxious or make her nervous. It was better just left unsaid," end quote. Sadly, Robin's mother eventually passed away without ever knowing what happened to her daughter. Over the years, it was so difficult for her family because from the beginning, detectives had been confident that Robin knew her killer. They told her family that outright. So for decades, on top of their grief, they had to live under a terrible shadow. The idea that the person who did this was close to them. Someone they knew, maybe even someone who had come to mourn Robin. Her sister Mary never forgot the thought that came to her at the funeral, looking out at all of those grieving faces. She thought to herself, "Robbins killer could be in this room with us." However, they had no idea how wrong that was because the answer wasn't in that room. Her killer wasn't anyone she knew, anyone they knew. For all those years, it had been sitting in a Fairfax County evidence locker. The killer's own blood, with no name attached, blood that matched no one in any database. But decades after Robin's murder, her eyes cold case would finally begin to warm up. In 2019, investigators turned to a technique called genetic genealogy using public ancestry sites. Now, the innocent people on these sites will send in a saliva sample. The company will then take your DNA and use it to help you build your family tree. It will tell you your family's origins. It can help you find lost cousins or even long lost siblings who share your DNA. And even though it's unlikely a killer would ever participate in something like this, because the last thing they want is for their DNA to be linked to their name. There are other workarounds that have helped solve crimes. You see, as these ancestry sites started to grow in popularity, criminals all over became fearful. Because it didn't matter if they didn't upload their DNA, if anyone who shared DNA with them used one of these sites, investigators could easily find them through what's called familial DNA. So in 2019, two of Fairfax County's cold case detectives, Melissa Wallace and John Long, decided to reach out to Parabond Nanolabs. Together, they took the DNA profile from the washcloth found in Robin's home and uploaded it to the public ancestry sites. And it almost didn't work. The matches that came back were faint, very distant cousins who shared an ancestor with the killer from seven generations back. Now, someone who lived that far back can have thousands of descendants walking around today. And according to Detective Wallace, Parabond gave us a solvability rate of zero on the case and essentially said, "You do not have the time nor the money to get it moving forward." And now for a brief ad break. (upbeat music) Anyways, y'all, let's get back to the show. The case could have ended right there. Wallace and Long could have closed the book and moved on. But there was someone willing to do the impossible part for free, a volunteer, an amateur genealogist named Liz, who worked cases like this in her spare time. She would later say, quote, "Geneology is a hobby of mine. I dabble in it on the side," end quote. Now Liz said that she knew from the beginning that Robin's case was not going to be easy. Saying, quote, "I knew it was gonna be a needle in a haystack," end quote. And it was a monster of a haystack at that. The DNA told her that the killer was about half Eastern European and a quarter Irish with some English Italian and Scandinavian in the mix. It also gave her a list of cousins, 1500 of them. And not first cousins or second cousins, it was like sixth and seventh cousins. There were 1500 distant strangers. And somewhere in the tangle of all their family trees was one man, a killer. Even Liz wasn't sure she could do it. Parabond Labs told her that the solvability rate was zero. But still, she told herself, quote, "it was worth trying." While she worked, Parabond built something else out of the DNA, a composite of Robin's killer, a computer's best guess at the killer's face. The detectives still believed Robin had known the man who killed her. So they took that face to the people who knew Robin best. Her family, her friends, the people she worked with, and they desperately hoped someone would recognize him. Maybe he was the mailman, a coworker, someone from the neighborhood, but no one knew the face. Detective Wallace even set up a video call with Oli and held the image up to the camera. She said, I was really hoping that when Oli saw that, he would go, oh my gosh, that looks exactly like so and so. But Oli just looked at it and said, that doesn't spark my memory at all. Looks like nobody I know. And so, the investigation stalled again. But Liz kept working on the list, 1,500 cousins, one branch at a time. She traced some of them up into Canada. There, she found two separate family trees who were both genetically tied to Robin's killer. But interestingly, these two families weren't related to each other at all. They