Closing the Cold Case of Robin Lawrence

0:12When you're dealing with a 30-year-old Cole case, it seems like there's not a lot of hope. It's a great photo of Robin. But look what happened in the Robin Lawrence case. Something sparked it. That nobody ever expected. It just caught everybody off guard.

0:42Her husband, Ollie, had been trying to reach Robin all weekend. Ollie was out of the country. Who else was in the house? Nicole. Her baby. Well, Ollie contacted me. He said, would you mind going over to the house and checking on her? I was like, yeah, sure. There's no answer at the front door. So, went around to the back. So, when you go around to the back deck, what do you notice? That the window screen is cut. That was the first time I thought, oh my God, something is wrong here. I had to climb in through the window, and Nicole comes down the hall. Her eyes were just so big, and her little face was just, there's no expression on it.

1:30I'm going down the hall, and I can see into the master bedroom. And I can see on the wall these large splatters and swaths of blood. I was terrified, and I went and I called the police. There was a very, very violent attack on Robin. She was stabbed 49 times. It looks like a personal attack. It looked like Nicole had been kind of roaming around the house. Clearly, she had been in that room with her mom. It's hard to think about. It's like a horror movie, but it's not a movie. This is our family. This is our lives. This was Robin's life. I did think that maybe it was someone she knew. That always kind of sat with my mind, like, who did she know that could have done this?

2:32Here's the photo of the washcloth where the key piece of evidence is a washcloth that they find in the bathroom and it has blood on both sides. I knew that we had a really strong DNA profile, which obviously stood out. So detectives just kept waiting to get that phone call from the lab saying that we have a match. And unfortunately that call never came. And then just another year would go by and another year would go by. So you switch tracks and try what we call genetic genealogy. and that was becoming really big at that time. That's when we turned to the help of a volunteer, and she said, genealogy is a hobby of mine.

3:18I dabble in it on the side. I'd be willing to do this case for free when I have spare time. I knew it was going to be a needle in the haystack, but I thought it was worth trying. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten generations away from even these people. And I think it's August of 2023. She sends me an email. She says, I think I found someone of interest. What happens as you start looking into him? Well, we find out computer programmer up in New York, married to a defense attorney, two kids in high school, nice house in the suburbs, not so much as a speeding ticket on his background. I am a serial killer who's only killed once.

4:05Ann Marie Green reports, closing the cold case of Robin Lawrence.

4:13So here's the crime scene pictures. There's a bunch of contact sheets in here. You can tell it starts from the pictures from the outside of the house and then moves in. Cold case detectives Melissa Wallace and John Long of the Fairfax County Police Department began reviewing Robin Lawrence's murder case in April of 2021. That's like your worst nightmare. Here's the bedroom. Obviously, her body's here. They were struck by the sheer violence of the attack on the 37-year-old mother. It looked brutal. Is that blood on the book? That's the reason why you tell your loved ones to make sure that your doors are locked at night.

4:53He is the boogeyman.

4:59On November 20th, 1994, Robin's friend Lori Lindberg had entered her home to check on her and saw blood on the bedroom walls and Robin's two-year-old daughter, Nicole, wandering around. Alarmed, Lori called 911 and then rushed the little girl to the hospital. Although Nicole did not appear hurt, she had undergone a liver transplant after she was born, and her health was fragile. Because, of course, she's taking immunosuppressive medications. I mean, this is life-saving medication. She needs to have it. Because you don't know how long she's been in that house by herself. Right. Lead crime scene detective Mark Garman was one of the first on site.

5:47This is what we determined to be the entry point to the home. According to Detective Garman, who photographed the evidence, the intruder came through that window off the back deck, the one Lori had used to get inside. He entered the house the same way. I had no idea what the scene looked like until I walked around the corner into the master bedroom. Tell me the state that Robin was in when you saw her. Very damaged. A lot of knife wounds. Severe, gaping knife wound in her neck. Unbelievable number of defensive wounds on her hands. Knife wounds in her back, on her legs. He says signs of a struggle were obvious in the room.

