One autumn night in the 1990s, after downing two beers and taking a dose of ephedrine, a stimulant, then-Army soldier Stephan Smerk left what is now Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, near Arlington National Cemetery, and drove toward his friends' house, he would later tell police. He said he wanted to go to a familiar area as he searched for a person to stab.
"It's hard to explain," Smerk said to a Fairfax County detective last September, adding: "I knew I was going to kill somebody. I did not know who I was going to kill."
In a video of that police interview played Thursday in a Fairfax County courtroom, Smerk described how he parked his white Chevrolet pickup truck in a driveway beside his friends' home, and used a branch to break into a sliding-glass door of a neighbor's residence. After glancing at what he thought was a child's crib, he said, he ventured into the master bedroom and watched as a woman got down on her knees and begged for her life.
He said he then stabbed her in the throat.
Smerk, now 52, who was arrested in September in the three-decade-old cold case, said he did not recall the woman's name or say what neighborhood the incident occurred. But prosecutors argue that Smerk fatally slashed Robin Warr Lawrence, 37, in her West Springfield, Va., home in November 1994. On Thursday, Judge Gary H. Moliken in Fairfax General District Court found probable cause that Smerk killed Lawrence and allowed the case to proceed to a grand jury.
Smerk's arrest came 29 years after Lawrence's death had vexed officials for decades. Fairfax police had initially considered Ollie Lawrence, Robin Lawrence's husband at the time, to be a possible suspect even though he was in the Bahamas the weekend she was killed. Police ultimately ruled him out.
"It didn't impact me much because I knew I didn't do it," Ollie Lawrence said at the time of Smerk's arrest. "But I was seriously concerned they were focusing on the wrong person in the case."
Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Northern Virginia, used DNA found at the crime scene to create a genetic profile of a possible suspect and link it to a family tree, authorities have said. Detectives then concentrated on Smerk, who was living with his wife and two high school-aged children in Niskayuna, N.Y. Fairfax Detective Melissa Wallace testified on Thursday that she went to Smerk's home and swabbed his cheeks for a DNA sample.
"He called me approximately a half-hour later on my cellphone," Wallace said in court. The two then met at a Niskayuna police station later that day, she said.
In the video statement taken during that meeting, Smerk said he killed an African American woman because "something inside of me compelled me to do it." He said he "did everything they taught me in the military" and "hand-to-hand combat."
After the stabbing, he told Wallace, he took his knife and drove over a bridge, tossing the weapon in the Chesapeake Bay. He returned to the barracks and took a shower, tossing his clothes in the dumpster. Smerk told Wallace that after the killing, he looked up Lawrence's background and learned that she was a wife and a mother.
Smerk continued living in the barracks and remained in the Army for three more years. Officials have said he had been honorably discharged.
Chief Public Defender Dawn Butorac said there were inconsistencies between Smerk's statement and Lawrence's killing. Smerk described breaking in through a sliding-glass door, but officials say the person who killed Lawrence had cut the screen of a window. The defendant also said he dropped the knife in the Chesapeake Bay, but Butorac reminded the court that the bay is nowhere near Springfield. Smerk didn't tell Wallace what year the crime occurred, but instead agreed with Wallace when she posited 1994, Butorac said.
"I understand Mr. Smerk has described a terrible and heinous crime," she said. "But it isn't this one."
Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Kelsey Gill argued that Smerk's statement connected him to the crime scene, such as his description of the home's back deck and that he used a knife to commit the crime. Gill further alleged that his research of the victim was an admission of guilt.
"This is a brutal murder," Gill said.
On Sunday, Nov. 20, 1994, Laurie Lindberg received a call from Ollie Lawrence. Lindberg testified on Thursday that she had known Robin Lawrence since the 1980s, after meeting at a dance class in Danbury, Conn. Ollie Lawrence, who was traveling for business, had told Lindberg that he called his wife on Friday night and Saturday but did not hear from her. He asked Lindberg to check on her.
At the house, newspapers were piled on the front stoop, Lindberg said in court. She and a friend went to the backyard and entered the home through the window with the broken screen. Once inside, she testified that Lawrence's 2-year-old daughter walked into the room, wide-eyed and quiet.
Lindberg began walking down a hall toward the master bedroom, calling "Robin." As she inched closer to the room, she saw that blood had been smeared across the wall.
"I didn't even get to the bedroom," she said.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/04/it-just-came-over-me-officials-show-mans-confession-1994-va-killing/
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