[reporter] It happened inside this house sometime over the weekend.
Something was wrong. I thought there was an accident.
[Laurie] All of a sudden, here comes the little two-year-old.
I knew something horrible had happened.
Her throat was cut so severely, she was almost decapitated.
It was an ugly, ugly graphic scene.
Seemed to be very personal.
I remember thinking, a person who did this could be
sitting in this room with us.
[Greg] He's having this affair. There's a mistress.
Detectives are not convinced of his innocence.
He's a trained killer, an assassin.
But the truth is actually even more shocking.
[theme music playing]
[Charlotte] This case is particularly tragic for us at People,
a close-knit family haunted by an unspeakable loss.
It was so violent and rage-filled that detectives
are convinced that it must have been someone who was
passionately angry with the victim.
After a relentless search for a cold-blooded killer,
investigators would get a confession
that they will never forget.
Oh, there's -- we got the Washington Monument
in the background.
-And you're here now. -I exist.
This one's my favorite, the one of her holding me.
Look, I'm preppy. I like the collared shirt.
[Mary] You liked your Auntie Robin. She was nice to you.
[Lauren] Yeah.
She was very much like me, that's why.
She just made me feel very comfortable to be myself,
and I think that is why I'm so passionate about talking
about her and sharing her story.
For 37 years, she was part of our lives, my life,
all of her life.
You don't think someone will be gone
from your life at that age
with no warning.
[Mary] Robin was special to us 'cause she was the youngest daughter,
and Robin and I had to share a bedroom and got into trouble
together and did funny things together.
She was very precocious,
full of life and full of energy.
And I remember her special talent.
She liked to draw and paint.
She could take a blank canvas and just create
something beautiful.
It's incredible how talented she was.
My family is very guarded with a lot of what's going on
and their emotions.
And my Aunt Robin was the outlier.
She was an open book.
[Laurie] Robin and I met after college at a dance class.
We shared a love of dance.
She had a really big, fun laugh and a big, fun smile.
I mean, it was just infectious. We had such a great friendship.
When we were 30, we both left our small town in Connecticut
and moved to the big city of Washington, D.C.
[Mary] After Robin moved to D.C.,
I remember my mother said, "Robin's got a new boyfriend."
And then I called Robin and say, "What's going on?
And who is this guy, Ollie Lawrence?"
Ollie was an executive for US Airways,
and he was so polite and gentlemanly
and soft-spoken and very appealing as a man.
You could definitely see how -- why they were
attracted to each other.
And they ended up getting married and moving out
to the suburbs.
In 1989, Robin and Ollie settle into the peaceful suburb
of Springfield, Virginia.
And three years later, Robin gives birth
to a daughter, Nicole.
There was a lot of joy and a lot of excitement.
Nicole was a happy and healthy little girl.
In 1994, Robin was working for the Merchant's Tire Company,
developing the ads, and Ollie's job was going well.
They were in a very good place at that time.
We were preparing to come together as a family group
for Thanksgiving.
[Lauren] I was excited to see Aunt Robin that Thanksgiving.
It was extra special because it was her birthday week,
and it was also a time for us to get together and celebrate.
[Greg] The weekend before Thanksgiving,
Ollie heads to the airport for a business trip,
leaving Robin home alone with their daughter.
I called her that weekend, and she didn't answer,
and I left a message saying, "What are we gonna do
for your birthday? It's coming up."
And I didn't hear back from her.
[somber tones playing]
Saturday passes, and late into the night,
police dispatchers in Fairfax County
receive a call from Robin's husband, Ollie.
[Wallace] They're telling him he needs to talk
to the police in the Bahamas.
They need to send a message electronically to Fairfax
asking for the car to be sent to the house.
And I know from experience these teletype requests
can take hours.
Frustrated, Ollie calls Robin's friend Laurie for help.
Ollie called me on Sunday morning and said,
"Well, I'm out of town, I'm in the Bahamas,
"and I haven't been able to get in touch with her.
"Would you mind going over to the house
and checking on her?" My first thought was,
"Oh, you know, Nicole knocked the receiver off the phone
playing with it, and that's why she never got the phone calls."
I didn't think that anything would be wrong.
I really didn't.
So one of my friends, Karlyn, came with me.
