Transcript

Man confesses to 1994 cold case murder, claiming he's "a serial killer who's only killed once"

From 48 Hours · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 4 min · 9,447 words · 179 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Man confesses to 1994 cold case murder, claiming he's "a serial killer who's only killed once"", an episode of 48 Hours published December 14, 2025 (1 h 4 min, about 9,447 words). It mentions 50 people, works and ideas, including Liz, Steven Smirk, Robert Ward Sr., Mary Ward, Niskayuna.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Robin Lawrence, Fairfax County, Fairfax County Police Department, genetic genealogy
  2. – 20:00: 48 Hours, DNA phenotyping, genetic genealogy, Jim Crow
  3. – 30:00: Steven Smirk, Fairfax County, John Long, Melissa Wallace
  4. – 40:00: Steven Smirk, 48 Hours, ephedra, Fairfax County
  5. – 50:00: 48 Hours, Robert War senior, Robin War Lawrence, Lorie Lindberg
  6. – 1:00:00: Steven Smirk, John Long, Mary Ellen Otul, Melissa Wallace
  7. – 1:04:02: Steven Smirk, War Lawrence family, Fairfax County, Mary Ellen Otul

Notable quotes from "Man confesses to 1994 cold case murder, claiming he's "a serial killer who's only killed once""

  • Mhm. But look what happened in the Robin Lawrence case.
    about Robin Lawrence · at
  • So you switch tracks and try what we call genetic genealogy and that was becoming really big at that time.
    about genetic genealogy · at
  • And then moves in to the scene. 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.
    about Fairfax County · at
  • Lead crime scene detective Mark Garmin was one of the first on site.
    about Mark Garmin · at
  • Robin's father, Robert War Senior, a World War II veteran and now 101 years old, says he tried to forget that call.
    about Robert War senior · at
  • Ali 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.
    about 48 Hours · at
  • Then decades later in 2019, investigators turned to Parabon Nano Labs, a DNA technology company, hoping genetic genealogy could identify Robin's killer. Ellen Greyac is the director of biioinformatics at Parabon. We take DNA.
    about Parabon Nano Labs · at
  • After three and a half years, Liz finally had a lead and it pointed her to a man named Steven Smirk.
    about Steven Smirk · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Liz — Person · 17 mentions
  • Steven Smirk — Person · 16 mentions · first at
  • Robert Ward Sr. — Person · 9 mentions
  • Mary Ward — Person · 8 mentions
  • Robert War senior — Person · 5 mentions · first at
  • Robin Lawrence — Person · 4 mentions · first at
  • Amry — Person · 4 mentions
  • Mary Ellen O'Toole — Person · 4 mentions
  • John Long — Person · 3 mentions · first at
    Pictures from the outside of the house and then moves in to the scene. 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.
  • Melissa Wallace — Person · 3 mentions · first at
    Pictures from the outside of the house and then moves in to the scene. 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.
  • Don Budarak — Person · 3 mentions
  • Lorie Lindberg — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    On November 20th, 1994, Robin's friend Lorie 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.
  • Mark Garmin — Person · 2 mentions · first at
  • Robin War Lawrence — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    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.
  • Mary Ellen Otul — Person · 2 mentions · first at
    So low in fact that former FBI profiler Mary Ellen Otul who you see in the hour who we 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.
  • Ellen Greytak — Person · 2 mentions
  • Erin Moriarty — Person · 2 mentions
  • Rosa Parks — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Selected to mold the first medal for the Martin Luther King Jr. nonviolent peace prize which was awarded to Rosa Parks.
  • Tom Shaw — Person · 1 mention · first at
    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.
  • Steve Dano — Person · 1 mention · first at
    On April 4th, 2024, Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Dano's office presented the case at a preliminary hearing to determine if there was enough evidence to move forward.
  • Olly Lawrence — Person · 1 mention · first at
    After the sentencing, Olly Lawrence gave a statement to the press.
  • Natalie Morales — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Welcome to Postmortem. I'm Natalie Morales filling in today as your host to talk about a story that 48 Hours correspondent Anie Green reported on.
  • Robert Junior — Person · 1 mention · first at
    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.
  • Dr. Marcus Vanickle — Person · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

