Between October 1986 and September 1989, eight young people from southeastern Virginia were killed or disappeared in four separate cases. Six were found dead. Two, a pair of college students on a first date, have never been found. The first and third cases centered on the Colonial Parkway, the scenic road through Colonial National Historical Park that links Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown. The second was across the James River at the Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge in Isle of Wight County, and the fourth in the woods of New Kent County, along Interstate 64. Because each case involved a young couple and a vehicle found without its occupants, or with them dead inside, the press and many investigators came to treat the four as a series and called it the Colonial Parkway Murders.
That grouping has always been a working view, not a finding. For decades the FBI and the Virginia State Police said they had no physical evidence tying all four cases together. No one was ever charged. Since January 2024, the two agencies have attributed three of the cases to Alan W. Wilmer Sr., a fisherman and hunter from Lancaster County, Virginia, who died in 2017 at 63. He was never arrested, charged or tried for any of them, and two of the attributions rest on different kinds of evidence: DNA in one case, and what the FBI called the totality of circumstances in another. The fourth case, the deaths of Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer in 1989, has no named suspect.
The Colonial Parkway runs about 23 miles from Jamestown to Yorktown through Williamsburg, according to a 2018 Coastal Virginia Magazine account, which called it the narrowest national park in the country. At night it has few exits, and drivers pass between the York River on one side and thick woods on the other.
Because the first and third cases happened on National Park Service land, the FBI had concurrent jurisdiction there and took the lead. The Virginia State Police led the investigations into the second and fourth cases, which happened off federal land. That split, two agencies working two pairs of cases, ran through the whole history of the investigation.
Cathleen Marian Thomas was 27. She was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and, by 1986, worked as a stockbroker in Virginia Beach, according to Coastal Virginia Magazine. The FBI later described her as a vibrant young woman known for her compassion, her intelligence and her closeness to family and friends. Rebecca Ann Dowski, known as Becky, was 21 and a senior at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. The FBI remembered her as a talented musician with a promising future, known for her creativity, her kindness and her love of music. The two women had begun dating in the spring of 1986, according to NBC News.
They were last seen on the evening of Thursday, October 9, 1986, at a computer lab at William and Mary, the FBI said. On Sunday, October 12, the National Park Service received a report of a car off the road east of Cheatham Annex. Park rangers found Thomas's white 1980 Honda Civic in a wooded area between the Ringfield Plantation overlook and the York River. Both women were dead inside. According to the FBI, each had been stabbed and strangled.
Coastal Virginia Magazine, summarizing the 2018 book by Blaine Pardoe and Victoria Hester, reported that the car was found hanging off an embankment near a parkway pullout, that diesel fuel had been poured over the women and the car but had not ignited, and that Thomas had hair tangled in her fingers, which suggested a struggle. Thomas's brother told WTKR in 2016 that it was not clear exactly where the women were killed, and that someone appeared to have tried and failed to set the car on fire. The case belonged to the FBI from the start.
David Lee Knobling was 20, the eldest of the Knobling brothers. His younger brother described him to 13News Now as a gearhead who loved cars and mechanics, and said he had followed David into working in the garage. One Snap-on wrench is the only one of David's tools that his brother still owns. On September 19, 1987, the two brothers spent about ten minutes together in the driveway of their mother's house, sharing a cigarette before David left. His brother said that short time had comforted him for thirty years.
Robin Margaret Edwards was 14. Her mother had told her to be home by 11 that night, and Robin called at about 11:15 to say she was home safe. Her family came to believe she then slipped out again to meet David. Her mother at first thought she had run away, as she had done before. Her older sister, 19 at the time, said years later that Robin had missed out on her whole life, including the chance to have children.
According to 13News Now, Knobling's truck was found abandoned a couple of days after the two were last seen, at the Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge in Isle of Wight County. Coastal Virginia Magazine, drawing on the Pardoe and Hester book, reported that the driver's door was open, the radio was playing, the keys were in the ignition, and clothes and shoes were in the back seat. On September 23, 1987, the two were found shot to death on the south bank of the James River in Isle of Wight County. It had rained heavily the night they were at Ragged Island, and there was concern that evidence had been washed away. The Virginia State Police took the case.
Around the 30th anniversary, Robin's mother told 13News Now that losing her daughter felt as if someone had torn out her heart, and that while the case was cold, "it's not cold in our heart."