We drove over to Robin's, and the first thing I noticed
was that there were a bunch of newspapers piled up
in front of the front door, which is a little strange.
And we knocked on the door, and nobody came to the door.
So I said, "We're gonna have to go around back."
And then we noticed that the window was open.
There was just something about it that was wrong.
In that moment, I was terrified, frankly.
But my friend Karlyn is really brave, and she said,
"We're going in."
We climbed in the window.
The family room and the kitchen is in front of us,
and to the left is the hallway down to the bedrooms.
We started calling for Robin and Nicole,
and nobody's coming out.
All of a sudden, here comes Nicole.
And her eyes are, you know, so big.
And she didn't cry. She didn't whimper.
Karlyn picked her up and said, "You go find Robin.
You can't believe you're in this situation that
you're just getting worse and worse feeling about.
And I walked down the hallway, and I could see on the wall
these blood splatters.
I knew something horrible had happened, but I was so afraid.
I mean, the fear just gripped me.
It was overwhelming.
And we just took off with Nicole,
climbed back out the window.
I ran next door.
A man was working in his garage, and I said,
"I need to phone, I need to phone, I need to call the police."
[Garman] When I arrived at the home, the scene was secure.
Many police cruisers there. I went into the house.
There was really no signs of a disturbance.
There was nothing knocked over, no signs of a struggle.
And there really wasn't any sign that there was a problem
until you rounded the corner to the master bedroom.
And then I could see this was
a major, major scene.
A female victim was on the floor next to the bed,
fully clothed, looked like possibly sleep attire,
blue stretch pants, pink top. It was a lot of blood.
I saw what appeared to be knife injuries on her back.
She has wounds on her face. Her throat was cut.
There were wounds to her abdomen
and her intestines had started to come out.
It was an ugly, ugly graphic scene.
Was this a burglary that went bad?
No idea. Anger?
Was it going to be a prelude to a sexual assault
that turned violent? I don't know.
[Charlotte] Based on the ID found in her purse,
they identify the victim as 37-year-old Robin Lawrence.
Outside of the Lawrence house, Robin's best friend
and officers are tending to baby Nicole.
[Laurie] The whole time, Nicole, the little two-year-old,
did not make a single sound.
She obviously hadn't had any food or water for however long.
Her skin was raw because of the diaper.
It seemed like they couldn't have been changed in like
36, 48 hours. I mean, it was bad.
And I remember thinking, Nicole, she needs fluids.
She needs her medicine. She needs to be taken care --
I mean, you know, like, I was, like, frantic.
Like, you've got to take care of her.
[siren wailing]
At the hospital, the police told me
that Robin was dead,
which was something so horrible that you can't believe
it's actually happening.
It's so surreal.
I think I was in shock.
The police asked me to call Robin's parents
to tell them.
That was the worst part of the whole day,
was telling Robin's parents that their daughter was dead.
My dad calls me,
and he was crying uncontrollably over the phone.
And he didn't mince words.
He said, "Robin is dead."
And I'm like, "What?
What do you mean?"
It was just disbelief.
From that moment, everything changed.
[Bobby] It's probably the worst call I've ever received in my life.
It was traumatic. It was -- couldn't believe it.
Was just horrified. I'm still horrified.
As Robin's loved ones grapple with their loss,
detectives scrutinize the crime scene.
This was an obvious, very violent encounter.
Robin was cut very badly all over her body.
I'm thinking, what a fight she put up, not only to save
her life, but she knows she's got a little daughter in here.
Her clothes were on basically completely.
There was no evidence of any kind of sexual assault there.
On the floor next to the victim was a baby bottle
and a child's book and tissues on the floor
in and around the victim.
The only thing that went through my mind is that
the small child had got these tissues
and had tried to stop the bleeding on her mother.
Nicole was there for days, alone, trying to get Mommy
to wake up, or she needs Mommy to help take care of her,
and Mom's not responding.
It was especially tragic.
The fact that Robin had been brutally murdered and her baby
left alone for two days, it was horrible.
[voice trembles] It was really horrible.
I'm a father. I have three daughters.
And the aspect of a little two-year-old,
what she may have went through, it -- it stayed with me.
[Long] There was a phone on the floor, and the cord was cut.