  • 48 Hours — Company · 4 mentions · first at
  • CODIS — Company · 3 mentions
  • Niskayuna Police Department — Company · 3 mentions
  • Parabon Nano Labs — Company · 2 mentions · first at
  • War Lawrence family — Company · 2 mentions · first at
    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.
  • FamilyTreeDNA — Company · 2 mentions
  • GEDmatch — Company · 2 mentions
  • Fairfax County Police Department — Company · 1 mention · first at
    And then moves in to the scene. 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.
  • Postmortem — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Welcome to Postmortem. I'm Natalie Morales filling in today as your host to talk about a story that 48 Hours correspondent Anie Green reported on.
  • Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney's Office — Company · 1 mention
  • NAACP — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

  • ephedrine — Product · 3 mentions
  • ephedra — Product · 1 mention · first at
    With bipolar 2 disorder and when you add aphedra and alcohol, he was struggling a lot. The FDA banned some ephedra products in 2004. And Budarak says that was in part because…

Concepts & topics

Places & events

  • Niskayuna — Place · 6 mentions
  • Fairfax County — Place · 4 mentions · first at
  • Springfield, Virginia — Place · 1 mention · first at
    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…
  • Syracuse — Place · 1 mention · first at
    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 General Electric.
  • Fort Myer — Place · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

When you're dealing with a 30-year-old coal case, it seems like there's not a lot of hope.

It's a great photo, Robin. Mhm. But look what happened in the Robin Lawrence case.

Something sparked it. that nobody ever expected. That just caught everybody offguard. Her husband Olly had been trying to reach Robin all weekend. Olly was out of the country.

Who else was in the house? Nicole, her baby. Well, Olly 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 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, you know, down the hall. Her eyes were just so big and her little face was just there's 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. It 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 going to be a needle in the haststack, but I thought 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 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. Heat. Hey, Heat. 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 to the scene. 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, but you can see

they were struck by the sheer violence of the attack on the 37year-old mother. It looked brutal.

See, 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 20th, 1994, Robin's friend Lorie 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, Lorie 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 imunosuppressive medications. I mean, this is life-saving medication. She needs to have it

cuz 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 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 and 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 um 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 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. 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 asked Lori to call Robin's parents. Robin's dad answered. I think I said Robin is dead. But what I remember is um Jesse, her mom must have just been in the overheard cuz she was just 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 War Senior, 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 War Coins, and his son, Robert Ward, 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 Melon 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 Senior, 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.

Lorie 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 funloving, just very down to earth. Lorie and Robin shared an apartment in Washington DC around the time Robin was dating her future husband Olly. Lorie says they were a great match.

Ali 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. 3 years later they welcomed their daughter Nicole. At the time of her death, Robin was working in advertising. Olly, who was away on a business trip in the Bahamas, was an executive at an airline.

Well, I 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.

Investigators suspected Robin was killed by someone she knew. They started looking at the family dynamic. They started looking at the marriage.

Was Olly cooperative? He was. But as authorities dug further, they learned something. Olly 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 cuz you just can't make sense of it.

Just 3 days after what would have been Robin's 38th birthday on November 26th, 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 cuz 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 2 days later. Investigators zeroed in on her husband, Olly, 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 Ali'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 Olly had anything to do with Robin's murder. I never thought that though, that he harmed her.

And how about you? Did it ever cross your mind? Maybe he's involved in this somehow?

No, I I didn't think that. He's not that type of person. Ali 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 uh 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 Ali 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 Cotus.

Yes. But Cotus also returned no matches and with no new leads, the investigation stalled. How much did the adults tell you?

Nothing. Mary's daughter, Lauren Oans, 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. 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 you 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, I that was kind of like, well, she went to her grave not knowing right

what happened to her child. And 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 Nano Labs, a DNA technology company, hoping genetic genealogy could identify Robin's killer. Ellen Greyac is the director of biioinformatics at Parabon. We take DNA from a crime scene. We upload it to JedMatch 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. Grey Tag 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 genealogologist 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 1500 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 believe was her killer. So I get a report from our Bionromax 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 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.

I'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 most likely like 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 composits 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, Olly, to see if he recognized the man in the composite.

I 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 genealogologist 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 I 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 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. 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 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.

Steven Smirk lived in Niskauna, 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. None. Stonefaced. 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 5 minutes with his DNA.