6:36This is the phone that was on the floor near Mrs. Lawrence. The phone cord was cut. She was assaulted in the bed and then fought her way out of the bed and continued to fight and struggle. Garman says one of the first things that stood out were bloody tissues scattered around the house and near Robin's body. He believes it was Robin's daughter, Nicole, who left them behind, trying to help her mother. Even at that age, kids know what blood is, and bloods come 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. And there was another heart-wrenching discovery.

7:17Empty baby bottles had been left around her mother's body. Having kids, when they got hungry, they brought you your baby bottle. And that's what I'm thinking. Nicole would have taken it to mom.

7:31While investigators processed the scene, Officers at the hospital asked Lori to call Robin's parents. Robin's dad answered. I think I said, Robin is dead. But what I remember is, Jessie, her mom, must have just been overheard because she was just wailing, just a sort of primal anguish. That was really horrible. That's probably the most horrible thing that's ever happened to me, is calling. Robin's father, Robert Warr Sr., a World War II veteran and now 101 years old, says he tried to forget that call, but one memory has never left him. My granddaughter was right next to where she was murdered.

8:33I'll never forget that. No. He had to break the news to his surviving children, including his daughter, Mary War Coens, and his son, Robert War Jr. After the words, Robin is dead, it was like... A nightmare. Yeah. You're just like, your world shattered. Mary says in those first few days, they didn't have a clear picture of what had happened to their sister. The details were very sketchy and slow to come. And the police asked, well, do you know anybody who had a grudge or something against Robin? And of course, the answer is no. Robin was a gifted artist with a fine arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University.

9:23After college, she was selected to mold the first medal for the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize, which was awarded to Rosa Parks. That was a big deal. And for my parents, who grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, during Jim Crow, and they could not ride in the front of the bus. They could not go to the zoo except on Tuesdays. That was a big deal. Robin's father, Robert Sr., says his daughter's accomplishments were his greatest source of pride. She was a powerful lady in this world. Her drawings are not just paintings, they are powerful. Lori first met Robin in ballet class. I was like, oh my God, this woman's beautiful.

10:17But what was really fun about Robin was she's very personable, very fun-loving, just very down-to-earth. Lori and Robin shared an apartment in Washington, D.C. Around the time Robin was dating her future husband, Ollie, Lori says they were a great match. Ollie has a very calm and kind demeanor, and you kind of feel very confident around him, very at ease with him. The couple were married on New Year's Eve 1989. Three years later, they welcomed their daughter, Nicole. At the time of her death, Robin was working in advertising. Ollie, who was away on a business trip in the Bahamas, was an executive at an airline.

11:02I think they had a relatively, what I call normal, family life. They were working on doing home improvements, getting the yard fixed up. Now that home with so much promise was an active crime scene. There were valuables that were in the bedroom. There was cash, there was jewelry. There wasn't anything stolen. one. Investigators suspected Robin was killed by someone she knew. They started looking at the family dynamic. They started looking at the marriage. Was Ollie cooperative? He was. But as authorities dug further, they learned something. Ollie had been having an affair with a colleague. Then what does that mean?

11:51You think, oh, how convenient. The weekend you go out of town for three days. Your wife is brutally murdered.

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13:17It just was surreal. It really was like, for me, walking through a dream state. Because you just can't make sense of it. Just three days after what would have been Robin's 38th birthday, on November 26, 1994, Her family and friends gathered for her funeral. We were still very much just bewildered and lost. Mary says Robin's injuries were so severe, the family had a closed casket. And 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.

14:08As Robin's family mourned her death, investigators pieced together a timeline and determined that the last time anyone had heard from Robin was around 6 p.m. on Friday, November 18th. We believe Robin was killed around 9.30ish. Her body was discovered two days later. Investigators zeroed in on her husband, Ollie, who they had discovered was having an affair. They followed up on his alibi. The detectives flew down in the Bahamas, confirmed that he was on the flight he was supposed to be on, he was at the hotel he was supposed to be at. Detectives also interviewed Ollie's lover, but found no evidence she was involved.

