January 17, 2024 • 47 mins
The Colonial Parkway murders were the serial murders of at least eight people in the U.S. state of Virginia between 1986 and 1989.
In this episode of Zone 7, Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum, Sheryl sits down with Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley to discuss the latest developments in the Colonial Parkway murders. They discuss the identification of Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. as a suspect, its implications for the case, its emotional toll, and the relentless pursuit of answers and justice.
If you have any information regarding the Colonial Parkway Murders or Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. call 1-800-225-5324 (1-800-CALLFBI)
Bill Thomas is a true crime podcaster and entertainment executive now living in Connecticut who sadly is the brother of a murder victim. His sister Cathy Thomas along with her girlfriend Rebecca Dowski, were the first two victims in the Colonial Parkway Murders, a horrific crime series that claimed the lives of eight young people near Williamsburg, Virginia from 1986 to 1989.
Kristin Dilley is a true crime podcaster, researcher, writer, and teacher from beautiful Williamsburg, Virginia. After losing a good friend's mother to homicide, she developed an interest in true crime and has become a passionate advocate for the families of unsolved murder victims.
Resources:
MIND OVER MURDER: True Crime Podcast
Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI)
Show Notes:
- [0:00] Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum.
- [1:00] Sheryl introduces guests Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley to the listeners
- [3:00] Introduction and background of the Colonial Parkway Murders
- [3:15] Mind Over Murder
- [11:00] The trio discuss the news of Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. as a prime suspect
- [14:30] Question: Tell us what happened on Columbus Day weekend 1986 at the Cheatham Annex Overlook in Williamsburg. What happened exactly to Cathy?
- [20:30] Potential motives for the murders
- [25:30] Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI)
- [26:00] Question: What do you think the next steps are for you all, and law enforcement?
- [31:30] Kristin discusses how she is re-evaluating her knowledge of the Colonial Parkway murders
- [33:00] Discussion on the suspect's profile and methodology
- [36:00] If you have any information regarding the Colonial Parkway Murders call 1-800-225-5324 (1-800-CALLFBI)
- [38:30] FBI identifying the suspect, Alan Wade Wilmer Sr
- [42:45] Ways the public can get involved
- [0:00] “I know when I was there prosecuting homicides in the District of Columbia, One of the most effective units there was the cold case squad, which had FBI agents as well as Metropolitan Police homicide detectives working together.” -R.M
- Thanks for listening to another episode! If you love the show and want to help grow the show, please head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review!
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Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Sheryl is also the founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a collaboration between universities and colleges that brings researchers, practitioners, students and the
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
We have breaking news tonight, but I'm not going to
be the one to tell you. I'm going to let
our special guests do that. And I want to tell
you it was twenty seventeen that I reached out to
the brother of a murder victim because I thought there
might just be a possibility that we could get DNA
(00:32):
from the crime scene. Specifically, I thought maybe the victim's clothing.
I reached out to him and he called me back immediately,
and as we were talking, I told him my idea.
My idea was to use the MBAT to see if
we could extract DNA from the victim's clothing. He said,
I've never heard of that. What is it? Very matter
(00:55):
of fact, very business. So I was like, okay, I'll
explain it the best way that I can. So I did,
and I told him about Jared Bradley, and he said, well,
do you think I could get in touch with him?
And I said, of course, So I shared Jared's number. Now,
a lot of times, weeks or months might go by
before there's any additional information. Not with this guy. Within
(01:19):
two days, I get a text message of a photograph
where he's standing next to the VAT and Jared at
a law enforcement training and I like, who is this guy?
A full operational, just wildfire of an advocate for his sister.
(01:41):
The brother that I am talking about was the one
and only Bill Thomas. And Bill is the brother of
Kathy Thomas, one of the first victims of the Colonial
Parkway murders along with her girlfriend Rebecca. Welcome to Zone seven.
What have you been doing the last twenty four hours?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Well, along with my podcast partner Kristin Dilley, we have
just been dealing with a breaking news situation in the
Colonial Parkway murders. The FBI, Virginia State Police, and the Hampton,
Virginia Police Departments held a press conference to announce that
(02:23):
they had identified an offender in at least one of
the four doublah homicides in the Colonial Parkway murders, the
murder of Robin Edwards and David Nobling, as well as
the murder of a woman that I think Kristin and
I had never heard of her before. Her name is
(02:45):
Teresa Howell. So Kristin and I have been dealing with
this crazy situation where after all these years thirty seven
years and counting, looking for answers in the Colonial Park
and murders. Suddenly we're starting to get some answers.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Now y'all had a chance to meet Bill, you've heard
him speak, or you're already a fan of his podcast,
Mind Over Murder. But you know he doesn't do this alone.
He has a partner in every sense of the word
when it comes to advocating for justice, fighting for these families,
(03:25):
researching for answers. And I want to just welcome Kristin Dilly.
You're a teacher, you're an advocate, you're an avid runner,
and you're a co host of the podcast Mind Over Murder.
And I want to say something about the two of
y'all two because your partnership is extraordinary to me because
(03:46):
it is based on advocating for Kathy and the other
victims in the other families, but it's also one of
deep friendship.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
It definitely is. I was thinking about this the other
day and Bill is one of the only people in
my life other than my parents and my significant other,
that I talk to every single day. And in fact,
it's kind of a weird day when I don't talk
to Bill.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, sometimes I feel like if we haven't talked, I
feel guilty somehow like, shouldn't we talked about something something,
because it's pretty close to seven days a week and
our respective partners seem to put up with it, so
I guess that's okay.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Well, they know the good work you're doing, and they
know the honesty of what your relationship is. I mean,
nobody would do anything but champion it.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Well. Thanks, And in a way, Kristin and I are
very different. We're from different parts of the country, we
have different backgrounds, we're twenty five years apart in age.
I'm the older of the two. You probably could have
figured that one out there.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I'm going to tell you, though it works. It's just
that chemistry thing. You can't invent it. It just is
and you've got it and it's remarkable. But I'm going
to tell you something, Kristian. When I got your message yesterday,
I was at work. I was in the middle of
a whole bunch of stuff. But I'm like, wait a minute,
what am I reading? Like? I literally had to read
(05:18):
it a couple of times before I could even respond.
And you know, it's one of those things where you
want something to happen so bad. And I know, even
back in twenty seventeen, I thought all of these cases
were solvable. I thought it was going to take the
right person, the right test, the right forensic invention. But
(05:39):
I just knew in my gut it was solvable all
of them. And here you go after all this time.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
I think the best terminology that I have for what
we've gone through in the last twenty four hours with
this breaking news is emotional whiplash. I have never felt
so exhilarated but also so exhausted at the same time.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
It has been a rollercoaster of the twenty four hours. Bill,
How are you holding up well?
Speaker 2 (06:08):
I feel the same way as Kristen describes. Now, keep
in mind, we have phenomenal news for two of our families.
The Edward family and the Nobling family got the news
that their loved ones, Robin and David, their case had
been solved. And then we heard about this additional murder
(06:29):
from nineteen eighty nine, This lovely young woman named Teresa
Howell was murdered by the same man. On the one hand,
you're getting good news, but then you've also got six
other families in the Colonial Parkway murders that have not
received the same news. Now, don't get me wrong, We're
(06:51):
thrilled for these families, and we've all worked together, as
Kristin knows, to collectively use our power as people and
advocates and families who've lost loved ones to work together
and show support for one another. But while we're talking here,
(07:15):
you know, here we are living in this multi platform world.
My screen is blowing up with messages from people congratulating us,
expressing support, but they're also saying, is there any word
on the other Colonial Parkway murders? And at this point
we don't have any answers there. So it's a real
(07:36):
mixed bag of feelings because you're so excited for three families,
and then you're part of a group of now six
other families that don't yet have those kind of answers.
So it's a real kind of whirlwind of emotion.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
The first time I ever talked to you, you talked
so lovingly about Kathy. She was only twenty seven. She
was one of those tomboy type of sisters. Y'all had
a great time with all those brothers in her and
she graduated from the Naval Academy. You know, she was impressive.
She was to me one of those folks that anybody
(08:21):
should admire for what she had already accomplished so young,
and you think, yes, I'm going to advocate for her
and I'm going to fight for her. But Bill, you
basically became the leader of what we all consider the
Parkway murders family. I mean, you're the spokesperson, You're the
person that we all know. And yes, of course we're thrilled.