So right away, you're thinking about how Robin is
potentially startled. She's afraid.
She goes to the phone to call 911, and that cord is cut.
Crime scene detectives go into every single room
of that entire house.
And they're gonna see, is there anything
of evidentiary value?
When they looked in the bathroom,
they saw a washcloth. It had some blood on it.
And it just didn't make sense,
because the injuries to Robin were such that she was not
going to be making her way to the bathroom at any point.
So essentially, first thing you think of is,
what is this blood doing here?
I'm thinking a suspect being injured and bleeding also.
And this is a major piece of evidence and something
that needs to be collected.
[Greg] The washcloth is collected for DNA testing, which is still
in its infancy in 1994.
The investigators also determine that their suspect
entered through the back of the house.
[Garman] There were no other unsecured windows or doors.
So the entry point was apparently
the window on the deck.
Someone broke into the house through that window.
[Wallace] Robin's purse was on the dresser.
It had her wallet, car keys still in there.
There was some jewelry left on the dresser as well.
So this wasn't a burglary.
It appears someone entered
and went directly to the bedroom,
committed the murder and went directly out.
There was a mission, a goal.
It tells you as a detective, she was the target of this.
With Ollie already on his plane back from the Bahamas,
police wait for him at the airport gate in D.C.
to deliver the news about his wife's murder.
[Wallace] They notified him right away of his wife's death.
He seemed just as shocked as everybody else.
Ollie wanted to see Nicole and was concerned that she
had been left in the home with her dead mother for days.
That was horrific.
All of it was horrific, that she could have --
she could have died
with her mother.
Two days after Robin's body was discovered,
the Fairfax County Medical Examiner conducts an autopsy.
[Wallace] Robin had injuries literally from head to toe.
Her face was slashed open in multiple areas.
Her throat was cut so severely,
it looked like she was almost decapitated.
[Long] All over her body, you know, 49 stab wounds,
a lot focusing around her face and her neck area.
There were a lot of defensive wounds that were on her hands
and her arms, where clearly, she tried to fight back.
Any time that you have such a violent encounter,
it is seemingly personal.
It looks like a crime of passion.
You're thinking this must be someone who was really,
really angry with her.
So then your thought as a detective goes to,
who wants to see Robin dead? Who benefits from the murder?
[Long] When you start an investigation,
you start very close. You start with the victim.
You start with who's in their inner circle,
and you start to work out.
[reporter] It happened inside this house sometime over the weekend.
37-year-old Robin Lawrence stabbed to death.
Beth Bade is a neighbor.
She says Mrs. Lawrence was alive and well Friday night.
My babysitter picked up
the Lawrence's babysitter at about 6:15
and took her to the subway.
And my babysitter saw Mrs. Lawrence and the child
and everything was fine.
[reporter] Tonight, a little girl brought a bouquet of flowers
to the front step of the Lawrence home.
This is the program from her funeral,
titled We'll Always Remember Your Smile,
and it has a beautiful picture of her.
Looked so much like her at that age.
To think you will never see your sister again
is just unthinkable.
And I think I cried buckets and buckets.
I didn't know I had that much liquid in me.
There were so many people there
that it was not enough chairs for everybody.
Her family, her friends, me, we know our lives
would have been so different if she was alive.
At the end, Robin's dad started singing
"This Little Light of Mine."
[voice trembles] So everybody joined in, singing that song with him.
It wasn't right that she was gone at that time.
I remember thinking at Robin's funeral, you know,
a person who did this could be sitting in this room with us.
We didn't know. We had no idea.
Two days after the funeral, police interview Ollie Lawrence.
Ollie was in the Bahamas on a business trip
during the time of this.
[Charlotte] Ollie provides detectives with all his travel details
so that they can verify his whereabouts for the weekend.
But he shares an additional piece of information
that gives detectives pause.
Ollie was having an affair at the time of the murder.
[Long] Marva was Ollie's mistress.
They had had an on-and-off relationship over a decade.
That relationship continued
after Ollie and Robin were married.
[Wallace] At this point, the detectives are thinking
this affair has got to have something to do
with this murder.
