Post Mortem | Closing the Cold Case of Robin Lawrence

0:10Welcome to Postmortem. I'm Natalie Morales, filling in today as your host to talk about a story that 48 Hours correspondent Anne-Marie Green reported on. It's about the cold case murder of Robin War Lawrence, which was finally solved after nearly 30 years with the help of advances in DNA testing and the tireless efforts of a pro bono genetic genealogist. Anne-Marie, so good to have you with us. What a fascinating story to be able to report on.

0:40Natalie Morales:It really is. It's a case a lot of people thought would never be solved. And just want to remind our listeners once again, if you haven't listened to the 48 Hours episode yet, you can find the full audio just below this episode in your podcast feed. Go take a listen, then come on back here for our conversation. Well, it was on the night of November 18th, 1994, when Robin War Lawrence was at her home in Springfield, Virginia, when an intruder broke in and stabbed her multiple times to her death. Her husband, Ollie, was away on a business trip in the Bahamas, and after being unable to reach her all weekend, he then asked their friend, Lori Lindberg, to stop by and check on his wife.

1:22Well, two days after the murder, Lori entered the house and saw blood on the wall. And of course, the couple's two-year-old daughter, Nicole, just wandering around by herself. So tragic. I mean, to think of little Nicole there at that young age, you know, witnessed whatever she witnessed. Yeah.

1:42Natalie Morales:Well, that's the thing about it. You know, that's what Lori says in the hour, that she could just see this sort of vacant expression on this little girl's face. she knows like there's something really really bad that has happened and she doesn't even really venture any further in she sort of peeks down the hall she sees that something has happened in the bedroom and immediately she's like out of there she grabs nicole and you know she's with another friend so they call um police yeah and investigators they learn that ollie her husband who as we said was away on a business trip in the Bahamas, they find out that he had been having an affair.

2:23Was that something that aroused suspicion with investigators early on, Anne-Marie?

2:28Natalie Morales:Yeah, I mean, you know, Natalie, we've done so many of these. Of course, it's the spouse is sort of the first person you look at. And then you find out he's having an affair, but, you know, they thoroughly vet him. His alibi checks out. He is in the Bahamas, very far away from the scene of the crime. And they also, you know, look at the woman that he was having the affair with as well. And they're able to kind of rule her out. And eventually his he is cleared. I should say Robin's family never suspected Ali. Yes, you know, they were surprised he was having an affair. But as far as they were concerned then and now, he would never do anything like this.

3:08So what evidence did investigators have from that crime scene? And again, you know, this is dating back to 1994. And, you know, this case was cold for over 30 years. So I imagine there wasn't a lot to go on initially. There wasn't.

3:24Natalie Morales:There were no fingerprints. It's certainly a bloody scene and it's a messy scene in the bedroom. But other than that, there is really not a lot. But we have this one crime scene investigator. And I mean, their job is to look at minute details and collect anything that could possibly be evidence. And he notices a little bit of blood in the bathroom on a washcloth. Other than that, the bathroom is pretty clean, almost pristine. Now, they had uploaded the sample to CODIS. There's no matches. But boy, 30 years later, it was going to make a heck of a difference when it came to solving this case. And all these years later, you interviewed Robin's family, including her sister, Mary, her brother, Robert Jr., and their father, Robert Sr.

4:23Natalie Morales:So Robert Sr. was 100 when we interviewed him. He's 101 now. And I have never met somebody this age who is just so with it. You know, he lives on his own, his own apartment. Somebody comes in, you know, to help him out a bit, but he's on his own. The apartment is the cutest, most picture perfect little apartment with Robin's art everywhere. And I'm just going to I'm going to have to look down a little bit at my note to sort of list off some of the stuff that Robert Sr. has done in his lifetime. Right. He was the first elected African-American school board member and elected council member in Syracuse.

5:04Natalie Morales:In 1962, he became the president of the Syracuse chapter of the NAACP, the first African-American engineering consultant at General Electric. My goodness. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're all they're all like super accomplished. And so was Robin as an accomplished artist. Yes. And he was so incredibly proud of her. She had just created that first medal, right? The Martin Luther King Jr. medal, which we see in the story. And I can't help but to think where she would have gone from there. What would have inspired her? Because when you look at her art, it's the range of styles, of subject matters, you know, individuals to landscapes, different types of mediums.

5:55Natalie Morales:I mean, who knows where she would have gone? So decades after the murder in 2019, cold case detectives, they start digging through the case again to see if there is anything new, new advances in DNA technology and what they could possibly use to be able to push this case along. So how significant were the advancements and the technology that then allowed them to relook at this case once again. Yeah, it's huge. Investigators send the DNA to a company called Parabon Nano Labs. What they figure out is that the killer is of European descent, right? So that helped in terms of identifying a possible suspect.

6:39Natalie Morales:But still, I mean, Parabon said to investigators, There's this is probably a zero probability that this case will be solved. Yeah, I mean, this is 2019. They get this little bit of a breakthrough, but still, I imagine, has to be so frustrating. And investigators said that they could have walked away at that point, having reached what they thought was the end of the road when it came to what they could extract from that DNA. But then one person did come out of the woodwork and you got to give so much credit to Liz. She worked this case pro bono hundreds of hours. She's a volunteer with the police department, an amateur genealogist.