Richard Keith Call was 20 and Cassandra Lee Hailey was 18. Both were students at Christopher Newport College, now Christopher Newport University, in Newport News. On the evening of Saturday, April 9, 1988, they went on their first date. They saw a movie and then went to a party at an apartment complex near the college in Newport News that ran past midnight into Sunday morning. That party was the last place they were seen, the FBI said.
That morning, the FBI said, Call's father found his son's car abandoned at the York River overlook off the Colonial Parkway near Yorktown, with the young people's clothing inside. Coastal Virginia Magazine described the car as a Toyota Celica, found with the driver's door open and the keys on the seat, a little over a mile from where Thomas and Dowski had been found. By that account Call's wallet, with $12 in it, was still in the car, and Hailey's purse was there with only her wallet missing. Because the car was on federal property, the FBI took jurisdiction.
Neither Call nor Hailey has ever been found. Officials at one point suggested that the two might have gone swimming and drowned, a theory Call's family never accepted, according to WTKR. His brother said Keith was not the kind of young man who would simply go missing. His siblings remember him as popular and good, and say his friends and family never got to say goodbye. In 2023 they told WTKR they hoped his remains would one day be found so he could rest between their parents' headstones, and a Maryland cemetery organization was designing a memorial that would attach his prom photograph to the family stone. Hailey's mother, speaking in 2010, said she prayed that whoever had her daughter loved her as much as her family did and was keeping her alive and healthy.
Annamaria Phelps was 18 and Daniel Lauer was 21. At about 11:15 on the night of September 4, 1989, the Labor Day weekend, they left Amelia County, Virginia, for Virginia Beach, heading east on Interstate 64 in Lauer's gold 1973 Chevrolet Nova, according to the Virginia State Police. When they did not arrive the next morning, their family reported them missing.
At about 5:30 p.m. on September 5, state police found the Nova abandoned at the westbound rest area on Interstate 64 in New Kent County, on the side of the highway opposite their direction of travel. On the morning of October 19, 1989, hunters found remains in woods near the rest area; the State Police put the spot about three miles east of it. The remains were identified as Phelps and Lauer. Coastal Virginia Magazine reported that Phelps had been stabbed and that the cause of Lauer's death could not be determined because of decomposition.
In 2010 Annamaria's mother told WWBT that three sets of fingerprints had been found on the car, none of them the victims'. Her bedroom was still kept with a 1980s band poster and her awards, and the family still had her wallet. Her father said every time he thought about the case it made him sick. The Virginia State Police lead this investigation, and its cold case website lists it as active.
From early on, investigators and reporters noticed what the cases shared: young victims in pairs, vehicles left behind, and remote places near water or woods. After 1989 the series stopped. Coastal Virginia Magazine summed up the problem in 2018: four scenes, eight victims, more than one cause of death, and no physical evidence linking them.
Opinions split. A former State Police investigator, Larry McCann, argued that there were two killers, and Victoria Hester agreed with him. Blaine Pardoe, her father and co-author, argued for one person who could control two victims at once, perhaps by posing as a police officer or security guard; he pointed out that the glove box had been open in three of the cases. Cathy Thomas's brother told WTKR in 2016 that one theory was that a police officer, or someone pretending to be one, had approached the women's car, and that a person presenting as a police officer might have been able to take control of two young women. He said he had once spent nine hours over two days with the FBI, which made what he called a fairly compelling case that parts of the cases were related.
The agencies were more careful. In 2009 the FBI said it and the State Police were looking into a possible connection but had no conclusive physical evidence linking all the homicides. In 2017 the State Police told 13News Now there was no physical evidence linking the State Police and FBI cases. In 2018 a State Police spokeswoman, Corinne Geller, said the agency had never definitively stated that the cases were connected. Even in January 2024, after Wilmer was named, Geller said the similarities among the double homicides could not be ignored but that there was still no forensic or physical evidence linking the Isle of Wight case to the others.
A private investigator hired by the Thomas family, Steve Spingola, a former Milwaukee homicide detective, joined the effort in May 2010. NBC News reported that his work led to several searches along the parkway by state officials and the FBI, but that his later published theories alienated many of his supporters. Spingola suggested that the 1986 killings might be connected to the 1996 killings of two young women camping in Shenandoah National Park, about 180 miles away; Pardoe disagreed, noting that the Shenandoah victims were killed in their tent with no staging of a scene.
For many years the families heard little. Keith Call's sister told WTKR in 2009 that the family had not talked to the FBI "in years and years and years."
What changed matters was a report by WTKR News 3 in 2009 that graphic crime scene photographs from the cases were circulating. In December 2009 the FBI's Norfolk special agent in charge, Alex J. Turner, confirmed that earlier that year crime scene photographs had been taken from the Norfolk office without authorization. A former FBI photographer, not an agent, who retired in 2001 had made duplicate slides and used them as an instructor at a civilian training agency in Hampton Roads. After he died, the slides were left at the agency, and the FBI seized them from his estate, the agency and two other people.
In September 2009 FBI staff met with the Call and Hailey families and promised what Turner called a "top to bottom" review. On November 30, 2009, the case team went over the physical evidence with FBI Laboratory staff at Quantico and chose items, among them clothing, blood, hair and fibers, for advanced nuclear DNA testing and fingerprint examination. The FBI said it was reviewing more than 3,500 investigative reports and setting priorities among about 130 suspects, and it raised its reward from $10,000 to $20,000 for information leading to an arrest and prosecution. In January 2010 the FBI issued a public appeal for information on all four cases.
That same month relatives of victims from the federal cases met Turner in Newport News. Cathy Thomas's brother flew in from Los Angeles; Cassandra Hailey's mother came by train from Florida; Keith Call's brother came from Florida, and Becky Dowski's brother attended as well. Hailey's mother said the family wanted answers, not "double talk," and that the FBI would have to show more than its earlier agents had shown. In mid-January 2010, Annamaria Phelps's parents told WWBT that they felt their daughter's case had been neglected and wanted the State Police to retest its evidence as the FBI was doing. A relative of one victim said more than 100 items had been sent to Quantico.
The years after brought anniversaries and more waiting. In 2018 an FBI spokeswoman, Tina Pullen, said the Call and Hailey investigation remained active but would not discuss evidence. Coastal Virginia Magazine reported that the families had formed a group called Family and Friends Against Crime Today, that the Thomas family had asked for the hairs from Cathy Thomas's hand to be retested with newer methods, and that, according to the Pardoe and Hester book, the FBI had at one point ordered some evidence from the 1986 case destroyed. Those last claims come from the book's account; the agencies have not been reported confirming them. In 2023 the FBI's Norfolk office said it was still investigating with local partners and examining evidence from the scenes.
In their 2018 book, A Special Kind of Evil: The Colonial Parkway Serial Killings, Pardoe and Hester described an early lead in the Call and Hailey case. Pardoe later told WTKR that Irvin Wells, a former special agent in charge of the FBI's Norfolk office who has since died, told him that in 1988 agents looked at a man whose pickup bore the Virginia plate EM-RAW. Wells did not name him. According to Pardoe, the man took a polygraph, passed it and was cleared. Because the man had been cleared, Pardoe changed the plate in the book to "EAT THEM."
These accounts come from the book and from Pardoe's interviews; the FBI has not publicly described the 1988 polygraph. In January 2024 an FBI spokesperson would not comment on that specific link but told WTKR that a wide range of people had been looked into in the parkway homicides, and confirmed that Wilmer was among them. Cathy Thomas's brother told WTVR that FBI agents told his father in 1988 that they had found Wilmer in his Lancaster County driveway four days after Call and Hailey disappeared. A Virginia Beach polygraph examiner told WTKR in 2024 that tests of that era, run with ink and paper, produced more inconclusive results and more false positives and negatives than modern computerized tests.
On Monday, January 8, 2024, the Virginia State Police, the FBI and the Hampton Police Division announced in Suffolk that DNA linked Alan W. Wilmer Sr. to three killings: those of David Knobling and Robin Edwards in 1987, and of Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell, 29, in Hampton in 1989. Howell had last been seen at about 2:30 a.m. on July 1, 1989, outside a Hampton nightclub, and was found strangled later that morning. A man had been arrested in her case earlier, but a judge set the charges aside after DNA excluded him. Police said her death was not part of the parkway series.
Wilmer had never been convicted of a felony, so his DNA had never been taken while he was alive and was in no law enforcement database. Investigators obtained it legally after his death, and in 2023 the Virginia Department of Forensic Science issued a certificate of analysis confirming a match to him from evidence in the Isle of Wight and Hampton cases. The State Police said that, had he lived, the Commonwealth's Attorneys of Isle of Wight County and Hampton would have charged him. They gave few details of how or when he had become a suspect.
