The smell was the first thing anyone noticed. A thick, rotting odor creeping out of unit 408 at the apartment complex on the edge of town. It was August 21st, 2002, and when staff finally opened the door, they found a woman’s body lying on the living room floor. She was only in her underwear.
No documents anywhere in the apartment identified her. The front door had no signs of forced entry, but the balcony door was slightly ajar. Someone had covered her with a sheet, which struck the detectives as strange. There was blood everywhere, but it all belonged to the victim, except for one single drop on a newspaper in the kitchen.
It was male blood, but it didn’t match anyone in the DNA database. The autopsy showed she’d been stabbed more than twenty times. She fought back hard, with defensive wounds on her arms. There were no signs of sexual assault, so that initial theory went out the window.
The first task was figuring out who she was. The building manager told police that the apartment was rented by a man named Richard, who apparently lived alone. Richard was out of state on a work trip in Florida. When they reached him by phone, he identified the victim.
Pamela Chrysler. He said they’d met recently and gone on a date, but nothing romantic came of it. They stayed friends, and when he had to leave town, he offered her his apartment to stay in for free. They’d talked on the phone every day until four days before, when she just stopped answering.
Right away, Richard raised red flags. He’d let a woman he barely knew stay in his place. And he mentioned that Pamela liked to sleep with the balcony door slightly open, a detail police hadn’t made public. They already suspected the killer came in through that balcony door.
Why would Richard bring that up out of nowhere? Then, on his way home, Richard called the apartment manager and asked him to cut out the section of carpet with the bloodstain. He claimed he wanted to test it himself at a lab. The manager thought that was bizarre and immediately reported it.
Police brought Richard in for questioning, and he kept acting oddly. But his alibi held up. He’d been in Florida well before the murder, and multiple coworkers vouched for him. His DNA didn’t match the blood on the newspaper.
Despite everything, Richard was crossed off the list. With Richard out of the way, detectives looked into Pamela’s clients, since she worked as a mental health and substance abuse counselor. That went nowhere. Then they considered a robbery gone wrong.
Pamela was on the ground floor and often left the balcony door open. They asked Richard to check the apartment for missing valuables. He said everything was there, except for a large vacuum cleaner. Why would a killer steal a bulky, cheap vacuum and leave everything else?
Detectives checked pawn shops, and it paid off. They found the vacuum, but there were no cameras in the building. The only clue was a young guy, around twenty years old, who brought it in. Every lead died there.
A few days later, Richard came back to the apartment and started talking to his neighbors. One woman told him she’d had trouble sleeping the night of the murder. She heard a noise in the hallway and looked through her peephole. She saw a young man she didn’t recognize rolling a vacuum cleaner out of Richard’s apartment.
She almost opened the door to offer help, but something stopped her. Then she cracked open a soda can, and the sound was loud enough that the man froze and stared directly at her door. After a few seconds, he grabbed the vacuum, shut the door, and disappeared. Police were frustrated she’d waited weeks to say something.
She insisted she hadn’t thought twice about it. They created a composite sketch based on her description, and the pawn shop employee confirmed the man looked like the one who brought in the vacuum. The sketch was released to the media, but no one recognized him. The case went cold for fifteen years.
Then, out of nowhere, a notification came through. A new DNA profile had been added to the FBI database, and it matched the drop of blood from the crime scene. The man was thirty years old, Abdus Lar Ro. His name had never come up in Pamela’s case.
But he had a history. As a child, his parents joined a religious cult led by Dwight York, a man who built a massive compound in Georgia with an Egyptian-style pyramid. York was eventually convicted after several children, including Lar Ro, accused him of serious crimes. He received a 135-year prison sentence.
Later, Lar Ro admitted his testimony had been made up, but it never led to a retrial. He was never charged because he’d been a child when he testified. What stunned detectives was how his DNA ended up in the system. Lar Ro had been arrested for selling bootleg DVDs and given probation.
Then he was pulled over, and a patrol officer found a small bag of illegal substances on him. Since he was on probation, he was arrested again, and this time a DNA sample was taken. When it hit the database, it matched. Detectives dug into his past and discovered something remarkable.
At the time of the murder, Lar Ro lived in the same apartment complex as Pamela, just in a different building. He was sixteen years old then, and police had never spoken to him. They pulled his old high school yearbook photo and compared it to the composite sketch. The resemblance was striking.
They brought him in for questioning, playing it cool, saying they were following up with former residents who hadn’t been interviewed in 2002. They asked if he’d ever been inside Pamela’s apartment. He said no. Then they told him about the DNA.
His blood was at the scene. Lar Ro changed his story. He said Pamela once paid him forty dollars to take out some trash. Detectives asked how his blood ended up on the kitchen counter.
He changed his story again, saying he’d found her body and panicked. Then he shifted once more, claiming they’d been in a romantic relationship, even though she was thirty-three years older than him. Before they arrested him, they needed a fresh DNA sample for final confirmation. While they waited, Lar Ro’s own brother called the FBI tip line.
He said that years ago, Lar Ro had confessed to him that he was the one who killed Pamela. He broke in at night, planning to steal something. She woke up and caught him. He grabbed a knife and attacked her.
Now they had a DNA match and a statement from his own brother. The lab confirmed the blood belonged to Lar Ro, and he was arrested. Prosecutors prepared for trial. Lar Ro kept insisting he was innocent.
But the prosecutor knew the case wasn’t as clean as they’d like. Lar Ro was only sixteen at the time of the murder. The only physical evidence was a single drop of blood. No fingerprints.
No murder weapon. A jury might not convict on that alone. So they offered him a deal. Plead guilty to manslaughter and theft of the vacuum, and they’d take life in prison and the death penalty off the table.
He agreed almost immediately. He signed a confession and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. He’ll be eligible for release in 2038, when he’s fifty-two. After that, he’ll be under supervision for another twenty years, and if he commits even a minor offense, he’ll go straight back to prison.
Pamela’s family was stunned when they heard the news. For fifteen years, they believed the case would never be solved. But in the end, a man who slipped through the cracks for so long was caught over something as small as selling bootleg DVDs.