(08:45):
We are thrilled with any answer, but it's not Kathy's
just as yet, and that kind of you know, leaves
it where we're celebrating but not completely.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, and I would say to Kristin earlier today while
we were recording Mind Over Murder, I don't think there's
a section at the card store where you can go
and buy a card that says congratulations on finding out
who killed your loved one. And it's one of those
(09:17):
things that all you can really say to the Edwards
and no Bling family. And it's funny. The FBI asked
me the other day would I be willing to talk
to the Howell family. This was a case we were
not familiar with Teresa's case, and I said, of course,
I said yes, But you know, this is the club
(09:40):
that no one wants to be asked to join. To
quote the great John Walsh, other than saying we're thinking
of you, I don't really know if you can regard
this as good news. I guess answers are better than
no answers. I'd be curious what Kristen said, but we
were both kind of of laughing through tears while recording
(10:02):
our own podcast earlier about the fact that you can't
really go to the card store and tay, congratulations. It
doesn't quite feel like that.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, I agree, you know, and it is. It's I
guess bittersweet is really the only adjective that I can
possibly think of that's going to work, because, just as
you said, Mac, we are so thrilled for the Edwards
and the Noveline and the Howell families. This is amazing,
but there are still families out there who do not
have answers. And as much as I'm absolutely amped and
(10:39):
jazzed and every other enthusiastic word that you can think
of that we actually have a solve in this case,
there's still more work to be done, and so the
jazzedness of it all kind of has to be tempered with. Okay,
we still have to move forward. We still have stuff
that we need to do. And I know that tomorrow morning,
(11:03):
when I'm not as tired, I'll feel a little more,
you know, prepared to be able to lay out, Okay,
here's what I think we need to do moving forward.
Right now, the jazz is still there, but the tired
is sinking in there too. It really is just a
It really is just a whirlwind of things.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Like Bill said, my prediction is your whirlwind is about
to get ramped up. There's going to be more case connections.
There's going to be more victims that we don't know
yet that are going to be connected. And any step
is a step forward. So now that we have a solved,
we're that much closer to the answers for all the
(11:45):
other families that I also believe.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
I think you're right, And of course, to get into
a little bit of case detail. Alan Wade Wilmer w
I L M R. I always have to remind myself
to pronounce it. He's Alan Wade Wilmer senior. There's also
a junior who was eight years old at the time
of the murders and obviously was just a little kid
(12:08):
back then. I think he is going to be identified
in other cases he was a leading suspect in the
disappearance of Keith Call and Cassandra Haley in nineteen eighty eight.
They are considered part of the Colonial Parkway murders. They
went missing in the same place. This is all over
(12:31):
a three year period where we have these eight young
people who are murdered, four couples. And since Allan Wade
Wilmer Senior was the leading suspect in the disappearance of
Keith Call and Cassandra Haley, we're hoping that our law
enforcement investigators will be able to make a determination because
(12:55):
we are highly confident he's responsible for their disappearance and
likely And you know, I just.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Have to interject because it comes up all the time,
and I tell young detectives nine times out of ten
their name is in that case file. If you take
every single name and put them in a column, everyone
every name, rule them out again, and if there's anybody
(13:23):
you cannot legitimately rule out, then they go in your
suspect pool. They had him in twenty eighteen. On paper,
he should have been on their list every day.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Well, this is a case that fits that precisely. Because
our investigators have been working this case hard and they
went back and revisited this particular suspect starting in about
twenty twenty. And our case agent has been working this case.
(13:59):
And of course, remember she comes along at a time
when the murders had happened. You know, she's been on
this case for ten years, but the murders had happened
twenty seven years prior to her arrival with the FBI.
But she's been working this case for a decade and
a couple of years ago that she really began focusing
(14:22):
on this guy again, just like she has with the
one hundred and fifty persons who've been named as suspects
or persons of interest in the Colonial Parkway murders.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Tell us what happened Columbus Day weekend nineteen eighty six
at the Cheatham Annex Overlook in Williamsburg. What happened exactly to.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Kathy, Well, my sister Kathy Thomas and her girlfriend, Rebecca
Dowski were we're dating. Now. Remember this is in the
nineteen eighties in Virginia. It's a very conservative area. It's
a big military area. There are tens of thousands of
military personnel and the CIA is just down the road,
(15:13):
I mean literally on the same road, the Colonial Parkway.
So this is a very conservative time. And my sister
Kathy Thomas, who's a Naval Academy graduate, which actually could
prove to be significant in the further investigation because there
may be a Navy tie in to my sister's murder.
(15:33):
She and her girlfriend, Rebecca Dowski, who was a senior
at the College of William and Mary, were out on
this Thursday evening, kind of kicking off the weekend. They
were going to be spending the Columbus Day weekend apart,
and so they decided to get together and have dinner
(15:55):
after Becky and another friend were working on a computer
assignment for a class they were taking at William and Mary.
After completing the assignment, there were four friends, two lesbian couples.
When they had completed their tasks, Kathy and Becky decided
they were going to go out and grab a bite
(16:17):
to eat. Now your options for late night dining. It
was probably maybe eight o'clock that evening in small town Williamsburg, Virginia,
which is where Kristin Dilly lives. It's gotten a lot
bigger and more sophisticated in the last thirty some years.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Marginally so Becky decided to go out to get something
to eat, so they spun off in my sister's nineteen
eighty one Honda Civic, little small two door.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
My sister Kathy was into sporty small cars. They went
out to eat were not one hundred percent certain where
they went, but based on the autopsy afterwards, they think
that they either stopped and had Hamburgers or might have
gone to a place that served like tacos or something
like that because they had ground beef and lettuce in
(17:10):
their systems. After grabbing a bike to eat, they went
to this beautiful roadway known as the Colonial Parkway. It's
a twenty three mile long ribbon of National parkland. It's
sometimes only a couple of hundred yards wide. It was
built by the National Park Service to connect the historic
(17:30):
sites of Jamestown, Yorktown, and Colonial Williamsburg. A lot of
folks that go up in that region remember the Colonial
Parkway because they went to those historic sites on class
trips and that sort of thing. You see a lot
of young people there at the historic sites in the evening. Though.
(17:54):
The Colonial Parkway that connects to these locations is extremely quiet.
It was built with no lights, no traffic signs, essentially
no intersections and no street lights whatsoever, and it runs
along the York and James Rivers. It's quite beautiful. Something
(18:16):
transpired on the Colonial Parkway that evening in October to
Kathy and Becky. They're not one hundred percent certain what happened,
but it appears that someone rolled up on them while
they were parked, probably looking out over the water at
the York River. And there's a naval weapons station nearby
(18:39):
and another military location called Cheata Mannex, which is where
they load US Navy ships with high explosives, including nuclear weapons,
all fenced in, but you can see it across the water.
And something happened, they think, on Thursday evening. It appears
(19:00):
that they were attacked, strangled with rope, and then their
throats were cut with a sharp knife. My sister was
essentially decapitated. They were cut almost from ear to ear,
and then their bodies were loaded into my sister's nineteen
(19:22):
eighty one Honda Civic with Kathy in the in the
what we used to call the way back when we
were kids, the trunk area, which is quite small. This
is and remember Hondas were even smaller than they are
now Becky's body was placed in the backseat on the
diagonal as sort of a final insult to injury, The
(19:46):
offender or offender's plural poured diesel fuel over the car
and the bodies and made an attempt to set the
car on fire. It appears, but if you know anything
about diesel fuel, and I didn't until the Colonial Parkway murders,
diesel fuel won't light with a match. It requires a
(20:09):
higher degree of heat and usually compression to get diesel
fuel to light. So, finally, failing to set the car
on fire, the offender or offenders pushed the car over
an embankment along the York River, so that the car
rolled down from a grassy parking area where they'd been
(20:30):
looking out at the water perhaps, and the car rolled
down towards the surface of the York River, so it would
be about fifteen feet or so, and it got caught
in underbrush, so it did not make it all the
way to the water, but it did obscure your view
of the car, so that the Honda's trunk area the
(20:53):
hatchback was not really visible from the road the Colonial Parkway,
So that resulted in a situation where they think the
murders took place on Thursday evening. The bodies were not
discovered until Sunday afternoon when a passerby sometimes they say
jogger or walker, who was closer to the surface of
(21:17):
the water spotted the car and then he called it in.
