Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: The Colonial Parkway Murders 2

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the decades-long hunt for the killer behind the Colonial Parkway Murders. For years, the four cases went nowhere, plagued by jurisdictional turf wars, false leads, and a string of suspects who turned out to be dead ends, including two men who inserted themselves into the families' grief only to exploit it. Refusing to let the case die, the victims' families applied relentless public pressure on the FBI and Virginia State Police. Then the same genetic genealogy breakthrough that caught the Golden State Killer gave investigators a new path forward, leading at last to a name. But the answers came late and incomplete, with some families finally learning who killed their loved ones and others still waiting, decades later, for any resolution at all.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. Some things just take time. A cold case isn't always about a missing clue.

Sometimes everything investigators need is already sitting in an evidence locker. They just don't have the tools yet to read it. so they wait for the science to catch up to the truth that's been there all along. But even when the answer finally comes, closure is rarely as clean as anyone wants it to be. Not all cases end with a trial, sometimes they end with a name and nothing else. No courtroom, no verdict, no swell of music and a final statement. just the strange hollow certainty of knowing who without ever getting to ask why. That's where the Colonial Parkway murders were headed.

Decades after the killing stopped in 1989, the victim's families refused to let the cases die quietly. But justice can be a strange, complicated thing when it shows up almost 40 years. too late. 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.

I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out 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

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This is the second 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. Last time, I introduced you to the eight victims, Kathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski, a couple looking for a quiet place to be together, 14-year-old Robin Edwards, who'd snuck out to meet up with 20-year-old David Nobling, Keith Call and Cassandra Haley, out on a first date, and Anna Maria Phelps and Daniel Lauer, two friends driving home.

Every one of them was murdered or vanished along the colonial parkway. Today, I'll walk you through the decades that followed, the suspects who came and went, the people who swooped in promising answers, and let the families down. And the science that almost 40 years later finally gave some of them a name. name and a whole host of new questions. All that and more coming up. By 1989, four couples were dead. The Colonial Parkway murders had claimed eight lives and investigators had almost nothing to show for it.

They had theories and what they didn't have was suspects. And part of the problem was that the four cases refused to line up neatly. Back in 1986, the first victims were 27 years. old Kathy Thomas and 21-year-old Rebecca Dowski. They were a gay couple, which raised the possibility of a hate crime, but none of the other three couples were gay, so that didn't fit as a motive for a serial killer. In 1987, the second couple was 14-year-old Robin Edwards and 20-year-old David Nobling. Early on, investigators had looked hard at David's pregnant girlfriend, They wondered if it was a crime of passion, but she was cleared.

And even if she hadn't been, a jealous girlfriend had nothing to do with Kathy and Rebecca. Then there was the case that stood apart from all the rest. 18-year-old Cassandra Sandy Haley and 20-year-old Richard Keith Kahl, who vanished in 1988. They were the only victims whose bodies were never found. And finally, in 1989, There were 18-year-old Anna Maria Phelps and 21-year-old Daniel Lauer. They were the only pair who weren't a couple, which raised its own set of questions. The thread tying it all together was hard to ignore.

Every crime happened on or near the Colonial Parkway. Everyone involved an abandoned car, and all the victims were young. But the differences kept tripping investigators up. And so did the way the cases were split up. Some fell to the Virginia State Police, others fell to the FBI because they happened on National Parkland. The two agencies had different rules and answered two different bosses. And that made it harder to see the whole picture at once. For the families, that split was its own kind of torment.

Depending on which stretch of road their child was found on, they were dealing with a different agency, different investigators, There's a different set of rules about what anyone was allowed to tell them. Still, when they agreed on the basics, the cases were connected. They were probably looking at a serial killer, someone who might have been posing as law enforcement to get close to the victims. A Virginia State Police behavioral analyst floated a darker version of that idea. He thought there might be two killers working together.

He reasoned that overpowering two healthy young people at once again and again would have been almost impossible for one person alone, even if the couple believed they'd been pulled over by an actual cop. At least one FBI official thought that was a real possibility too. But that only made things harder. If they couldn't identify one killer, how were they ever going to find two? For years, that was where things stood. The first real lead didn't come until 1996, a full decade after Kathy and Rebecca were killed. The murders had stopped in 1989. Seven years of silence followed, and then another double homicide.

