Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: The Colonial Parkway Murders 1

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Between 1986 and 1989, four young couples were murdered or vanished along the same 23-mile stretch of road in Virginia known as the Colonial Parkway. A scenic route through the state's Historic Triangle by day, the parkway became a place of terror by night, drawing couples seeking privacy and a killer who seemed to know exactly where to find them. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 27, and the cases shared eerie similarities: abandoned cars, isolated locations, and signs that the attacker may have posed as law enforcement to get close. But the differences left investigators wondering whether they were chasing one serial killer or several. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces the eight young victims, the dark and lonely road that connected their deaths, and the chilling pattern that left an entire region afraid to pull off the highway after dark.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap.

It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. Certain places are supposed to be safe. The road you take home from work every night.

The overlook where you go to watch the sunset. The quiet spot where you and the person you love can pull over and just be alone for a little while. In Virginia, the colonial parkway was supposed to be one of those places. It's a 23-mile ribbon of road that runs through the woods, linking three of the oldest towns in America, Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg. By day, it's postcard pretty, green forest, marsh grass, the wide river. By night, it's dark, quiet, and completely private.

it, which is exactly why young couples love it. And it's exactly why for four years in the 1980s, someone used it as a hunting ground. Eight young people, four couples, all of them killed on or near that same stretch of road. For decades, the people who loved them were left holding the same two questions. Who did this and why them? People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending on Carter Roy. And this is murder, true crime stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes, come at every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday,

with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the

the Murder True Crime Story Show page on Apple Podcasts. This is the first of two episodes on the Colonial Parkway murders. Between 1986 and 1989, four young couples were killed on or near that same 23-mile road in Virginia. The cases weren't identical, but they were similar enough that investigators started grouping them together. Today, I'll introduce you to the eight people at the center of this story. Kathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski, Robin Edwards and David Knobling, Cassandra Haley and Keith Call, and Anna Maria Phelps, and Daniel Lauer. They ranged in age from 14 to 27, and as the bodies piled up,

the people trying to solve these cases grew more and more desperate. and they kept circling one impossible question. Were they chasing one killer or a whole network of them? Next time, I'll walk you through the cold case that stretched on for decades. The false leads, the dead ends, the suspects who came and went. I'll also explain how, years later, a new kind of DNA science would finally give some of these families an answer. while others are still waiting for theirs. All that and more coming up.

In the fall of 1986, the Colonial Parkway was exactly the kind of place you went when you wanted to be left alone. Long, unlit stretches where you could pull off the road and not see another set of headlights for a while. The locals knew it, and the college kids especially knew it. It was a lover's lane, plain and simple. That's what brought 27 years. year old Kathleen Thomas there one night in October. Everyone called her Kathy, and she was just looking for a quiet place to be with the person she was seeing. Kathy's life up to that point had been anything but ordinary. She grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Massachusetts,

and the family business, so to speak, was the Navy. Her father had gone to the U.S. Naval Academy, so had her brother, and in 1981, Kathy graduated from Annapolis. too, making the Thomas's the first father, son, and daughter to all graduate from the academy. That was a big deal for the family. It was an even bigger deal for the Navy. Kathy was part of only the second class that ever admitted women, and she made the most of it. She learned Russian and became one of the first women in the Navy to qualify as a surface warfare officer. By all accounts, she loved the work and was a perfect fit.

Friends described her as a firecracker, sharp as attack, and fiercely loyal. She didn't have a lot of patience for people who complained. Her go-to line when someone was moping was, quote, Suck it up, Buttercup. But there was one part of Kathy's life she had to keep carefully locked away. Kathy was gay, and in the early 1980s, the military wouldn't let her live openly. This was years before, don't ask, don't tell. Back then, the armed forces didn't look the other way.