Remember this is before cell phones. He went to a payphone,
probably at the visitors station, and called in what he
thought was a traffic accident, that they had accidentally rolled
(21:38):
over the edge. And the first person on scene was
a National Park Service ranger who, again, thinking the car
had rolled over the edge, he wasn't able to open
the doors. He shattered the back window of the Honda
Civic with probably his baton, and that covered the bodies
(21:59):
with last but it did allow him to look into
the car, you know, angled down the hill, and he
quickly determined this isn't a traffic accident. These two women
have been murdered, and at that point the National Park
Service police were informed and park rangers began the investigation,
(22:23):
and then the investigation was ultimately taken over by the FBI,
because if you die in a National park, it's an
FBI case from day one.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
If you are going to roll up on somebody and
you just want to kill two people. Some things that
were done there wasn't necessary to accomplish that. And one
is both of the victims had rope burns on their
wrist and their neck. Bill already mentioned the diesel again,
what is that about. You don't need it unless you're
(22:54):
trying to destroy evidence because it's going to come back
to you, or you want to do moreamage just to
be torturous. But those to me are the two things.
So arson is almost always to cover up another type
of crime. They weren't sexually assaulted, they were completely dressed,
their persons were in the car, money was in their purse,
(23:14):
So those two things are out money, sex, revenge. So
we're left with revenge.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Right, And there's one thing worth adding to mac, which
is I don't think we might have used the expression
hate crime back then. We do now, but a lot
of people have said to us, including the investigators FBI
and the Virginia State Police and National Park Service all
participated in the investigation, together with local law enforcement for
(23:45):
York from York County. The idea that this could have
been a hate crime is definitely part of that mix.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So let's just say the killer from a distance, thought
it was a man and a woman. Kathy had shorter,
dark hair, Rebecca had long, beautiful red hair. Maybe he
thought it was a man and a woman, and when
he got closer and it was two women, maybe that's
when he flipped. And that's when the rope came out,
and the knife came out, and the other tortuous stuff
(24:14):
came out. Because with David and Robin, they were shot
at point blank range. That person set out to kill
two people. They did that. That was it, he was done,
he left. That's not what happened with Kathy and Rebecca.
Anytime I have a situation where I've got a double
homicide and one victim was treated differently, I cannot ignore that.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Agreed. There's one other thing mentioning in the Robin Edwards
David Nobling attack. It appears that Robin Edwards was sexually assaulted. Well,
all they knew for sure since their bodies have been
dumped in the river, was that someone had had sex
with Robin Edwards, and we sent forensic testing, and thank
(25:02):
god for advancements in DNA testing, they had received a
sexual Assault Hit Initiative grant, a SAKI grant. I know
Mack you know about.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Those sure absolutely.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
They had gone back and retested the seamen found inside
Robin Edward's body, and they had not ever been able
to get a profile from it in the past, and
thank god, they were able to finally get a workable
DNA profile and that is one of the things that
(25:37):
led to the identification of this offender. Alan Wade Wilmer, Sr.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I just want to tell everybody what SAKE stands for
is Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. So if there's a police
department that's got secial assault kits from the eighties, nineties,
early two thousands that have never been tested, they want
them to be tested immediately. So that's one thing that
(26:04):
that task force does. So here's what I want to
know for both of you. What do you think the
next steps are for y'all and law enforcement?
Speaker 3 (26:14):
We want to make sure that everybody has a lot
of information about the suspects vehicle and watercraft because they're
very distinctive, and so we are going to make sure
that we put up a lot of information provided from
the FBI that was given in the press kit for
the briefing of pictures of this suspect of various age
(26:38):
progression photos. There's also photos of his very distinctive blue
nineteen sixty six Dodge Fargo truck with the personal license
plate em RAW, and photos of his wooden, custom built boat,
the Denny Wade. We're going to put all of those
(27:01):
up on our social media pages, and we're going to
encourage everyone who may ever have worked with this guy,
hunted with this guy, entertained with this guy, gone to
bars with this guy. We're going to encourage everybody who
may know him to please give any information possible to
the FBI or the Virginia State Police, because it is
imperative that they learn everything possible about this person so
(27:25):
that they can figure out where he might have been
hunting his victims and whether or not there are any
other people he came in contact with.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
This offender. Wilmer is a what they call a waterman
in Virginia, again, an expression I wasn't familiar with until
the Colonial Parkway murders. So he's a man who is
doing crabbing, oystering. There's other important things that we're going
to be emphasizing at the request of the Virginia State
(27:55):
Police and the FBI. This guy is very distinctive he's
only five beat five inches tall, so he's quite small,
but at the same time he's heavily muscular. And so
this guy's driving a very distinctive truck. This is a
nineteen sixty six truck that he's driving in the late eighties,
(28:19):
so it was an old, funky truck even back then.
And then if he got out of the truck, he's
a very unusually built guy, almost picture like a Popeye
type character because he's very small, way smaller than the
average man, but very very muscular. And then, as Kristen said,
(28:41):
he's fishing using this very distinctive boat. He's got a
very bold graphic on the side. The boat's called the
Denny Dnni Wade and that those happened to be the
names of his two kids. So he's fishing, crabbing, and
(29:02):
oystering from this very distinctive wooden hulled boat painted white
with a very large graphic Danny Wade. So what we're
trying to do is we're trying to help amplify the
request from law enforcement for people in that Tidewater area
of Virginia who might remember anything that would trigger their
(29:28):
memory of having any kind of interaction with this guy.
Even if it was just how I used to dock
in Gloucester, Virginia and he used to dock at the
pier next door.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Here's what sticks out for me. You've got somebody that
targeted couples, not individuals. That's unique. He did it in
a location that was surrounded by water, again, a place
we know that he was comfortable and he understood it.
You're only talking about twenty three miles, y'all, and it
(30:04):
connects this triangle of historic Virginia, Bill, You've already talked
about it with Jamestown and Williamsburg and Yorktown. But again,
this had to be something that he knew. He knew
when the sun went down it was going to be
kind of a ghost town along that stretch there, And
I'm telling you, from the water, you could see the
(30:25):
cars and they couldn't see you. And so he's also
picking activities that would require and not even raise any
suspicion that he was doing them alone. So people that
go hunting or crabbing or boating a lot of times,
that is a single person sport, if you will. So
(30:49):
he had it built in that he could go away
from his family for an extended period of time and
nobody would think anything about it.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, and it's funny. There's something that I have to admit.
And again, I didn't go up in Virginia. Kristen is
from the Williamsburg area. She went away for grad school,
college and grad school and teaching, but ultimately has come
back to the Williamsburg area. But me, being less familiar
with it, I had thought it sounded unrealistic that someone
(31:23):
might be actually using the river the York or James
Rivers or the two rivers there to move around and
participate in these heinous crimes. And now I realize, you
know something, Bill, You made some assumptions there that I
think could be completely wrong. It would be more than
(31:46):
possible for someone like Wilmer to use the river to
move around, because that's how he made his living, and
he could have pulled right up down along these locations.
And three of the four double homicides in the Colonial
Park Gray murders happened right next to a major body
(32:08):
of water.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I remember when I was there and I sent you
some of the pictures. The water is what attracted me.
I mean, it was just so beautiful and it's right there.
It's not a distance from where you could part. And
so again, now that we've got information we didn't have before,
it checks beautifully.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
It really is very interesting. In one of the things
that I've been sort of, you know, whiplashing over the
last twenty four hours is now that we have this
information about this guy, I need to spend a little
bit of time kind of reassessing what do we know
about these cases? And what now that we have a
suspect who's been named and you know, proven to be
(32:53):
connected to two of these cases, what do we know
and now what do we need to reassess as well?
And so I know that part of what I'm thinking
about Mac is doing exactly what you were kind of
talking about, which is figuring out, Okay, what we know
this guy was a waterman, what else might that mean
he's been doing? What else might he have spent time doing?