This one wasn't on the parkway. It was in Shenandoah National Park, about three hours inland, different place, different setting. but the similarities were eerie enough that investigators looked twice. The victims were 24-year-old Julianne Julie Williams and 26-year-old Laura Lolly Wynens. The two women were serious hikers who'd met a couple of years earlier through a program that ran wilderness trips for women.

They'd been a couple ever since. They'd gone backpacking deep into the park with their dog. When they didn't come home on schedule, Julie's father reported them missing. Rangers found their car first, then they found the dog, wandering loose. The next day, they found Julie and Lolly at their campsite. Both women had been bound and gagged. Their throats had been cut.

The echoes of Kathy and Rebecca were impossible to miss. Two gay couples, both bound, both with their throats cut. Investigators couldn't help but wonder if they were looking at the same killer, someone who'd gone quiet and then resurfaced again. But there were real differences too. Kathy and Rebecca had been confronted in their car in a quick, controlled attack. Julie and Lolley's killer had tracked them deep into the backcountry, which felt far more premeditated. Was that difference enough to rule out a connection? nobody was sure.

They kept at it. And in 2002, six years after the Shannandoah killings, a man named Daryl Rice was indicted for murdering Julie and Lolly. The evidence was circumstantial, but to investigators, it added up. And there was already a reason he was on their radar. A few years earlier, Rice had pleaded guilty to trying to abduct a female cyclist in that very same park. Prosecutors went further, alleging he was deeply homophobic and had said he liked targeting women because he saw them as easier prey. He'd also been in the park right around the time

Julie and Lolly were killed. For a moment, the colonial parkway families let themselves hope. If Rice had killed Julie and Lolly, maybe he'd also killed the others. Maybe this was a it. It wasn't. In 2004, DNA testing ruled Rice out. A hair recovered at the scene didn't match him and the case against him fell apart. The charges were dropped and he was fully exonerated years later when the DNA was matched to another man entirely. And by then, Rice had spent more than a decade under a cloud for killings he didn't commit and he died in a car accident just weeks after his name was finally cleared. For the Parkway families, it was a cruel kind of whiplash.

They'd let themselves picture an ending, a name, a trial, a verdict, and then watched it vanish with a single lab result. Julie and Lolley's murder was back to Square One, and so was the Colonial Parkway investigation. Almost two decades had passed since Kathy and Rebecca, and the families are no closer to an answer. By now, some of the parents were getting older. A few would die without ever learning what happened to their children.

For years, the families had heard the same reassurances. The case was active. Leeds were being run down. These things take time. And they'd learned to steady themselves every time another anniversary came around and the phone didn't ring. Then one of them decided, He'd waited long enough. In September 2009, 52-year-old Bill Thomas, Kathy's older brother,

was sitting at his computer in Los Angeles a few weeks shy of the anniversary of his sister's death. For two decades, he'd mostly stayed in the background and trusted that the authorities would eventually crack the case. That night, for whatever reason, he typed his sister's name into Google. and once he started reading, he couldn't stop. For the next five hours, he went through everything he could find. News archives, cold case forums, all of it. And somewhere in there, he found something that made his blood boil.

Graphic crime scene photos from Kathy's murder had been made public. Not by accident and not by investigators. a retired FBI photographer had been using them to teach a class. After everything his family had been through, it felt like a violation. And it was the thing that finally pushed Bill off the sidelines. He started reaching out to the other victim's families. It was the first time he'd spoken to any of them since the murders. And he found people who felt exactly the way he did.

isolated, forgotten, fed up. So they came together and they turned that frustration into something organized. Bill became the loudest voice in the room. He hammered the FBI with requests for updates. And when he didn't get them, he went to the press and got the other families to do the same. For Bill, none of this was a hobby or a puzzle to crack. It was his little sister. someone had taken Kathy off that road when she was 27,

and more than two decades later, he still didn't know who or why. He decided he wasn't going to spend whatever years he had left in the dark. By his own admission, he was a little annoying about it, but it worked. Eventually, the FBI promised to put more resources into the case. Around the same time in 2010, a man reached out to the families and offered to help. His name was Fred Atwell, and he was 61 years old back in 1986 when the killing started.