shared no DNA. And that's when Liz realized, if she could find this single place, those two trees touched, one marriage somewhere back in time, that joined them, then she could find the killer. So she searched and eventually she found it. Liz would later say, quote, what I found was this woman on this tree married this man on this tree. And that was it. That was the aha moment. That's when I realized that he is a descendant of this couple right here, end quote. After a little more digging, Liz believed she finally found him. It took her three and a half years to get to this moment. But finally, in August of 2023, she sent the detective an email and read, quote, I think I found someone of interest. She would later say, quote, I felt like this was really him. I didn't know for certain, but I believed it was, end quote. And his name was Steven Smirk. Immediately, detective started looking into him. But on paper, he didn't seem like their guy. Stefan Smirk was a computer programmer, living an ordinary life upstate in New York. He was married to a defense attorney, had two kids in high school and a nice house in the suburbs. He had nothing on his record, not even a speeding ticket. And there was nothing, nothing at all, tying him to Robin Lawrence. Even Detective Wallace doubted it was him. She remembered thinking to herself, there's no way this is our guy. Then they pulled his old high school yearbook. There was Stefan Smirk at 16 years old. They then pulled up the composite sketch Parabond had built from the killer's DNA. The same sketch the detectives had carried around for years. The one no one had recognized. But there, holding it up to the screen, they couldn't ignore the similarities. On September 7th, 2023, detectives Melissa Wallace and John Long drove up to Niske, United New York, to a house on Niske, United Circle. They didn't have enough to arrest anyone, but what they did have was the name off of volunteers family tree, and a need for one thing, a sample of Stefan Smirk's DNA. Once they had it, they get officially compared to the blood on that washcloth. So they walked right up to his front door. Moments later, Stefan opened the door, and that was when they told him, were detectives from Fairfax County, Virginia, were looking into a cold case from the '90s. Do you mind if we come in and talk to you? Stefan stepped to the side. Sure, he said, inviting them right in. But right away, something was off, because Steven Smirk didn't react. No surprise, no fear, no confusion, nothing, two detectives had just traveled a thousand miles to his door, to ask about a 30-year-old murder, and his face didn't move. Now, Wallace had done this a hundred times, and it never went like that. She would later say, quote, when we're asking for DNA, the conversation typically takes a solid 45 minutes. People generally have a lot of questions like, what do you mean someone in my family has committed a murder who was killed? There was not a single question from him. We were in and out of his house in five minutes with his DNA, consent form signed. Swap taken, packaged up. That was it." On the drive back to their hotel, I'm sure a doubt sunk in for the detectives. If Steven Smirk really was their guy, he wouldn't have given up his DNA that easily. The detectives walked into their hotel room, and had barely sat their bags down. When suddenly, the phone rang. It was Steven Smirk. He told the detectives this, "I'm at the police department to turn myself in." Wallace wasn't sure she heard him right. "Turn yourself in for what?" she asked. "I'm here to turn myself in for the murder." But there was a problem. Smirk was standing outside the police station, and the doors were locked. He couldn't even get in to confess, so Wallace told him exactly what to do. "Okay, we're gonna hang up. I need you to call 911 and tell them that you're here." And after they hung up, that's exactly what he did. Back at the hotel, Detective Wallace ran down the hall to John Long's room, pounding on his door. "We gotta go to the police department," she told him. "He's turning himself in." From there, they called the local police. And soon enough, Smirk was sitting across from them in an interrogation room. But before they could even get started, Smirk was the one who spoke first. "Where do you want to start?" he asks. "You've come here to turn yourself in for a 1994 murder." "It was 100% intentional. I am a serial killer who's only killed once." It almost seemed too good to be true. The detectives couldn't believe what they were hearing, but they also had a problem. Their DNA results weren't back yet, and people confessed to things they didn't do all the time. So before they let themselves believe him, they needed Smirk to tell them things only they killer would know. They were just about to ask him when Smirk buts in with a question of his own. "You said you were minding your name. Can't you say that?" "I can't. Do you remember anything about the