7:18But she threw all her knowledge and all her effort into helping try to solve this case, which is so remarkable. So Liz is fascinating.

7:27Natalie Morales:First off, she didn't even really want to talk. She preferred to stay anonymous. She wouldn't let us use her last name. Liz's background. She was a successful attorney. She had a very successful career. Um, and she retires and decides, no, I'll probably spend some time with my grandkids. I'll help, help my daughter out. But when you have a mind like that, your retirement is not like other people's retirement. You got to stay busy. Um, she was looking for a way to give back to the community and she had a passion for genealogy. And so this was sort of the perfect opportunity for her. But this is a hard case, right?

8:08Natalie Morales:it's probably estimated that she put in 1400 hours of work on this case over three years. COVID hits, she can't go anywhere. So she's in the house on the computer. And there were so many times she said that she would be like, that's it. You know, there's nothing more I can do. And then she would lie in bed and be like, wait a minute, wait a minute. What about this? What about that? What about that? And she just never gave up. Amazing. Thank goodness for people like her who just throw all their knowledge at something. And she finally cracked the puzzle. She solved it. Well, when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about Liz, the genetic genealogist, and how she was able to piece together that family tree that then led investigators to their suspect, Stephen Smirk.

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10:06Welcome back. Well, let's get into now how Liz was able to narrow in on the suspected killer, Stephen Smirk.

10:13Natalie Morales:So there is a sample of DNA that comes from that washcloth. What Parabon did is upload the DNA sample to two sites, Family Tree DNA and GEDmatch. These sites allow law enforcement to access the database. You can opt out of that if you don't want, you know, your information to be seen by law enforcement. But generally, they have quite large databases, which allows them to then, you know, identify possible familial connections when they have suspect DNA. And so from that comes all of these cousins, over a thousand cousins. So what she has to literally do, Liz does, is build family trees for all of these cousins until she finds the right person.

11:03Natalie Morales:And she does that by going all as far back as she can and identifies the one side of the family and the other side of the family in Europe. She traces them over to Canada where they settle. She then parses out the people who moved to California and slowly finds one family where the two family lines crisscross, follows that down and sees a family that has two sons. One of those sons was in Virginia at the time of the murder. And that is the name that she sends to the police. I mean, the amount of work and effort that went into that major breakthrough. What was that moment like for her, Anne-Marie?

11:54I mean, she said it was like magic.

11:56Natalie Morales:Like you hear the phrase needle in the haystack. It was a needle in a needle stack, right? Like, what are the odds of her figuring this out? It was phenomenal. OK, so the investigators get this possible match, but they also then have to think, you know, okay, does this guy fit with who we think it could be? And in 2021, investigators, they worked with a forensic artist at Parabon Nano Labs. This was so fascinating to me because with that DNA sample, then an artist at the lab there then can create a phenotype drawing, a rendering of what they believe the suspect might look like. That to me was a moment of like, oh my gosh, they could figure out the shape of his face, his chin size, his nose size, his hair.

12:46I mean, it's remarkable.

12:48Natalie Morales:Like that is what surprised me the most about using DNA in this way, because I didn't think that it could get into that kind of detail. And they then compare that sketch to Stephen Smirk's high school yearbook photo, and it bore such a striking resemblance. I mean, it was pretty good. It was pretty damn good. I'm going to play for you now an unaired clip of Mary and Robert Jr.'s reaction to Liz's help on the case. If you could say something to Liz, what would you say to her? Thank you. Thank you very much for your hard work and dedication. I would say you are an angel, Liz. You brought comfort and closure to this family after so many years.

13:46And if it wasn't for your tenacity and hard work and keep going, we would not know who killed Robin. And that means everything. That means everything to us.

14:05Natalie Morales:You can see they're soft-spoken and measured. You know, I think it was important for them to kind of maintain emotional control. You know what I mean? They're reserved. And so this tragedy is completely kind of out of the norm of anything that they would have envisioned for their family. What we learn about Stephen Smirk in 2023, he was living in Niskayuna. That's a town in upstate New York. And, you know, it's incredible to me, as we learn in the hour, he had no criminal history. I mean, not even a parking ticket, Anne-Marie. It's more than I can say for me. I think I have a couple of parking tickets.

14:53Natalie Morales:Yeah, it's remarkable. At least on the surface, this is as average of a guy as you can get. The police learned that he's a computer programmer living in upstate New York. You mentioned Niskayuna, you know, smallish town, married to a defense attorney. He has two kids in high school. and just to add sort of another weird coincidence is uh mary's daughter lauren actually went to the same high school as steven smirk's kids um obviously not at the same time lauren's older than them but i mean that's how kind of physically close these two families had been but there is really nothing particularly remarkable about this guy and the way he's living his life you know when when police finally catch up with them.