Being gay was flat-out grounds for getting thrown out. Or a woman who'd built her whole life around serving that was always hanging over Kathy. and in the spring of 1984, the threat became real. The Naval Investigative Service, the branch that would later become NCIS, opened a formal investigation into Kathy over her sexuality. She could be court-martialed, and even if she beat it, her career would never really recover. So Kathy made a decision. Rather than fight it, she would leave the Navy the moment her five-year-term,

commitment was up. And in May of 1986, she walked away. She'd given the Navy nine years, four at the Academy and five in uniform. But in the end, none of that mattered as much as who she loved. But Kathy wasn't the type to let that get her down, and by the time she left, she already had a plan B. While she was still in the Navy, she'd been chipping away. She'd been chipping away at a master's in business. She took those skills, walked into a brokerage firm in Virginia Beach, and got herself a job as a stockbroker. She brought the same hard-charging energy she'd had in uniform. Her coworkers called her sales style aggressive, but it worked. Within months, she was one of the top brokers in the office, pulling in around $4,000 a month. In today's money, that's about $12,000.

Things were going so well that when fall came around, Kathy didn't even bother re-enrolling in her master's program. She didn't need to. She'd found her footing. And it wasn't just work. On that summer, Kathy had started seeing someone new, a 21-year-old woman named Rebecca Dowski. Rebecca was a senior at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, majoring in business management, not far off. from what Kathy had studied. She'd transferred in from a school in Pennsylvania,

and before that, she'd studied at the American school in Paris. She was a gifted musician, remembered for her creativity and kindness. She also had an eye for style and loved to keep up with all the latest trends to help cover her costs. Rebecca worked two jobs,

one at a daycare, and one as a clerk in the college's English department. She wasn't a natural student, but she was a grinder. When her grades slipped, she'd put in hours with tutors to bring them back up. The people who knew Rebecca remembered someone warm and a little glamorous, and with a bit of that Paris polish still on her. Nobody's totally sure how the two of them first met. Friends introduced them somewhere in that Williamsburg orbit.

What mattered was that Kathy wasn't in uniform anymore. She didn't have to hide. For the first time, in a long time, she could just love who she loved. On the night of Thursday, October 9, 1986, Kathy drove over to William and Mary to see Rebecca. It was a work night for Kathy and a school night for Rebecca, but Thursdays were kind of their thing.

They'd get together and go for a drive. So after hanging around the campus computer lab with some of Rebecca's friends, the two of them got in Kathy's white Honda and headed out onto the colonial parkway. Eventually, they pulled off at a spot called the Cheatham Annex Overlook. They'd been there before. The land had once belonged to the Navy, which might be how Kathy first heard about it, but by 1986 it was National Parkland and overlook where you could peer out over the York River. To Kathy and Rebecca, it was just a good, quiet place to be together. Kathy pulled up near the top of the embankment above the water and cut the engine.

The view was probably beautiful that night, but Kathy wasn't looking at it. She was looking at Rebecca. They had no idea anyone else was out there watching them. The next morning, Kathy didn't show up to work. Normally that would raise an alarm, but her boss couldn't remember whether she'd put in for time off, and she was one of his best people. He figured if Kathy wasn't there, she had a good reason. He didn't chase it down.

He just assumed he'd see her Monday. And no one in Kathy's or Rebecca's life realized that two of them were gone either. The whole weekend went by, and nobody reported them missing. Then that Sunday, someone visiting the overlook noticed something down the slope near the water. There was a car, nose down in the brush at the bottom of the embankment. They called the police. When officers got down to the car, they found Kathy and Rebecca inside. Both women had been strangled and both of their throats had been cut.

They had rope burns on their wrists and necks. which meant someone had bound them, and the whole car, inside and out, reeked of diesel fuel. Whoever did this had doused it and tried to set it on fire, but diesel doesn't catch the way gasoline does, and the matches just burned out. That meant several pieces of evidence were still preserved. Kathy and Rebecca still had their wallets and their valuables,

so this wasn't a robbery, and there was no sign of sexual assault. which left an obvious question hanging in the air. If this wasn't about money and this wasn't about sex, then why were Kathy and Rebecca targeted? That question wouldn't have an answer for a long time, but a more immediate one did. Whose case was this? And because the murders happened on National Parkland,

it went to the FBI. A special agent out of the Norfolk office took the lead, Local and state police pitched in where they could, but officially this was a federal investigation. The Norfolk team quickly identified Kathy and Rebecca from the IDs still in their wallets, and then came the part no investigator ever really gets used to, driving out to two families and telling them their daughters weren't coming home. After that, it was time to look for clues. There wasn't much to work with, but one strange detail stood out.