(33:15):
Where else might he have spent his time? And I'm
starting to kind of rethink and rewrite my own internal
profile and sort of reconnect.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
The dots here.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
So while this is a very interesting process to go through,
it is also making me spin my wheels and sort
of reevaluate what do we know?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
What do we think we know? And what might be
wrong when all the information came out, I'm thinking, you know,
some boats take diesel, some trucks take diesel. Is this
something he had at the ready? You know? And again
from if you're a master at this boat, and then
you can you can pull up easily and walk right
(33:52):
up to that car, push the car, get right back
on the boat. What better get away?
Speaker 2 (33:57):
And we also think and Kristen makes some really good points,
and there are dozens of unsolved murders, especially back then
between the Northern Neck where he's from, all the way
down to the Tidewater area which is Williamsburg, Newport News, Hampton, Gloucester,
(34:22):
that these murders that we're talking about took place. So
this guy's highly mobile. He moves around. The FBI and
Virginia State Police use the word transient. Sometimes he lived
on his boat. Sometimes he stayed at a low budget apartment.
So even though he has a home and a family
(34:45):
up in Lancaster, Virginia, as you mentioned a minute ago, Mac,
he's moving around all the time with really not creating
any suspicion. He shows up in all sorts of different places.
I know, oh that law enforcement agencies across Virginia have
to be looking at where else could this guy have been.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
I can almost see the war room now with these detectives.
Your boat's got to have a tag, just like your car.
If you win a rise it and you dock it somewhere,
if you go to the same place. Because men are
creatures of habit, they normally buy gasoline at the same place,
They get their haircut at the same place, they go
to the same liquor store. There are people that are
(35:29):
going to know this man. If he does all the
crabbing and getting all the oysters, is he's selling them
that person knows him. So he's going to have this
subculture of people that intimately know him. They know when
he goes out, they know how long he stays. And
I'm telling you, any man with children that has been
(35:51):
able to carve out, I'm gonna go live on the
boat for a couple of months. He's got that story down.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I'm telling you, yeah, I would have to agree. We're
hopeful that people will come forward with different recollections. Our
media is just blowing up with people saying they knew
this man, they knew his family. We're trying to steer
these people to the FBI and Virginia State Police who
(36:22):
are requesting the information. Because Kristin and I are not investigators,
I think we will proudly wear the advocate hat, but
we ultimately are trying to prevail upon these people. Look,
you need to talk to law enforcement, and they pointed
out at the press conference that people's situations change. There's
(36:46):
no reason to be afraid of this man. He clearly
was highly violent, but he's gone now. So we're hoping
that people will come forward and say, yeah, I knew
this guy. Poky was his nickname. I knew that guy.
I sold him equipment that he used on his boat,
or I bought oysters or crabs from him, or I
(37:09):
went to a hunt club with him, or whatever it
might be. Because the investigators are trying to recreate this
man's personal history thirty something years later.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Well, I'm going to give out the information to get
in contact with the FBI one eight hundred call FBI.
So if you have any information, please you can call
the FBI anonymously, but please call them. Nothing is too minuscule.
The slightest bit of information could be critical. You may
(37:44):
not think it's a big deal, but it could be
the small piece that's going to put this whole puzzle together.
Do either one of you know how law enforcement got
the information together to do the raid on his house.
I mean they had to have a ton to get
a judge to sign off on that raid.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Yeah, that's an interesting piece of information that we would
like to have. We don't have that information available to
us at the moment, But give us enough time, we'll
snoop around. Maybe we'll come up with something.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Let's talk about how authorities got DNA from a dead
man with zero felony convictions. He's not in CODIS, he's
not in the DNA database. December fifteenth, twenty seventeen, a
delivery driver spots an open door and as he walks
toward the entrance, he just gets a feeling something wrong,
(38:39):
So we calls the Lancaster County Sheriff's office. They find
a deceased man inside. Because of the condition of the body,
the state Medical Examiner was called in to investigate so
that they can positively identify this person and perhaps determine
the cause of death. But the DNA that the exact
(39:00):
elemen are collected in twenty seventeen ended up being critical
to the Colonial Parkway investigation. The FBI in the Virginia
State Police sought out this deceased person's genetic material in
their investigation into the Colonial Parkway murders. Interestingly, law enforcement
(39:22):
will not say how this person got on their radar.
They won't tell how this subject came to be somebody
They wanted his DNA to cross check against the murders
in the Colonial Parkway investigation, but they positively identified Alan
Wade Wilmer, Senior. Wilmer is now the number one suspect
(39:45):
in all the Colonial Parkway murders, and I can tell
you I believe that he will be linked to other cases.
Another thing that I find real curious is since the
identification of Wilmer, law enforcement as it re late to
the Colonial Parkway has not used the term serial killer.
(40:06):
But I will and further as a criminologist, I'll remind
y'all ems, signatures and targets meaning victims can change. You
don't have to look any further than Ted Bundy. Ted
Bundy strangled, bludgeoned, and beheaded victims. He killed adults and
children seen to scene. Bundy's murders did not appear to
(40:31):
be the same killer, but they were any information that
you might have about the Colonial Parkway murders or Alan
Wade Wilmer Senior, please contact the FBI or this podcast,
or a clergy or somebody.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
I'll add that on Sunday night, my phone started blowing
up that a raid had occurred at multiple locations in Lancaster, Virginia.
Even though it's way out in the country, people talk,
and they saw the dark SUVs and the FBI agents
(41:19):
with the windbreakers and a whole bunch of agents checking
out various locations, all of which were owned by members
of this Wilmer family. We don't know what they were
looking for, but it's interesting. The FBI seemed surprised that
(41:39):
we knew as much as we did. But the thing is,
we've really put ourselves out there all these years in
the Parkway murders, maybe a bit too much sometimes. What
happened neighbors who saw all of this activity, they started
(42:01):
talking and then people said, you know, I think this
has something to do with all those unsolved murders in Virginia.
So the next thing we know, our phones are blowing
up on Sunday night, you know, well into the night,
saying are you all aware of the fact that there
have been a raid at these homes in Lancaster, Virginia. Now,
(42:26):
Kristin and I had an inkling from our sources that
something very important was coming in the Colonial Parkway murders.
We didn't know they were going to raid these family
homes up there, but they clearly got the warrants that
were required. We are very confident there were certain things
(42:46):
they were looking for, but we don't know what those
things might be.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Just keep sharing the information about our suspect as many
times and with as many people as you can. Spam
people with it for all weeks, but we really really
want this information out there so that law enforcement can
start getting a better idea about this guy and his movements.
(43:10):
He has been doing this since the late nineteen eighties,
and he lived until twenty seventeen. He did not only
kill three victims. There are more people out there, and
we need to find those victims because those families deserve
answers and justice as well.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Don't forget if someone were to turn to me and say, well,
what difference does it make this fellow Wilmer's been dead
since twenty seventeen. No one's going to jail et cetera.
Families are looking for answers. Anyone who's been waiting for answers,
And in our case, we're talking about a case that
extends back thirty seven years. We were never certain that
(43:52):
we were going to be identifying suspects and putting perpetrators
in jail. That might have happened years ago, but that
ship has sailed. But don't forget these folks are waiting
for answers. As I mentioned at the top of this podcast,
we have six more families and maybe more who are
(44:12):
all waiting for answers in their loved ones murders and disappearances.
So maybe it's not the most satisfying answer I've ever gotten,
but I sure would like to know what happened to
my sister and all the victims in the Colonial Parkway murders,
and having that answer is some degree of satisfaction. It's
(44:38):
not going to bring our loved ones back, it's not
going to bring my kid's sister back, but this is
still important and I think we really need the public's
help at this point.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
Well, I'd like to add to that number one. Your sister,
your family, all the families, all the victims deserve it.
They deserve answers, They deserve a conclusion, They deserve to
have somebody named period. Secondly, what better way to train
(45:18):
There's gonna be things that come from the Colonial Parkway
solutions that other detectives can go, Oh, we need to
try that with our case today. We need to go
back through and pull every name and see if we
have truly ruled these folks out, and if we haven't,
they go to the top of the list. Oh. I
(45:39):
didn't realize they could do this now with DNA. That's
why to me, this case is doubly important, not just
because obviously they deserve answers in justice, but also to
teach there are families right now that don't have answers
(46:00):
in cases all over this country. Maybe y'all can give
them some answers a roadmap of how to do it. Bill,
I've watched you. There is nobody better to contact law enforcement,
to stay on them, to let them know when you're
not pleased, to let them know when you are pleased.
