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Welcome to Postmortem. I'm Natalie Morales filling in today as your host to talk about [music] a story that 48 hours
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correspondent Anarie Green reported on. It's about the cold case murder of Robin
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War Lawrence, which was finally solved after nearly 30 years with the help of advances in DNA testing and the tireless
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efforts of a pro bono genetic genealogologist. Amarie, so good to have you with us. What a fascinating story to
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be able to report on. >> It really is. It's a case a lot of people thought would never be solved.
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And just want to remind our listeners once again, if you haven't listened to the 48 hours episode yet, you can find
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the full audio just below this episode in your podcast feed. Go take a listen, then come on back here for our
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conversation. Well, it was on the night of November 18th, 1994 when Robin Warrence was at
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her home in Springfield, Virginia, when an intruder broke in and stabbed her multiple times to her death. Her husband
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Ali was away on a business trip in the Bahamas. And after being unable to reach her all weekend, he then asked their
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friend Lorie Lindberg to stop by and check on his wife. Well, 2 days after the murder, Lorie entered the house and
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saw blood on the wall and of course the couple's 2-year-old daughter, Nicole, just wandering around by herself. So
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tragic. I mean to think of little Nicole there at that young age, you know, witnessed whatever she witnessed.
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>> Yeah. Well, that's the thing about it, you know, that's what Lorie says in the
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hour that she could just see this sort of vacant expression on this little girl's face. She knows like there's
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something really, really bad that has happened. And she doesn't even really venture any further in. She sort of
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peaks down the hall. She sees that something has happened in the in the bedroom and immediately she's like out
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of there. She grabs Nicole and you know she's with another friend. So they call um police.
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>> Yeah. And and investigators they learn that Ali, her husband, who as we said was away on a business trip in the
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Bahamas, they find out that he had been having an affair. Was that something that aroused suspicion with
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investigators early on? Amory. >> Yeah. I mean, you know, Natalie, we've done so many of these. Of course, it's
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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
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thoroughly vet him. They they his alibi checks out. He is in the Bahamas, very far away um from the scene of the crime.
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And and they also, you know, look at the woman that he was having the affair with
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as well, and they're able to kind of rule her out. And eventually his he is cleared. I should say Robin's family
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never suspected Ali. Um, yes, you know, they were surprised he was having an affair, but as far as they were
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concerned then and now, he would never do anything like this. So, what evidence did investigators have from that crime
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scene? Again, you know, this is dating back to 1994. And, you know, this case was cold for over 30 years, so I imagine
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there wasn't a lot to go on initially. >> There wasn't. Uh, there were no fingerprints. Um, it's certainly a
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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
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this one crime scene investigator and I mean their job is to look at minute details and collect anything that could
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possibly be evidence. and he notices a little bit of blood in the bathroom on a washcloth. Other than that, the bathroom
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is pretty clean, almost pristine. Now, they had, you know, uploaded the sample to Cotus. There's no matches. But boy,
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30 years later, it was going to make a heck of a difference when it came to solving this this case. And all these
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years later, you interviewed Robin's family, including her sister Mary, her brother Robert Jr., and their father um
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Robert Senior. So Robert Senior was 100 when we interviewed him. He's 101 now. And I have never met somebody this age
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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
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out a bit, but he's on his own. The apartment is the the the cutest, most picture perfect little apartment with
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Robin's art everywhere. And I'm just gonna I'm gonna have to look down a little bit at my note to sort of list
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off some of the stuff that Robert Senior has done in his lifetime. Right. He was
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the first elected African-American school board member and elected council member in Syracuse. In 1962, he became
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the president of the Syracuse chapter of the NAACP, the first African-American engineering consultant at uh General
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Electric. >> My goodness. Wow. What a list. [laughter] >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're all they're
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all like super accomplished. Super. >> And so was Robin as an accomplished artist.
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>> Yes. And he was so incredibly proud of her. She had just created that first metal, right? the Martin Luther
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King Jr. medal which we see in the story and I can't help but to think where she
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would have gone from there. Um what would have inspired her because when you look at her art it's the range of styles
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of subject matters you know individuals to landscapes uh different types of mediums I mean who knows where she would
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have gone. So decades after the murder in 2019, cold case detectives, they start digging through the case again to
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see if there is anything new, new advances in DNA technology and what they could possibly use to be able to push
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this case along. So how significant were the advancements in the technology that
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then allowed them to relook at this case once again? >> Yeah, it's huge. Investigators send the
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DNA to a company called Parabon Nanolabs. What they figure out is that the killer is of European descent.