He'd been a 37-year-old deputy sheriff in the area. And Atwell already had a connection to the case. He was the one who'd exposed those leaked crime scene photos, taking the story to the press. It hadn't made him any friends at the FBI. but to the families that made him seem like the perfect ally. Someone on the inside who wasn't afraid to make noise, he told them he wanted to help. He even said he had two specific names, two suspects,

and then he told them his own theory about the case. He didn't think the killer had just been posing as a police officer. He thought the killer actually was a cop. By 2010, the Colonial Parkway families had a new ally, Fred Atwell, a former deputy sheriff. He just told them he believed the killer was one of their own and even promised them two names. But those two names never went anywhere. They were never made public. And no one was ever charged.

And then Atwell's story took a strange turn. He told the families that a lawyer had contacted him. representing a client who claimed to be involved in the murders. For $20,000, that client would reveal where Sandy Haley and Keith Call's bodies were. Investigators didn't buy it. It smelled like a shakedown and eventually Atwell dropped the whole thing, but the damage was done. The family started to wonder what Atwell was really after. In 2011, they got an answer.

That year, Atwell was arrested for running a fake charity raffle. He'd been collecting donations under the name the Colonial Parkway Victims Fund and pocketing the money. Around the same time, Atwell robbed a woman at gunpoint. He told her he'd been living in the woods and was hungry and took $60 from her. not long after he called a suicide hotline and on that call he said something that stopped everyone cold no one had ever named him a suspect in the parkway murders but that night he named himself he told the hotline he was a suspect in a serial murder investigation and that he wanted to die the families didn't know what to make of it they'd let this man into their grief

and now they had to ask themselves, was Fred Atwell just a con man falling apart, or had he been involved all along? In the end, it was the first, a man coming undone, not a killer. Atwell was eventually sentenced for the scam. He died in 2018, still insisting he'd had nothing to do with the murders.

He claimed anyone trying to tie him to the case was doing it out of spite. And the evidence backed him up. There was nothing connecting him to the killings, and he was dismissed as a suspect. The families had been dragged through the ringer, and the case was still unresolved. But when the next outsider showed up promising answers,

they were ready to listen all over again. This one had real credentials, and he'd actually arrived around the same time Atwell did back in the spring of 2010, just as Bill Thomas was drawing new attention to the case. His name was Steve Spengola, and the families had hired him. Spengola was a retired homicide detective out of Milwaukee, with a reputation for cracking cases other people had given up on. The families brought him on privately, hoping he'd spot something the official investigation had missed. It didn't take him long to read.

a conclusion, and it was a big one. Spengola didn't think the four cases were connected at all. For years, almost everyone in law enforcement and in the public had assumed a single serial killer was behind all eight deaths. In a strange way, people needed that to be true. One killer is terrifying. But more than one, working the same roads, that was worse. that meant there was no single pattern to spot, no one profile to build. It meant anyone could be next. But Spengola looked at the evidence and decided investigators had boxed themselves in. He thought the assumption that there was just one killer

was the very reason none of the cases had ever been solved. The way he saw it, Kathy Thomas and Rebecca Dowski had been targeted for who they were. A hate crime committed by someone who knew the parkway was a place gay couples went to be alone and used that knowledge to find them. In his mind, that meant their case might still be connected to the unsolved Shandanoa murders. But the rest of the Parkway cases, Spengola didn't think the same person was responsible. And then he found something that seemed to back him up. Years earlier, about two weeks after Anna Maria Phelps was buried, investigators had handed her mother, Jewel, a box of Anna Maria's belongings.

They'd gone through it, found nothing useful, and returned it. But Jewel couldn't bring herself to open it, so she set it on a shelf and left it there until the day she could face it. That box sat unopened for years. When the family finally went through it, they found a note. It looked like Anna Maria had written it in the days before she and Daniel left for Virginia Beach. In it, she mentioned that the two of them were planning to meet someone at a rest stop along the way, someone in a blue van.

She'd even written down a name, though it's never been released to the public. Anna Maria's sister-in-law brought the note to Spingola. To him, it meant Anna Maria and Daniel might not have been random victims at all. Maybe they'd been lured to that rest stop. Maybe a meeting had simply gone wrong. Either way, it pointed to a different culprit than whoever killed the others. For Anna Maria's family, it felt like the first solid thing they'd had in years. but the state police weren't convinced.

