FBI Names Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. in the 1988 Disappearance of Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey
The two college students vanished from a Newport News party in 1988 and were never found. The FBI's finding rests on circumstantial evidence, not DNA. Wilmer died in 2017.
Published
Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey left a party together in the early hours of April 10, 1988, and never came home. More than thirty-eight years later, on September 18, 2026, the FBI's Norfolk Field Office announced that it had found the answer their families had waited for, or as much of one as the evidence allows: investigators have determined that Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. was responsible for their deaths.
Their remains have never been found, and the finding does not rest on DNA. The FBI said it reached its conclusion through an exhaustive review of the evidence and a convergence of investigative findings, built on the totality of the circumstances. The disappearance matched the other regional killings connected to Wilmer in timing, in location, and in the way the victims vanished. The bureau said plainly that direct forensic evidence from the scene remains unavailable. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia told investigators that had Wilmer been alive, the evidence developed would have supported a federal prosecution. He died in 2017.
Call was twenty, from Gloucester. Hailey was eighteen, from Grafton. Both were students at Christopher Newport, then a college, and on the night they disappeared they had been at a party in the University Square area of Newport News. They left together in the early morning. Later that day Call's car was found abandoned near the York River Overlook on the Colonial Parkway, the scenic road where, between 1986 and 1989, couple after couple was killed or lost.
"Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey were young people with families, friends, futures, and lives that mattered," said Dominique Evans, the special agent in charge in Norfolk. "They deserved to come home."
The man the task force named
Wilmer, a Lancaster County fisherman, was first named publicly in 2024, when authorities announced that three of the killings had been conclusively linked to him. In 2025 he was linked to a fourth, the murder of Laurie Ann Powell of Gloucester, and in January 2026 to two more. Call and Hailey bring the number of people the authorities now attribute to him to eight.
The Colonial Parkway Task Force that worked the case brings together the FBI, the Virginia State Police, the Hampton Police Division and the Suffolk Police Department. Col. Jeffrey S. Katz, the state police superintendent, said law enforcement had never stopped working on the case, and he named the families who had already received answers: those of Robin Edwards, David Knobling, Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell, Laurie Ann Powell, Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski. He credited Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones's office for funding analytical support and testing through the state's Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.
Wilmer was never tried for any of these deaths and died before any of them was attributed to him. The finding in the Call and Hailey case is the FBI's investigative determination, reached on circumstantial evidence, not a court's verdict.
Sources
- FBI Norfolk Announces Resolution in the Disappearances of Richard 'Keith' Call and Cassandra Lee Hailey, FBI Norfolk Field Office
- FBI declares Wilmer responsible for disappearance of Call and Hailey, Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal