At about half past five on the morning of October 12, 1986, a jogger found a white 1980 Honda Civic at the bottom of an embankment at the Cheatham Annex Overlook on the Colonial Parkway, seven miles east of Williamsburg, Virginia, a few feet short of a fifteen-foot drop into the York River. Inside were Cathleen Marian Thomas, twenty-seven, a Naval Academy graduate, and Rebecca Ann Dowski, twenty-one, a business management senior at the College of William and Mary who worked as a stockbroker. The two women were a couple and had last been seen leaving a campus computer lab at about 6:30 on the evening of October 9. There were rope burns on their necks and wrists and signs of strangulation, and their throats had been cut so deeply that they were nearly beheaded. Thomas had a clump of hair between her fingers. Their purses, money and jewelry were untouched, and there was no sign of sexual assault. The killer had soaked the bodies and the car in diesel fuel and not lit it. More than a hundred fingerprints on the car matched no one on file.
The parkway is a twenty-three-mile scenic road through the Colonial National Historical Park linking Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown. Long stretches have no lighting, and young couples used its pull-offs as a lovers' lane. Over three years the pattern held: a couple sitting in a car was attacked, both were killed, and the killer drove the car away from where they died.
David Lee Knobling, twenty, a salesman, and Robin Margaret Edwards, fourteen, an eighth grader, disappeared after midnight on September 19, 1987. On September 21 a patrolman found Knobling's black Ford Ranger in the parking area of the Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge with the engine running, the radio and wipers on, both doors open and the driver's window partly down, which led police to suspect the killer had been, or was posing as, a uniformed officer. On September 23 their bodies washed ashore about a hundred feet apart on the James River. Edwards had been shot in the back of the head, Knobling in the head and shoulder. The state police later said Edwards had been sexually assaulted.
On April 10, 1988, Richard Keith Call, twenty, and Cassandra Lee Hailey, eighteen, students at Christopher Newport College, were reported missing after a first date at a movie and a party. Call's red 1982 Toyota Celica was found at the York River Overlook in Yorktown with the keys on the seat, a watch and glasses on the dashboard, and nearly all of Call's clothes and some of Hailey's in the back. Her purse and his wallet were gone. Police dogs followed their scent along the parkway to the Indian Field Creek shoreline. They have never been found. Within days the FBI learned of a local fisherman in a blue 1966 Dodge Fargo pickup who had approached at least one other couple on the parkway. Agents watched him clean and spray-paint the truck and searched his home, finding handcuffs and a gun. An FBI polygraph examiner cleared him, and he was let go.
On September 5, 1989, Annamaria Phelps, eighteen, and her boyfriend's brother, Daniel Lauer, twenty-one, disappeared on the way to Virginia Beach. His gold 1972 Chevrolet Nova was found at a westbound rest stop on Interstate 64 in New Kent County with the keys in the ignition and dirt and grass on its underside. On October 19 hunters found their skeletal remains in woods along the interstate between Williamsburg and Richmond, about a mile from the rest stop, covered with an electric blanket from Lauer's car. Neither the cause of death nor whether there had been a sexual assault could be determined.
For decades the FBI and the Virginia State Police did not solve the case, and the families pressed for years for the investigators to tell them what they had. In 2022 DNA from the 1989 rape and strangling of Teresa Lynn Howell, twenty-nine, in Hampton was linked to the Knobling and Edwards killings, and on January 8, 2024, authorities announced that the DNA belonged to Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., a Lancaster County waterman from the Northern Neck who had died in 2017. He was the fisherman in the blue pickup. On November 14, 2025, authorities confirmed him as the killer of Laurie Ann Powell, eighteen, whose stabbed body was recovered from the James River near Ragged Island on April 2, 1988. On January 20, 2026, DNA linked him to the murders of Cathy Thomas and Becky Dowski.
On September 18, 2026, the FBI met the families of Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey and told them it had closed the investigation into their disappearances, concluding that Wilmer was responsible. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said that had he been alive, the evidence would have supported federal prosecution. "Nothing can replace Keith or Cassandra," said Dominique Evans, the FBI special agent in charge. The families said they felt no closure. Hailey's brother-in-law, Jim Meehan, said the FBI had relied on a profile of Wilmer and on the cases tied to him by DNA, and Cathy Thomas's brother, Bill Thomas, said everything the families had been shown was circumstantial. No new DNA or physical evidence connects Wilmer to Call and Hailey, and their remains have not been found.
That leaves Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer. No one has been publicly named in their deaths.