They said they'd seen that note decades earlier, reviewed it, and written it off as a dead end. As far as they were concerned, Spengola was selling the family false hope. The family wanted the note looked at again with fresh eyes and better technology. They trusted Spengola, they wanted to believe in him. And then Spengola published what he'd found. Not in a report to the authorities, not in testimony to a task force. He put it in an online true crime magazine, one that readers had to pay for. To Jewel Phelps, that felt like a betrayal.

She'd handed this man her murdered daughter's note, and now it was part of something being sold. She said she never would have done that if she'd known. Spengola has said the proceeds went to cover the costs of investigating cases like this one, but for Jewel, the damage was done, and whatever trust Spengola had built with the families mostly collapsed after that. By now, the families had learned a hard lesson. Every time somebody showed up promising the truth, it seemed to cost them something. A little more hope, a little more trust.

after Atwell and now Spengola, and they were running low on both. It was another chapter in a long story of disappointment. And the case sat right where it had been for years. Unsolved. Then in April 2018, something happened, 3,000 miles away that changed everything. Joseph DiAngelo, the gold, state killer was arrested in California. Investigators had cracked one of the most notorious cold cases in the country,

using a brand-new approach called investigative genetic genealogy. They took crime scene DNA, uploaded it to a public genealogy database, built out a family tree, and worked backward until they landed on a name. The case sent a jolt through every unsolved investigation in America. Suddenly, DNA that had been sitting in evidence lockers for 30 years had new value. The technique worked even with tiny or degraded samples because all it needed to do was point toward a family.

The science had finally caught up to what so many cold cases were waiting for. For the Colonial Parkway families, it felt like a door swinging open. That same year, Virginia authorities confirmed. they still had DNA from some of the Parkway crime scenes. And as long as that evidence existed, and the science kept improving, there was a way forward. Bill Thomas wasn't about to let that momentum go to waste. In June 2019, at 62 years old, he flew to New Orleans for CrimeCon, a huge true crime convention sponsored by the Oxygen Network.

By then, he'd been fighting for his sister's case for a decade, and he knew events like this were a great way to keep it in the spotlight. He spent the whole weekend on his feet, working the room, cornering anyone who'd listen. He'd been doing versions of this for years by then. Radio hits, newspaper reporters, anniversary features, anyone who might keep his sister's name in circulation. It was exhausting, and a lot of the time, it was lonely, but he'd seen what a little attention could do. Bill had learned that the only way to keep the FBI moving was to keep the pressure on. Back in 2010, when he'd first started making noise, the Bureau had sat down with all the families

for an update. And then? Nothing. Almost 10 years had gone by without another meeting. What Bill and the families wanted now was simple. They wanted the FBI. to retest the DNA, the same way California had caught the Golden State killer. It was a delicate balance. But the experts Bill trusted kept telling him the same thing. This was a solvable case. And that was all the fuel he needed. His strategy worked.

A few weeks after CrimeCon, the FBI reached out. They weren't thrilled with his tactics, but they were willing to talk. And before long, they'd come back with something no one had had in almost 40 years. A real suspect. For more than a decade, Bill Thomas and the other Colonial Parkway families had refused to let this case go quiet. Through the 25th anniversary of the murders, the 30th and beyond, they kept the pressure on the FBI and the Virginia State Police. and eventually that pressure paid off. Cold case teams went back through the files with fresh eyes.

They re-read decades-old witness statements. They re-examined every piece of physical evidence that had survived. It was slow, painstaking work, especially because the cases were split between two agencies. This time, though, the work led somewhere, and it came down to DNA. The trail started with Robin Edwards. Back in 1987, 14-year-old Robin had been sexually assaulted. Investigators had recovered a DNA profile from that assault, but for decades it matched no one.

