Closing the Cold Case of Robin Lawrence | Full Episode | Forensic Files

♪♪ ♪♪ -When you're dealing with a 30-year-old cold case... ♪♪ ...it seems like there's not a lot of hope.
♪♪ That's a great photo of Robin. -Mm-hmm. -But look what happened in the Robin Lawrence case.
-Something sparked it... -...that nobody ever expected that just caught everybody off guard.
♪♪ Her 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?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure." There's no answer at the front door,
so I 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 was no expression on it. I'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? -Here'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. I 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 gonna be a needle in the haystack, but I felt it was worth trying.
6, 7, 8, 9, 10 generations away from even these people. -And I think it's August of 2023.
She sends me an e-mail. 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. ♪♪
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Birds singing ] -So, 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 Jon 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, but you can see... -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. He is the boogeyman. ♪♪ -On November 20, 1994,
Robin's friend Laurie Lindberg had entered her home to check on her and saw blood on the bedroom walls
and Robin's 2-year-old daughter, Nicole, wandering around. Alarmed, Laurie 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. -'Cause you don't know how long she's been in that house by herself. -Right.
-Lead crime-scene detective Mark Garmin was one of the first on site. -This is what we determined to be the entry point to the home.
-According to Detective Garmin, who photographed the evidence, the intruder came through that window off the back deck --
the one Laurie 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.
-This 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.
-Garmin 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 blood 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.
Empty 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.
♪♪ -While investigators process the scene, officers at the hospital ask Laurie to call Robin's parents.
-Robin's dad answered. I think I said, "Robin is dead." But...what I remember is, um...
Jessie, her mom, m-must have just been in the -- or overheard 'cause she was just --
just wailing, just a... sort of primal... anguish. -Mm-hmm. -That was really horrible.
That's probably the most horrible thing [Voice breaking] that's ever happened to me, is calling.
[ Sniffles ] -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. I'll never forget that -- never. -He had to break the news to his surviving children,
including his daughter Mary Warr Cowans and his son Robert Warr Jr. -After the words "Robin is dead,"
I -- 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.
After 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. ♪♪ -Laurie first met Robin in ballet class. -I was like, "Oh, my God, this woman is beautiful."
But what was really fun about Robin was she's very personable, very fun-loving, just very down to earth.
-Laurie and Robin shared an apartment in Washington, D.C., around the time Robin was dating her future husband, Ollie.
Laurie says they were a great match. -Ollie is 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. -I think they had a relatively what I call "normal" [Chuckles]
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. -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? You think, "Oh, how convenient.
The weekend you go out of town for three days, your wife is brutally murdered." ♪♪
♪♪ -It just was surreal. It really was like, for me, walking in a -- through a dream state
'cause you just can't make sense of it. -Yeah. -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 'cause I never got a chance to see her one last time.
I always wanted to be able to say goodbye and see her. ♪♪ -As Robin's family mourned her death,
investigators pieced together a timeline and determined that the last time anyone had heard from Robin was around 6:00 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 to 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. Robin'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 Ollie -- that he...harmed her.
-And how 'bout 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 Garmin's eye while he was documenting the bathroom. -On the towel rod to the sliding tub door,
there's a washcloth. I do notice a small stain on this towel right here -- 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 Ovans, was just 8 years old when her Aunt Robin was killed.
-I 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." I just knew that they were still thinking of her.
-Can you describe what you lost when you lost Robin? ♪♪ -[Voice breaking] I think I lost an extension of myself...
♪♪ ...'cause she was the one who just taught me to be comfortable with who I was,
so...you -- you -- 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,
so 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. Um...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..."
-Right. -"...what happened to her child." And at that point, I said, "Well, just -- I have to just kind of let it go.
I have to let it go." -Then, decades later, in 2019, investigators turned to Parabon NanoLabs,
a DNA-technology company, hoping genetic genealogy could identify Robin's killer.
Ellen Greytak 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. -Greytak 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 -- 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,
and 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... -It 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. -But would anyone recognize him? ♪♪ ♪♪ -In 2021, nearly 30 years after Robin Lawrence's murder,
Parabon NanoLabs was tasked with producing a composite of the man investigators believed 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 most likely gonna 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.
-I've kind of outlined where his eyes are because I'm gonna 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 almost like
like a lighter brownish hair, and so I gave him a little bit lighter eyebrows to match what his hair color is gonna 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. -Does 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.
-I was really hoping that when Ollie 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, and they were the people
that were truly cousins to the suspect. Where 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 3 1/2 years, Liz finally had a lead, and it pointed her to a man named Stephan Smerk.
♪♪ -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 e-mail. 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'm thinking, "There's no way this is our guy."
-But according to Detective Jon 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."
♪♪ -Stephan Smerk 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. None. Stone-faced. -None. 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. -Yeah. -Consent form signed,
swab collected, packaged up. That was it. ♪♪ -After the visit, detectives checked in to their hotel.
But then Detective Wallace got an unexpected call. -It's Steve Smerk calling me,
and he says, "I'm at the police department to turn myself in." ♪♪ And 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.
-Smerk 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 gonna hang up. I need you to call 911 and tell them that you're there."
-Stephan Smerk's call was recorded. Wow. So, when do you tell him? -Oh, my God. I was freaking out, so I'm on --
-She freaked me out. -I run down to his room, and I'm banging on his door. I'm like, "We gotta go to the police department.
He's turning himself in." -Wallace also reached out to local police, and Stephan Smerk was taken into custody.
-The adrenaline was pumping so hard because the reality hit, and it sounds like he's gonna talk to us about it.
-Detective Long says they had to refocus fast and figure out how they would handle
Stephan Smerk's interrogation. -We need to make sure this is a sound interview that could potentially be used in court down the road.
-When they finally sat down with him... ...investigators say he didn't need much prompting.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -When investigators met with Stephan Smerk on September 7, 2023, they were skeptical.
-This doesn't happen every day, so we -- we had to really think through, "Well, why is he doing this?"
-Detectives had not yet received the results of the DNA sample Smerk had provided,
