Decades later, police have suspect in Va. woman’s brutal stabbing death

Twenty-nine years after someone killed Ollie Lawrence Jr.’s wife, he received a startling email Friday at his home in southern France. Shaking awake the brutal past, the message said to call a detective in Fairfax County, where Robin Warr Lawrence was slashed to death in their home in 1994.

He picked up his phone. The detective told him police had a suspect in custody, Ollie Lawrence said in an interview Monday with The Washington Post.

The development came after decades in which police were stumped by the stabbing and slashing death, which left the couple’s 2-year-old wandering alone in the house in West Springfield, Va., for days the weekend before Thanksgiving in 1994.

At a news conference Monday, police identified the suspect as 51-year-old Stephan Smerk, of Niskayuna, N.Y. They alleged he was in the Army working at Fort Myer at the time and attacked Robin Lawrence, 37, at random.

Police said a break in the case came when Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Northern Virginia, was able to link a DNA profile found at the scene to a family tree and create an image of a possible suspect. That helped detectives zero in on Smerk, a man who police said was living with his wife and two high school-aged children in New York when authorities contacted him.

Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said that Smerk - who had no other known prior criminal history - confessed to the slaying after investigators approached him. He was charged with second-degree murder and is awaiting extradition from New York to Virginia, Davis said. The chief said investigators are still probing a motive while they await the results of DNA testing to see if a sample taken from Smerk matches the one taken from the crime scene.

“I was flabbergasted. You could have probably knocked me over with a feather,” said Ollie Lawrence, who remarried 12 years ago and has since retired in the south of France. “After all of this time, you have hope, but you also wonder: ‘Will they really find someone after 29 years?’”

Efforts to reach Smerk’s relatives Monday were not immediately successful. A Fairfax County police official said he had been honorably discharged from the military. Police initially spelled his first name as Stephen, though they later said that was in error.

Robin Lawrence was originally from Syracuse, N.Y., where her father Robert Warr was the first Black city council member and served in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During her first marriage, she lived in Connecticut, but divorced and moved to D.C. in the mid-1980s. She married Ollie Lawrence in 1989. They had a daughter, Nicole.

At the time of her death, Robin Lawrence was director of promotion and merchandising at Merchant’s Tire and Auto Center in Manassas. She’d graduated from Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts.

“She was an artist and a graphic designer,” Ollie Lawrence said. “She was a very artsy person. She was very well loved by many.”

According to news reports at the time, Ollie Lawrence was traveling for business the week before Thanksgiving of 1994. His wife went to work on a Friday, came home and dropped their nanny about 6:30 p.m. Lawrence called Robin late Friday but got no answer. He called on Saturday as well. Anxious, he called a friend to check on Robin Lawrence.

The friend and another woman called the police and drove to the home on Reseca Lane, reports at the time show. They found Nicole, dehydrated with badly soiled diapers. And they found blood.

“Our young daughter had to spend the weekend in the house,” Ollie Lawrence said. “I advised a friend to go to the house because I hadn’t heard from Robin. That’s when she was found.”

Police said Robin Lawrence was stabbed and slashed repeatedly. They said there was no sign of forced entry, theft or sexual assault. Fairfax County police had initially considered her husband, then-USAir’s vice president for human resources, to be a possible suspect, Lawrence himself said, even though he was in the Bahamas the weekend she was slain.

“I was always disappointed in the detectives because they seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time as me as a suspect. I recognize and respect the fact they needed to rule me out. But I was out of the country and could prove it,” Lawrence said. He later added, “It didn’t impact me much because I knew I didn’t do it. But I was seriously concerned they were focusing on the wrong person in the case.”

Lawrence said he periodically spoke with detectives as years went by, checking to see whether there had been any developments in the case. The killing was a mystery and remained one for decades.

Lawrence said his family members are interested in learning as much about the case “as they can get” in light of the arrest. But he said the new charges bring an array of emotions connected to reliving Robin’s slaying.

“It does resurrect the loss and grief,” Lawrence said.

Eli Cory, Fairfax County’s deputy chief of police for investigations, said at the news conference that in 2019, detectives sent in a DNA sample from the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs, which developed a family tree of the suspect based on a relative’s DNA profile that had been entered into an online genealogical database.

After three years of working with DNA technology, Davis said, detectives went to Niskayuna to further their investigation.

Detectives saw Smerk placing trash bins at the end of his driveway and approached him, Davis said. They asked Smerk if they could swab his cheeks for a DNA sample, and he said yes, without hesitation, Davis said. Detectives took the sample and left their business card with Smerk.

After they got back to their hotel, Davis said detectives got a call. It was Smerk. He said he wanted to talk to detectives immediately, and went the local Niskayuna police station to turn himself in, Davis said. There, detectives listened as Smerk confessed to the crime, the chief said.

“He talked about killing Robin,” Davis said.