Cold case detective closes decades-old double murder mystery

New York Police Department Detective Ryan Glas was a 10-year-old kid when a sickly Harlem mom and her special needs daughter were strangled inside their home in 1994.

The cold case investigator, now 39, helped close the long-dormant homicide probe last week with the arrest of murder suspect Larry Atkinson, indicted for the unsolved double homicide. Glas chose the case, his first with the unit, last Feb. 9 after joining the unit.

“This particular (case) stood out to me given that it was a mother and a daughter,” he told The New York Daily News, adding family members were shocked by last week's unexpected arrest of a suspect with a long rap sheet.

Atkinson, 64, was indicted after his arrest on murder charges for the Feb. 20, 1994, killings of Sarah Roberts, 57, and her 25-year-old daughter Sharon inside their Grant Houses apartment. Both victims were found strangled inside their bedrooms.

The suspect, with three aliases, 28 previous arrests and five stints in state prison, denied any wrongdoing when taken into custody. Police did not provide a motive for the gruesome killings or how he slipped inside the partially ransacked apartment with no sign of forced entry.

Glas recalled initially going through the case file in the 26th Precinct, where it originated, and found a “very well-organized” recounting of the investigation.

“We just went from there,” he said. “Started digging through it. Started reading the interviews that were conducted in ‘94.”

The obstacles were instantly noted: No witnesses, no video. Cold case investigators turned to the evidence gathered from the crime scene and eventually resubmitted DNA samples last year for a new look.

The new testing linked Atkinson to the crimes through a fingernail scraping and biological evidence found on the daughter's hand, police said.

The victim's family was unaware of the renewed investigation in case the killer turned out to be a relative, said Glas.