The Colonial Parkway Serial Killings
Tonight, we unravel one of Virginia’s most haunting cold cases—The Colonial Parkway Serial Killings—where multiple young couples vanished or were discovered dead in isolated lovers’ lanes along the scenic Colonial Parkway during the late 1980s.
Between 1986 and 1989, eight young adults—traveling in four couples—were brutally slain or disappeared along Virginia’s Colonial Parkway and surrounding areas. Known as the Colonial Parkway Murders, these chilling crimes involved strangulation, gunshots, and staging under gasoline, and remain among the most eerie serial homicides in modern American history
Wikipedia
colonialghosts.com.
Despite decades of exhaustive investigation, the case remained unsolved—until 2024, when investigators used posthumous DNA evidence to identify Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., a local fisherman, as the key suspect in at least two of the killings—and potentially more
AP News. This renewed breakthrough brings closure to some families, though many questions and theories about multiple killers, law enforcement missteps, and forensic gaps still linger
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Start your free seven-day trial and unlock this episode plus hundreds more, all ad-free, when you become a Mysterian on Patreon. If you don't mind. Well, in the first two murders in 1986, Kathy Thomas and Rebecca Dowski,
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the killer brought with him many implements of destruction. He strangled them with a piece of navel twine
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and attempted to decapitate them or cut their throats, nearly decapitated Kathy Thomas,
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put their bodies in a car and tried to set the car on fire with diesel fuel, was unable to get ignition because diesel fuel ignites at a higher temperature. You know, just throwing matches at it isn't going to do it.
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And then tried to push the vehicle into the river. Start your free seven-day trial and unlock this episode plus hundreds more, all ad-free, when you become a Mysterian on Patreon.
