Five times, the FBI and Virginia State Police named Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. on the strength of a DNA match. On September 18, 2026, they named him a sixth time without one. The families noticed the difference before I could write it down.
The FBI Norfolk Field Office has linked the 1988 disappearance of Cassandra Hailey and Richard “Keith” Call to Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., a Virginia waterman who died in 2017. Unlike the five prior announcements naming Wilmer in six other deaths, this determination is not based on DNA or any other forensic evidence recovered from the case. The FBI describes it as a “totality of circumstances” finding: a pattern match in timing, location, and method against Wilmer’s confirmed offenses, reached without a body, a crime scene, or physical evidence to test.
How was the Call and Hailey case linked to Wilmer?
Through what the FBI calls a totality of circumstances: matching patterns in timing, location, and manner of disappearance with Wilmer’s confirmed victims. No forensic evidence from the scene has been recovered, since Call and Hailey’s bodies were never found.
Is that the same standard used in Wilmer’s other cases?
No. The five earlier determinations, naming Wilmer in the deaths of David Knobling, Robin Edwards, Teresa Howell, Laurie Ann Powell, Cathleen Thomas, and Rebecca Dowski, were each built on a DNA match. This is the only one of the six built on pattern analysis alone.
What did the families say?
Keith Call’s brother, Doug Call, said investigators did not base the finding on anything solid. Cassandra Hailey’s brother-in-law, Jim Meehan, said the determination did not bring closure. Both spoke at a press conference the same day the finding was announced.
Are all four Colonial Parkway cases resolved now?
No. The 1989 disappearance of Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer remains without any announced link to Wilmer, forensic or circumstantial, making it the only one of the four with no determination at all.
Six Announcements, One Without a Match
I wrote about this case in August, when the third DNA confirmation closed the loop on Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski. At the time, two of the four couples counted as the “Colonial Parkway murders” still had no forensic link to Wilmer at all. As of Friday, that number is down to one, but not because a lab found anything new. Read the full arc in the August breakdown if you want the DNA chain in full.
Here is the record as it now stands, with the basis for each determination made explicit, because that column is the entire story.
| Victims | Date | Status | Evidentiary Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cathleen Thomas, 27, and Rebecca Dowski, 21 | Oct. 9, 1986 | Confirmed to Wilmer | DNA match on retested clothing, Jan. 2026 |
| David Knobling, 20, and Robin Edwards, 14 | Sept. 19, 1987 | Confirmed to Wilmer | Genetic genealogy and postmortem DNA, Jan. 2024 |
| Cassandra Hailey, 18, and Richard “Keith” Call, 20 | Apr. 10, 1988 | Linked to Wilmer | Totality of circumstances, no forensic evidence, Sept. 2026 |
| Laurie Ann Powell, 18 | Mar. 8, 1988 | Confirmed to Wilmer | DNA match, Nov. 2025 |
| Annamaria Phelps, 18, and Daniel Lauer, 21 | Sept. 4, 1989 | No determination | None announced |
| Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell, 29 | July 1, 1989 | Confirmed to Wilmer | Postmortem DNA match, Jan. 2024 |
Seven of eight victims now carry Wilmer’s name. Six of those seven carry it because a lab said so. The seventh and eighth, Hailey and Call, carry it because the FBI says the pattern fits and no scene evidence exists to test either way.
Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski
Thomas, 27, and Dowski, 21, a William and Mary student, were last seen together at a campus computer lab in Williamsburg on October 9. Three days later, Thomas’s car was found pushed down an embankment near the York River, off the Colonial Parkway. Both women had been killed inside it.
David Knobling and Robin Edwards
Knobling, 20, and Edwards, 14, went missing after Knobling’s truck was found abandoned at Ragged Island Wildlife Management Area, radio and wipers still running. Their bodies were recovered along the James River shoreline four days later. Both had been shot; Edwards had been sexually assaulted.
Laurie Ann Powell, then Cassandra Hailey and Richard Call
Powell, 18, disappeared in Gloucester County on March 8 after an argument with her boyfriend; her body surfaced in the Elizabeth River weeks later. One month afterward, Christopher Newport University students Hailey, 18, and Call, 20, left a University Square party together after midnight and were never seen again. Call’s car was found the next day at the York River Overlook, along the Colonial Parkway, with his wallet and Hailey’s purse still inside. Investigators identified Wilmer, a local waterman, as a person of interest in the disappearance. He submitted to an FBI polygraph examination and passed.
Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell, then Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer
Howell, 29, was strangled in Hampton after leaving a nightclub in the early hours of July 1. Two months later, Phelps, 18, and Lauer, 21, disappeared en route to Virginia Beach on Labor Day weekend; their car was found at a rest stop off Interstate 64, and their remains were recovered in nearby woods weeks afterward.
