Closing the Cold Case of Robin Lawrence | Post Mortem | Forensic Files

Welcome to Postmortem. I'm Natalie Morales filling in today as your host to talk about [music] a story that 48 hours
correspondent Anarie 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 genealogologist. Amarie, so good to have you with us. What a fascinating story to
be able to report on. >> 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 Warrence was at
her home in Springfield, Virginia, when an intruder broke in and stabbed her multiple times to her death. Her husband
Ali was away on a business trip in the Bahamas. And after being unable to reach her all weekend, he then asked their
friend Lorie Lindberg to stop by and check on his wife. Well, 2 days after the murder, Lorie entered the house and
saw blood on the wall and of course the couple's 2-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. Well, that's the thing about it, you know, that's what Lorie 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
peaks down the hall. She sees that something has happened in the 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 and investigators they learn that Ali, 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. Was that something that aroused suspicion with
investigators early on? Amory. >> 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. They they his alibi checks out. He is in the Bahamas, very far away um from the scene of the crime.
And 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. Um, 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. So, what evidence did investigators have from that crime
scene? 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. Uh, there were no fingerprints. Um, it's certainly a
bloody scene and it's a a messy scene in the bedroom. Um, 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, you know, uploaded the sample to Cotus. 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 this case. And all these
years later, you interviewed Robin's family, including her sister Mary, her brother Robert Jr., and their father um
Robert Senior. So Robert Senior was 100 when we interviewed him. He's 101 now. And I have never met somebody this age
who is just so with it. Um 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 the the cutest, most picture perfect little apartment with
Robin's art everywhere. And I'm just gonna I'm gonna have to look down a little bit at my note to sort of list
off some of the stuff that Robert Senior has done in his lifetime. Right. He was
the first elected African-American school board member and elected council member in Syracuse. In 1962, he became
the president of the Syracuse chapter of the NAACP, the first African-American engineering consultant at uh General
Electric. >> My goodness. Wow. What a list. [laughter] >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're all they're
all like super accomplished. Super. >> And so was Robin as an accomplished artist.
>> Yes. And he was so incredibly proud of her. She had just created that first metal, 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. Um 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 uh different types of mediums 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 in 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 Nanolabs. What they figure out is that the killer is of European descent.
Right. So that helped in terms of identifying a possible suspect, but still I mean Parabon said to
investigators 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 genealogologist, but she threw all her knowledge and all her effort into helping try to solve this case,
which is so remarkable. So, Liz is fascinating. 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, nah, 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? It's it's probably estimated that she put in 1,400 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 the puzzle. She solved it. Well, when we
come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about Liz, the genetic genealogologists, [music]
and how she was able to piece together that family tree that then led investigators to their suspect, Steven
Smirk. Welcome back. [music] Well, let's get into now how Liz was able to narrow in
on the suspected killer, Steven Smirk. So, there is the sample of DNA that comes from that washcloth. What Parabon
did is upload uh the DNA sample to two sites, Family Tree DNA and Jed Match. 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. Um, but generally they have quite large databases which allows them
to then uh, 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. 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, Amry? I mean, she said it was like magic. 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.
Okay. So, they 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. I mean, it's remarkable. 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 Steven Smirk's high school yearbook photo and it bore such a striking resemblance. I mean, it was it
was pretty good. It was pretty damn good. I'm going to play for you now an unaired clip of Mary and Robert Junior'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 I would say you are an angel, Liz.
You you brought comfort and closure to this family after so many years. >> And if it wasn't for your tenacity and
hard work and keep keep going, we would not know who killed Robin. And that means everything.
That means everything to us. Um, you can see they're soft-spoken and measured. Um, you know, I think it was
important for them to kind of maintain um emotional control, you know what I mean? They're
reserved. Um, and so this tragedy is completely kind of out of the norm of anything that that they
would have envisioned for their family. what we learn about Stephen Smirk. In 2023, he was living in Niskeuna, that's
a town in upstate New York. And you know, it's it's incredible to me, as we learn in the hour, he had no criminal
history. I mean, not even a parking ticket, an Marie, that's more than I could say for me. I think I have a
couple of parking tickets. >> Yeah, it's remarkable. At least on the surface, this is as average of a guy as
you can get. Uh the police learned that he's a computer programmer living in upstate New York. You mentioned
Niskauna, you know, smalish town, married to an 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 him. >> Yeah. 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 in to the Nisuna Police Department. I mean, what did investigators think at the time about
all of that? They 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. Um, 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 Don Long uh told us that Smirks told them that his wife said something along the lines
of do the right thing. But Steven Smurf's wife had no idea this was part of his past. And he says she
had no idea. Well, that interrogation was so chilling when he he said he openly says and admits, "I'm a serial
killer, but I've only killed once before." Um, yeah. I mean, that took my breath away. I was like, "Wow." Um, so
what do they start to learn as investigators dig into his background? What do they find? Um, we spoke to his
defense attorney who gave us a little more information about his past. Uh, his parents are divorced. uh 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 uh a a rough crowd. Um there was an interest with that crowd an interest in
studying sort of the occult. 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 um 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 uh Vanickle. He
is the defense's witness. Um and he does a psychopath test, which I think we've all kind of heard of before. And he
scores incredibly low, four out of 40. So low in fact that former FBI uh profiler Mary Ellen Otul who you see in
the hour who he asked to review this these documents she was not a part of this case. She thinks it's so low it's
suspiciously low that you know maybe he was trying to game the test a little bit. Um 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. is 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 '9s
that he says may explain some of his behavior. >> But 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? >> Um, I mean, he says it is. Mhm. >> He says that he just, you know, he had
this compulsion that night and he didn't know she was home alone. Um, and he just
picked the house randomly. Marie Ellen Otul, who once again I'll say, you know, wasn't a part of this case, just
reviewed the documents, finds that suspicious, his his assertion that it was completely random. [snorts]
So, I want to actually play a little bit more from a former FBI profiler, Mary Ellen Otul.
>> 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 and this victim lived a pretty low-risk lifestyle and she is in her own home and it's at night
and it's a a low crime area of Fairfax County. Um, so you have an offender basically who um 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 uh a cover for their face um
to bring the weapon and 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. So there you go. In October 2024, Steven Smirk
accepted a plea deal for firstdegree 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 Amry, 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. 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 and really hear the damage that was done, you know. Um, this is
what I'm going to I'm like pulling out this book. So, I told you how the the War Lawrence family is this 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 Opair. She's now married. She works in the hospitality uh 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 Steven 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 Jesse 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. And Marie, once again, such great reporting. Thank you
so much for bringing the hour [music] to us. And I do want to remind our listeners, if you like this episode,
please rate and review us on Apple Podcast or Spotify.

Join "48 Hours" correspondents Natalie Morales and Anne-Marie Green as they discuss the cold case of Robin Lawrence, who was home with her 2-year-old daughter when she was murdered. They discuss how DNA technology and a genetic genealogist helped investigators zero in on the killer.

Crime. Social justice. Impact. "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 cold case murder of Robin War Lawrence was solved after 30 years through DNA advancements and the work of genealogist Liz.

Key points

The Cold Case of Robin Warrence. After nearly 30 years, advances in DNA testing finally solve the murder of Robin Warrence.
Liz's Dedication. Liz, a pro bono genealogist, dedicates 1,400 hours to solving the cold case.
The Chilling Confession. Steven Smirk admits, "I'm a serial killer, but I've only killed once before."
Justice Served?. The War Lawrence family feels relief but wanted a trial for closure.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This is probably a zero probability that this case will be solved.

Parabon's initial assessment of the case's solvability.

6:38WatchNov 1, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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