The Colonial Parkway Murders: What the DNA Actually Solved, and What It Didn’t

Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. died in Lancaster County, Virginia, in 2017. It took a multi-agency task force, a federal sexual assault kit grant, and thirty-nine years of preserved evidence to prove what a 1988 polygraph said he hadn’t done.

The Six Names Behind “Colonial Parkway”

I want to be direct about something before we walk through the record: “Colonial Parkway murders” is a media label, not a forensic finding. It was applied to four double-homicides that occurred along or near a twenty-three-mile stretch of parkway connecting Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown, Virginia, between 1986 and 1989, because they shared enough surface pattern to look connected. Two additional murders from the same window, initially filed separately, later turned out to share a killer with two of the four. The distinction matters because it shapes what “solved” actually means here, and it isn’t what the headlines suggest.

Six confirmed victims. Two more people missing and presumed dead, with no forensic link announced. That is the actual scoreboard, and any piece that tells you Colonial Parkway is “solved” is rounding up.

The Polygraph That Cleared Him

Here is what stops me every time I walk through this timeline: investigators had Wilmer’s name in 1988. He fit the physical description witnesses gave. He worked the waterways the killer clearly knew. He was treated as a real suspect in the Hailey-Call disappearance, close enough to the center of that case that he was brought in for a polygraph examination.

He passed it. And for the next twenty-nine years, that result functioned as an answer, not a data point.

Polygraph examinations are not admissible as scientific evidence of truth or deception in the overwhelming majority of American courts, and the forensic literature on their reliability has been unsettled for decades. None of that stopped a 1988 polygraph from operating, in practice, as an investigative closure mechanism. A man with a documented physical match, a documented presence near the crime, and a documented prior connection to the case was administratively set aside on the strength of a test whose scientific footing was already contested at the time. That is not a story about one detective’s bad judgment. It is a story about a system that let one unvalidated instrument outrank everything else in the file.

Why His DNA Was Invisible for Thirty Years

The second structural problem is quieter, and arguably more important for anyone working cold cases today. Wilmer was never convicted of a felony. Under Virginia law, as in most states, that meant his genetic profile was never entered into CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System that law enforcement uses to run crime scene evidence against known offenders. He could be investigated, polygraphed, and cleared, all without his DNA ever touching the system that might have caught him.

The workaround only existed because Wilmer died. Investigators collected a DNA sample for the routine purpose of identifying his remains. That sample sat in a state lab file until someone thought to run it against unsolved case evidence, a process that depends entirely on staffing, funding, and institutional memory, not automation. The multi-agency effort that eventually connected Wilmer to Laurie Ann Powell’s 1988 murder was explicitly funded through the federal Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, a grant program built to clear backlogged rape kit evidence nationally. Without that funding stream, there is no guarantee the comparison happens at all.

Virginia State Police have themselves acknowledged the structural problem here. The loophole that let a documented person of interest’s DNA sit outside the national index for his entire life, simply because he was never convicted of a qualifying offense, is the kind of gap that may require a legislative fix, not just better detective work.

What Still Isn’t Solved

Two cases remain open, and I am not going to soften that for the sake of a cleaner narrative. Cassandra Hailey and Richard Call vanished in April 1988. Their car was found on the Colonial Parkway with clothing, a wallet, and a purse still inside, which ruled out robbery but left investigators with no bodies, no crime scene in the traditional sense, and no biological evidence to test against Wilmer’s profile even if anyone wanted to. Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer, killed five months later, do have recovered remains. No announced DNA link to Wilmer exists for that case either.

Bill Thomas, whose sister Cathleen was among the first two victims, put the frustration plainly after the Powell announcement: “we’re baffled as to why this is taking so long.” That question does not have a satisfying answer. Genetic genealogy is not a universal key. It depends entirely on what biological evidence survived, what condition it survived in, and whether anyone has the funding and the mandate to test it. Where that evidence does not exist, or has not been located, the science cannot manufacture an answer.

What Fixing This Would Actually Require

FBI Norfolk Special Agent in Charge Dominique Evans credited the agents involved with “tenacity and commitment to justice never wavered.” That is true, and it should not obscure the more uncomfortable finding underneath it: individual persistence closed a gap that policy should have closed decades earlier.

Three structural changes would matter more than any single investigator’s diligence. First, dedicated and recurring funding for cold case forensic retesting, on the model of the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative that ultimately cracked the Powell case, rather than the current pattern of grant-dependent, agency-by-agency effort. Second, a legislative review of who enters DNA databases and when, so that a postmortem sample collected for identification purposes has a defined pathway to be checked against unsolved case evidence instead of sitting inert in a lab file until someone remembers to look. Third, formal retention and chain-of-custody standards robust enough that a piece of clothing from 1986 is still testable, and still admissible, forty years later.

None of that requires new technology. Genetic genealogy already exists and already works, when the evidence and the funding are both present. What Colonial Parkway actually demonstrates is that the technology was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck was administrative: what gets preserved, what gets funded, and whose “clearance” goes unquestioned for thirty years. I ask the same three questions of Michigan case files more often than I’d like to admit, and the answer is rarely more comforting than it was here.