Virginia 1973 Cold Case FINALLY Solved – Her Killer Hid in Plain Sight for 52 Years

On December 8th, 1973, someone moving through Conway Robinson State Forest off Route 29 in Prince William County, Virginia, came across the body of a 33-year-old woman among the trees. She had been stabbed eight times. Her home was in Washington, D.C. and there was no record of any connection she had ever had to rural Virginia.

 She had no reason to be in that forest unless someone had driven her there in the dark and left her among the oldest oaks more than 40 miles from her front door. Virginia State Police had a primary suspect by the end of the first week.    Detectives knew his name. They had his motive on paper and his history of violence was already in another agency’s file.

What they did not have was a way to prove it in 1973. The file sat with that suspect’s name on it for the next 52 years. Her name was Shirley Leona Washington. She was 33 years old, born and raised in Washington, D.C. where she had lived her whole adult life. She had moved back into her mother’s house in the same city earlier that fall.

Conway Robinson State Forest sat along Route 29 between Gainesville and the Manassas National Battlefield in Prince William County. The land had been donated to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1938 by the Conway Robinson Memorial Park Association in memory of the 19th century Virginia lawyer and historian whose name the property carries.

By the early 1970s, it was managed by the Virginia Department of Forestry, kept as one of the few large blocks of public forest in the rapidly suburbanizing northern part of the state. In 1973, the area around the forest was far more rural than it is today. Open farmland, scattered houses, and long stretches of two-lane road ran through the Virginia Piedmont.

 Manassas National Battlefield Park sat about a mile to the east and the 440 acres of Conway Robinson made up one of the largest tracks of undeveloped state-owned land in northern Virginia. The suburbanization that has since pushed the Washington metro area west into Prince William County had not yet arrived. The Civil War site drew tourists in season, but the area in December was as quiet as anywhere in northern Virginia.

The hiking season was over and the parking areas near the trailheads sat empty after dark. The trees were dense. Some of the oaks were more than 250 years old dating back to the earliest settlement of the surrounding farms. The Civilian Conservation Corps had planted the first pines on the property in the late 1930s.

The canopy blocked light and the trails were narrow. Shirley’s body was discovered by someone who had been moving through the woods. The wounds were concentrated and deliberate. She had been brought to the site from somewhere else and left where she was found. The location had not been random. It had been chosen.

The location matched someone who knew the area. From Washington D.C. to the entrance was about 40 miles, less than an hour on Route 29 in 1973. The trip had to be made twice in one go. Once with Shirley in the car, once without her. Virginia State Police responded and processed the crime scene. Investigators collected physical evidence from the body and the surrounding area.

 They documented the wounds, the positioning of the body, and the condition of the ground near where she was found. They looked for tire tracks on the access roads, footprints on the trails, and witnesses along Route 29 who might have seen an unfamiliar vehicle near the entrance in the days before. Everything they collected was preserved and logged into the case file under the homicide of Shirley Leona Washington.

Detectives built a picture of Shirley’s life in the months before her death. They learned that she had recently moved back to her mother’s house in the district, and they learned why. Her husband had been accused of assaulting a minor, and the accusation had ended the marriage. She went to her mother’s house.

 In the weeks that followed, her husband came looking for her. Investigators canvassed the area, traced her last known contacts in the district, and built a timeline of her last days against the location of the body. He had shown up at her mother’s house and threatened her. Police documented the threat in the original case file.

He had told Shirley he was going to cause her some sort of harm. Days later, she was dead. The husband refused to cooperate with the investigation. He turned away from detectives, would not sit for an interview, and offered no alibi for the days surrounding Shirley’s death. When investigators asked him about Conway Robinson State Forest, he told them he had never heard of the place.

They later established that he had been there before. The denial was a lie. Detectives followed the leads in the first months. They interviewed witnesses, ran down alibis, and built a timeline of the days leading up to December 8th. But the forensic tools available in 1973 could not connect a person to the physical evidence recovered from the site.

Modern DNA analysis would not exist for another decade and a half. They had a suspect and no way to prove it. The file moved into the cold case category, where it sat for the next four decades. The husband stayed in the Washington D.C. area after Shirley’s death. In 1964, 9 years before Shirley was killed, he had been charged with stabbing a previous wife.

 That case had been adjudicated by the early 1970s before he met and married Shirley. By 1973, she had become the second wife he had attacked with a knife. The 1964 charge had been on file. By the early 1970s, the case had moved through the courts and ended in some kind of disposition. He was free and married again by the time Shirley was killed.

The system that tracked violent offenders in 1973 did not have the tools to connect what had happened in 1964 to the man now under suspicion in a Virginia State Police homicide file. Whether the 1964 case ended in conviction, acquittal, plea, or dropped charge was not part of the public record carried forward into the 1973 file.

