Alan Wade Wilmer Sr.

What the record shows

The Colonial Parkway murders are a series of killings and disappearances of young people in eastern Virginia between 1986 and 1989, centred on the Colonial Parkway between Jamestown and Yorktown and nearby stretches of the James and York rivers. Four couples, eight people in all, were killed or went missing. Since 2024, investigators have publicly named Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., a Lancaster County fisherman who died in 2017 at age 63, as the person responsible for most of these cases. He was never charged with any of them and his guilt was never tested in court; prosecutors and federal officials have said only that charges would have been brought had he lived. The killings of one couple, Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer, remain officially unsolved.

The first case began on October 9, 1986, when Cathleen Thomas, 27, and Rebecca Dowski, 21, were last seen together at a computer lab at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. Their bodies were later found in their car along the Colonial Parkway. Fox News reported that both women had been stabbed and strangled. Almost a year later, in September 1987, David Knobling, 20, and Robin Edwards, 14, were found shot along the James River shoreline in Isle of Wight County; officials have said Edwards was sexually assaulted.

In April 1988, Keith Call, 20, and Cassandra Hailey, 18, both students at Christopher Newport University, left a party in Newport News and were never seen again. Call's car was found abandoned later that day near the York River Overlook on the parkway, and the couple's remains have never been found. The last case began on the night of September 4, 1989, when Phelps, 18, and Lauer, 21, left Amelia County for Virginia Beach. According to the Virginia State Police case file, Lauer's car was found the next afternoon at a westbound Interstate 64 rest area in New Kent County, and hunters found the couple's remains in woods about three miles east of the rest area on October 19, 1989.

For decades the cases were grouped together on the strength of their similarities: couples, isolated roadside locations and abandoned vehicles. Investigators were careful, however, not to treat them as a proven single series. As recently as January 2024, Virginia State Police said the similarities could not be ignored but that there was no forensic or physical evidence tying the Isle of Wight killings to the other double murders.

The first public break came on January 8, 2024, when state police and the FBI's Norfolk office named Wilmer as the suspect in the Knobling and Edwards killings and in the July 1989 death of Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell, 29, in Hampton, a case that is not one of the four couples. NBC News reported that Wilmer had no felony record, so his DNA was not in the national offender database; after he emerged in a review of the cold cases, investigators legally obtained his genetic material after his death, and it matched evidence from the crime scenes in June 2023. Prosecutors in Isle of Wight County and Hampton said charges would have been filed if he were alive. NBC News described him as a clam and oyster farmer who ran a tree service, kept a wooden fishing boat named the Denni Wade and died at his Lancaster County home in December 2017.

In January 2026 the FBI's Norfolk Field Office said advances in forensic science and DNA analysis had linked Wilmer to the deaths of Thomas and Dowski, and that it considered him responsible for at least six of the killings and disappearances between 1986 and 1989. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said the evidence would have supported a federal prosecution had he lived. On September 18, 2026, WTVR reported, the FBI also attributed the disappearances of Call and Hailey to Wilmer. That finding rests on circumstantial evidence and similarities in timing, location and the way the couple vanished; the FBI acknowledged that direct forensic evidence from the scene is unavailable, and Call's brother publicly questioned it.

With those announcements, authorities attribute six of the eight Colonial Parkway victims, plus Howell, to Wilmer, a total of seven. None of these attributions has been tested at trial. Relatives of the victims have pressed for changes in the law so that the DNA of people who were never convicted, such as Wilmer, can be compared against other unsolved cases. Thomas's brother has said he believes the true number of victims is higher than eight. The Wikipedia article on the case also discusses other killings that some investigators have suggested may be connected, but the authorities have not tied them to Wilmer. The Phelps and Lauer case remains open with the Virginia State Police.