Kathy's wallet was found down on the floor of the car, not in her bag. That meant she'd taken it out at some point. To investigators, and that suggested one of two things. Maybe the killer had flashed a badge and asked for her license, so she'd reached for it, or maybe they'd shown a gun. She assumed it was a robbery and tried to hand it over. Either way, there was a real possibility that whoever did this had gotten Kathy to trust them just long enough.

But a hunch about trust was a long way from a name, so for weeks, agents worked the case the only way they could. They knocked on doors. They sat down with Kathy's coworkers and Rebecca's classmates. They tried to rebuild that Thursday night minute by minute. But the overlook was so far off the beaten path, and the two women had been out there so long before anyone found them, that there was almost nothing to go on. Then, as agents talked to more people and learned that Kathy and Rebecca were a couple, a second theory took shape. What if one or both of them had been targeted on purpose?

They came to that overlook on Thursday nights. maybe someone knew that, someone who had a problem with two women being together. That became the leading theory that this was in some way a hate crime, and it wasn't a baseless one. In the mid-1980s, that kind of hostility toward gay people was common, and a lot of folks didn't think twice about it. Kathy had already lost the career she loved because of it. For the agents on the case, a motive like. that helped explain why the attack had been so vicious and so personal. It was still just a theory though and investigators needed a lot more to prove it. But they never got the chance.

Because less than a year later a second couple would turn up dead near that same road. And everything they thought they knew would come apart. In October of 1986, Kathy Thomas and Rebecca Dowski were murdered at an overlook on the Colonial Parkway. The FBI's best guess was that the two women had been deliberately targeted, maybe as victims of a hate crime. But the idea started to crack in September of 1987 when another young couple was killed less than a year later in the same dark corner of Virginia. Only this time, one of the victims was still a child. Her name was Robin Edwards, and she was 14 years old. She was fearless, funny, and bursting with energy that she wasn't always sure what to do with. She used to talk about running off to join the circus, and more than once, she actually tried to run away from home, though she never got very far.

Her family had a phrase for it, that was just Robin being Robin. But things had been looking up for her lately. She'd started going to therapy, and according to her sister, she'd recently started medication for depression. As a reward for how well she'd been doing, her parents had gotten her a kitten and a waterbed. It was a dangerous combination, but apparently that was what Robin wanted. That fall, things were still going well for her. On the night of September 19th, Robin went out with a group of friends to catch a movie, and the plan was to see Dragnet, but it was still going well for her.

sold out, so the group ended up at an arcade instead. Among them was a 20-year-old named David Knobling. David lived in Hampton, about 30 miles from where Kathy and Rebecca had been found the year before. He worked for his father's landscaping business, and his pride and joy was a black Ford Ranger pickup. David had a lot going on in his life at that point. His girlfriend, 16-year-old Tara Cook, was pregnant. She wanted to get married, but her family was upset about the pregnancy. They had nothing against David personally, and they just wanted more for their daughter than becoming a teen mom. David himself was genuinely excited to become a dad, whether he was ready to be a husband, was a different question.

That night, after the arcade, the group dropped Robin back at her parents' house around 10 p.m. She went inside, put her younger sister to bed, and then later that night, slipped back out to meet up with David. I want to be careful here because the reporting on David and Robin is genuinely murky. Some later accounts described the two of them as friends, but the facts are that he was 20 and she was 14, and it isn't clear whether David even knew how young she really was. What we do know is that Robin was a kid who had been targeted by grown men before. According to her parents, when she was just 11, she'd snuck out to be with a 21-year-old who called himself her boyfriend. So this was a child who had already been failed more than once by adults who should have known better.

And that night, she and David drove out along the parkway, then turned south, crossed the James River Bridge and parked in a sandy pull-off near the ragged island wildlife refuge. It was another spot teenagers used for privacy. David had been there before. Back at the Edwards house, nobody realized Robin was gone until morning.

