Bob Dowski and Bill Thomas had long wondered who killed their sisters, Rebecca and Cathy, whose bodies were found in Cathy’s car in 1986 with their throats slashed. Their deaths were linked to several more in southeastern Virginia around that time in what became known as the Colonial Parkway murders.
“The memory is always there,” Dowski said. “You try to keep it locked inside little rooms in your heart and your head. But that doesn’t really work.”
Last week, he and Thomas were invited to Virginia by FBI agents. The two were told what the FBI formally announced Tuesday: The FBI believed that Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., who died in 2017 and in recent years had been linked to four other murders in Virginia from that time, also killed Rebecca and Cathy.
“Had Wilmer Sr. been alive today,” the FBI said in a statement, “the evidence developed through this investigation would have supported federal prosecution.”
The FBI cited “advances in forensic science and DNA analysis” in cracking the case but did not elaborate.
Dowski, 72, was left with mixed feelings — grateful for the FBI’s efforts, pleased to have some answers, upset that Wilmer never faced any consequences.
“This guy snuffed out two young people in 1986 and went on to have a life and in 2017 died in his sleep,” he said. “I am not sure he lived a happy life, but my sister didn’t get to have her life.”
“I don’t think justice was served,” Dowski said. “Justice would have been served if he was charged, convicted and executed.”
As Dowski tried to compartmentalize his grief, Bill Thomas, 69, took a different path — starting a website and a podcast about the Colonial Parkway murders to keep attention on them and help try to solve them. The project had him speaking with surviving family members of other murder victims, which has fueled him to expand the Mind Over Murder podcast to other crimes.
“We’ve met so many amazing people along the way,” he said. “Lots of people have gone through what we’ve gone through.”
The FBI said Tuesday there were at least eight murders and disappearances of young people from 1986 to 1989 near Virginia’s Colonial Parkway and surrounding areas. There has long been uncertainty about exactly how the cases were related and which ones come under the umbrella of the “Colonial Parkway murders.” But taken collectively, the crimes have generated “one of the most complex and enduring cold case investigations in Virginia history,” the FBI said in a statement. The agency vowed to “continue to actively pursue unsolved cases related to the Colonial Parkway murders.”
It was an October night in 1986 when Thomas, 27, among the U.S. Naval Academy’s first female graduates; and Dowski, 21, whom she had recently started dating, left a computer lab at the William & Mary, where Dowski was a student. Days later, a jogger spotted Thomas’s white Honda in brambles on an embankment near the York River.
The women had been choked with a rope and their throats had been cut, Bill Thomas said. Their purses were in the car, which the killer had unsuccessfully tried to torch.
At first, it seemed as though the attack was an isolated incident, and perhaps the killer knew one or both women. Then, nearly a year later, the bodies of David Knobling, 20, and Robin Edwards, 14, were found at the Ragged Island Wildlife Management Area on the James River in Isle of Wight County. Both had been shot in the head, and Knobling’s truck was parked at the refuge.
In September 1989, police found an abandoned car at a rest stop along Interstate 64. Annamaria Phelps, 18, and Daniel Lauer, 21, had been headed to Virginia Beach. The drivers window was cracked open, according to family members.
A month and a half later, hunters found the pair’s remains in the woods about a mile away. Both had been stabbed. Phelps, a feisty free spirit who liked to go barefoot, was wearing Lauer’s socks and shoes, her sister said.
In his meeting with the FBI on Tuesday, Bill Thomas said agents told him they reanalyzed DNA evidence that had long ago been collected at the crime scene from a piece of Rebecca Dowski’s clothing. “DNA testing and analysis has gotten so much more sensitive,” Thomas said.
The DNA matched DNA that had long ago been collected from Wilmer.
Wilmer, nicknamed “Pokey,” 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 and belonged to a hunt club in the Middle Peninsula area. He sometimes operated a tree-service business.
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.
In January, 2024, investigators said they connected Wilmer to two of the Colonial Parkway homicides: Knobling and Edwards.
Authorities have also tied Wilmer 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, and to the 1989 killing of Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell, 29, in Hampton.
Bill Thomas has classified six of the homicides and two disappearances into the broader category of “Colonial Parkway murders.” He said that depending on how the term is defined, the total can swell to 10.
Thomas also said that if Wilmer’s DNA profile was available to more investigators in Virginia and elsewhere, Wilmer would probably be linked to more murders.
The post Serial killer linked to 1986 murders of Virginia women appeared first on Washington Post.