I've watched you do it. It's amazing, and I think
(46:23):
that's something when they say, hey, can you reach out
to this family, There's nobody better. You're a gift to
be able to do that. So again, Bill, thank you
so much for stopping in the middle of what I
know can only be one of the most onslaught of
media request and attention and people reaching out to you
(46:46):
for answers. But you talking to me tonight is a
gift and something I will just cherish. This is an
important case to me. You were important to me, Kathy's
important to me. This podcast episode means the world to me.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Well, we can't thank you enough for all the work
you're doing on Zone seven and we feel really great
to be a part of it.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
Yeah, thank you so much, so much.
Speaker 1 (47:10):
Mac.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
We appreciate you and everything that you do.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
I'm going to end Zone seven the way that I
always do with a quote. I know when I was
there prosecuting homicides in the District of Columbia, one of
the most effective units there was the Colcase Squad, which
had IF the Eye agents as well as Metropolitan Police
homicide detectives working together. Robert Mueller, former director of the FBI.
(47:40):
I'm Cheryl McCollum, and this is Zone seven.
We have breaking news tonight, but I'm not going to
be the one to tell you. I'm going to let
our special guests do that. And I want to tell
you it was twenty seventeen that I reached out to
the brother of a murder victim because I thought there
might just be a possibility that we could get DNA
(00:32):
from the crime scene. Specifically, I thought maybe the victim's clothing.
I reached out to him and he called me back immediately,
and as we were talking, I told him my idea.
My idea was to use the MBAT to see if
we could extract DNA from the victim's clothing. He said,
I've never heard of that. What is it? Very matter
(00:55):
of fact, very business. So I was like, okay, I'll
explain it the best way that I can. So I did,
and I told him about Jared Bradley, and he said, well,
do you think I could get in touch with him?
And I said, of course, So I shared Jared's number. Now,
a lot of times, weeks or months might go by
before there's any additional information. Not with this guy. Within
(01:19):
two days, I get a text message of a photograph
where he's standing next to the VAT and Jared at
a law enforcement training and I like, who is this guy?
A full operational, just wildfire of an advocate for his sister.
(01:41):
The brother that I am talking about was the one
and only Bill Thomas. And Bill is the brother of
Kathy Thomas, one of the first victims of the Colonial
Parkway murders along with her girlfriend Rebecca. Welcome to Zone seven.
What have you been doing the last twenty four hours?
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Well, along with my podcast partner Kristin Dilley, we have
just been dealing with a breaking news situation in the
Colonial Parkway murders. The FBI, Virginia State Police, and the Hampton,
Virginia Police Departments held a press conference to announce that
(02:23):
they had identified an offender in at least one of
the four doublah homicides in the Colonial Parkway murders, the
murder of Robin Edwards and David Nobling, as well as
the murder of a woman that I think Kristin and
I had never heard of her before. Her name is
(02:45):
Teresa Howell. So Kristin and I have been dealing with
this crazy situation where after all these years thirty seven
years and counting, looking for answers in the Colonial Park
and murders. Suddenly we're starting to get some answers.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Now y'all had a chance to meet Bill, you've heard
him speak, or you're already a fan of his podcast,
Mind Over Murder. But you know he doesn't do this alone.
He has a partner in every sense of the word
when it comes to advocating for justice, fighting for these families,
(03:25):
researching for answers. And I want to just welcome Kristin Dilly.
You're a teacher, you're an advocate, you're an avid runner,
and you're a co host of the podcast Mind Over Murder.
And I want to say something about the two of
y'all two because your partnership is extraordinary to me because
(03:46):
it is based on advocating for Kathy and the other
victims in the other families, but it's also one of
deep friendship.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
It definitely is. I was thinking about this the other
day and Bill is one of the only people in
my life other than my parents and my significant other,
that I talk to every single day. And in fact,
it's kind of a weird day when I don't talk
to Bill.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, sometimes I feel like if we haven't talked, I
feel guilty somehow like, shouldn't we talked about something something,
because it's pretty close to seven days a week and
our respective partners seem to put up with it, so
I guess that's okay.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Well, they know the good work you're doing, and they
know the honesty of what your relationship is. I mean,
nobody would do anything but champion it.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Well. Thanks, And in a way, Kristin and I are
very different. We're from different parts of the country, we
have different backgrounds, we're twenty five years apart in age.
I'm the older of the two. You probably could have
figured that one out there.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I'm going to tell you, though it works. It's just
that chemistry thing. You can't invent it. It just is
and you've got it and it's remarkable. But I'm going
to tell you something, Kristian. When I got your message yesterday,
I was at work. I was in the middle of
a whole bunch of stuff. But I'm like, wait a minute,
what am I reading? Like? I literally had to read
(05:18):
it a couple of times before I could even respond.
And you know, it's one of those things where you
want something to happen so bad. And I know, even
back in twenty seventeen, I thought all of these cases
were solvable. I thought it was going to take the
right person, the right test, the right forensic invention. But
(05:39):
I just knew in my gut it was solvable all
of them. And here you go after all this time.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
I think the best terminology that I have for what
we've gone through in the last twenty four hours with
this breaking news is emotional whiplash. I have never felt
so exhilarated but also so exhausted at the same time.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
It has been a rollercoaster of the twenty four hours. Bill,
How are you holding up well?
Speaker 2 (06:08):
I feel the same way as Kristen describes. Now, keep
in mind, we have phenomenal news for two of our families.
The Edward family and the Nobling family got the news
that their loved ones, Robin and David, their case had
been solved. And then we heard about this additional murder
(06:29):
from nineteen eighty nine, This lovely young woman named Teresa
Howell was murdered by the same man. On the one hand,
you're getting good news, but then you've also got six
other families in the Colonial Parkway murders that have not
received the same news. Now, don't get me wrong, We're
(06:51):
thrilled for these families, and we've all worked together, as
Kristin knows, to collectively use our power as people and
advocates and families who've lost loved ones to work together
and show support for one another. But while we're talking here,
(07:15):
you know, here we are living in this multi platform world.
My screen is blowing up with messages from people congratulating us,
expressing support, but they're also saying, is there any word
on the other Colonial Parkway murders? And at this point
we don't have any answers there. So it's a real
(07:36):
mixed bag of feelings because you're so excited for three families,
and then you're part of a group of now six
other families that don't yet have those kind of answers.
So it's a real kind of whirlwind of emotion.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
The first time I ever talked to you, you talked
so lovingly about Kathy. She was only twenty seven. She
was one of those tomboy type of sisters. Y'all had
a great time with all those brothers in her and
she graduated from the Naval Academy. You know, she was impressive.
She was to me one of those folks that anybody
(08:21):
should admire for what she had already accomplished so young,
and you think, yes, I'm going to advocate for her
and I'm going to fight for her. But Bill, you
basically became the leader of what we all consider the
Parkway murders family. I mean, you're the spokesperson, You're the
person that we all know. And yes, of course we're thrilled.
(08:45):
We are thrilled with any answer, but it's not Kathy's
just as yet, and that kind of you know, leaves
it where we're celebrating but not completely.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, and I would say to Kristin earlier today while
we were recording Mind Over Murder, I don't think there's
a section at the card store where you can go
and buy a card that says congratulations on finding out
who killed your loved one. And it's one of those
(09:17):
things that all you can really say to the Edwards
and no Bling family. And it's funny. The FBI asked
me the other day would I be willing to talk
to the Howell family. This was a case we were
not familiar with Teresa's case, and I said, of course,
I said yes, But you know, this is the club
(09:40):
that no one wants to be asked to join. To
quote the great John Walsh, other than saying we're thinking
of you, I don't really know if you can regard
this as good news. I guess answers are better than
no answers. I'd be curious what Kristen said, but we
were both kind of of laughing through tears while recording
(10:02):
our own podcast earlier about the fact that you can't
really go to the card store and tay, congratulations. It
doesn't quite feel like that.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah, I agree, you know, and it is. It's I
guess bittersweet is really the only adjective that I can
possibly think of that's going to work, because, just as
you said, Mac, we are so thrilled for the Edwards
and the Noveline and the Howell families. This is amazing,
but there are still families out there who do not
have answers. And as much as I'm absolutely amped and
(10:39):
jazzed and every other enthusiastic word that you can think
of that we actually have a solve in this case,
there's still more work to be done, and so the
jazzedness of it all kind of has to be tempered with. Okay,
we still have to move forward. We still have stuff
that we need to do. And I know that tomorrow morning,
(11:03):
when I'm not as tired, I'll feel a little more,
you know, prepared to be able to lay out, Okay,
here's what I think we need to do moving forward.