What was carried forward was a name, a known charge, and a man living openly in the area. The records existed. They were not linked to each other in any way an investigator could pull up by entering a name. In an era before searchable criminal history databases, a previous violent charge in one jurisdiction did not automatically surface when the same person became a person of interest in another.

The information lived in paper files in different courthouses, accessible only by phone calls to clerks who would need to be told what to look for. In the 1980s, he was charged with stabbing additional acquaintances on separate occasions. The weapon, the method, and the type of target stayed consistent. The victims were people he knew, never strangers.

Decades of court filings tracked the same violence directed at people who had been close to him. Each charge generated its own court record in its own jurisdiction, sitting in a separate paper file from the Prince William County homicide case that had been waiting since 1973. The physical evidence from the 1973 crime scene had never been conclusively linked to him through any forensic method available at the time.

The file moved through successive generations of detectives at the Fairfax Field Office, each inheriting the same dead-end picture the originals had built. He died in 2013 at the age of 68. No charge for Shirley’s murder had ever been filed against him. Shirley’s family carried the weight of her death for more than 50 years.

 Her mother, who had taken her daughter in when the marriage fell apart, lived afterward with the knowledge that giving her a place to go had not been enough to keep her alive. The family did not make public statements during the decades that followed. They waited for the investigation to deliver what it had not delivered in 1973.

Proof. They knew who detectives suspected. They had lived with that knowledge for decades, knowing who had probably done it, but having no official confirmation, no arrest, no trial, no verdict. The suspect was the man Shirley had been married to, the man she had run from, and the man whose name had been on the case file since the first week.

Two and three generations of Shirley’s relatives grew up knowing the story of what had happened to her, and knowing it could not be officially named. Cousins, nieces, and nephews who had not been alive in 1973 inherited the unfinished case as part of the family history. Shirley would have been 43 in 1983, 53 in 1993, 63 in 2003, and 85 if she had lived to the day the case was solved.

 Leaving was supposed to be the answer. For Shirley, leaving had been the beginning of the end. The advice that domestic violence advocates give to women in dangerous marriages, get out,  go somewhere safe, go to family, had worked exactly as far as her mother’s front door. Whatever drove him to make the drive to Conway Robinson with his estranged wife in the car has never been told publicly.

He took the answer to that question with him when he died in 2013. In the early 2020s, investigators with the Virginia Sexual Assault Kit Initiative reopened Shirley’s case. The initiative is a federally funded program run through the Virginia Office of the Attorney General in partnership with the Virginia Department of Forensic Science and the State Police.

Since 2016, the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative has awarded Virginia more than $6 million in federal grants to fund laboratory work and analysis. The program had been operating in Virginia for nearly a decade by the time it reached Shirley’s case. The initiative was originally designed to clear backlogs of untested sexual assault kits sitting in storage across the state and to use modern DNA testing on cold cases that had stalled in earlier eras of forensic science.

By September 2024, it had already led to convictions in older sexual assault cases pulled out of storage, including a 1992 Norfolk case where a man named Vernon Gay was convicted more than three decades after the original attack. That Norfolk conviction was the first prosecution to come out of Virginia’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative work and the proof of concept that older files could be reopened and finished.

 The Bureau of Justice Assistance, which administers the federal grants, later expanded the mandate to include other violent cold cases that were not strictly sexual assault. Shirley’s murder was one that benefited from that expansion. Her file was flagged as one that could be helped by modern forensic methods applied to material preserved since 1973.

What drove the flagging was a combination of physical evidence still on hand and existing investigative leads that had stalled for technological reasons rather than evidentiary ones. For a case like hers, the program covered laboratory testing, behavioral and pattern analysis hours, and the cost of moving the file through legal review at the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.

The physical evidence from the woods had been kept in storage for nearly 50 years, surviving moves between evidence facilities, changes in department leadership, and the slow degradation that time imposes on biological material. Some of what had been collected at the scene in 1973 still held meaningful information, and the funding covered the cost of pulling it back out and running it through current methods.

Senior Special Agent C. McClure of the Virginia State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation led the reinvestigation, working out of the Fairfax Field Office. The office covers Prince William County and the surrounding Northern Virginia territory and had been the home of the Conway Robinson case from the beginning.

Analysts from the Homeland Security Division’s Violent Crime Analytical Support Team joined the case to provide behavioral and pattern analysis. The Virginia Office of the Attorney General provided the funding for the analytical support and testing. The work spanned multiple agencies. State police field agents, prosecutors at the Attorney General’s Office, and analysts trained in violent crime patterns all coordinated around one case file that had been sitting unresolved since the Nixon administration.