Then modern testing let them take another look. And this time, that same profile turned up in a completely separate case. the 1989 murder of 29-year-old Teresa Howell. Teresa had been out at the Zodiac Club, a bar in Hampton, and was last seen around 2.30 in the morning. A few hours later, a construction crew came across a trail of her clothing near a tree line. Her body was close by. She'd been sexually assaulted and strangled,

and did it all happen within about 15 miles. of where Robin and David were found. Her murder had never been connected to the Colonial Parkway cases. For more than three decades, no one had any idea her death was tied to anything bigger. Now, the same DNA sat at the center of both, but investigators still needed a name. So they turned to the same tool that had caught the Golden State Killer investigative genetic genealogy. They built out a family tree from the crime scene DNA and worked their way toward a living person. By late 2023, that trail led to a name.

Alan Wilmer, Sr. Back in the 1980s, when the murders happened, Wilmer would have been in his 30s. He was a wiry man around 5 foot 5 with sandy hair, blue eyes, and a close-cropped beard. He ran a business called Better Tree Service at a custom wooden workboat he'd named the Denny Wade and belonged to a hunt club out on the Middle Peninsula. And he drove something people tended to remember. A blue 1966 Dodge Fargo pickup

with a Virginia plate that read EM-Raw. Not only that, but Wilmer's whole life was a map of the places these victims were last seen or later found. The isolated pull-offs, the back roads, the rivers and marshes, he worked every day. He knew that landscape better than almost anyone. And a man like that could get close to people without ever looking out of place. And this wasn't even the first time investigators had crossed paths with Alan Wilmer. He'd been on investigators' radar once before in the disappearance of Sandy Haley and Keith Call.

Just four days after the couple vanished, FBI agents watched him scrubbing down and repainting that same blue truck. It looked exactly like a man destroying evidence, so they got a warrant and searched his property. They came away convinced he was hiding something, but they couldn't find enough to hold him. They even put him on a polygraph,

and he passed. With nothing solid to go on, the FBI let him go. This time, investigators weren't going to let him slip away. There was just one problem. Wilmer was already dead. He'd passed away in 2017 at the age of 63, and because he'd never been convicted of a felony, his DNA had never been collected or entered into any database.

The only reason they had a same, sample of it at all came down to something grim. When Wilmer died, authorities had collected his genetic material just to confirm who he was. Six years later, that sample was about to answer the question. Nobody ever got to ask him while he was alive. They sent it to a lab to compare against the profile from the crime scenes. It was a match. That same year, 2023, The Virginia Department of Forensic Science had put it in writing, a formal certificate of analysis, confirming that Wilmer's DNA matched the evidence pulled from the crime scenes.

Every investigator who'd ever touched this case had wanted exactly this and never had it. One clean fact nobody could argue with, the DNA from Robin Edwards case pointed straight to the man the FBI had questioned and let walk more than 30 years earlier. After nearly four decades of theories, dead ends, and false saviors, they finally had it. In January, 24, the Virginia State Police stood in front of cameras, and for the first time in almost 40 years, gave the public a name. For the families of Robin Edwards and David Nobling, it was a moment 36 years in the

the making, the person who did this finally had a face. He wasn't a shadow on a dark road anymore, or a theory, or a profile. He was a man who had lived and worked among them the whole time. And for Teresa Howell's family, who'd spent decades grieving her as an entirely separate loss, there was closure too, even if nothing could bring Teresa back. But naming Wilmer was also a starting point. Investigators didn't think Robin, David, and Teresa were his only victims, so they put out a public call,

asking anyone who'd worked the water beside him, hunted with him, were tied up at the same arenas to come forward. They said that loyalty shifted over the years, and so do people. Even now, they're still working to reconstruct where Wilmer went and what he did across the 1980s and into the 90s. And they were right to wonder, because once they had that name, other cases started to fall into place.

In late 2025, the Virginia State Police announced another match this time to an 18-year-old woman named Lori Ann Powell. Back in 1988, Lori had been out with her boyfriend when the two of them got into an argument. It got bad enough that she climbed out of the car and started walking home alone along a dark. rural road. She was 18. It was the kind of ordinary bad night, a fight, a walk to cool off, that should have ended with her back home by morning. She was never seen alive again. Investigators believe that somewhere along that road in Gloucester County, someone offered her a ride or forced her into one. Weeks later, her body was found in a river. She'd been sexually assaulted and stabbed, and investigators determined she died from a wound to the back of