Right now, the jazz is still there, but the tired
is sinking in there too. It really is just a
It really is just a whirlwind of things.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Like Bill said, my prediction is your whirlwind is about
to get ramped up. There's going to be more case connections.
There's going to be more victims that we don't know
yet that are going to be connected. And any step
is a step forward. So now that we have a solved,
we're that much closer to the answers for all the
(11:45):
other families that I also believe.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
I think you're right, And of course, to get into
a little bit of case detail. Alan Wade Wilmer w
I L M R. I always have to remind myself
to pronounce it. He's Alan Wade Wilmer senior. There's also
a junior who was eight years old at the time
of the murders and obviously was just a little kid
(12:08):
back then. I think he is going to be identified
in other cases he was a leading suspect in the
disappearance of Keith Call and Cassandra Haley in nineteen eighty eight.
They are considered part of the Colonial Parkway murders. They
went missing in the same place. This is all over
(12:31):
a three year period where we have these eight young
people who are murdered, four couples. And since Allan Wade
Wilmer Senior was the leading suspect in the disappearance of
Keith Call and Cassandra Haley, we're hoping that our law
enforcement investigators will be able to make a determination because
(12:55):
we are highly confident he's responsible for their disappearance and
likely And you know, I just.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Have to interject because it comes up all the time,
and I tell young detectives nine times out of ten
their name is in that case file. If you take
every single name and put them in a column, everyone
every name, rule them out again, and if there's anybody
(13:23):
you cannot legitimately rule out, then they go in your
suspect pool. They had him in twenty eighteen. On paper,
he should have been on their list every day.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Well, this is a case that fits that precisely. Because
our investigators have been working this case hard and they
went back and revisited this particular suspect starting in about
twenty twenty. And our case agent has been working this case.
(13:59):
And of course, remember she comes along at a time
when the murders had happened. You know, she's been on
this case for ten years, but the murders had happened
twenty seven years prior to her arrival with the FBI.
But she's been working this case for a decade and
a couple of years ago that she really began focusing
(14:22):
on this guy again, just like she has with the
one hundred and fifty persons who've been named as suspects
or persons of interest in the Colonial Parkway murders.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Tell us what happened Columbus Day weekend nineteen eighty six
at the Cheatham Annex Overlook in Williamsburg. What happened exactly to.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Kathy, Well, my sister Kathy Thomas and her girlfriend, Rebecca
Dowski were we're dating. Now. Remember this is in the
nineteen eighties in Virginia. It's a very conservative area. It's
a big military area. There are tens of thousands of
military personnel and the CIA is just down the road,
(15:13):
I mean literally on the same road, the Colonial Parkway.
So this is a very conservative time. And my sister
Kathy Thomas, who's a Naval Academy graduate, which actually could
prove to be significant in the further investigation because there
may be a Navy tie in to my sister's murder.
(15:33):
She and her girlfriend, Rebecca Dowski, who was a senior
at the College of William and Mary, were out on
this Thursday evening, kind of kicking off the weekend. They
were going to be spending the Columbus Day weekend apart,
and so they decided to get together and have dinner
(15:55):
after Becky and another friend were working on a computer
assignment for a class they were taking at William and Mary.
After completing the assignment, there were four friends, two lesbian couples.
When they had completed their tasks, Kathy and Becky decided
they were going to go out and grab a bite
(16:17):
to eat. Now your options for late night dining. It
was probably maybe eight o'clock that evening in small town Williamsburg, Virginia,
which is where Kristin Dilly lives. It's gotten a lot
bigger and more sophisticated in the last thirty some years.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Marginally so Becky decided to go out to get something
to eat, so they spun off in my sister's nineteen
eighty one Honda Civic, little small two door.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
My sister Kathy was into sporty small cars. They went
out to eat were not one hundred percent certain where
they went, but based on the autopsy afterwards, they think
that they either stopped and had Hamburgers or might have
gone to a place that served like tacos or something
like that because they had ground beef and lettuce in
(17:10):
their systems. After grabbing a bike to eat, they went
to this beautiful roadway known as the Colonial Parkway. It's
a twenty three mile long ribbon of National parkland. It's
sometimes only a couple of hundred yards wide. It was
built by the National Park Service to connect the historic
(17:30):
sites of Jamestown, Yorktown, and Colonial Williamsburg. A lot of
folks that go up in that region remember the Colonial
Parkway because they went to those historic sites on class
trips and that sort of thing. You see a lot
of young people there at the historic sites in the evening. Though.
(17:54):
The Colonial Parkway that connects to these locations is extremely quiet.
It was built with no lights, no traffic signs, essentially
no intersections and no street lights whatsoever, and it runs
along the York and James Rivers. It's quite beautiful. Something
(18:16):
transpired on the Colonial Parkway that evening in October to
Kathy and Becky. They're not one hundred percent certain what happened,
but it appears that someone rolled up on them while
they were parked, probably looking out over the water at
the York River. And there's a naval weapons station nearby
(18:39):
and another military location called Cheata Mannex, which is where
they load US Navy ships with high explosives, including nuclear weapons,
all fenced in, but you can see it across the water.
And something happened, they think, on Thursday evening. It appears
(19:00):
that they were attacked, strangled with rope, and then their
throats were cut with a sharp knife. My sister was
essentially decapitated. They were cut almost from ear to ear,
and then their bodies were loaded into my sister's nineteen
(19:22):
eighty one Honda Civic with Kathy in the in the
what we used to call the way back when we
were kids, the trunk area, which is quite small. This
is and remember Hondas were even smaller than they are
now Becky's body was placed in the backseat on the
diagonal as sort of a final insult to injury, The
(19:46):
offender or offender's plural poured diesel fuel over the car
and the bodies and made an attempt to set the
car on fire. It appears, but if you know anything
about diesel fuel, and I didn't until the Colonial Parkway murders,
diesel fuel won't light with a match. It requires a
(20:09):
higher degree of heat and usually compression to get diesel
fuel to light. So, finally, failing to set the car
on fire, the offender or offenders pushed the car over
an embankment along the York River, so that the car
rolled down from a grassy parking area where they'd been
(20:30):
looking out at the water perhaps, and the car rolled
down towards the surface of the York River, so it would
be about fifteen feet or so, and it got caught
in underbrush, so it did not make it all the
way to the water, but it did obscure your view
of the car, so that the Honda's trunk area the
(20:53):
hatchback was not really visible from the road the Colonial Parkway,
So that resulted in a situation where they think the
murders took place on Thursday evening. The bodies were not
discovered until Sunday afternoon when a passerby sometimes they say
jogger or walker, who was closer to the surface of
(21:17):
the water spotted the car and then he called it in.
Remember this is before cell phones. He went to a payphone,
probably at the visitors station, and called in what he
thought was a traffic accident, that they had accidentally rolled
(21:38):
over the edge. And the first person on scene was
a National Park Service ranger who, again, thinking the car
had rolled over the edge, he wasn't able to open
the doors. He shattered the back window of the Honda
Civic with probably his baton, and that covered the bodies
(21:59):
with last but it did allow him to look into
the car, you know, angled down the hill, and he
quickly determined this isn't a traffic accident. These two women
have been murdered, and at that point the National Park
Service police were informed and park rangers began the investigation,
(22:23):
and then the investigation was ultimately taken over by the FBI,
because if you die in a National park, it's an
FBI case from day one.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
If you are going to roll up on somebody and
you just want to kill two people. Some things that
were done there wasn't necessary to accomplish that. And one
is both of the victims had rope burns on their
wrist and their neck. Bill already mentioned the diesel again,
what is that about. You don't need it unless you're
(22:54):
trying to destroy evidence because it's going to come back
to you, or you want to do moreamage just to
be torturous. But those to me are the two things.