first thing you said after getting murdered?" "Okay." That's all he remembers. He took a woman's life, stabbed her dozens and dozens of times, and 30 years later, the only thing he can remember is the color of her skin. Slowly after that, the rest comes out. According to Smirk's confession, on the night of November 18th, 1994, he had been drinking. He was 22 years old, a soldier stationed at Fort Meier in Arlington. That night, he says, he wasn't himself. He tells them that he was drinking and using a stimulant called a fedron. He said, "Something inside me said that. It's hard to explain. I knew that I was going to kill somebody. I did not know who I was going to kill. It was like this overbearing thought in my brain that I just had to kill somebody." So he got in his car and drove. But he wasn't driving aimlessly. He knew exactly where he was going. Out to a West Springfield neighborhood where his friends lived. He knew the area, but he also lived far enough away that no one would suspect him. So that night, he pulled right up to his friend's house. And that's when he spotted the green-framed home, tucked onto a quiet wooded cul-de-sac on recessical lane, Robin's house. As it turns out, Robin lived directly next door to his friend's house. And for a moment, he just sat in the dark, thinking about what he was about to do. He didn't know who lived there. He didn't know what awaited him inside. But still, he got out of his car and walked forward. "I never met this person before or see her or anything." A total stranger. For 30 years, Robin's family had been told that she must have known her killer. And here he is saying the opposite. He had never laid eyes on her in his life. But on that dark street in Springfield, smirk pulled a ski mask down over his face. He slipped his hands into a pair of leather gloves and then he crept into Robin's backyard. He had everything he needed for this moment, including a steel tonto knife. Holding it, he stepped up onto the back deck. At one of the windows, he used a knife to cut through the screen, along slit, top to bottom. Then he slid the blade back into the sheath, took hold of the sliding glass door and forced it open. Within moments, he was standing inside Robin's home. The house was silent. He stood there for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. Then he drew the knife again and slowly walked down the hallway. Up ahead, there was an open door. Inside, a baby was sleeping. He kept going past Nicole's room. To the door at the end of the hall, the primary bedroom. He opened the door to see Robin asleep in her bed. She was all by herself. Her husband over a thousand miles away. Smirk stepped closer and hearing the movement inside her room. Robin woke up. Standing there at her bedside was a man wearing a ski mask and holding a knife. Startled and terrified, she got up off the bed and down on the floor, begging for her life. But Smirk would not show even an ounce of mercy. Robin knew what was ahead. Hoping to save her life, she quickly reached for her phone. But in an instant, he took it from her and cut the cord. The line went dead in her hand. And it's there where Smirk began stabbing her over and over and over again. In his confession, he told detectives, quote, "I cut her up pretty good." And, quote, "And then he said this." "He makes it sound quick, almost tidy. But the scene in that bedroom told a different story. As the knife came down, Robin clawed at his face. She pulled at his hair. She did everything she could to escape him. But Smirk was close behind, stabbing her over and over again. Robin's blood spattered around the room as she fought for her life. And soon enough, she couldn't fight anymore. After several stab wounds to the neck, Smirk took a fistful of her hair and he cut her throat. But even then, he didn't stop. He kept going, stabbing at her over and over again. And those last moments of her life, I'm sure Robin's thoughts were with her two-year-old daughter in the other room. The fight that she put up wasn't just for her, but for Nicole too. And horrifically, a Smirk stood over her, stabbing her 49 times. Robin took her last breath. Sitting in this interrogation room, detectives are finally hearing the confession they had waited decades for. But they still had a few questions. "Did you injure yourself at all during this? Did you cut yourself?" "Not that I can remember. I know she caught at my face. I had a little bit of a scar here. I was worried that maybe she had some DNA underneath her finger or something like that, but I didn't. I wasn't worried about that. But it was a lot of blood. And I don't remember that. If I get going to the bathroom, it would have been to look at what she did to my face." And there it was, the bathroom, the washcloth. The wound Robin had given him with her own hands. He had been worried about the wrong evidence and just handed Wallace to the right one. For the first time, she knows exactly how his blood