her neck. For decades, her case had gone cold too, then it got picked back up through Virginia's Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, a state pushed to retest old evidence with the lab work done by a private forensic company in Florida. The profile came back to Wilmer. For Lori's family, the news landed somewhere between release. and heartbreak. Her sister said she was grateful the investigators never gave up, but an answer also meant living with the details of what Lori went through and with the fact that no courtroom would ever hold the man accountable. The DNA had now tied Wilmer to four killings, but identifying him and closing a case weren't the same thing. Even after all of that,

most of the Colonial Parkway cases were still officially open. Robin and David's murder had been closed. The rest had not. Now that changed in early 2006. In January, the FBI announced that DNA had now tied Wilmer to the very first Parkway victims, Kathy Thomas and Rebecca Dowski. Investigators had gone back to genetic material recovered from Rebecca's clothing decades earlier, evidence that had been tested before without success

and sent it to that same private lab in Florida. This time, they got a hit. For Bill Thomas, it was the answer he'd chased for 17 years. He said that result simply wasn't possible five years earlier. The science hadn't caught up yet, but now it had. And now he knew for certain who had killed his sister. Over the decades, the case had turned through something like 150 persons of interest. Bill would admit that even after all of it, the name still caught him off guard.

Federal prosecutors put it plainly, if Wilmer was still alive, they'd have had more than enough to charge him. As far as law enforcement was concerned, Alan Wilmer Sr. was the Colonial Parkway Killer. Bill spoke for his family afterward. He said it wasn't a celebration. It was a resolution. The Edwards and nobling families put it in their own way. For 36 years, they said they lived in what they called a vacuum of the unknown. Now, at last, they had some relief and some justice.

Knowing the man who killed Robin and David could never hurt anyone else. But underneath all of it said a hard truth. Some families got that resolution. Others never got the neat, tidy bow. Anna Maria Phelps and Daniel Lauer's case still has no DNA link to Wilmer. Investigators haven't ruled him out, and they're still chasing new leads, but they're not there yet. And there's still that note from Anna Maria's box, the one that pointed somewhere else entirely. It's possible their story doesn't belong to Wilmer at all.

Sandy Haley and Keith Call's case may be the hardest of all. Without their remains, there's no way to formally close it, even though investigators believe Wilmer was responsible. So every announcement about someone else's case reaches them without the same closure the others finally got. And there was one more twist for years. Everyone worried there was a single killer working the parkway, and that idea came closer to the truth than anyone could prove at the time.

Wilmer alone accounts for most of these deaths. What was wrong was the idea that every nearby case belonged to the same story. And the Shenandoah murders that once seemed so connected got their own separate ending. In 2024, DNA tied Julie and Lolly's deaths to a different man entirely. a convicted rapist who, like Wilmer, had already died. It all keeps coming back to the same hard fact. The men responsible were gone. Alan Wilmer will never sit in a courtroom.

He'll never explain why. But there's a more concrete problem too. Because Wilmer was never convicted of a crime while he was alive, as the law stands now, his DNA can't even be entered into CODIS, the FBI's National DNA Database, which means other cold cases his DNA might quietly answer ones no one has thought to connect to him yet may never get checked against him at all. So the families have taken up one last cause,

changing that law to give the next set of cold cases the answers they finally got. After nearly 40 years, the Colonial Parkway murders are partly solved, but solving a case and telling the whole story are two different things, and the whole story starts and ends with eight young people. Kathy Thomas was a Naval Academy graduate, finally living life on her own terms. Rebecca Dowski was months from graduating with a career in front of her, Robin Edwards was 14 years old.

David Nobling was about to be a father. Sandy Haley taught gymnastics. Keith Kahl wanted to write computer programs. Anna Maria Phelps and Daniel Lauer were two friends about to move in together and start something new. They were all young. They all had their whole lives ahead of them. And those lives were cut brutally senselessly short. For some of their families, justice finally came, even if it came late, and even if it came incomplete.

For the others, the wait goes on. And even the answers that did arrive came in a strange, unsatisfying shape. Not a trial, not a confession, not a man in a courtroom explaining himself. Just a name pieced together through patient science and stubborn love, long after the person who could explain any of it was gone. It is not the ending anyone would have written, but for these families, after almost 40 years, it is an ending. And that counts for something. They may finally know who.

They may never know why. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people at effect. 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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This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pertsovsky, 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 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.

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