When her mom went to wake her up and found the bed empty, she went straight to the police and reported her missing. A day later, out at R. Ragged Island, an aisle of white county sheriff's deputy came across David's Ford Ranger, parked and abandoned. The keys were still in the ignition. The driver's door was unlocked, the window was down, and the radio was still playing. But there was no one inside. Police ran the plates, traced the truck to David, and called his family, who confirmed he was missing.

They knew David would never have just walked away and left his car like that. They feared the worst. Since Ragged Island was off federal land, the Virginia State Police took the lead. Inside the truck, they found some clothing and a pair of shoes. The shoes didn't belong to David's girlfriend, so investigators tried to figure out who he'd been with. They photographed the shoes and drove over to the Edwards' house, where a 14-year-old girl had just been reported missing that morning. When Robin's mother saw the photos, she recognized them immediately.

They were Robbins. That was how the family learned where Robin had been, and that she and David were still gone. David's father threw everything he had into finding them. He organized a search and pulled in anyone willing to help. For the next two days, volunteers combed the ragged island, refuge on foot. It rained hard the whole time, which only made things worse. Then on September 23rd, a man walking the shoreline found two bodies washed up on the bank, about a mile from where the

truck had been left. By then, the weather and the search had wrecked the scene. Days of heavy rain, plus all those well-meaning volunteers walking the refuge meant that whatever evidence the killer left behind was probably gone, trampled, or washed away. Still, the bodies were identified. It was Robin Edwards and David Knobling. They had both been shot in the head, execution style. Before the police could even reach the families, the local news ran a story on the discoveries. That's how both families found out from a TV report. David's brother, Michael, later called it the worst day of his life. Robin's family was shattered. She was only 14. They weren't just grieving the girl she was, but the woman she'd never get to become.

And David's girlfriend, Tara, would have been reeling too. She was pregnant and she'd thought she was going to marry him. Then, almost immediately, she became a suspect. The way police first sought, the pregnancy gave her a motive. Maybe she'd found out David was with another girl and flown into her rage. They wanted her to take a polygraph, but Tara was a minor and her family shut it down. Still, the jealous girlfriend theory never sat right, because the more detectives looked, the more this echoed. The first case. Both couples were killed at night. Both were in, or near their cars, both happened in dark, isolated spots, and like Kathy and Rebecca, investigators kept coming back to the same idea, that the killer had walked up to the vehicle

and forced the couple out, maybe by pretending to be a cop. If the two cases were connected, it meant something a lot of people in those towns didn't want to say out loud. It meant there was a serial killer working the Colonial Parkway. But there were no real suspects. Tara was the closest thing to one and ruling her out took years. It wasn't until 1989 after she turned 18 that she willingly took the polygraph and was cleared. With no one left to look at, fear settled over the towns around the parkway. One killer or two, targeted or random.

Nobody felt safe anymore. and the horror wasn't over just yet. In the spring of 1988, a year before Tara ever took that test, a third couple vanished. This time it was two college students, 20-year-old Richard Call, who went by Keith, and 18-year-old Cassandra Haley, who went by Sandy. They both went to Christopher Newport College, just up the peninsula from where David and Robin had and found the year before. Keith was kind of an old soul. He was shy until he got to know you, and then he'd open right up. He was a computer science major who wanted to be a programmer,

and he spent most of his free time messing around on the home computer he'd gotten, which was still a pretty big deal in the late 1980s. Sandy was a freshman, warm and generous, the kind of person who seemed to be friends with everybody. She modeled a little and taught gymnastics on the side. If you saw a photo of them from that spring, you might swear they'd wandered out of an 80s teen movie. And on the night of April 9, 1988, Keith and Sandy went on their first date. It wasn't anything serious. Keith was on a break with his longtime girlfriend. They caught a movie, then hit a college party near campus, where Sandy spent a good chunk of the night talking to her Onex. A little before 2 a.m., they left to get Sandy home before her curfew in Keith's red Toyota