[Wallace] Detectives have learned about Ollie's affair,
and at this point they are still suspicious,
whether it's Ollie's motive to have Robin killed
so he can be with his girlfriend,
whether it's the motive of the girlfriend to have Robin
killed so she can be with Ollie.
The detectives actually went to the Bahamas.
They did corroborate that Ollie was on a business trip.
[Wallace] He was in the Bahamas at the time of the murder,
but did he hire somebody to kill her?
Detectives look into Ollie's financials to see if there was
some suspicious sum of money that may have been paid
to someone else that would have supported the theory
that he had hired somebody to kill his wife,
but there was nothing in his financials.
Fairfax County finds no evidence that Ollie was
behind his wife's murder, but they're not convinced
of his innocence.
Detectives interview Marva and discover that Ollie had
invited her to the Bahamas with him, but she stayed
in the D.C. area instead.
[Wallace] This seems like a perfect opportunity to get away
with your lover. So why didn't she go?
Should suspicion be placed on her?
Police ask Marva if she has an alibi for the night
of Friday, November 18th.
[Wallace] She was home by herself watching TV.
She couldn't prove that she was where she said she was
at the time of Robin's murder.
Never fully able to shake their suspicions of Ollie,
and with Marva's alibi unreliable,
the police interview Ollie again.
[Charlotte] In August 1995, still unable to rule out
Ollie and Marva's involvement,
detectives request a blood sample from Marva
to compare with the DNA on the washcloth.
However, with DNA forensics still in its early days,
the results will take months to come back.
Waiting on the DNA results, one of the things
that detectives will do is check reports from the vicinity
of where the crime occurred.
Is there anybody that stands out in the area?
And what the detectives found was a white male who lived
in the area, and he was arrested for peeping in the homes.
That did give us a name, Pavlik.
[Wallace] Pavlik had been arrested for peeping in the neighborhood
around that time.
Peepers are typically someone that want to catch somebody,
a woman, in a state of undress or getting in and out
of the shower.
Somebody that's peeping into homes, his thought process
could be he sees that Robin's potentially home by herself.
He escalates his behavior, breaks into the home.
He commits this crime.
Wary that Pavlik could be Robin's killer, detectives find
a way to get his DNA surreptitiously.
[Long] The investigators pulled Mr. Pavlik's trash
that he had left out off of his property.
They were able to send some of those items to the laboratory.
In waiting for lab results to come in,
you need a lot of patience.
Everybody's frustrated because you should be able
to figure it out and break whoever is responsible,
and it's just not happening.
Finally, over a year after Robin's murder,
detectives receive the DNA results.
[Wallace] The washcloth did have blood on it.
Finally, we have a good, solid DNA profile.
Now we have a potential suspect DNA.
You don't get to have that in a lot of cases.
Detectives compare the DNA profile to every suspect
in the case, including Ollie, Marva, and Pavlik,
but none of them are a match.
[Wallace] In 1994, CODIS was up and running
at the time of this murder.
CODIS is the FBI's DNA data bank.
The profile was uploaded into CODIS, and that DNA profile
didn't hit on anybody.
So what that tells the detectives is our suspect
does not have a violent criminal record.
If he had been arrested for a violent crime,
his DNA would be in the system.
[Long] The leads quickly dissolved,
and there just wasn't a lot to go on.
The only thing that they had was this washcloth
with the DNA profile.
The suspect is out there somewhere.
We don't know who to look for to get their DNA.
After the murder, Ollie and Nicole moved
to New Haven, Connecticut.
He retreated with Nicole, and that was his own way
of dealing with the grief and the suspicions.
Ollie and Nicole had a house, which wasn't too far from me,
so I got to see Nicole.
You know, we lost someone special, and we just couldn't --
couldn't come to talk about it.
I never talked about it in detail with my son
or Nicole or Lauren. And it was just difficult.
It's still difficult for me, personally.
[Lauren] I had nightmares... [sobbing]
...about what had happened to my aunt for years.
And nobody really wanted to talk to me about it.
They just wanted my aunt.
[Wallace] As years go by and more and more people get into CODIS,
what you're hoping is for that bad guy
to finally get arrested, get put into the database,
and then you get that fateful phone call saying,
"We got a hit."
And that never happened.
[Long] So this wall represents our cold case homicide victims
from over the years.