14:52Robin's sister and brother were surprised to learn about the affair, but they say they never believed Ollie had anything to do with Robin's murder. I never thought that he harmed her. And how about you? Did it ever cross your mind? Maybe he's involved in this somehow. No, I didn't think that. He's not that type of person. Ollie chose not to talk to 48 Hours about his experience. Investigators didn't have much else to go on. The killer left no fingerprints. But something had caught crime scene detective Mark Garman's eye while he was documenting the bathroom. On the towel rod to the sliding tub door, there's a washcloth.

15:37I do notice a small stain on this towel right here, a small brownish stain. That brown stain turned out to be blood, and authorities extracted DNA from it. But it didn't match anyone close to the case, including Ollie or the woman he had had a relationship with. Detectives believed it belonged to Robin's killer and uploaded it to the FBI's national database. The suspect's DNA is uploaded to CODIS. Yes. But CODIS also returned no matches, and with no new leads, the investigation stalled. How much did the adults tell you? Nothing. Mary's daughter, Lauren Ovens, was just eight years old when her Aunt Robin was killed.

16:26I remember her being angelic. She says even though her family avoided the topic, she could feel the void Robin's murder left behind. Out of all of my family members, she was the most like me. So everybody always called me Robin. It just knew that they were still thinking of her. Can you describe what you lost when you lost Robin? I think I lost an extension of myself. Because she was the one who just taught me to be comfortable with who I was. So I lost a piece of me. Lauren says she stayed close with her cousin Nicole, who rarely spoke about her mother. I think she didn't know much about her mother.

17:19So there wasn't really much to share. And 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. The family eventually resigned themselves to the idea that the case may never be solved. When my mother died, that was kind of like, well, she went to her grave not knowing what happened to her child. And at that point, I said, well, I have to just kind of let it go. I have to let it go. Then, decades later, in 2019, investigators turned to Parabon Nano Labs, a DNA technology company, hoping genetic genealogy could identify Robin's killer.

18:07Ellen Graytack is the director of bioinformatics at Parabon. We take DNA from a crime scene. We upload it to GEDmatch and to Family Tree DNA, which are two databases. And what they give us back is people in our database who share DNA with your unknown person. Gray Tack says that while their analysis showed Robin's killer likely had European ancestry, tracing him through his relatives proved nearly impossible. So in this case, the database matches were just really distant. They only shared little tiny pieces of DNA, which means that their shared ancestor with our unknown person was pretty far back in time.

18:53And that means that those people had a lot of descendants today. Parabon 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. Investigators say they could have walked away. But Liz, an amateur genealogist and volunteer with the police department, who asked that her last name not be used, offered to take on the case in her spare time for free. I just felt I wanted to give something back to the community, and I believed that I could actually be helpful in solving some of these cases. Investigators gave Liz everything Parabon had uncovered about the suspect's ethnicity.

19:36It was about half Eastern European, about 25 % Irish. Another 25 % was a combination of, I think, English and Italian and Scandinavian. Along with a list of cousins who shared his DNA. So what I got was approximately 1 ,500 cousins. I was not certain that I could crack it. There were no first cousins or second cousins. There was really more fourth to sixth. As Liz worked to trace the suspect through his family tree, Detective Wallace turned to another DNA tool and asked Parabon to produce a phenotyping sketch of Robin's killer. DNA phenotyping, it means actually predicting what that person looked like from their DNA.

20:19But would anyone recognize him?

20:26Tonight's 48 Hours will continue.

