On an autumn morning in 1986, his 11th birthday, Edwin Lard awoke in a house with no grown-ups. His mother, Jacqueline Lard, a 40-year-old real estate agent in Stafford County, Va., hadn’t returned from work the previous evening. Then the boy and his sister got a call from someone at her office, wondering if she was all right. Her co-workers didn’t know where she was, either.
The following day, Jacqueline Lard’s partially clothed body was found beneath a discarded carpet in neighboring Prince William County. Reports at the time said she had been killed by blunt force trauma. A month after that, her car, a rose-colored Nissan Stanza sedan, turned up abandoned in Alexandria.
“It happened a long time ago and, I mean, it shaped my life,” Edwin Lard, 48, said recently. “I can pretty much look at the majority of things that I’ve done in my life, and I think many of them stemmed from this event.”
Now, 37 years later, authorities have arrested the alleged killer.
Based on DNA evidence, a Stafford County grand jury March 4 indicted Elroy Harrison, 65, on charges of first-degree murder, abduction with the intent to defile, aggravated malicious wounding and breaking and entering with intent to kill, authorities said. Meanwhile, police in Fairfax County, also citing DNA evidence, publicly identified Harrison as a suspect in the 1989 strangulation of 18-year-old Amy Baker. No charges have been filed in the Fairfax case. Harrison’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Stafford officials said Jacqueline Lard was last seen at 9 p.m. on Nov. 14, 1986, at Mount Vernon Realty in the 300 block of Garrisonville Road. After the office closed for the night, police said, Lard never made it home. Authorities said employees of nearby businesses found evidence of a “horrific struggle” the next morning at the realty office, with Lard and her vehicle both gone. The day after that, officials said, two juveniles playing in a wooded area near Railroad Avenue in Woodbridge, Va., found Lard’s body.
After the killing, officials have said, they suspected that a man who pleaded guilty to murder in Calvert County, Md., had also killed Lard. Stafford County Sheriff David Decatur said on Thursday that officials never made an arrest in the case before Harrison. Decatur said detectives “followed countless leads” decade over decade, but never found their suspect.
“There’s been four sheriffs since this happened,” Decatur said after Harrison’s arrest. “All of us have tried very hard to continue investigating to find out who committed the murder.”
Over those years, Edwin Lard grew up to be a Navy medical corpsman and then a paramedic. Lard, who has three daughters and a son, is now the executive director of Rescue Task Force, a threat protection consulting group.
“My mom was his victim,” Lard said. “I’m not his victim, my family’s not his victim. And I’ll never be a victim.”
On March 29, 1989, more than two years after Lard’s killing, Fairfax County police said Amy Baker visited her family in Falls Church for Easter. Sue Baker, Amy’s mother, said her husband urged their daughter to wait for traffic to subside before heading back to Stafford a few days later. Authorities said Baker began driving back to Stafford around 8:30 p.m. By 9:55 p.m., a Virginia State Trooper had discovered Baker’s vehicle abandoned on Interstate 95 near the exit ramp to Backlick Road.
“Evidently, the gas gauge had broken and we didn’t know it,” Sue Baker said. “She didn’t stop to get gas. And then, she ran out of gas.”
Sue Baker said she became worried when her daughter couldn’t be found and continued to fret through that night over her whereabouts. The next morning, she called the police and soon learned that her daughter’s car had been towed. Two days later, conducting a search of their own, Baker, her husband and sister-in-law found Amy Baker’s body in a wooded area near the interstate.
Police collected DNA evidence but failed to find a suspect who matched it. People of interest came and went, but Baker said police never landed on a suspect in the killing. The case, like Lard’s killing, went cold.
“I think she was just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Baker said. “And I hate to say that.”
In 2017, authorities said, Stafford County officials submitted DNA from the Lard crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company based in Reston, Va. CeCe Moore, chief genetic genealogist, said the DNA evidence was highly degraded, but officials were able to create a viable DNA profile in 2018 from the sample. The DNA did not match any accused or convicted criminals in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS.
But DNA sleuths in recent years have used a new method to identify suspects who aren’t in the law enforcement database. DNA from a crime scene can be compared to millions of DNA samples submitted by customers of some genealogical companies. Genealogists can find people from the same family tree as the unidentified suspect. Researchers then explore the family tree, looking for someone who, for instance, was living in the vicinity of the crime when it happened. That person’s DNA can then be compared to the crime scene DNA.
“This is one of my two oldest cases,” Moore said, adding, “It is a big burden off of all of our shoulders, I think, to finally have it to this point.”
Forensic genealogy has become increasingly common in solving cold cases in Northern Virginia. In September 2023, police arrested a man from Niskayuna, N.Y., in a woman’s stabbing and slashing death in 1994 in West Springfield, Va. Police also used genealogy to identify a woman whose body was found by officials in 2001 near a drainage ditch at Lincoln Circle in McLean.
Fairfax County police said that in 2021, they submitted DNA evidence from Baker’s killing to DNA Labs International, a company specializing in forensic DNA analysis for law enforcement, attorneys and government labs. Authorities created a DNA profile for Baker’s suspect and Fairfax police said they uploaded it to a Virginia database, which ultimately linked Baker’s killing and Lard’s homicide.
In December 2023, genealogists found a family tree for the suspect. Decatur said Stafford County detectives followed up on the family and narrowed their focus to Elroy Harrison. After obtaining a search warrant, Decatur said, they got a DNA sample from Harrison. Then in February, Decatur said, investigators learned that Harrison’s DNA matched the crime-scene DNA in Lard’s case. Harrison is being held without bail.
When Sue Baker said she got a call March 1 from police, asking to meet, she did not think much of it, she said. At least four detectives had been assigned to her daughter’s case across nearly 35 years. Time and again, she said, detectives would tell her they were doing the best that they could do to solve the case but lacked any leads.
But this time, Fairfax County detectives and a Stafford official told her they had a name, and that an arrest could happen in a matter of days. Baker and her husband were stunned, she said.
“We looked at each other like we were in a dream.”