[Wallace] It's a visual reminder. When we walk in the office
every day, this is the first thing we see.
For Robin's case, We see Robin's picture
up here, her smiling.
Regardless of how many years or decades go by,
her family are still waiting for answers.
[Mary] Over 30 years, there was no new leads
and no new information.
So the point that I lost hope that Robin's case would be
solved was probably when my mom passed.
Maybe we'll never know. That's God's will, so be it.
Just kind of come to terms with that.
This was a case where we have this really good piece
of evidence in this DNA profile.
There's more and more advances in DNA technology
with phenotyping and genetic genealogy.
And so that was the obvious point where that needed
to continue to be explored.
[Wallace] In 2019, we start working with Parabon, the private lab,
and they start genealogy analysis
on the DNA evidence from the washcloth.
They're doing something called phenotyping, where they're able
to do a computerized sketch of what the suspect is
supposed to look like from the DNA profile.
Police reach out to Robin's family with news
of the computerized image.
I was really, really hoping it was gonna be this
light bulb moment and I saw a face light up and go,
"Oh, my God, I know exactly who that is."
I learned about the case being reopened.
There were new technologies that they were exploring.
I was hopeful, but it's, you know,
it's like, OK, it's been a long, long time.
When I talked with Melissa Wallace,
we looked at the sketch.
You just feel, "Oh, my goodness, this is the man
who murdered Robin,"
and that was a white man with blonde hair.
And they asked us, "Does this look like anybody we know?"
And we said, "No, it does not."
Nobody recognized the person.
It was another dead end.
As a next step, Parabon uploads the DNA sample
to genealogy websites to see if they can find any
related family members. And they get a hit.
[Wallace] They did get one match to a distant relative,
but it was such a distant relative, that the amount
of time and money it would take to work through that family tree
would be exorbitant.
And we still might not be able to get closure for this case.
However, a volunteer genealogist painstakingly
attempts to build out the family tree, hoping to get
closer to the suspect's primary family lineage.
It took a long time, but after about three years,
a volunteer with the police department that does genealogy,
calls Melissa, and she says, "Hey, you know,
I think I might have found something."
[Wallace] The volunteer found somebody on the family tree
that would have been 22 years old at the time of the murder,
who was stationed at Fort Myer in Arlington
in Northern Virginia in 1994,
and so she gave me the name of Stephan Smerk.
The first thing in our mind is, let's see if we can get a photo.
Let's just see, you know, how close to the phenotyping
sketch from Parabon is he gonna be?
And we were able to see an old yearbook picture,
a driver's license picture. And when we saw those pictures,
we got a little bit more excited
because it looked close.
[Wallace] We started doing some digging into Mr. Smerk.
His criminal history, background,
we didn't see anything.
He was in the Army, but there wasn't anything
about his military career that would have stood out.
He was a computer programmer.
His whole life, basically, from afar, seemed to be
very normal.
Detectives tracked down his current address
and see that he lives in the town of Niskayuna
in upstate New York with his wife
and their two children.
At this point, our goal was just to get DNA from Mr. Smerk
to see if he's a match.
[Long] So in the fall of 2023, we made the decision
we're gonna make a road trip to Niskayuna, New York.
We pull into the neighborhood, and we get eyes on the house.
We knock on the door. Mr. Smerk answers.
We explain to him that we're cold case detectives
from Fairfax County, that we're working on a cold case murder
from the '90s, and we wanted to know if we could talk to him.
There was no fear. There was no shock, no awe.
Nothing. He invited us into his house.
I said, "We're here to collect DNA for genetic
"genealogy purposes. We were hoping it might help
with the investigation."
[Wallace] He said, "OK."
And I got the DNA, put it in the little package.
I left him with my business card
with my cell phone number on the back.
And I said, "If you have any questions or concerns,
you can call me at any time."
We were in and out of his house in five minutes.
We drive to our hotel.
I'm in my room, and around 5 o'clock,
my cell phone rings.
And I see it's Mr. Smerk.
He said, "Where are you?"
And that made me a little uneasy.
And I said, "I'm at the hotel. What can I do for you?"
And he says, "I'm at the Niskayuna police station to turn myself in."
And I said, "Turn yourself in for what?"
And he says, "I'm here to turn myself in for the murder."
