Virginia police have linked a suspected serial killer to the 1988 slaying of Laurie Ann Powell, who was 18 when her body was found floating in the Elizabeth River near Portsmouth with multiple stab wounds. Investigators said Friday that DNA evidence connects her case with other killings in the region at that time, some of which became known as the Colonial Parkway murders.
Virginia police have linked a suspected serial killer to the 1988 slaying of Laurie Ann Powell, who was 18 when her body was found floating in the Elizabeth River near Portsmouth with multiple stab wounds. Investigators said Friday that DNA evidence connects her case with other killings in the region at that time, some of which became known as the Colonial Parkway murders.
Police attributed Powell’s killing to Alan W. Wilmer Sr., a waterman who died in 2017 in Lancaster County, Virginia.
“It’s not justice, but it is resolution,” Capt. Timothy Reibel of the Virginia State Police said Friday at a news conference in Suffolk.
Reibel said Powell had been sexually assaulted, and investigators decided to test DNA evidence found on her after Wilmer was linked last year to other cases from that time period.
Investigators said in January 2024 that DNA evidence had connected Wilmer to at least three other homicides:
The deaths of Knobling and Edwards have long been associated with a string of killings between 1986 and 1989 that became known as the Colonial Parkway murders. In all of the cases, couples had been parked in remote, “lover’s lane”-type areas — two of them along the Colonial Parkway, which links the historic sites of Yorktown, Williamsburg and Jamestown.
Family members of the six or eight other victims — there is uncertainty about how many cases are related — believe Wilmer could be responsible for those, too, but police and FBI investigators have not established a conclusive link. Officials said Friday they are continuing to pursue those cases.
“We recognize there are other families of homicide victims who are still waiting for answers,” Reibel said. “We are not ruling anything out.”
Powell’s 1988 stabbing was considered possibly related to the other cases because of circumstances and geography. She had gotten out of her boyfriend’s car during an argument and was last seen walking along a road in rural Gloucester County.
On Friday, Powell’s sister, Cindy Kirchner, thanked law enforcement for continuing to work the case and said officials “never gave up on finding justice.” She described her sister as “bold, brave, spontaneous, full of life, witty, smart and beautifully herself. A true firecracker.”
Reibel said investigators still don’t know how Powell got from Gloucester to the location where her body was found several weeks later, more than 30 miles away. He said they continue to investigate Wilmer’s movements during that time.
All of the crime scenes were near water in on the southeastern side of Virginia. The killings of young people rattled residents of Hampton Roads for decades and have been featured on true-crime television shows.
Wilmer had come up in police investigations over the years, and his distinctive vehicle — a blue 1966 Dodge Fargo pickup truck with a personalized Virginia license plate, EM-RAW — was seen near the locations of some of the killings.
But it wasn’t until Wilmer died at age 63 that investigators obtained DNA samples and subjected them to new types of tests that officially began connecting him to some of the murders, authorities said. They have said they continue to investigate other possible crimes he might have committed.
Wilmer, whose nickname was Pokey, also owned a commercial fishing boat, a custom-built 1976 wooden craft named Denni Wade, and frequented the waterways and marinas around the Northern Neck, Gloucester and Middlesex counties, and Hampton Roads. Officials said that he liked to hunt, belonging to a hunt club in the Middle Peninsula area, and that he sometimes operated a tree-service business.
State Police spokeswoman Robin Lawson asked that anyone with information about Wilmer to contact authorities at [email protected].
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