Selica. That was the last time anyone ever saw either of them. The next morning, Keith's dad was driving to work when he thought he spotted his son's car, parked off the side of the parkway. But he didn't stop. Keith had told his parents he'd be out and wouldn't be home till around noon, and his dad trusted him. A park ranger noticed the same car around 7.30 that morning. When he came back through at 9 and it still hadn't moved, he pulled over to look. The car was empty. It was only a few miles from where Kathy and Rebecca had been murdered two years before,

and it looked eerily like David and Robin's case. Keys left behind and clothes inside that belonged to a young man and a young woman. There was also a watch, a pair of glasses, and Keith's wallet, which is how the ranger figured out whose car it was. His first guess was that the couple had gone down to the river for a late-night swim. That didn't hold up. The water was freezing that time of year, and Sandy's family said she was genuinely afraid of the water. There was no chance she'd gone swimming in the dark. The wallet, though, had only gotten the officer halfway.

He knew this was Keith's car. but not who the young woman with him had been. Sandy wasn't identified until investigators started asking around about Keith's last night. And because the car was on federal land, the FBI stepped in again. Once they did, agents couldn't help wondering if this was the same killer using the same playbook, surprising a couple in their car and forcing them out into the dark. The FBI brought in dogs to track Keith and Sandy, but the canines quickly lost the scent. Helicopters swept low over the trees, and police dragged the river.

None of it turned up a single thing. And this is what makes Keith and Sandy's case different, and in some ways the hardest of them all. With the others, there were bodies. There was something to bury. With Keith and Sandy, there was just... an empty car by the road. They were presumed dead, but no trace of them was ever found. Their families were left in a horrible kind of limbo, never knowing for certain what happened. And they wouldn't be the last, because soon one more couple would go missing, bringing the toll on the colonial

Parkway to eight. By the spring of 1988, three young couples had been killed or vanished on or near the same stretch of road in Virginia. People had started calling them the Colonial Parkway murders. In 1986, Kathy Thomas and Rebecca Dowski were strangled in their car, their throats cut. In 1987, David Knobling and Robin Edwards were shot and left on the shore at Ragged Island, and, and And in 1988, Keith Call and Sandy Haley disappeared. Their bodies were never found, but they were presumed dead. Three double murders in three years, and there was about to be a fourth. In the late summer of 1989, 18-year-old Anna Maria Phelps was living in Virginia Beach with her boyfriend, Clint Lauer.

Money was tight. Clint had lost his job, and at one point their power got shut off. So the couple came up with a plan. They asked Clint's older brother, 21-year-old Daniel Lauer, if he'd move in and help cover the rent. They brought it up to Daniel over Labor Day weekend when he came to visit. Daniel said, yes. And the only catch was that he had to drive back to Amelia County, a couple of hours inland where he lived and pack up his things. Anna Maria decided to ride along.

Her own parents lived out in Amelia County so she could visit them while Daniel packed. Then the two of them would drive back to Virginia Beach together. And to be clear, Anna Maria and Daniel weren't a couple. He was her boyfriend's brother, and this was just a favor and a chance to see family. In a few weeks, on September 25th, Anna Maria was supposed to marry Clint. The first half of the trip went exactly to plan, but on the way back to Virginia Beach, Anna Maria and Daniel disappeared. The very next morning, before anyone had even reported them missing, a state trooper found Daniel's Chevy Nova abandoned at a rest stop off Interstate 64, the highway that runs right past the colonial parkway. The keys were in the ignition.

The car was still packed with everything Daniel was bringing to start his new life at the beach. The trooper didn't know it yet, but only two things were missing from that car, Anna Maria's wallet, and a blanket. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle, nothing to tell him this was anything more than a car somebody left behind. Then the pieces started coming together. The Virginia State Police traced the Nova to Daniel, and eventually he and Anna Maria were reported missing. And that's when investigators noticed something that made no sense. The car had been left at a rest stop on the wrong side of the interstate.