So arson is almost always to cover up another type
of crime. They weren't sexually assaulted, they were completely dressed,
their persons were in the car, money was in their purse,
(23:14):
So those two things are out money, sex, revenge. So
we're left with revenge.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Right, And there's one thing worth adding to mac, which
is I don't think we might have used the expression
hate crime back then. We do now, but a lot
of people have said to us, including the investigators FBI
and the Virginia State Police and National Park Service all
participated in the investigation, together with local law enforcement for
(23:45):
York from York County. The idea that this could have
been a hate crime is definitely part of that mix.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So let's just say the killer from a distance, thought
it was a man and a woman. Kathy had shorter,
dark hair, Rebecca had long, beautiful red hair. Maybe he
thought it was a man and a woman, and when
he got closer and it was two women, maybe that's
when he flipped. And that's when the rope came out,
and the knife came out, and the other tortuous stuff
(24:14):
came out. Because with David and Robin, they were shot
at point blank range. That person set out to kill
two people. They did that. That was it, he was done,
he left. That's not what happened with Kathy and Rebecca.
Anytime I have a situation where I've got a double
homicide and one victim was treated differently, I cannot ignore that.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Agreed. There's one other thing mentioning in the Robin Edwards
David Nobling attack. It appears that Robin Edwards was sexually assaulted. Well,
all they knew for sure since their bodies have been
dumped in the river, was that someone had had sex
with Robin Edwards, and we sent forensic testing, and thank
(25:02):
god for advancements in DNA testing, they had received a
sexual Assault Hit Initiative grant, a SAKI grant. I know
Mack you know about.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Those sure absolutely.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
They had gone back and retested the seamen found inside
Robin Edward's body, and they had not ever been able
to get a profile from it in the past, and
thank god, they were able to finally get a workable
DNA profile and that is one of the things that
(25:37):
led to the identification of this offender. Alan Wade Wilmer, Sr.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
I just want to tell everybody what SAKE stands for
is Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. So if there's a police
department that's got secial assault kits from the eighties, nineties,
early two thousands that have never been tested, they want
them to be tested immediately. So that's one thing that
(26:04):
that task force does. So here's what I want to
know for both of you. What do you think the
next steps are for y'all and law enforcement?
Speaker 3 (26:14):
We want to make sure that everybody has a lot
of information about the suspects vehicle and watercraft because they're
very distinctive, and so we are going to make sure
that we put up a lot of information provided from
the FBI that was given in the press kit for
the briefing of pictures of this suspect of various age
(26:38):
progression photos. There's also photos of his very distinctive blue
nineteen sixty six Dodge Fargo truck with the personal license
plate em RAW, and photos of his wooden, custom built boat,
the Denny Wade. We're going to put all of those
(27:01):
up on our social media pages, and we're going to
encourage everyone who may ever have worked with this guy,
hunted with this guy, entertained with this guy, gone to
bars with this guy. We're going to encourage everybody who
may know him to please give any information possible to
the FBI or the Virginia State Police, because it is
imperative that they learn everything possible about this person so
(27:25):
that they can figure out where he might have been
hunting his victims and whether or not there are any
other people he came in contact with.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
This offender. Wilmer is a what they call a waterman
in Virginia, again, an expression I wasn't familiar with until
the Colonial Parkway murders. So he's a man who is
doing crabbing, oystering. There's other important things that we're going
to be emphasizing at the request of the Virginia State
(27:55):
Police and the FBI. This guy is very distinctive he's
only five beat five inches tall, so he's quite small,
but at the same time he's heavily muscular. And so
this guy's driving a very distinctive truck. This is a
nineteen sixty six truck that he's driving in the late eighties,
(28:19):
so it was an old, funky truck even back then.
And then if he got out of the truck, he's
a very unusually built guy, almost picture like a Popeye
type character because he's very small, way smaller than the
average man, but very very muscular. And then, as Kristen said,
(28:41):
he's fishing using this very distinctive boat. He's got a
very bold graphic on the side. The boat's called the
Denny Dnni Wade and that those happened to be the
names of his two kids. So he's fishing, crabbing, and
(29:02):
oystering from this very distinctive wooden hulled boat painted white
with a very large graphic Danny Wade. So what we're
trying to do is we're trying to help amplify the
request from law enforcement for people in that Tidewater area
of Virginia who might remember anything that would trigger their
(29:28):
memory of having any kind of interaction with this guy.
Even if it was just how I used to dock
in Gloucester, Virginia and he used to dock at the
pier next door.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Here's what sticks out for me. You've got somebody that
targeted couples, not individuals. That's unique. He did it in
a location that was surrounded by water, again, a place
we know that he was comfortable and he understood it.
You're only talking about twenty three miles, y'all, and it
(30:04):
connects this triangle of historic Virginia, Bill, You've already talked
about it with Jamestown and Williamsburg and Yorktown. But again,
this had to be something that he knew. He knew
when the sun went down it was going to be
kind of a ghost town along that stretch there, And
I'm telling you, from the water, you could see the
(30:25):
cars and they couldn't see you. And so he's also
picking activities that would require and not even raise any
suspicion that he was doing them alone. So people that
go hunting or crabbing or boating a lot of times,
that is a single person sport, if you will. So
(30:49):
he had it built in that he could go away
from his family for an extended period of time and
nobody would think anything about it.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, and it's funny. There's something that I have to admit.
And again, I didn't go up in Virginia. Kristen is
from the Williamsburg area. She went away for grad school,
college and grad school and teaching, but ultimately has come
back to the Williamsburg area. But me, being less familiar
with it, I had thought it sounded unrealistic that someone
(31:23):
might be actually using the river the York or James
Rivers or the two rivers there to move around and
participate in these heinous crimes. And now I realize, you
know something, Bill, You made some assumptions there that I
think could be completely wrong. It would be more than
(31:46):
possible for someone like Wilmer to use the river to
move around, because that's how he made his living, and
he could have pulled right up down along these locations.
And three of the four double homicides in the Colonial
Park Gray murders happened right next to a major body
(32:08):
of water.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I remember when I was there and I sent you
some of the pictures. The water is what attracted me.
I mean, it was just so beautiful and it's right there.
It's not a distance from where you could part. And
so again, now that we've got information we didn't have before,
it checks beautifully.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
It really is very interesting. In one of the things
that I've been sort of, you know, whiplashing over the
last twenty four hours is now that we have this
information about this guy, I need to spend a little
bit of time kind of reassessing what do we know
about these cases? And what now that we have a
suspect who's been named and you know, proven to be
(32:53):
connected to two of these cases, what do we know
and now what do we need to reassess as well?
And so I know that part of what I'm thinking
about Mac is doing exactly what you were kind of
talking about, which is figuring out, Okay, what we know
this guy was a waterman, what else might that mean
he's been doing? What else might he have spent time doing?
(33:15):
Where else might he have spent his time? And I'm
starting to kind of rethink and rewrite my own internal
profile and sort of reconnect.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
The dots here.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
So while this is a very interesting process to go through,
it is also making me spin my wheels and sort
of reevaluate what do we know?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
What do we think we know? And what might be
wrong when all the information came out, I'm thinking, you know,
some boats take diesel, some trucks take diesel. Is this
something he had at the ready? You know? And again
from if you're a master at this boat, and then
you can you can pull up easily and walk right
(33:52):
up to that car, push the car, get right back
on the boat. What better get away?
Speaker 2 (33:57):
And we also think and Kristen makes some really good points,
and there are dozens of unsolved murders, especially back then
between the Northern Neck where he's from, all the way
down to the Tidewater area which is Williamsburg, Newport News, Hampton, Gloucester,
(34:22):
that these murders that we're talking about took place. So
this guy's highly mobile. He moves around. The FBI and
Virginia State Police use the word transient. Sometimes he lived
on his boat. Sometimes he stayed at a low budget apartment.
So even though he has a home and a family
(34:45):
up in Lancaster, Virginia, as you mentioned a minute ago, Mac,
he's moving around all the time with really not creating
any suspicion. He shows up in all sorts of different places.
I know, oh that law enforcement agencies across Virginia have
to be looking at where else could this guy have been.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
I can almost see the war room now with these detectives.
