Robin Lawrence was brutally stabbed to death by an intruder who remained unknown for nearly three decades

Robin Lawrence.Credit : Courtesy Lauren Ovans; Fairfax County Police Department

While on a business trip to the Bahamas in the fall of 1994, airline executive Ollie Lawrence grew concerned about his wife, Robin, 37, who was back at home in Springfield, Va., with Nicole, their 2-year-old daughter.

Robin wasn’t answering his phone calls, so Ollie contacted her friend Laurie Lindberg and asked her to go over to the house to check on his family.

What Lindberg found after climbing through an open window at the Lawrences’ home in a quiet suburb of Washington, D.C., was disturbing: Nicole, wearing a diaper that hadn’t been changed in days, was alone and walking down a hallway with blood splattered on the walls.

“I knew something horrible had happened,” recalls Lindberg, 68.

She picked up Nicole and ran to a neighbor’s house to call the police.

Robin, right, and Nicole Lawrence.Courtesy Lawrence Family

Authorities soon learned shocking details of what appeared, at first, to be a crime of passion.

Just days before her 38th birthday, Robin, an artist and devoted mother, was stabbed 49 times and nearly decapitated. Nicole, who’d had a liver transplant shortly after she was born, was severely dehydrated.

The toddler had been in the house with her deceased mom for two days and may have tried to help by bringing her a roll of toilet paper.

The hunt for the killer initially focused on Robin’s husband, who admitted to investigators that he was having an affair with another woman at the time.

Ollie and Robin Lawrence.Courtesy Mary Cowans

But Ollie had a solid alibi — he was out of the country on the day Robin was killed. DNA lifted from a bloody washcloth in Robin’s bathroom yielded no matches in CODIS, the government database of DNA samples of every convicted felon in the U.S.

Within a year, the case went cold. Now the story of how investigators used advanced forensic technology to reopen the case and apprehend the killer nearly three decades later is featured in “The Serial Killer Who Only Killed Once,” on People Magazine Investigates, premiering Feb. 16 on ID and streaming on HBO Max. (An exclusive clip is shown below.)

“There were no new leads and information [for years],” says Robin’s sister Mary Cowans, 73. “We lost hope.”

Growing up in Syracuse, N.Y., with her parents and three siblings, Robin, who studied dance and painting, was the most outgoing member of her family.

Crime scene.Fairfax County Police Department (2)

“She could take a blank canvas and create something beautiful,” says her brother Bobby Warr, 66. “It’s incredible how talented she was.”

After graduating with a fine arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University, she moved to Washington and began dating Ollie. They were married in 1989 and welcomed Nicole three years later.

The family soon moved to a house in the suburbs, where, on Nov. 18, 1994, an intruder brutally killed Robin.

When investigators found the bloody washcloth in her bathroom, they believed that the blood on it must have come from the suspect, since Robin was attacked, and likely incapacitated, several feet away in her bedroom.

But it would be decades before advances in DNA testing technology and the development of genetic genealogy finally allowed them to successfully identify a suspect: a then-51-year-old Army vet named Stephan Smerk, who had been stationed in nearby Arlington, Va., at the time of the murder.

Stephan Smerk.Fairfax County Police Department

When contacted by police at his home in upstate New York, Smerk, a married father of two, confessed to the crime. He coldly described how he used his military training to murder Robin, whom he had targeted for no reason other than an urge to kill.

Stephan Smerk.Fairfax County Police Department (2)

“I honestly believe that if it wasn’t for my wife and my kids, I probably would be a serial killer,” he told police.

Smerk pleaded guilty to murder in 2024 and was sentenced to 70 years in prison, finally giving Robin’s loved ones the justice they’d been seeking for 30 years.

“The day of the sentencing there was a good feeling of closure,” says Cowans, “of seeing things finally put right for the family.”

“The Serial Killer Who Only Killed Once,” on People Magazine Investigates, premieres Feb. 16 on ID and streams on HBO Max.