Perhaps Stafford County Sheriff’s Detective David K. Wood put it best: “These cases are not easy, or they would have been solved a long time ago.”
Wood was describing, over email, the difficulties inherent in working on cold cases.
“It takes a strong background in law enforcement, superior investigative skills, and a high degree of determination and patience, with the understanding that all your time and effort will not always pay off and get you the final results you desire or the ability to solve these cases,” he wrote. “It will require many hours of reviewing old evidence, reviewing old reports, re-locating and re-interviewing original witnesses.”
Despite these challenges, Wood found success in a nearly 40-year-old cold case — an accomplishment for which he was honored last week at the Fredericksburg Convention Center.
Wood was one of a host of local public servants recognized at the Fredericksburg Regional Chamber of Commerce’s 9th Annual First Responders Awards Breakfast, which also featured Dr. Karen Shelton, Virginia’s state health commissioner, and Christopher Lindsay, chief operating officer of the Virginia Department of Health.
In introducing Wood, who received an Excellence in Criminal Investigation Award, Stafford Sheriff’s Maj. R. Jason Dembowski described the case:
On Nov. 14, 1986, Jaqueline Lard, 40, was working at Mount Vernon Realty in the 300 block of Garrisonville Road. She left there at 9 p.m. as the business closed but never made it home that night.
The next morning, employees of other area businesses prepared to open for the day and discovered a crime scene at the rear of the office that indicated a struggle. Lard and her vehicle, however, were missing.
The following day, two kids playing in a wooded area near Railroad Avenue in Woodbridge discovered a body beneath a pile of discarded carpet.
“Stafford detectives joined Prince William detectives and the FBI to diligently process the scene and identify the deceased as Jacqueline Lard,” Dembowski said. “This meticulous collection of evidence would ultimately provide the suspect’s identification nearly 37 years later.”
Lard’s vehicle was found abandoned in Fairfax County on Dec. 18, 1986, leading to the discovery of additional evidence. Over the next several years, detectives from multiple agencies, including an investigative task force that was created, followed up on countless leads and conducted interviews that resulted in the elimination of numerous suspects and persons of interest.
The investigation moved to cold-case status, Dembowski said, but Wood continued digging, exploring a new technology, forensic investigative genetic genealogy. He worked with Parabon NanoLabs, a company providing DNA phenotyping, to analyze the evidence, which also linked Lard’s murder to the unsolved 1989 slaying of Stafford resident Amy Baker in Fairfax.
On Dec. 14, 2023, a family name for the Lard case suspect was identified, Dembowski said. Detectives followed up on leads and ultimately obtained a search warrant for DNA from Stafford resident Elroy Harrison, who is in his 60s. DNA ended up being a match, and Harrison was arrested.
In June of this year, Harris was found guilty after a two-week jury trial of second-degree murder, abduction with the intent to defile, aggravated malicious wounding, and breaking and entering with the intent to commit murder.
He is scheduled to be sentenced in October and faces two life sentences plus 60 years in prison.
“The extraordinary work by Detective Wood to review evidence from nearly 40 years ago, managing to document over 1,200 supplemental investigative reports, and the tremendous pursuit of justice led to the successful prosecution and conviction of this horrendous crime,” Dembowski said.
Information on the Baker case was unavailable on Friday evening.
In the email with the Free Press, Wood wrote that, if he had to pick a best case out of all the ones he’s worked on over four decades, it would be the Lard case.
However, he wrote, “Instead of considering cases successes or failures, I simply consider each one a learning experience in hopes of giving the victim(s) and their family members the justice they deserve. But these cases all have tragic storylines behind them and victims who cannot be forgotten.”
The investigator wrote that he is “humbled and honored” to have received the Chamber award, and he thanked the organization for the recognition.
“I am being recognized,” he wrote, “but I feel it necessary to also credit the countless other law enforcement professionals who have worked on this case over the years in order to bring this case to a successful closure.
“This award is a testament to the power of collaboration, passion and determination. It symbolizes not only what one can achieve with determination, but also what we can accomplish together as a community.”