ended up on that washcloth. After murdering Robin, Smirk stepped into the bathroom. He examined his bleeding face, where Robin's nails tore into his skin. Off to the side, there was a pink washcloth hanging outside the shower door. He grabbed it and pressed it to his bleeding cheek. He didn't know it at the time, but that very action would lead to his capture decades later. The blood Robin drew would sit on that cloth and an evidence locker for 29 years until the day it finally gave him up. But Smirk wasn't thinking about that on that November night in 1994. At that point, his main concern was getting out of Springfield. Following the murder, he got back into his vehicle, took off down the road and headed right back to his army base in Arlington. Somewhere along the way, he threw the knife from a bridge down into the Chesapeake Bay, and then he goes home and continues on with life like nothing happened. He told detectives that sometime after that night, he looked Robin up online. He'd wanted to know who she was. He was there when he saw that she was a wife and a mother. But to his luck, he also saw that the police were looking at Robin's husband, his mistress. They were looking everywhere but at him. Smirk also told investigators that in all the years that followed, he told one person about what he had done, an old high school friend. It was a couple months after the murder, and while out at a pool hall in California, Smirk told his friend that he had murdered a woman. The friend didn't believe him at first, but Smirk told him he wasn't lying. But still, that friend never said a word to anyone. Now, as for why he killed Robin, Smirk told detectives that he was highly, highly influenced by demons. Here he is, talking about it at length during his interrogation. I don't believe that I can actually be possessed, but if something came over me, I'm not going to say if I had voices in my head, I'd hear somebody talking. talking to me, but it was like this old preparing thought in my brain that I needed to kill somebody. I just had to kill somebody. I can't explain it to you in any other way. He went so far as to explain that those feelings were the only reason he joined the army in the first place. How often do you or had you back then have those thoughts? All the time. It's one of the reasons why I joined the infantry because I wanted to go to combat. To kill people in combat. At the time, yes. But despite these concerning comments, he was adamant that Robin was the only person he had ever murdered. I'm not killed anybody else, but I am like I was in the if I I could be a serial killer. But I want to tell you right now that I'm choosing the only person that I can. Smirk admitted that after Robin's murder, he didn't stop killing because he had a change of heart, but because he had a family to live for. A wife and children who relied on him. However, even then, the darkness within him never went away. I'm very at kids. I honestly believe that if it wasn't for my life or my kids, I probably wouldn't be a serial killer. Steven Smirk went 30 years without facing justice. For most killers by that point, I'm sure they'd assume that they had gotten away with it. But Smirk admitted that he wasn't surprised they came knocking on his door. Recently, he had this feeling that his crime was going to catch up with him. In fact, about a week before, he said he was standing in his kitchen when he had a vision, two figures, one in blue, one in black, law enforcement coming to his door. As the detectives wrapped up their interview, there was still one question lingering in their minds. Is there anything you'd want to say to Robin's family? Any apology or statement you'd want to give them? I don't know. I say this. I know you're recording. Yeah, you say however you want. I don't feel anything for the family. Okay. Okay. Since I don't have animosity to the feeling, to the family. Okay. Okay. I can't say that any other one. I feel bad that I did it because I knew someday my personal freedom would be affected. Sure. No remorse at all. Steven Smirk knew that he took the life of an innocent woman. He knew that Robin's two-year-old daughter sat in the home with her mutilated body for two whole days that Nicole used tissues to try and clean her mommy's wounds and still he felt nothing. Detective Wallace would later say quote, "I think what you see is 100% what you get from him, arrogance and title meant. He wanted to do it so he did." And that's it." Even the confession she believed wasn't about guilt. He'd known he was caught and he wanted to come in on his own terms. Wallace said quote, "It wasn't because he was sorry. It wasn't because he was tired of running for 30 years. He wanted to maintain control." When the interview was over, Stefan Smirk was placed under arrest and charged with the murder of Robin Lawrence. For the detectives working the case, they felt relieved to finally have answers. But at the same time, those