linking him definitively. -We needed to be very careful to make sure that we weren't getting a false confession.
-So then what was your approach gonna be? -We started talking about things like, "Hey, let's make sure
that he's gonna bring up details of the case without us telling him first." -He starts volunteering information, which is great.
-So it was just like he wanted to talk about, you know, his weekend or, uh, some other family event that he went to.
It was a very... calm conversation -- nonchalant. -Stephan Smerk told detectives
that back in November 1994, he was a 22-year-old soldier stationed at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia,
and on the night of the murder, he had been drinking beer. He says he had been taking ephedrine pills, a stimulant.
Smerk said he drove to Robin's neighborhood because he was familiar with the area.
He visited friends who stayed in a house nearby. Smerk confirmed he entered the house from the back deck
and told detectives he was wearing a ski mask and leather gloves. He said he went down the hall
to Robin's bedroom. He told investigators one of the reasons he enlisted was because he wanted to kill.
-Okay. -Detective Wallace knew it was critical to link him to that washcloth found in the bathroom,
so she asked him if he'd been injured that night. -That's when I knew that -- that we were in business
with putting him in the bathroom and why his DNA was there. That was the biggest confirmation.
-As the interview wrapped up, Detective Long asked Smerk if he wanted to express any remorse to Robin's family.
-I think what you see is 100% what you get from him -- arrogance, entitlement. He wanted to do it, so he did it.
And that's it. -Detective Wallace believes Stephan Smerk confessed because he knew he was caught
and wanted to turn himself in on his own terms. -It wasn't because he was sorry.
It wasn't because he was tired of running for 30 years. He wanted to maintain control.
-Former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, who reviewed the case for "48 Hours," agrees that Smerk wanted to control the narrative.
-He was prepared that he was gonna tell his version of the story. -O'Toole says she doesn't buy Smerk's claim
that Robin's murder was random. She classifies it as a mission-oriented homicide.
-He brought the weapon with him. He had a mask. He had gloves. ♪♪ It also happens to be on an evening
when the victim's husband is in a travel status. This was purposeful. Went inside somebody's home, took enormous risk.
So, that suggests to me more of a targeting than it does randomness. -In her analysis, O'Toole says she was struck by Smerk
identifying himself as a serial killer. -I am a serial killer who's only killed once.
-He did come across as someone that had admiration for them. -So, here's kind of, like, the big question, though.
Do serial killers stop killing? -Yes. They do. -According to O'Toole, serial offenders can sometimes channel their compulsion to kill
into other crimes, like stalking or voyeurism. -I think it's also possible that he engaged in other behaviors much less serious
than homicide that, um, satisfied him. -He has no criminal history of any kind. How unusual is that?
-Not very unusual. But here's the important thing to keep in mind. The absence of a rap sheet
does not mean that criminal behavior is absent. It means that they didn't get arrested for it.
-I'll take care of this process. -Okay. -After his confession, Stephan Smerk was arrested
and charged with the murder of Robin Lawrence. Detective Wallace says her first phone call
was to Robin's daughter, Nicole. -You could tell the shock, but she didn't, um, break down or crumble.
I could tell that she was like, "Okay, now my job is to notify the rest of the family."
♪♪ -How is it that he could live his life with his family when he blew up our family 30 years ago?
Where's the justice in that? ♪♪ -Robin's family prepared for the next step. -We really wanted to do a trial.
We wanted... the world to know... what he did, and we wanted the spectacle of that,
that satisfaction. -But would they get that chance? ♪♪ ♪♪ -A week after Stephan Smerk's interview with police...
-I'll take care of the process. -...forensic testing confirmed Stephan Smerk's DNA was a match to the blood on the washcloth
found in Robin's bathroom. ♪♪ -It's a one-in-over-7-million chance that it would not have been his DNA.
-On April 4, 2024, Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano's office presented the case at a preliminary hearing
to determine if there was enough evidence to move forward. -Look, I've dealt with murderers before.
I can tell you that, in my mind, Stephan Smerk stands alone as somebody who represents a true danger to the community.
♪♪ -Robin's family saw Stephan Smerk for the first time at the hearing. -I was amazed how big he was.
He needed two bailiffs around him. The first thing I thought of was like, "My aunt didn't stand a chance."
-Prosecutors played Smerk's confession, and the family heard the details of Robin's murder
in Smerk's own words. -There was no emotion. It didn't feel real. It just made me feel angry.
Like, how could he have done that? -The judge found probable cause that Stephen Smerk killed Robin
and allowed the case to proceed to a grand jury. On April 15th, a grand jury indicted him,
but six months later, he accepted a plea deal for first-degree murder. -We get guaranteed accountability.
-Descano says the agreement ensured Smerk would be held accountable. -We had the challenge of some witnesses passing,
other witnesses -- their memories becoming a little bit cloudy and not as sharp.
-Robin's family, however, say they were disappointed. -We wanted him to be put on trial.
-On March 7, 2025, Stephen Smerk returned to court for sentencing. As part of the mitigation strategy
for a more lenient sentence, his attorney, Dawn Butorac, told the judge that in the early '90s,
Smerk was a troubled young man struggling with alcohol and substance abuse. -He eventually decided, "I'm gonna join the military,"
thinking that that would be a good choice for him to maybe get his life stabilized.
-He said he joined the military so he could kill people. What did he mean by that?
-I never asked him what he meant by that. I think it was an idea that "If I go, maybe I can take my anger out on this.
Maybe this will get me back on the right track." -According to Butorac, Smerk was also crippled
with an undiagnosed mental illness. -It wasn't until several years later that he eventually was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder,
and when you add ephedra and alcohol, he was struggling a lot. -The FDA banned some ephedra products in 2004,
and Butorac says that was, in part, because when abused with other substances, they could trigger dangerous psychiatric side effects.
Did Steve Smerk tell you that he ever had hallucinations or heard voices or anything along those lines
while taking ephedra? -No, but you have to remember, at the time, also, he had undiagnosed bipolar,
so it's hard to figure out exactly... what his mental state was attributable to.
-She says by the time investigators came to Smerk's door nearly 30 years later, Smerk had sought help for his mental-health problems
and become sober. Butorac says her client confessed and waived his right to a trial
because he felt genuine remorse. But over the 30 years, did he think about Robin?
-Every day. -Every day? -Every day, he'd think about it. -But during his statement to investigators,
he doesn't express empathy or remorse. -He always wanted to accept responsibility.
Acceptance of responsibility is one form of remorse. -In the end, the judge sentenced Stephen Smerk
to the maximum sentence allowed under the plea deal -- 70 years with the possibility of parole.
-I think what he got, as long as he never comes out of prison, ever, brings closure for me.
-After the sentencing, Ollie Lawrence gave a statement to the press. -The Warr and Lawrence family
are grateful that justice has finally been done for the murder of our beloved Robin.
-Lauren answered a few questions with Robin's daughter, Nicole, by her side. -As much as it's a sigh of relief,
we still have to live with this. [Voice breaking] It just doesn't go away. -She's strong. She stood next to me,
and she held my hand. ♪♪ Oh, my God, if her mom could see us! [ Chuckles ] Um, it was great.
-How do you want people to remember your aunt? -I want people to remember her as creative,
exuberant, very vocal, caring, a beautiful mother. ♪♪ -She just had a light that shined from within.
-I feel like she is living through her art because her art... -Is everywhere. -...emotes.
♪♪ So, when you do look at her art, what do you see? -I kind of see the spirit of Robin.
who she was, how she looked at the world, you know, through her eyes. And that was good things,
happy things, warm things. ♪♪ ♪♪

