Stephan Smerk appears in court, accused in the formerly cold-case killing of 37-year-old Robin Warr Lawrence in Fairfax County in 1994.
One autumn night in the 1990s, after downing two beers and taking a dose of ephedrine, a stimulant, then-Army soldier Stephan Smerk left what is now Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, near Arlington National Cemetery, and drove toward his friends’ house, he would later tell police. He said he wanted to go to a familiar area as he searched for a person to stab.
In a video of that police interview played Thursday in a Fairfax County courtroom, Smerk described how he parked his white Chevrolet pickup truck in a driveway beside his friends’ home, and used a branch to break into a sliding-glass door of a neighbor’s residence. After glancing at what he thought was a child’s crib, he said, he ventured into the master bedroom and watched as a woman got down on her knees and begged for her life.
Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Northern Virginia, used DNA found at the crime scene to create a genetic profile of a possible suspect and link it to a family tree, authorities have said. Detectives then concentrated on Smerk, who was living with his wife and two high school-aged children in Niskayuna, N.Y. Fairfax Detective Melissa Wallace testified on Thursday that she went to Smerk’s home and swabbed his cheeks for a DNA sample.in court.
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