He's just sitting there, very calm, same demeanor,
jeans and a T-shirt, very normal.
I'm thinking, "OK, that's good."
But, you know, I need more.
And then he starts walking through that he was stationed
at Fort Myer in the Army.
That's when I knew we were talking about the same case,
because of Nicole being there.
Smerk continues on, telling the detectives
he entered Robin Lawrence's bedroom.
I'm thinking, "My God, I can't believe I'm getting
"this confession right now. I can't believe he's done this.
I can't believe there's no emotion."
It's almost like he was just resigned to the fact of,
like, "It's over.
"Let me just get this interview over with
and out of the way, and let me move on."
I felt like it was sincere.
I was surprised he didn't remember more details.
And then that made me realize that to him,
this was just another day.
There was no emotion. There was no remorse.
It was like he was telling me a story.
In the same way that he would be telling me
about his golf game the day before.
He joined the army because he wanted
to experience killing.
He went to Robin's house that night because he wanted
to kill somebody.
He could have been a serial killer.
[Wallace] We get done with the interview,
and JD and I just kind of looked at each other,
and it was like this collective sigh of like, "Oh, my gosh,
I can't believe that just happened, and he's in custody."
And so then it's like, "What do I need to do next?
I gotta call the family."
[Mary] It was night. I was upstairs in the bedroom,
and I got a phone call from my niece, Nicole,
Robin's daughter.
And she said,
"They got the guy."
And she didn't have to say anything more than that
'cause I knew instantly what she was talking about.
And I'm like, "What?
What?" And I think we yelped.
I said it out loud, and Lauren was there.
We're like, "What? They got him!
They got him!" So there was jubilation.
The fact they found him was the first shock.
The fact that he gave it in so readily,
whatever's happening in this world
to...
to make things right...
is happening.
[Wallace] The day after the confession, I drove the buccal swab
containing his DNA straight to the -- our Virginia state lab,
and they were able to confirm within five days that his DNA
was, in fact, a match to the blood
left on the washcloth.
New at 4, a Niskayuna man is charged with
second degree murder in connection with a cold case
from nearly 30 years ago.
It's been 30 years of unanswered questions,
not knowing, and having to endure the trauma
that comes with that.
[reporter] Ollie Lawrence was away on business
when his wife was killed.
Daughter Nicole, wiping away a tear outside court,
was just two years old.
This entire family shattered in 1994 when Robin Lawrence was
found stabbed to death in her home.
Stephan Smerk decides to plead guilty, and Robin's family
prepares to see him in court for the first time
during his plea hearing and sentencing.
[Mary] We saw Smerk for the first time in court.
I wanted to see him.
I wanted to see the man who did this.
He wreaked havoc on our family.
He killed my sister.
I won't say we were broken, but we were shattered
and in distress and in need of resuscitation.
And I wanted to see that he got what he deserved.
On March 7, 2025, 53-year-old Stephan Smerk is
sentenced to 70 years in prison, but he's eligible
for parole in 2041 due to Virginia state law from 1994.
I think we're happy now that we have some justice,
but I think the hardest part is Nicole didn't have a mother
for 30-plus years.
If it came up that the parole board was going to consider
letting him out, I would tell them that he had
gotten married, had two kids, had a job, had a house,
lived a full life for the last 30 years,
30 years that Robin didn't have.
[Mary] My memories of Robin have changed over time.
So I knew her all of her life, but it's been another 30 years
since she died.
In my mind, she's always young.
I had always thought we would grow old together,
but that wasn't
in the cards for her.
[Lauren] There she is. It's Robin.
Spring flowers for Robin.
[Lauren] It's OK to cry.
[Mary] 30 years she's been here.
[Robert] A long time.
I know. You look at all of her work.
[Mary] My dad, 100 years old, got the closure
of seeing things put right for the family finally.
With the passage of time, we can talk
and share our stories and come together
as a family and remember
how much we loved Robin.
This is a missing persons investigation.
There just wasn't a huge footprint.
Her only link to the outside world was pulling away from her.
We found her marriage certificate,
but there was no death certificate.
I'm going to go see if old Jeff will come to the door.
[knocking]
[over the phone] I'm not lying about anything.
[woman] You did lie to me.