very answers left them with this deep unsettling feeling. Detective John Long said that men like Stefan Smirk are the reason you tell your loved ones to make sure your doors are locked at night. He is the boogie man. After the arrest, the first call Detective Wallace made was to Nicole Robin's daughter. The two-year-old who had been left alone in that house with her mother was a grown woman now. Wallace told her they had found the man who killed her mom. Nicole was stunned, but somehow she held it together. All he got the call too. By then he'd built a new life. He was remarried and retired, living in another country. He would later say that upon hearing the news, I was flabbergasted. You could have probably knocked me over with a feather. After all this time, you have hope, but you also wonder, will they really find someone after 29 years? But they did. Robin's entire family was so relieved to hear the news. And more than anything, they wished that Robin's mom could have been around to see it. For decades, her parents had carried the not knowing. Through the funeral, through making up their daughter's bed one last time, through the long silence that followed. But the wait outlasted her mother, Jessie. By the time the answer finally came, her father Robert War was 99 years old. And luckily, he had lived long enough to hear it. About a week after Smirk's arrest, the last piece fell into place. The lab matched, Stefan Smirk's DNA to the blood on the washcloth. The trace of himself he'd left behind that night. The one the police had held on to for three decades. The odds it belonged to anyone else were one and more than seven million. After all those years, the blood finally had a name. And there was one more thing, a coincidence that unsettled Robin's family, like almost nothing else. The town where the detectives had found Stephen Smirk, Nyskina, New York, wasn't some distant place with no connection to the people who loved Robin. It was their town too. Robin's sister Mary had lived in Nysk, Yuna for decades. She was there in 1994 when Robin was killed. And she was there still. They're all the long years the case went unsolved. Her niece Lauren had grown up in that same corner of New York, the same small town, the man who murdered Robin in her Virginia bedroom, had been living right where her family had built their lives. He could have been the stranger in line at the grocery store, the car idling at the red light, and no one would have known. For Lauren, it was almost too much to hold. She would later say quote, "How is this just a coincidence?" She kept circling back to the thought of him right there all that time, saying quote, "It makes me question a lot. How could I have found him sooner?" He was right next to me. In the months after his arrest, Robin's family came face to face with Stephen Smirk for the first time. Her niece, Lauren, couldn't get over the size of him. A man who needed two bailiffs beside him. She said, "The first thing I thought was, my aunt didn't stand a chance." In April of 2024, a grand jury indicted Stephen Smirk for the murder of Robin Lawrence. But there wouldn't be a trial. Six months later, Smirk pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. For the prosecution, a plea made sense. The case was 30 years old, witnesses had died and memories had faded. A trial that far from the crime is never a sure thing. But for Robin's family, the plea was a disappointment. After three decades, they had wanted to see him stand trial. On March 7, 2025, Stephen Smirk was sentenced. His defense painted a picture of the young man he had been in 1994, troubled, drinking, using drugs, struggling. They said he had joined the army hoping to straighten his life out, that he had been crippled at the time by a mental illness. No one had diagnosed. Something doctors would later call by polar-2 disorder. He had also been taking a fedron. A supplement the FDA would later ban a decade later for its health risks. The defense argued that mixed with alcohol, the drug could set off dangerous psychiatric effects and leave a young man not fully in control of himself. But by the time detectives knocked on his door, the defense said that Stephen had gotten help. He was sober, he felt genuine remorse, and that he thought about Robin every day. Robin's family spoke to the court about what they had carried since the day she died. Her brother put it in a single sentence. The impact of the crime has been devastating beyond measure. No family should endure such prolonged suffering. At the sentencing, Smirk addressed Robin's family directly, the first time, saying, "No family should have to wait 30 years for justice for a loved one. I'm extremely sorry for the pain and suffering I have caused." But these words were much different than what Stephen had said in his confession. A year and a half before, the man sitting in front of detectives admitted that he didn't feel remorse for what he did. He didn't think