Your boat's got to have a tag, just like your car.
If you win a rise it and you dock it somewhere,
if you go to the same place. Because men are
creatures of habit, they normally buy gasoline at the same place,
They get their haircut at the same place, they go
to the same liquor store. There are people that are
(35:29):
going to know this man. If he does all the
crabbing and getting all the oysters, is he's selling them
that person knows him. So he's going to have this
subculture of people that intimately know him. They know when
he goes out, they know how long he stays. And
I'm telling you, any man with children that has been
(35:51):
able to carve out, I'm gonna go live on the
boat for a couple of months. He's got that story down.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I'm telling you, yeah, I would have to agree. We're
hopeful that people will come forward with different recollections. Our
media is just blowing up with people saying they knew
this man, they knew his family. We're trying to steer
these people to the FBI and Virginia State Police who
(36:22):
are requesting the information. Because Kristin and I are not investigators,
I think we will proudly wear the advocate hat, but
we ultimately are trying to prevail upon these people. Look,
you need to talk to law enforcement, and they pointed
out at the press conference that people's situations change. There's
(36:46):
no reason to be afraid of this man. He clearly
was highly violent, but he's gone now. So we're hoping
that people will come forward and say, yeah, I knew
this guy. Poky was his nickname. I knew that guy.
I sold him equipment that he used on his boat,
or I bought oysters or crabs from him, or I
(37:09):
went to a hunt club with him, or whatever it
might be. Because the investigators are trying to recreate this
man's personal history thirty something years later.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Well, I'm going to give out the information to get
in contact with the FBI one eight hundred call FBI.
So if you have any information, please you can call
the FBI anonymously, but please call them. Nothing is too minuscule.
The slightest bit of information could be critical. You may
(37:44):
not think it's a big deal, but it could be
the small piece that's going to put this whole puzzle together.
Do either one of you know how law enforcement got
the information together to do the raid on his house.
I mean they had to have a ton to get
a judge to sign off on that raid.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Yeah, that's an interesting piece of information that we would
like to have. We don't have that information available to
us at the moment, But give us enough time, we'll
snoop around. Maybe we'll come up with something.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Let's talk about how authorities got DNA from a dead
man with zero felony convictions. He's not in CODIS, he's
not in the DNA database. December fifteenth, twenty seventeen, a
delivery driver spots an open door and as he walks
toward the entrance, he just gets a feeling something wrong,
(38:39):
So we calls the Lancaster County Sheriff's office. They find
a deceased man inside. Because of the condition of the body,
the state Medical Examiner was called in to investigate so
that they can positively identify this person and perhaps determine
the cause of death. But the DNA that the exact
(39:00):
elemen are collected in twenty seventeen ended up being critical
to the Colonial Parkway investigation. The FBI in the Virginia
State Police sought out this deceased person's genetic material in
their investigation into the Colonial Parkway murders. Interestingly, law enforcement
(39:22):
will not say how this person got on their radar.
They won't tell how this subject came to be somebody
They wanted his DNA to cross check against the murders
in the Colonial Parkway investigation, but they positively identified Alan
Wade Wilmer, Senior. Wilmer is now the number one suspect
(39:45):
in all the Colonial Parkway murders, and I can tell
you I believe that he will be linked to other cases.
Another thing that I find real curious is since the
identification of Wilmer, law enforcement as it re late to
the Colonial Parkway has not used the term serial killer.
(40:06):
But I will and further as a criminologist, I'll remind
y'all ems, signatures and targets meaning victims can change. You
don't have to look any further than Ted Bundy. Ted
Bundy strangled, bludgeoned, and beheaded victims. He killed adults and
children seen to scene. Bundy's murders did not appear to
(40:31):
be the same killer, but they were any information that
you might have about the Colonial Parkway murders or Alan
Wade Wilmer Senior, please contact the FBI or this podcast,
or a clergy or somebody.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
I'll add that on Sunday night, my phone started blowing
up that a raid had occurred at multiple locations in Lancaster, Virginia.
Even though it's way out in the country, people talk,
and they saw the dark SUVs and the FBI agents
(41:19):
with the windbreakers and a whole bunch of agents checking
out various locations, all of which were owned by members
of this Wilmer family. We don't know what they were
looking for, but it's interesting. The FBI seemed surprised that
(41:39):
we knew as much as we did. But the thing is,
we've really put ourselves out there all these years in
the Parkway murders, maybe a bit too much sometimes. What
happened neighbors who saw all of this activity, they started
(42:01):
talking and then people said, you know, I think this
has something to do with all those unsolved murders in Virginia.
So the next thing we know, our phones are blowing
up on Sunday night, you know, well into the night,
saying are you all aware of the fact that there
have been a raid at these homes in Lancaster, Virginia. Now,
(42:26):
Kristin and I had an inkling from our sources that
something very important was coming in the Colonial Parkway murders.
We didn't know they were going to raid these family
homes up there, but they clearly got the warrants that
were required. We are very confident there were certain things
(42:46):
they were looking for, but we don't know what those
things might be.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Just keep sharing the information about our suspect as many
times and with as many people as you can. Spam
people with it for all weeks, but we really really
want this information out there so that law enforcement can
start getting a better idea about this guy and his movements.
(43:10):
He has been doing this since the late nineteen eighties,
and he lived until twenty seventeen. He did not only
kill three victims. There are more people out there, and
we need to find those victims because those families deserve
answers and justice as well.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Don't forget if someone were to turn to me and say, well,
what difference does it make this fellow Wilmer's been dead
since twenty seventeen. No one's going to jail et cetera.
Families are looking for answers. Anyone who's been waiting for answers,
And in our case, we're talking about a case that
extends back thirty seven years. We were never certain that
(43:52):
we were going to be identifying suspects and putting perpetrators
in jail. That might have happened years ago, but that
ship has sailed. But don't forget these folks are waiting
for answers. As I mentioned at the top of this podcast,
we have six more families and maybe more who are
(44:12):
all waiting for answers in their loved ones murders and disappearances.
So maybe it's not the most satisfying answer I've ever gotten,
but I sure would like to know what happened to
my sister and all the victims in the Colonial Parkway murders,
and having that answer is some degree of satisfaction. It's
(44:38):
not going to bring our loved ones back, it's not
going to bring my kid's sister back, but this is
still important and I think we really need the public's
help at this point.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
Well, I'd like to add to that number one. Your sister,
your family, all the families, all the victims deserve it.
They deserve answers, They deserve a conclusion, They deserve to
have somebody named period. Secondly, what better way to train
(45:18):
There's gonna be things that come from the Colonial Parkway
solutions that other detectives can go, Oh, we need to
try that with our case today. We need to go
back through and pull every name and see if we
have truly ruled these folks out, and if we haven't,
they go to the top of the list. Oh. I
(45:39):
didn't realize they could do this now with DNA. That's
why to me, this case is doubly important, not just
because obviously they deserve answers in justice, but also to
teach there are families right now that don't have answers
(46:00):
in cases all over this country. Maybe y'all can give
them some answers a roadmap of how to do it. Bill,
I've watched you. There is nobody better to contact law enforcement,
to stay on them, to let them know when you're
not pleased, to let them know when you are pleased.
I've watched you do it. It's amazing, and I think
(46:23):
that's something when they say, hey, can you reach out
to this family, There's nobody better. You're a gift to
be able to do that. So again, Bill, thank you
so much for stopping in the middle of what I
know can only be one of the most onslaught of
media request and attention and people reaching out to you
(46:46):
for answers. But you talking to me tonight is a
gift and something I will just cherish. This is an
important case to me. You were important to me, Kathy's
important to me. This podcast episode means the world to me.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Well, we can't thank you enough for all the work
you're doing on Zone seven and we feel really great
to be a part of it.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
Yeah, thank you so much, so much.
Speaker 1 (47:10):
Mac.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
We appreciate you and everything that you do.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
I'm going to end Zone seven the way that I
always do with a quote. I know when I was
there prosecuting homicides in the District of Columbia, one of
the most effective units there was the Colcase Squad, which
had IF the Eye agents as well as Metropolitan Police
homicide detectives working together. Robert Mueller, former director of the FBI.
(47:40):
I'm Cheryl McCollum, and this is Zone seven.
Host
Sheryl McCollum
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