The former tenant charged in the slaying of his 72-year-old Lorton landlord was in a rent dispute with her shortly before the killing, according to search warrants filed in Fairfax County.
The court documents offer the first indication of a possible motive in the slaying of Emily Lu. Her body was found last month 51 days after she mysteriously vanished, prompting a large search, desperate pleas from her family for her return and media coverage.
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Family of Emily Lu asks for help locating her
The tenant, Brian Sayrs Jr., 25, of Woodbridge, is facing counts of second-degree murder and concealing a dead body in Lu’s slaying. Authorities said he called police on July 23 and then led them to Lu’s body in a wooded area near Lorton’s Laurel Hill Golf Club.
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Jennifer Ball, Lu’s only daughter, said that her mother had mentioned issues with Sayrs but that they did not seem overly serious. She said police had discussed the alleged rent dispute with her and had not offered her another possible motive for her killing.
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Ball said she hopes the criminal proceedings against Sayrs provide a fuller picture of the circumstances of her mother’s slaying.
“What it just sounds like to me is something very unreasonable,” Ball said of the potential motive. “I don’t know what else it could be.”
The search warrants also for the first time detail what authorities found in Lu’s home that led them to suspect she was the victim of foul play even before her body was discovered.
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A detective wrote in the court documents that they found a knife with its blade broken off in a sink and a sign that Lu’s daily routine had been “suddenly disrupted”: Perishable food was left out in the kitchen area before she disappeared on June 3.
In addition, the home smelled of cleaning products and investigators found bottles of bleach and other cleaning chemicals inside the residence, a detective wrote in the search warrants.
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Detectives using blue lights that make hemoglobin in blood fluoresce also uncovered signs someone had tried to clean up blood in the garage of the home, according to the search warrants. A field test also indicated the presence of blood.
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A day after Lu vanished, detectives interviewed Sayrs, who was Lu’s tenant at the time. Sayrs gave inaccurate statements about his whereabouts during and after the period when Lu went missing, according to the search warrant.
On July 15, police announced at a news conference they had a person of interest in the case. They did not name Sayrs at the time, but they later said he was the person they had connected to Lu’s slaying.
The next day, Sayrs phoned a Fairfax County police detective to tell him he would not run if police obtained warrants for his arrest, according to the search warrant.
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On July 23, Sayrs called detectives from a park bench in Prince William County, police said. They wrote in the search warrant that he gave them “turn by turn” directions to the location where Lu’s body was discovered off a remote roadway, less than two miles from her home. Lu was wearing the same clothes she was last seen in before she went missing.
Body of 72-year-old Lorton woman discovered
Detectives filed the search warrants in Fairfax County Circuit Court to obtain the contents of Sayrs’s cellphone and for details of his phone calls.
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The Fairfax County public defender’s office, which is representing Sayrs, declined to comment. Sayrs’s father also declined to comment. A preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled for Sept. 21.
Ball said the family is planning a memorial service for Lu on Sept. 1.
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