The officials described Wilmer this way. Known as "Pokey," he was about 5 feet 5 inches tall, muscular, about 165 pounds, with sandy brown hair, blue eyes and a close-cropped beard. In the 1980s he made a living as a fisherman, farming clams and oysters; he also ran a business called Better Tree Service and was an avid hunter who belonged to at least one hunt club on the Middle Peninsula. He owned a 1976 custom-built wooden commercial fishing boat, the Denni Wade, and often lived aboard it at marinas in Gloucester and Middlesex counties, the Northern Neck and Hampton Roads. Among several pickups he drove in the 1980s and early 1990s was a distinctive blue 1966 Dodge Fargo with the Virginia plate EM-RAW, usually loaded with clamming gear and a large metal toolbox. He died in December 2017, at 63, at his home in Lancaster County.
The Knobling and Edwards families, in a statement read by Geller, said that for 36 years they had "lived in a vacuum of the unknown." They felt relief that he could not harm anyone else but said his death meant their questions would never be answered by him. Howell's family thanked investigators and said nothing would bring her back. Wilmer's family said the crimes were a complete shock and that the man they knew was not the man who had done these things. Brian Dugan, the FBI's Norfolk special agent in charge, asked anyone who had known Wilmer to come forward, saying relationships and loyalties change over time.
Within days the families of the other parkway victims pressed for more. Cathy Thomas's brother told WTVR that the families were "absolutely furious" about what he called a go-slow approach, and asked why Wilmer's DNA had not been taken earlier if his name had been in the files for decades. Geller said the State Police had recently served a search warrant on property once connected to Wilmer and had received about 50 tips. In April 2024 Keith Call's sister said Wilmer had not been linked to her brother by DNA but that investigators had "strongly suggested" he was connected. Learning that investigators had looked at him from the beginning, she said, was overwhelming.
On November 14, 2025, the Virginia State Police and the Isle of Wight Commonwealth's Attorney, Georgette Phillips, announced that DNA had identified Wilmer as the suspect in the 1988 killing of Laurie Ann Powell, 18, of Gloucester County. She was last seen on March 8, 1988, walking in Gloucester County, and her body was found on April 2, 1988, in the Elizabeth River; she had been stabbed. The testing was done by DNA Labs International in Florida and paid for by the Virginia Attorney General's Office through its Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. The State Police said that had Wilmer been alive, he would have been charged with her murder. Powell's sister said she "loved life and was living life to the fullest," and called her a firecracker. Officials did not place the Powell case in the parkway series.
On Tuesday, January 20, 2026, the FBI's Norfolk Field Office announced that it had resolved the 1986 killings of Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski and had determined that Wilmer killed them. The bureau credited persistent investigation and breakthroughs in forensic technology. "We are thankful that advances in technology and DNA evidence allowed us to finally bring answers in this case," said Dominique Evans, the special agent in charge, who also credited the State Police, the Hampton Police Division and the Suffolk Police Department. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said the evidence would have supported a federal prosecution had Wilmer been alive. The FBI said Wilmer was now connected to at least six murders and disappearances of young people in Virginia, and that it would keep working the unsolved parkway cases. The families of the two women attended the announcement.
The public statements did not describe the forensic results. Cathy Thomas's brother told 13News Now, as reported by Fox News, that he believed there were more than eight victims. Because Wilmer was never convicted, his DNA could not be entered into CODIS, the national DNA database, and the families said they were working to change the law so that other unsolved cases could be closed.
On Friday, September 18, 2026, the FBI met the families of Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey and told them it had concluded that Wilmer was responsible for their disappearance. The bureau cited an "exhaustive review of evidence and a convergence of investigative findings," pointing to the totality of circumstances, including similarities in timing, place and the way the victims vanished. It acknowledged that direct forensic evidence from the scene was unavailable. The U.S. Attorney's Office again said the evidence would have supported a federal prosecution if Wilmer were alive. Evans said the two "were young people with families, friends, futures and lives that mattered," and that they "deserved to come home."
The families said they were disappointed. At a news conference that afternoon, Keith Call's brother said the finding rested on nothing solid and that the evidence was all circumstantial; asked whether he was satisfied, he answered, "Not really." He said that if the case had been closed within months, the family would not have had to carry it their whole lives. Cassandra Hailey's brother-in-law, who never met her, described her as "a frozen picture on a mantle" and said a trial and conviction would not have brought closure either. Cathy Thomas's brother said the families were "not going away quietly" and that no one had explained to them why Wilmer was linked to his sister's death. Call and Hailey have still not been found.