Yeah. 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. 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 start going through my mind.

Smurk told detectives he was having trouble getting into the Niskauna 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."

Steven Smurk's call was recorded. 911, the address of your emergency. I'm actually here to turn myself in for a cold case crime. You're here to turn yourself in.

Well, they collected DNA, so it's What's your last name? Wow. So, when do you tell him?

Oh my god, I was freaking out. So, I'm She freaked me out. I run down to his room and I'm banging on his door. I'm like, "We got to go to the police department. He's turning himself in."

Wallace also reached out to local police and Steven Smirk was taken into custody. The adrenaline was pumping so hard because the reality hit and um it sounds like he's going to talk to us about it.

Detective Long says they had to refocus fast and figure out how they would handle Steven Smirk's interrogation.

We need to make sure this is a sound interview that could potentially be used in court down the road.

All right, go ahead and have a seat. When they finally sat down with him, where do you want to start? Investigators say he didn't need much prompting.

It was 100% intentional. I am a serial killer who's only killed once. You've come here to turn yourself in for a 1994 murder. When investigators met with Steven Smirk on September 7th, 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 samples Smirk 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 going to be? We start talking about things like, "Hey, let's make sure that he's going to bring up details of the case without us telling him first."

Can you remind me her name again? Can you say that? I can. Do you remember anything about the person?

She was Africaname. Okay. That's all I remember. He started 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.

I was not in the right frame of mind. Okay. Steven Smurk told detectives that back in November 1994, he was a 22year-old soldier stationed at Fort Meyer in Arlington, Virginia. And on the night of the murder, he had been drinking beer.

I was uh drunk and under a federan. He says he had been taking ephedrin pills. a stimulant.

Something inside me said that it's hard to explain. I knew that I was going to kill somebody. I did not know who I was going to kill. It was like this overbearing thought in my brain that I just had to kill somebody.

Smur said he drove to Robin's neighborhood because he was familiar with the area. He visited friends who stayed in a house nearby. Had you had any contact with her, spoke to her or anything like that?

No, I didn't even to be honest with you, I don't know. Didn't even know who lived there. I never met this person before or seen her or anything.

Smirk confirmed he entered the house from the back deck and told detectives he was wearing a ski mask and leather gloves.

And I went in and noticed that she had a baby in one of the rooms. He said he went down the hall to Robin's bedroom.

I startled her. She got out of bed. She was on her knees. She was just begging for her life. I cut her up pretty good. I did everything they taught me in the military. Hand to hand combat.

Mhm. I'm highly highly influenced by demons. Okay. He told investigators one of the reasons he enlisted was because he wanted to kill.

But I want to tell you right now that I she's the only person that I've killed.

I'm married. I have kids there. I honestly believe that if it wasn't for my wife and my kids, I probably would be a serial killer. 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.

She clawed at my face. I had a little bit of a scar here. Did you ever go into her bathroom at all?

I don't remember that. If I did go into the bathroom, it would have been to look at what she did to my face. 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 Smirk if he wanted to express any remorse to Robin's family.

Um, how do I say this? I don't know. You're recording. I don't feel anything for the family.

I can't say that any other way. I feel bad that I did it because I knew someday my personal freedom would be affected.

I think what you see is 100% what you get from him. Arrogance, uh entitlement. He wanted to do it, so he did it. And that's it. Detective Wallace believes Steven Smurk 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 Tulle, who reviewed the case for 48 hours, agrees that Smirk wanted to control the narrative. He was prepared that he was going to tell his version of the story.

Otul says she doesn't buy Smurk's claim that Robin's murder was random. She classifies it as a missionoriented homicide.

Went down the hallway, bedroom was a ahead. 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 when inside somebody's home took enormous risk. So that suggests to me more of a targeting than it does randomness.

In her analysis, Otul says she was struck by Smirk 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 Otul, serial offenders can sometimes channel their compulsion to kill into other crimes like stalking or voyerism. 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 wrap sheet does not mean that criminal behavior is absent. It means that they didn't get arrested for it.

Can I take care of this process? Okay. After his confession, Steven Smirk 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 I think we wanted the spectacle of that, a satisfaction. But would they get that chance?