A gifted artist is murdered in her home. Her toddler is left at the crime scene to fend for herself. "48 Hours" correspondent Anne-Marie Green reports. Watch more full episodes of "48 Hours" on Pluto TV.

True crime. Real justice. "48 Hours" investigates the most intriguing crime and justice cases that touch on all areas of the human experience including greed and passion. "48 Hours," which premiered in 1988, has developed a rich history of original reporting and impact journalism that has helped exonerate wrongly convicted people, caused cold cases to be reopened and solved, and along the way changed lives.

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Brief Summary

The episode details Robin Lawrence's murder, the investigation, and Stephan Smerk's confession 30 years later.

Key points

The Discovery of a Murder. Robin Lawrence was brutally murdered, leaving her family shattered and searching for answers.
The Search for Answers. Detectives explore the possibility of a personal connection to the murder.
A Family's Heartbreak. The emotional toll of Robin's murder on her family is profound and lasting.
A Breakthrough in the Case. Years later, a volunteer genealogist uncovers a potential suspect.
The Unusual Demeanor. When approached by detectives, the suspect's reaction raises suspicions.
Smerk Turns Himself In. Steve Smerk calls the police to confess to murder, shocking detectives.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This is our family. This is our lives.

Reflecting on the impact of the crime.

2:17WatchOct 31, 2025

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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