20:41In 2021, nearly 30 years after Robin Lawrence's murder, Parabon NanoLabs was tasked with producing a composite of the man investigators believe was her killer. So I get a report from our bioinformatics scientists, and it lays out all the predictions from the DNA. Scientists created this facial model based on the DNA predictions. It starts off with his skin color, which he's predicted to have very fair or fair skin color. He's mostly going to have a larger chin than average, wider jaw or cheeks than average, kind of a narrower nose than average. Tom Shaw, a forensic artist at Parabon, says his job was to refine the model by applying other details like hair and eye color.

21:32I've kind of outlined where his eyes are because I'm going to be putting new ones in. So here's one, kind of that dark blue that are predicted. I'll do eyebrows. We're looking at kind of, looks like a lighter brownish hair. And so I gave him a little bit lighter eyebrows to match what his hair color is going to be. I'll go and find a hairstyle, something generic. Shaw says DNA doesn't reveal a person's age, so the composites are generated as a young adult, typically around 25 years old. So this is him. Did this look like their mailman? Was this the neighbor's kid? Was it somebody from work? Detective Melissa Wallace set up a video call with Robin's husband, Ollie, to see if he recognized the man in the composite.

22:24I was really hoping that when Ali saw that, that he would go, oh my gosh, that looks exactly like so-and-so. And did he? He did not. He said, that doesn't spark my memory at all. Looks like nobody I know. The investigation stalled again. But behind the scenes, volunteer genealogist Liz kept working with that list of 1 ,500 cousins distantly related to the suspect. Liz had eventually traced some of the suspect's ancestors to Canada, where they had settled. That's where she found two cousins that were not related to each other. And so I ended up with two trees that were highly reliable. They were the people that were truly cousins to the suspect.

23:09Where did their two trees come together? Liz says if she could figure out where those two trees were linked through a marriage, the suspect would be a descendant of that couple. And what I found was this woman on this tree married this man on this tree. That was it. That was the aha moment. That was when I realized that he is a descendant of this couple right here. After three and a half years, Liz finally had a lead and it pointed her to a man named Steven Smirk. I felt like this really was him. I didn't know it for certain, but I believed it was. Contacted the detectives. So she sends me an email.

23:52She says, I think I found someone of interest. What happens as you start looking into him? Well, we find out. Computer programmer up in New York, married to a defense attorney, two kids in high school, nice house in the suburbs, not so much as a speeding ticket on his background. I'm thinking, there's no way this is our guy. But according to Detective John Long, things got a bit more interesting when they found his yearbook photo at age 16. It looked very similar to the phenotyping sketch. We're like, well, you know, maybe this does make sense.

24:34Stephen Smirk lived in Niskayuna, a town in upstate New York. so investigators decided to pay him a visit. Does he know you're coming? No, no. They were hoping he would cooperate and provide his DNA. Wallace and Long say he appeared to be home alone, so they knocked on his door. All we said is we are detectives from Fairfax County, Virginia, and we're looking into a cold case from the 90s. Do you mind if we come in and talk to you? He said, sure. He invited us in. And... Okay, hold on a minute. So you say, we're from Virginia. We're investigating this murder. His initial reaction? No reaction.

25:19None. None. Stone face. There was no surprise. There was no fear. Nothing. They found his demeanor unusual. When we're asking for DNA, this 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, swab collected, packaged up. That was it. After the visit, detectives checked into their hotel. But then Detective Wallace got an unexpected call. It's Steve Smart calling me.

26:01And he says, I'm at the police department to turn myself in.

26:08and I said, turn yourself in for what? And he said, I'm here to turn myself in for the murder. A million things started going through my mind. Smirk told detectives he was having trouble getting into the Niskayuna Police Department, which was locked. So then I'm thinking it must be a smaller police station, and I said, okay, what I need you to do is we're going to hang up. I need you to call 911 and tell them that you're there. Stephen Smirk's call was recorded. 9-1-1, the address of your emergency I'm actually here to turn myself in for a full case crime You're here to turn yourself in? Well, they collected DNA So it's only my time Wow, so when do you tell him?