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Right. So that helped in terms of identifying a possible suspect, but still I mean Parabon said to
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investigators this is probably a zero probability that this case will be solved. Yeah. I mean this is 2019. they
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get this little bit of a breakthrough, but still I imagine has to be so frustrating. And investigators said that
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they could have walked away at that point, having reached what they thought was the end of the road when it came to
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what they could extract from that DNA. But then one person did come out of the woodwork. And you got to give so much
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credit to Liz. She worked this case pro bono, hundreds of hours. She's a volunteer with the police department, an
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amateur genealogologist, but she threw all her knowledge and all her effort into helping try to solve this case,
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which is so remarkable. So, Liz is fascinating. First off, she didn't even really want to talk. She
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preferred to stay anonymous. She wouldn't let us use her last name. Liz's background, she was a successful
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attorney. She had a very successful career. Um, and she retires and decides, nah, I'll probably spend some time with
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my grandkids. I'll help help my daughter out. But when you have a mind like that,
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your retirement is not like other people's retirement. You got to stay busy. Um, she was looking for a way to
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give back to the community and she had a passion for genealogy and so this was sort of the perfect opportunity for her.
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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
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three years. COVID hits, she can't go anywhere. So, she's in the house on the computer. And there were so many times
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she said that she would be like, "That's it. You know, there's nothing more I can
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do." And then she would lie in bed and be like, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What about this? What about that? What
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about that?" And she just never gave up. Amazing. Thank goodness for people like
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her who just throw all their knowledge at something and she finally cracked the the puzzle. She solved it. Well, when we
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come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about Liz, the genetic genealogologists, [music]
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and how she was able to piece together that family tree that then led investigators to their suspect, Steven
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Smirk. Welcome back. [music] Well, let's get into now how Liz was able to narrow in
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on the suspected killer, Steven Smirk. So, there is the sample of DNA that comes from that washcloth. What Parabon
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did is upload uh the DNA sample to two sites, Family Tree DNA and Jed Match. These sites allow law enforcement to
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access the database. you can opt out of that if you don't want, you know, your information to be seen by law
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enforcement. Um, but generally they have quite large databases which allows them
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to then uh, you know, identify possible familial connections when they have suspect DNA. And so from that comes all
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of these cousins, over a thousand cousins. So what she has to literally do, Liz does, is build family trees for
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all of these cousins until she finds the right person. And she does that by going
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all as far back as she can and identifies the one side of the family and the other side of the family in
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Europe. She traces them over to Canada where they settle. She then parses out the people who moved to California and
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slowly finds one family where the two family lines crisscross. Follows that down and sees a family that
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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
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police. I mean, the amount of work and effort that went into that major breakthrough, what was that moment like
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for her, Amry? I mean, she said it was like magic. Like, you hear the phrase needle in the haystack. It was a needle
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in a needle stack, right? Like, what are the odds of her figuring this out? It was phenomenal.
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Okay. So, they the investigators get this possible match, but they also then have to think, you know, okay, does this
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guy fit with who we think it could be? And in 2021, investigators, they worked with a forensic artist at Parabon Nano
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Labs. This was so fascinating to me because with that DNA sample, then an artist at the lab there then can create
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a phenotype drawing, a rendering of what they believe the suspect might look like.
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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,
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his hair. I mean, it's remarkable. Like that is what surprised me the most about
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using DNA in this way because I didn't think that it could get into that kind of detail. And they then compare that
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sketch to Steven Smirk's high school yearbook photo and it bore such a striking resemblance. I mean, it was it
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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
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reaction to Liz's help on the case. >> If you could say something to Liz, what would you say to her?
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>> Thank you. Thank you very much for your hard work and dedication. >> I I would say you are an angel, Liz.
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You you brought comfort and closure to this family after so many years. >> And if it wasn't for your tenacity and
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hard work and keep keep going, we would not know who killed Robin. And that means everything.
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That means everything to us. Um, you can see they're soft-spoken and measured. Um, you know, I think it was
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important for them to kind of maintain um emotional control, you know what I mean? They're
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reserved. Um, and so this tragedy is completely kind of out of the norm of anything that that they
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would have envisioned for their family. what we learn about Stephen Smirk. In 2023, he was living in Niskeuna, that's
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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
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history. I mean, not even a parking ticket, an Marie, that's more than I could say for me. I think I have a
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couple of parking tickets. >> Yeah, it's remarkable. At least on the surface, this is as average of a guy as
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you can get. Uh the police learned that he's a computer programmer living in upstate New York. You mentioned
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Niskauna, you know, smalish town, married to an defense attorney. He has two kids in high school. And just
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to add sort of another weird coincidence is uh Mary's daughter Lauren actually went to the same high school as Steven
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Smirk's kids. Um obviously not at the same time. Lauren's older than them, but I mean that's how kind of physically
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close these two families had been. But there is really nothing particularly remarkable about this guy and the way
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he's living his life, you know, when when police finally catch up with him. >> Yeah. except when investigators show up
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at his front door there in upstate New York and they knock on the door, he opens it up, he willingly lets them
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inside. And you know, to the detectives, what was so interesting, he didn't seem
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surprised at all when they start to ask him questions about a murder that's going back 30 years. I mean, he didn't
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ask a single follow-up question, and he willingly provides his DNA. And then after the detectives left, he then turns
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himself in to the Nisuna Police Department. I mean, what did investigators think at the time about
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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
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then when they saw him, they thought, "Well, what the heck? Let's just go over there and talk to him." So, they were
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not expecting things to unfold as quickly as they did. He welcomed them in. They talked for a while. Um, and
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they were shocked when just a few hours later he is turning himself in. I don't know what was going through his mind.