Death, postmortem DNA, and three rounds of forensic confirmation
Wilmer died at home in Lancaster County in December 2017 at 63. DNA obtained for identification purposes at his death was later compared against evidence from unsolved cases. Virginia State Police and the FBI announced a DNA match to the Knobling-Edwards and Howell cases in January 2024, to the Powell case in November 2025, and to the Thomas-Dowski case in January 2026, after a retest of preserved clothing produced a hit.
A determination without a match
The FBI Norfolk Field Office told the Call and Hailey families that an “exhaustive review of evidence and a convergence of investigative findings” had led investigators to conclude Wilmer was responsible, based on the totality of circumstances rather than any single forensic result. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said the evidence developed would have supported federal prosecution had Wilmer been alive. Family members held a press conference the same afternoon voicing skepticism of the finding.
What “Totality of Circumstances” Actually Means Here
I want to be precise about what happened Friday, because the phrase “the FBI linked” is carrying more weight in the headlines than the underlying finding supports. In each of the five earlier Wilmer determinations, a specific piece of biological evidence, tested against a specific reference sample, produced a match. That is a forensic finding. It can be checked, and in principle it can be wrong, but it rests on something physical.
The Call and Hailey determination rests on something else: a comparison of case characteristics. The FBI’s release cites “matching patterns in timing, location, and the manner in which the victims disappeared” as the basis, and states plainly that “direct forensic evidence from the scene remains unavailable.” That is not a euphemism. It means investigators are asserting a conclusion about who killed two people without a body, a crime scene, or a single physical trace to test it against.
Pattern-matching is a legitimate investigative tool, and multi-victim case analysis has closed real cases. But it is a different category of proof than a DNA match, and Clutch Justice will not describe the two as equivalent just because both produced the word “linked” in a press release.
None of this means the determination is wrong. Wilmer’s confirmed pattern, a waterman who moved by boat and truck through the same corridor, who approached young couples in parked cars, who struck within the same roughly three-year window as five confirmed victims, is a real pattern, and Hailey and Call fit it closely. It means the finding sits on a different evidentiary footing than the other five, and the FBI’s own language says so. The distinction is the story, not an asterisk on it.
The Same Blind Spot, Twice
The part of this case that has stayed with me since August is the polygraph. In 1988, investigators had Wilmer’s name, his physical description, and his documented presence near the crime, and they set all of it aside on the strength of a test whose scientific validity was already contested at the time. An unvalidated method cleared him for twenty-nine years.
Thirty-eight years later, the case that finally names him rests on a different kind of unvalidated instrument: not a polygraph this time, but a pattern-matching judgment call made without the forensic corroboration that closed every other Wilmer case. I am not equating a polygraph clearance with a totality-of-circumstances finding; they are not the same tool and they do not carry the same institutional weight. But both are, in the end, professional judgment applied in the absence of physical proof, and in this case file, that kind of judgment has now been wrong once and is being relied on a second time. That should make investigators, and readers, more careful with the word “solved,” not less.
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$10/month ?What the Families Said
The Call and Hailey families learned of the determination Friday and addressed it publicly the same afternoon. Their response was not the relief that closure narratives usually expect. Doug Call, Keith’s brother, said investigators “didn’t base this on anything solid.” He told reporters the finding largely confirmed what the family had already suspected for decades, and added that if the case had been pursued with the same conclusion forty years ago, it might have spared the family years of uncertainty.
Jim Meehan, Cassandra Hailey’s brother-in-law, described the emotional cost of thirty-eight years without an answer or a body. “My sister-in-law is a frozen picture on a mantle.” He said a conviction, had one ever been possible, would not have changed that.
FBI Norfolk Special Agent in Charge Dominique Evans framed the announcement differently, telling families the victims were “young people with families, friends, futures and lives that mattered.” Both things can be true at once: the bureau’s intent to bring answers to a decades-old case, and a family’s accurate observation that this particular answer is not built the way the others were.
A DNA match and a totality-of-circumstances finding can produce the identical press release language. They are not the identical claim. The difference is whether anyone besides the agency making the determination could go check it, and in this case, nobody can. That gap is worth naming every time an institution asks the public to accept “linked” as a synonym for “proven.”
What Still Isn’t Answered
Hailey and Call are still missing. Naming Wilmer does not change that, and it does not close the practical work of finding them, which the FBI’s release does not claim to have advanced. Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer remain in a different category still: the one canonical Colonial Parkway case with no determination of any kind, forensic or circumstantial, thirty-seven years on.
If agencies are going to rely on totality-of-circumstances determinations in cold cases where no forensic evidence survives, that standard needs to be disclosed as plainly and consistently as a DNA match is, every time, not folded into the same “linked” language used for cases with a lab result behind them. Families and the public can only weigh a finding’s strength if they know what kind of finding it is.
I opened the August piece by writing that “Colonial Parkway murders” is a media label, not a forensic finding. The same caution applies now to the word “linked.” It has done a great deal of work this year covering six deaths with three different kinds of proof, and this is the first time an agency has told the public, in its own words, that the proof in question isn’t forensic at all. Credit the disclosure. Do not mistake it for resolution.
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