Family Tree Leads Cops to Suspect in 2 Cold-Case Murders

After nearly 40 years, police say they have solved two cold-case murders of Virginia women using genetic genealogy.

On Tuesday morning, cops arrested Elroy Harrison, 65, in connection with the 1986 slaying of Jacqueline Lard, 32, who was working at a real-estate office when she was beaten and left dead under a pile of carpet in the woods.

Authorities say they also expect to charge Harrison in the death of Amy Baker, 18, who was fatally strangled and dumped in the woods after her car broke down in 1989. Forensic evidence links the two cases, police said.

Lard was married to a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and had two children. The FBI was brought in to investigate, but a year later, authorities still had no idea who killed her.

“We’ve been on sort of a rollercoaster ride throughout the investigation,” DEA Agent Bill Healey told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1987.

Baker had just passed her GED and was returning from a visit with relatives when she was killed. Her own mother found her body while searching the area where her car had been towed.

“I guess I should be happy I found her instead of wondering for the rest of my life where she is,” Sue Baker told the Potomac News in 1989.

Both murders had been classified as cold cases, but Stafford County Detective D.K. Wood employed a new technology that uses unidentified DNA to build a family tree of a suspect to come up with Harrison’s name late last year.

A DNA sample from him proved to be a match from the Lard crime scene: the office of the Mount Vernon Realty, where police found signs of what they called a “horrific struggle.” He was indicted this week in the case.

According to a 1983 article in the Times-Dispatch, a man by the same name was arrested for the gunpoint robbery of a Stafford County bank.