15:43Yeah. Except when investigators show up at his front door there in upstate New York and they knock on the door, he opens it up. He willingly lets them inside. And, you know, to the detectives, what was so interesting, he didn't seem surprised at all when they start to ask him questions about a murder that's going back 30 years. I mean, he didn't ask a single follow-up question and he willingly provides his DNA. And then after the detectives left, he then turns himself into the Niskayuna Police Department. I mean, what did investigators think at the time about all of that?

16:20Natalie Morales:The intention was to just drive by his house and take a look and then go check into their hotel. But then when they saw him, they thought, well, what the heck, let's just go over there and talk to him. So they were not expecting things to unfold as quickly as they did. He welcomed them in. They talked for a while. And they were shocked when just a few hours later, he is turning himself in. I don't know what was going through his mind. Detectives Melissa Wallace and John Long told us that Smirks told them that his wife said something along the lines of do the right thing. But Stephen Smirk's wife had no idea this was part of his past.

17:03Natalie Morales:And he says she had no idea. Well, that interrogation was so chilling when he said he openly says and admits I'm a serial killer, but I've only killed once before. Yeah. I mean, that took my breath away. I was like, wow. So what do they start to learn as investigators dig into his background? What do they find? We spoke to his defense attorney who gave us a little more information about his past. His parents are divorced. His mother, when his mother left, she moved in with another woman. After this divorce, things changed in his life. He kind of fell into a rough crowd. There was an interest with that crowd and interest in studying sort of the occult.

17:52Natalie Morales:There was some drug use. But then, you know, he meets his wife the same year that he kills Robin and he credits meeting her with kind of what prompted him to really turn his life around. She talks to him about some of his anger problems, some of his drinking issues, and he goes to rehab and he gets sober and he kind of is on the road to recovery at that point. So later on, this is 2024, he's already pleading guilty. He undergoes a forensic psychological evaluation. It was done by Dr. Marcus Van Sickle. He is the defense's witness.

18:50Natalie Morales:Mary Ellen O'Toole, who you see in the hour, who we asked to review these documents. She was not a part of this case. She thinks it's so low, it's suspiciously low, that maybe he was trying to game the test a little bit. He says that he has an undiagnosed mental illness. And I should also point out that he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the early 2000s. It's something that officers didn't find out about till much later. But this is part of what he says was his you know, undiagnosed mental illness that he may have been suffering from in the 90s that he says may explain some of his behavior.

19:28But there's no evidence at this point, though. Or was there anything that connected Smirk to Robin? I mean, did investigators think this was a totally random attack?

19:40Natalie Morales:I mean, he says it is. He says that he just, you know, he had this compulsion that night and he didn't know she was home alone and he just picked the house randomly. Mary Ellen O'Toole, who once again, I'll say, you know, wasn't a part of this case, just reviewed the documents, finds that suspicious. His assertion that it was completely random. So I want to actually play a little bit more from a former FBI profiler, Mary Ellen O'Toole. It doesn't feel like it's a random killing to me. In the FBI, we do an assessment of victims, and it's based on their lifestyle. And this victim lived a pretty low-risk lifestyle, and she is in her own home, and it's at night.

20:28And it's a low-crime area of Fairfax County. So you have an offender, basically, who breaks into the home and seems to have some kind of understanding of the layout of the home. At least the behavior suggests that. But you also have an offender who is thinking ahead enough to bring gloves and to wear a cover for their face, to bring the weapon and to take the weapon with them. And I think it's also very interesting that it also happens to be at night on an evening when the victim's husband is in a travel status. So all of those features, for me, do tend to take away some of the randomness of it.

21:21So there you go. In October 2024, Stephen Smirk accepted a plea deal for first-degree murder. He was later sentenced to the maximum sentence allowed under the plea deal. That's 70 years with the possibility of parole. Smirk will be eligible for parole in 2037. So, Anne-Marie, does the War Lawrence family feel, though, that justice has been served, at least knowing finally who the killer is and knowing that he is behind bars, but yet they didn't get a trial?

21:51Natalie Morales:I think they were incredibly relieved to have identified the killer. They wanted a trial. They felt like he kind of got off a little bit by not having to sit there and really hear the damage that was done, you know? this is what I'm going to I'm like pulling out this book so I told you how the war lawrence families is incredibly interesting family and Robert war senior actually wrote a book covering the family and he writes about what an amazing person Robin was and he also writes about Nicole and how well Nicole is doing and how she graduated from university she's traveled abroad and worked as an au pair.

22:33Natalie Morales:She is now married. She works in the hospitality industry. And Nicole is doing fine, which I think a lot of people would be sort of curious about. He writes about when he heard that Stephen Smirk had been arrested. And he said, I cried and grieved for the many years, not knowing who killed Robin or why. My beloved wife, Jessie, died without ever knowing the person responsible would pay for their crime. I shouted hallelujah when we received a phone call that Robin's killer had been found after 29 years. Well, we can only imagine that at least finally having an answer has to give them all some peace.

23:13Anne-Marie, once again, such great reporting. Thank you so much for bringing the hour to us. And I do want to remind our listeners, if you like this episode, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. you