Virginia police close 1973 cold case, husband named as killer

Virginia State Police closed the 52-year-old homicide file on Shirley L. Washington by concluding that her husband, Clarence E. Washington Jr., was involved in her killing, ending one of Prince William County’s longest-running cold cases.

Shirley Washington, 33, of Washington, D.C., was found dead on December 8, 1973, in Conway Robinson State Forest outside Gainesville, Virginia. She had been stabbed eight times. On April 24, 2026, special agents with the Virginia State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation Fairfax Field Office said a fresh review of the case file pointed squarely to Clarence Washington as the man responsible.

Investigators said the case came into focus through old records, witness information and the pattern of violence surrounding Clarence Washington. Shirley Washington had moved out of the home she shared with him after he was accused of assaulting a minor. Before her death, he later threatened her at her new home in Washington, D.C., where she was living with her mother. State police also said Clarence Washington knew Conway Robinson State Forest, while his whereabouts at the time of the murder were never accounted for and he refused to cooperate after Shirley Washington disappeared.

The violence in his past mattered. Virginia State Police said Clarence Washington had been charged in 1964 with stabbing an ex-wife and was later charged with stabbing additional acquaintances in the 1980s. That history, combined with the threats, his access to the forest and his silence when investigators came calling, gave detectives the basis to close the file with a named killer, even though the case had aged out of court.

Clarence Washington died in 2013 at 68, so prosecutors cannot bring him to trial. The Prince William County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office said the case would have been prosecuted if he had still been alive. Amy Ashworth, who became the first woman elected commonwealth’s attorney in Prince William County in November 2019 and took office on January 1, 2020, said she and the chief deputy were convinced by the evidence, but the passage of time left them unable to proceed because physical evidence had deteriorated and key eyewitnesses had died.

The closure gives Shirley Washington’s family an official answer, even if it cannot deliver a conviction. Virginia’s cold-case system defines such files as unsolved homicides, missing-person cases or unidentified-remains cases that have remained open for at least five years, a reminder that some investigations can still move forward decades later, even when the courtroom door is already closed.