DNA links two Virginia cold case murders, revisiting Amy Baker's death

A single DNA link has done what three decades of paper files could not: it tied Amy Baker’s killing to another Virginia murder that had long sat in a separate cold-case box. The June 2 installment of DMV Confidential on DC News Now put Baker back at the center of the story, while also showing how Jacqueline Lard’s 1986 death became the other half of the same forensic puzzle.

Amy Baker was 18 when she disappeared in 1989 after visiting family in Falls Church and heading back toward Stafford County. Fairfax County police say a Virginia State Trooper found her car abandoned near I-95 that night, and Baker’s mother later checked the vehicle and saw her belongings still inside. The next day, the family searched near where the car had broken down and found Baker’s remains in a wooded area near the exit ramp from I-95 to Backlick Road in Springfield.

Lard’s case began three years earlier, on Nov. 14, 1986, when she was last seen leaving work at Mount Vernon Realty on Garrisonville Road in Stafford County. Authorities said evidence at the office suggested a violent struggle by the next morning, and her body was found on Nov. 16, 1986, in a wooded area under discarded carpet. Reports described Lard as a wife and mother, and investigators later said she had been abducted, beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled.

What changed was not the crime scene, but the science. Fairfax County police said evidence submitted in 2021 to DNA Labs International produced a DNA profile that was uploaded to the Virginia state database, where it linked Baker’s death to the homicide investigation of Lard. That kind of comparison was not possible when the women were killed; now it could stitch two cases, two counties and two timelines into one suspect-centered investigation.

The next breakthrough came on Dec. 14, 2023, when the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office said it identified a family name for the suspect. On March 5, 2024, investigators arrested Stafford resident Elroy Neal Harrison, 65. He was charged in Stafford County with first-degree murder, abduction with intent to defile, aggravated malicious wounding and breaking and entering with intent to commit murder.

The case then moved from cold-case theory to courtroom verdict. A jury convicted Harrison in the Lard murder in June 2025, and a Stafford County judge sentenced him in October 2025 to three life sentences plus 40 years in prison. The DNA did more than revive one file. It turned the abandoned car off I-95 and the carpet-covered body in Stafford County into parts of the same investigation, and Baker’s death is now the next question hanging over that long-delayed answer.