It was pointed away from Virginia Beach, not toward it. Investigators kept circling that detail. If somebody wanted to make two people disappear, leaving the car facing the wrong way was almost a taunt. or a slip. Either way, it told them one thing for certain. This wasn't a breakdown, and it wasn't two kids running off. Somebody else had been behind the wheel of that car. For the families, that was baffling. They just sent the two of them off toward the beach. There was no reason they'd have turned around and driven the opposite way. For investigators, there was one obvious uncons. comfortable explanation. Maybe Daniel and Anna Maria had run off together. Nobody wanted to say it,

given that Anna Maria was engaged to Daniel's brother, but those things happened, and early on, police couldn't rule it out. As the weeks dragged on, though, with no word from either of them, that idea fell apart. If they'd run off, surely one of them would have called someone by now, and then in mid-October, the family's got their answer. On October 19th, two hunters were out in the woods off a logging road, about a mile from the rest stop where Daniel's car had turned up. They came across a blanket and underneath it, two bodies. The hunters called it in and the state police came out fast.

They immediately suspected it was Anna Maria and Daniel, but they couldn't be sure just by looking. the bodies had been out there too long. Anna Maria and Daniel had gone missing on Labor Day weekend. It was now the middle of October. Six weeks in the open had erased almost everything. It took dental records to finally confirm what everyone already feared. The two bodies under that blanket were Anna Maria Phelps and Daniel Lauer.

Back at the lab, the medical examiner couldn't even say how. they died. There were what looked like small knife marks on Anna Maria's remains, but even that was hard to say for certain. Whatever the killer did and whatever they left behind, the months outdoors had wiped it away. Or Anna Maria's and Daniel's families, though six weeks had been their own kind of torture, they'd spent them holding on to the one story that ended with the two of them still alive, that maybe somehow they'd just driven off somewhere. Now, even that was gone, and like two of the families before them, they were left with a body, a burial, and hardly any answers. So by the end of 1989, this was where things stood. Four pairs, eight young people,

all killed on or near the colonial parkway in just four years. But the investigations were a patchwork because of where each crime happened and the cases were split between two agencies that weren't always talking to each other. The FBI had Kathy and Rebecca and Keith and Sandy because those happened on federal land. The Virginia State Police had David and Robin and Anna Maria and Daniel because those happened off it. For the agents and detectives on both sides of that divide, these had become the kind of cases you carry home at night. Eight young people gone. Four families with no answers and still nobody in custody.

The overlooks where couples used to park sat empty now. People had gotten the message. And here's the hardest part. Even though everyone lumped the four cases together as the Colonial Parkway murders that didn't mean they were actually connected. Yes, there were similarities,

but there were real differences too in how each couple was killed and in whether they were ever found at all. There was a real chance they were looking at more than one killer. The victims didn't fit a single mold either, different ages, different backgrounds, one gay couple,

two straight ones and a brother and sister-in-law to be, trying to build a single profile out of all that was nearly impossible. And that uncertainty was its own kind of cruelty. Were these four chapters of one story or four separate tragedies that happened to share a road, nobody could say. But eight families were now bound together by a single name. The colonial Parkway murders. There was another way to look at it, though. Double homicides are rare to begin with. Four of them in four years, all in the same small stretch of Virginia?

That's even rare still. And it pushed a lot of investigators toward the serial killer theory. There was even a behavioral specialist with the state police who landed on a darker idea. He figured that in order to control victims who were young, and strong and healthy, it would have taken more than one person, not a single killer, but two working together. The theory that kept surfacing went like this. The killer or killers approached the cars in some kind of uniform, something official enough that a couple would roll their window down at nights without a second thought. At more than one scene, wallets were missing or turned up in odd places, as if someone had fumbled for their ID during what felt like a routine traffic stop.

Once that window was down, it would have been easy to pull a gun and order the couple out of the car. Real badge or fake, the killer was in control from that point on. And that led investigators somewhere they really didn't want to go, because if the killer was dressing up as a police officer to get these couples to trust them, then there was another possibility they couldn't ignore. What if the killer wasn't pretending? What if they really were a police officer? Thanks so much for listening.

I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories. Come back next time for part two on the Colonial Parkway Murders and all the people. people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts.

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powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protofsky, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Alex Burns,

and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crimehouse Original

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