As of October 22, 2026, no one has been charged in any of the four cases, and no court has examined the evidence in any of them. The agencies' positions are as follows. The Knobling and Edwards case was attributed to Wilmer by the State Police on DNA evidence in January 2024. The Thomas and Dowski case was attributed to him by the FBI in January 2026, which credited DNA advances without making the results public. The Call and Hailey disappearance was attributed to him by the FBI in September 2026 on circumstantial grounds. The Phelps and Lauer case has no named suspect; the Virginia State Police list it as active, and in September 2026 news reports said it remained unsolved and was not linked to Wilmer.
The series itself. Whether the four cases are the work of one person has never been tested in court. The agencies long said no physical evidence linked them all; the State Police said in 2018 that they had never definitively called them connected. Researchers disagree on one killer or two.
The Call and Hailey finding. The FBI's September 2026 conclusion rests, by its own description, on circumstances rather than direct forensic evidence. The victims' relatives have called it circumstantial and unsatisfying.
The forensic basis for the 1986 case. The FBI cited DNA and forensic advances but did not publish what was tested or what it showed.
The 1988 polygraph. The account that agents examined the EM-RAW driver in 1988 and cleared him after a polygraph comes from Pardoe, citing a former FBI official who has since died. The FBI has confirmed only that Wilmer was among many people looked at.
Other victims. Cathy Thomas's brother has said he believes there were more than eight victims. No official source has attributed further parkway-era deaths to Wilmer beyond Howell and Powell.
Details of the scenes. Sources differ on small points, such as who first found the 1986 car (park rangers after a report, in the FBI's account; two tourists, in the book's account as summarized in 2018), the exact days in 1987, and the distance from the rest area to the 1989 remains.
Coastal Virginia Magazine reported that Patricia Cornwell's 1992 novel All That Remains drew on the crime scenes and on the Phelps and Lauer case, and that the Phelps family's invasion of privacy lawsuit over it was unsuccessful. The magazine described the 2018 book by Pardoe and Hester as the first book-length account of the cases, based on more than 80 hours of interviews, including with former police and FBI officers.
October 9, 1986: Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski last seen at a William and Mary computer lab.
October 12, 1986: Their bodies found in Thomas's car off the Colonial Parkway east of Cheatham Annex. The FBI leads.
September 19, 1987: David Knobling and Robin Edwards last seen.
September 23, 1987: Their bodies found on the south bank of the James River in Isle of Wight County, near Ragged Island. The State Police lead.
March 8, 1988: Laurie Ann Powell last seen in Gloucester County; found April 2 (not part of the parkway series).
April 9 to 10, 1988: Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey last seen after a party in Newport News; Call's car found at the York River overlook near Yorktown. The FBI leads. They have never been found.
1988: By Blaine Pardoe's account, FBI agents examine the driver of a pickup with the plate EM-RAW; he passes a polygraph and is cleared.
July 1, 1989: Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell killed in Hampton (not part of the parkway series).
September 4 to 5, 1989: Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer leave Amelia County; Lauer's car found at an Interstate 64 rest area in New Kent County.
October 19, 1989: Their remains found by hunters in nearby woods.
2009: WTKR reports leaked crime scene photographs; the FBI confirms the theft, meets the Call and Hailey families, begins a full review and raises its reward to $20,000.
January 2010: Families meet the FBI in Newport News; the FBI issues a public appeal.
2017: Alan W. Wilmer Sr. dies at his Lancaster County home, at 63.
2018: A Special Kind of Evil, by Blaine Pardoe and Victoria Hester, is published.
2023: The Virginia Department of Forensic Science confirms a DNA match to Wilmer in the Isle of Wight and Hampton cases.
January 8, 2024: Officials name Wilmer in the Knobling, Edwards and Howell killings.
November 14, 2025: The State Police name Wilmer in the killing of Laurie Ann Powell.
January 20, 2026: The FBI attributes the Thomas and Dowski killings to Wilmer.
September 18, 2026: The FBI attributes the disappearance of Call and Hailey to Wilmer; families call the finding circumstantial.
October 2026: The Phelps and Lauer case remains unsolved and active.