A week after Steven Smirk's interview with police, forensic testing confirmed Steven Smirk'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 4th, 2024, Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Dano'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, Steven Smirk stands alone as somebody who represents a true danger to the community. Robin's family saw Steven smirk for the first time at the hearing.

I was amazed how big he was. He needed two baiffs around him. The first thing I thought of was like, "My aunt didn't stand a chance."

Prosecutors played Smurk's confession and the family heard the details of Robin's murder in Smurk's own words. There was no emotion. It It didn't feel real. It just made me feel angry. Like, how could he have done that?

The judge found probable cause that Steven Smirk killed Robin and allowed the case to proceed to a grand jury. On April 15th, a grand jury indicted him. But 6 months later, he accepted a plea deal for firstdegree murder.

We got guaranteed accountability. Dano says the agreement ensured Smirk would be held accountable.

We had the challenge of some witnesses passing, other witnesses their memories uh 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 7th, 2025, Steven Smirk returned to court for sentencing. As part of the mitigation strategy for a more lenient sentence, his attorney, Don Bddarak, told the judge that in the early 90s, Smirk was a troubled young man struggling with alcohol and substance abuse.

He eventually decided, I'm going to 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 Budarak, Smirk was also crippled with an undiagnosed mental illness. It wasn't until several years later that he eventually was diagnosed with bipolar 2 disorder and when you add aphedra and alcohol, he was struggling a lot. The FDA banned some ephedra products in 2004. And Budarak says that was in part because when abused with other substances, they could trigger dangerous psychiatric side effects.

Did Steve Smirk tell you that he ever had hallucinations or heard voices or anything along those lines while taking a fedra? 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 Smurk's door nearly 30 years later, Smurk had sought help for his mental health problems and become sober. Burak says her client confessed and waved 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 Steven Smirk 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, Olly Lawrence gave a statement to the press. The Warren Lawrence family are grateful that justice has finally been done for the murder our of our beloved Robin. Lauren answered a few questions with Robin's daughter Nicole by her side.

As much as this a sigh of relief, we still have to live with this. 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. 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 shine from within.

I feel like she is living through her art because her art 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 I was good things, happy things, warm things.

Welcome to Postmortem. I'm Natalie Morales filling in today as your host to talk about a story that 48 Hours correspondent Anie 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 War Lawrence 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? Any? 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 Olli. 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 U.

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 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 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. 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 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. The 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 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, and how she was able to piece together that family tree that then led investigators to their suspect, Steven Smirk.

Welcome back. 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 haststack. 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 softspoken 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 Steven 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. and 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 Iskauna, 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 Niskeuna 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 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 John 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 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 we 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. 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 '9s that he says may explain some of his behavior. But there's no evidence at this point, though. Or 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. 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 Oul, 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. So, I want to actually play a little bit more from 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 lowrisk 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. An 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 Podcast or Spotify.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Man confesses to 1994 cold case murder, claiming he's "a serial killer who's only killed once""?

Olly (Olli/Ali) Lawrence (Guest), Natalie Morales (Host), Anne-Marie Green (Guest), Melissa Wallace (Guest), John Long (Guest), Mark Garmin (Guest), Lorie Lindberg (Guest), Robert Ward Sr. (Guest).

What is discussed in "Man confesses to 1994 cold case murder, claiming he's "a serial killer who's only killed once""?

In order: 0:00 Robin Lawrence, Fairfax County, Fairfax County Police Department, genetic genealogy; 10:00 48 Hours, DNA phenotyping, genetic genealogy, Jim Crow; 20:00 Steven Smirk, Fairfax County, John Long, Melissa Wallace; 30:00 Steven Smirk, 48 Hours, ephedra, Fairfax County; 40:00 48 Hours, Robert War senior, Robin War Lawrence, Lorie Lindberg; 50:00 Steven Smirk, John Long, Mary Ellen Otul, Melissa Wallace; 1:00:00 Steven Smirk, War Lawrence family, Fairfax County, Mary Ellen Otul.

What is mentioned in this 48 Hours episode?

50 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Liz, Steven Smirk, Robert Ward Sr., Mary Ward, Niskayuna, Robert War senior. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Man confesses to 1994 cold case murder, claiming he's "a serial killer who's only killed once""?

The episode runs 1 h 4 min; the transcript is about 9,447 words in 179 timestamped sections.

More from 48 Hours

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated December 17, 2025.