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Detectives Melissa Wallace and Don Long uh told us that Smirks told them that his wife said something along the lines
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of do the right thing. But Steven Smurf's wife had no idea this was part of his past. And he says she
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had no idea. Well, that interrogation was so chilling when he he said he openly says and admits, "I'm a serial
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killer, but I've only killed once before." Um, yeah. I mean, that took my breath away. I was like, "Wow." Um, so
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what do they start to learn as investigators dig into his background? What do they find? Um, we spoke to his
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defense attorney who gave us a little more information about his past. Uh, his parents are divorced. uh his mother when
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his mother left she moved in with another woman after this divorce things changed in his life. He kind of fell
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into uh a a rough crowd. Um there was an interest with that crowd an interest in
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studying sort of the occult. There was some drug use. But then, you know, he meets his wife the same year that he
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kills Robin. And he credits meeting her um with kind of what prompted him to really turn his life around. She talks
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to him about some of his anger problems, some of his drinking issues, and he goes
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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
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already pleading guilty. He undergoes a forensic psychological evaluation. It was done by Dr. Marcus uh Vanickle. He
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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
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scores incredibly low, four out of 40. So low in fact that former FBI uh profiler Mary Ellen Otul who you see in
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the hour who he asked to review this these documents she was not a part of this case. She thinks it's so low it's
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suspiciously low that you know maybe he was trying to game the test a little bit. Um he says that he has an
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undiagnosed mental illness and I should also point out that he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the early
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2000s. is something that officers didn't find out about till much later, but this
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is part of what he says was his, you know, undiagnosed mental illness that he may have been suffering from in the '9s
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that he says may explain some of his behavior. >> But there's no evidence at this point,
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though. Or was there anything that connected Smirk to Robin? I mean, did investigators think this was a totally
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random attack? >> Um, I mean, he says it is. Mhm. >> He says that he just, you know, he had
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this compulsion that night and he didn't know she was home alone. Um, and he just
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picked the house randomly. Marie Ellen Otul, who once again I'll say, you know, wasn't a part of this case, just
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reviewed the documents, finds that suspicious, his his assertion that it was completely random. [snorts]
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So, I want to actually play a little bit more from a former FBI profiler, Mary Ellen Otul.
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>> 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
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their lifestyle and and this victim lived a pretty low-risk lifestyle and she is in her own home and it's at night
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and it's a a low crime area of Fairfax County. Um, so you have an offender basically who um breaks into the home
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and seems to have some kind of understanding of the layout of the home. At least the behavior suggests that. But
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you also have an offender who is thinking ahead enough to bring gloves and to wear uh a cover for their face um
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to bring the weapon and and to take the weapon with them. And I think it's also very interesting
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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
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features for me do tend to take away some of the randomness of it. So there you go. In October 2024, Steven Smirk
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accepted a plea deal for firstdegree murder. He was later sentenced to the maximum sentence allowed under the plea
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deal. That's 70 years with the possibility of parole. Smirk will be eligible for parole in 2037.
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So Amry, does the War Lawrence family feel though that justice has been served, at least knowing finally who the
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killer is and knowing that he is behind bars, but yet they didn't get a trial. I
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think they were incredibly relieved to have identified the killer. They wanted a trial. they felt like he kind of got
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off a little bit by not having to sit there and and really hear the damage that was done, you know. Um, this is
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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
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interesting family and Robert War senior actually wrote a book covering the family and he writes about what an
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amazing person Robin was and he also writes about Nicole and how well Nicole is doing and how she graduated from
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university. She's traveled abroad and worked as an Opair. She's now married. She works in the hospitality uh industry
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and Nicole is doing fine, which I think a lot of people would be sort of curious
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about. He writes about when he heard that Steven Smirk had been arrested and he said, "I cried and grieved for the
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many years not knowing who killed Robin or why. My beloved wife Jesse died without ever knowing the person
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responsible would pay for their crime." I shouted, "Hallelujah!" when we received a phone call that Robin's
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killer had been found after 29 years. >> Well, we can only imagine that at least
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finally having an answer has to give them all some peace. And Marie, once again, such great reporting. Thank you
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so much for bringing the hour [music] to us. And I do want to remind our listeners, if you like this episode,
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please rate and review us on Apple Podcast or Spotify.