about Robin every day or the suffering he put her family through. When the detectives offered him the chance to say something to her family, he said he felt nothing for them, at all. And to add and sold to injury for the past 30 years, while he walked free, Stephen Smirk got to live a pretty decent life. He was honorably discharged from the army and went to work as a senior software engineer, making $120,000 a year. He got to play the part of a good husband and father, a family man. The prosecutor Kelsey Gill told the courts, quote, "He got to live the life, his victim dreamed of living. That's the definition of injustice." Fairfax County Circuit Judge David O'Blanc called the murder of Robin Lawrence one of the worst in Fairfax County history. And from there, he handed down the maximum sentence aloud, 70 years. He also added a $100,000 fine. The judge told the court, "After destroying the Lawrence family, he went on to build his own family. It is beyond callous to know that Mr. Smirk left a two-year-old child alone with her freshly-dead, bleeding mother. She never even knew the basics of her mother, such as what made her laugh." Now 70 years is a very long time. It's likely that Stephen Smirk will die in prison where he but surprisingly, the number of people in the world is increasing. Surprisingly, he is eligible for parole in 2037, when he's 65 years old, which is horrifying because there is a possibility he could be set free one day. You see, in the state of Virginia, they operate under what is called "truth and sentencing," which makes it to where the innmate has to serve around 85% of their sentence before they can even be eligible for parole. If Stephen fell under this rule, that would mean he would have to serve about 60 years before a parole board would even look at his case. Stephen would be dead by then. But this rule only applies to people who committed crimes after 1995. That's the year that the state of Virginia implemented the "truth and sentencing." Unfortunately, Smirk killed Robin Lawrence 41 days before the cutoff, meaning if he behaves in prison, a parole board could set him free as early as 2037. Now, do we think that will actually happen? No. The possibility of it happening at all is horrifying, and the judge in his case seemed to agree. At his sentencing, the judge told the courts that if he is ever released, he will spend the rest of his life on probation, wearing a GPS monitor. For Robin's sister Mary, the sentence was enough. On one condition, she said, "I think what he got, as long as he never comes out of prison, ever, brings closure to me." After the sentencing, Olly Lawrence spoke for the family, saying, "The war and Lawrence family are grateful that justice has finally been done for the murder of our beloved Robin." But 30 years of waiting doesn't simply close when a sentence is read. Robin's niece, Lauren, standing beside Nicole said it best. As much as it's a sigh of relief, we still have to live with this. It just doesn't go away. Nicole was there for all of it. The two-year-old who'd been found wandering that house dehydrated, carrying bottles to her mother, grown now, standing in a courtroom with a man who took her mother was sentenced. Her cousin Lauren said, "She's strong. She stood next to me. She held my hand. Oh, if her mom could see us." Steven Smirk took so much that night, in November of 1994. He didn't just take Robin's life, but every year that should have come after it. Today, Robin would be in her late 60s. She should have watched Nicole grow up. The first days of school, the graduations, the woman she became. Robin should have grown old alongside her family. She should have kept painting and making a difference in the world. Instead, a stranger left his barracks looking for someone to kill. And he chose her door. Steven Smirk will be remembered as a monster, a man with a quiet house, a clean record, and a 30-year secret. But Robin Lawrence will be remembered for so much more. Her sister Mary said it this way, "She just had a light that shined from within." Robin was an artist. The very first medal for the Martin Luther King Jr. The one placed in Rosa Parks's hands. That was hers. And her paintings are still here, bright canvases full of color and life. When Mary looks at them, she doesn't just see her sister's work. She sees her sister, saying, "I kind of see the spirit of Robin, who she was, how she looked at the world through her eyes. And that was good things, happy things, warm things." For today's episode, we'll be making a donation to the Innova Health Foundation. The same organization Robin's family turned to back in 1994 when they asked that gifts in her memory go to help children with liver transplants, children like her own daughter Nicole. You can learn more at foundation.inovia.org. Hey, everybody, it's Colin here. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Murder in America. 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