Cold cases solved: Police arrest Stafford man in murder cases dating back nearly 40 years

Police in Stafford and Fairfax counties say they arrested a suspect in the slayings of 18-year-old Amy Baker and 4032-year-old Jaqueline Lord in 1989 and 1986, respectively.

Stafford County Sheriff’s Major Shawn Kimmitz credits the excellent work of detectives from both agencies, who used DNA evidence to identify a suspect.

On November 14, 1986, Lord, was working at Mount Vernon Realty in the 300 block of Garrisonville Road. She was last seen that evening at 9 p.m. as the business closed. Lord never made it home.

The next morning, employees of other businesses in the area prepared to open for the day and discovered a crime scene at the realty office, which indicated a struggle. Lord and her vehicle were both missing. Stafford County detectives, assisted by the Virginia State Police Crime Scene Unit and the FBI processed the scene and collected blood and other evidence.

The following day, two teenagers played in a wooded area off Route 1 at Railroad Avenue in Woodbridge, about 20 miles north of the realty office. They discovered a body beneath a pile of discarded carpet. Stafford detectives joined Prince William detectives and the FBI to process the scene and identified the deceased as Lord.

Lord’s missing vehicle was located abandoned in Fairfax County on December 18, 1986, leading to the recovery of additional evidence. Over the years, detectives from multiple federal and state agencies followed up on countless leads and conducted interviews, eliminating numerous suspects and persons of interest.

The FBI created a task force combining the efforts of the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office, Prince William County Police Department, the FBI, and the DEA. DNA was extracted from the evidence, but repeated searches of the Virginia and National DNA Databanks via CODIS, in addition to direct comparisons against submitted persons of interest and familial searches, failed to identify the killer. The leads were exhausted, and the investigation was moved to cold case status.

At the order of Stafford County Sheriff David Decatur, D.K. Wood explored a new technology, forensic investigative genetic genealogy, to help identify the killer.

Wood worked with Parabon NanoLabs, a company providing DNA phenotyping. The analysis of the DNA linked the Lord’s murder to the unsolved 1989 murder of Amy Baker in Fairfax County. A Stafford resident, Baker, ran out of gas while traveling on Interstate 95 and pulled off the highway at Backlick Road in Fairfax County.

Baker met her killer while walking toward a gas station. She was raped, assaulted, and left for dead in the woods.

On December 14, 2023, identified their suspect. Detectives followed up on the leads this technology created and ultimately obtained a search warrant for DNA from Stafford County residents. In February, the Department of Forensic Science reported that the DNA matched.

On March 4, Elroy Harrison, 65, was indicted by a Stafford County Grand Jury for first-degree murder, abduction with the intent to defile, aggravated malicious wounding of Lord, as well as breaking with the intent to commit murder.

He was arrested at his Stafford County home on March 5 and placed in the Rappahannock Regional Jail without bond. Cold Case detectives from the Fairfax County Police Department are working alongside the Fairfax County Office of the Commonwealth Attorney to seek charges against Harrison for the murder of Baker’s murder.

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