M. William Phelps

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Just to the northwest of Washington, D.C., Loudoun County is not a place investigators were accustomed to getting called out to a homicide scene.

In a county of nearly 400,000 people, there had been only five homicides that year, leading up to December 10th.

Loudoun County Sheriff's Office Detective Greg Locke had yet to be involved in a murder investigation.

That is, before he took the call to head out to Dr. Schwartz's house.

His boss had warned him that this homicide was unlike any other the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office had seen in as long as anyone could recall.

As I stood on the street facing Dr. Schwartz's property, an eerie sense of how his killer or killers descended upon his house washed over me.

The property is set far back away from the road.

At night, with the lights on in the house, it would be easy to watch anyone inside without them knowing.

Heather Greenfield is a local Associated Press reporter who covered the case extensively.

I reached out to her back when I began writing my book about the case to get a better lay of the land.

Dr. Schwartz and his wife, Joan, had settled in Leesburg in the early 80s and raised their three children there.

And he wasn't just a scientist.

He was famous.

Detective Greg Locke is tall and thin, sports brown hair, a thin mustache to match, and presents the overall look of a television detective, smooth and laid back.

On that day, December 10th, 2001, when the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office arrived on scene, Locke had been on the job for only a few months.

Schwartz's killer had stabbed him through his torso entirely, lodging the blade into the floor, leaving gouge marks in the wood.

That's volcanic rage, and it speaks to the personality of Schwartz's killer.

victimology becomes the number one focus.