Behavioral pattern analysis as a forensic discipline did not exist in 1973 in the form it exists today. The violent crime analytical support team applies it to old files where suspects have been identified but never charged, looking for signature patterns that connect cases across decades and jurisdictions. The reinvestigation combined the new forensic work with archival investigation.

McClure’s team went back through the original case file, re-examined witness statements, and built the most complete picture of the suspect’s history of violence that had ever been assembled in one place. Nobody had ever lined the separate incidents up next to each other before. In practical terms, the work was a full file rebuild.

 Old reports reread in light of new information. Dormant leads chased down through whatever paper trail still existed. The original 1973 documents were also reconciled against modern criminal history records that had not been available the first time around. The analysts at the Homeland Security Division provided behavioral and pattern analysis that had not been available to investigators in 1973.

They found a documented signature repeated across decades attached to one person. The weapon used, the type of victim chosen, and the closeness of the relationship were consistent across every incident on record. His name was Clarence Edward Washington, Jr. In December 1973, Clarence had been approximately 28 or 29 years old and married to Shirley.

The marriage had ended in the months before the killing. His criminal history bracketed the murder on both sides. The 1973 homicide sat in the middle of his record, the only one he was never charged with. On April 24th, 2026, the Virginia State Police and the Prince William County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office held a joint announcement confirming that the homicide case had been solved.

 Both agencies had worked the case across leadership changes, technology changes, and the legal lifetime of the original suspect. Matthew Demlein, the Virginia State Police Public Relations Coordinator, coordinated the release of information to the press. The briefing was carried by news outlets across Northern Virginia and the District of Columbia within hours and ran on regional television evening newscasts that same night, reaching audiences across the metropolitan area where Shirley had lived.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Amy Ashworth, who serves Prince William County and the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park, took the lead at the press briefing and spoke for the prosecution side of the joint investigation. Ashworth told reporters that her office had reviewed the information and evidence provided by the state police.

She and her chief deputy were convinced from what they had seen that the murder had been committed by Clarence Edward Washington, Jr. But she said the case could not be prosecuted. The length of time that had elapsed, the deterioration of the physical evidence, and the death of key eyewitnesses meant there would be no trial.

 Had Clarence been alive, the case would have been prosecuted. He had been dead for 13 years, and prosecution had become a hypothetical the office could no longer pursue. Ashworth laid out the evidence publicly. Clarence had a motive, and his whereabouts at the time of the murder were not accounted for. He had refused to cooperate with detectives investigating his wife’s disappearance.

He had made statements to Shirley indicating he was going to cause her some sort of harm. And he had denied knowing Conway Robinson State Forest, even though he knew it. The cumulative weight of those facts was what her office had relied on. The Virginia State Police, Ashworth said, should be commended for working the investigation for over 50 years.

 It showed dedication not only to the job, but to the pursuit of justice for everyone. There was no way to take away the pain from the loss of a loved one in circumstances like these, Ashworth said. But the fact that the state police did not give up on the families of victims should be reassuring. Senior Special Agent McClure credited the program and the resources it had provided.

It was a relief, McClure said, to be able to provide closure to Shirley’s family after all these years. The state police, he said, did not give up on solving cold cases. The Shirley Washington investigation was, in his words, another example of department personnel who stayed with a long dormant file long enough to see it through.

Attorney General Jay Jones acknowledged the work publicly. The program, Jones said, had helped bring closure to a decades-long investigation, proving to be a crucial tool in the fight for justice. His office, he added,  was proud of the collaboration with the state police in bringing the case to a just resolution, and would continue to provide every resource available to law enforcement agencies across the Commonwealth.

The announcement was the first time the suspect’s name had appeared on a public document attached to Shirley’s case. The family was not present at the announcement. No family statements were released either before or after the press event. The people who had carried Shirley’s loss for more than half a century received the confirmation privately ahead of the public announcement in keeping with Virginia State Police practice of contacting the families of victims before the press.

The man they had suspected since the original investigation was now formally identified on the case file as the killer. For most of the span between 1973 and 2026, Shirley’s death had been an unsolved homicide on the books of the Virginia State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. That status finally changed on April 24th, 2026, when the case was officially closed.

After all those years, the Fairfax Field Office moved it out of the active rotation and into the archive of resolved cold cases. The man on the closure was Clarence Edward Washington, Jr. The original detectives in 1973 had written that name down 52 years earlier and had never been able to use it on a charging document.

By 2026, the name had outlasted them. The suspect they could not charge and most of the witnesses who could have testified against him. A 33-year-old woman was stabbed eight times and left among the trees of Conway Robinson, 40 miles from the city where she had gone to be safe with her mother. The man who took her there told detectives he had never heard of the place.

52 years later, what he had left behind in the woods told a very different story. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.