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Police Link Anthony Robinson, Charged in Two Harrisonburg Killings, to Two More Deaths in Fairfax County

The remains of two women were found in a container beside a shopping cart near a Richmond Highway motel, one of them believed to be missing D.C. woman Cheyenne Brown.

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Illustration: a police headquarters building on a snowy winter night

Cheyenne Brown, 29, took the Metro out of Washington on September 30, 2021, and got off at the Huntington station in northern Virginia. It was the last time anyone saw her. Surveillance video later showed she was not alone: she was with a man she had been talking to through a dating website.

By December, that man was in jail in Harrisonburg, Virginia, charged with two murders. On November 23, Harrisonburg police had found the bodies of Allene Elizabeth "Beth" Redmon, 54, and Tonita Smith, 39, in a commercial area of the city, and arrested Anthony Robinson, 35, of Washington, D.C., after video surveillance and cell phone evidence placed him with them before their deaths. He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two of concealing a dead body. Investigators there believed he had moved the women's bodies in a shopping cart.

When Washington police learned that the Harrisonburg suspect was Brown's last known contact, Fairfax County detectives were called in, on December 7, to help with the missing-person case. A search with a cadaver dog near the Moon Inn on Richmond Highway, the last place she was known to have been, found nothing. On Wednesday, December 15, new information sent detectives back. One of them noticed a shopping cart in the tree line nearby. Remembering how the bodies had been moved in Harrisonburg, they searched the area, and near the cart they found a container. At the medical examiner's office it was found to hold the remains of two women.

On Friday, December 17, Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis and Harrisonburg Police Chief Kelley Warner announced the link. One of the women had been tentatively identified as Brown from a distinctive tattoo; the other could not yet be identified. Detectives, the Fairfax County police said, believed Robinson was responsible for both deaths.

Davis did not hedge. "He's killed four already and we suspect that he has more victims," he said. He described a pattern that police said ran through the cases: women met through dating sites, taken to motels, killed by blunt force, and moved in a shopping cart. Police said they would comb Robinson's travel records and work with other departments to find out whether there were more. Robinson's attorney, Louis Nagy, declined to comment.

Brown's family said she had a seven-year-old son and was pregnant when she disappeared.

On December 17, 2021, Robinson was charged with the two Harrisonburg killings and named as the suspect in the two Fairfax County deaths. He had not been tried for any of them, and he was presumed innocent.

What came next. On January 7, 2022, Fairfax County police announced that DNA had confirmed the two women found near the shopping cart as Cheyenne Brown, 29, of Washington, D.C., and Stephanie Harrison, 48, of California. The Harrisonburg victim's middle name appears as Laurice in NBC News's account of the press conference and as Lorice in other reports.

Sources