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Law enforcement officials on Monday afternoon announced a major breakthrough in three cold case homicides that occurred in the late 1980s, including one double homicide that was part of a string of crimes that became known as the Colonial Parkway murders.

Virginia State Police identified Alan W. Wilmer Sr. of Lancaster County as a suspect in the 1987 double murder of David L. Knobling, then 20, and Robin M. Edwards, then 14, in Isle of Wight County.

Wilmer, who died in December 2017 at the age of 63, is also a suspect in the 1989 murder of Teresa Howell, then 29, in Hampton.

“If not for Wilmer’s death, charges would be filed against him in connection with the three homicides,” said VSP spokesperson Corinne Geller.

Police said Knobling and Edwards were last seen alive and together on Sept. 19, 1987. The next day, Knobling’s pickup truck was discovered abandoned in the parking lot of the Ragged Island Wildlife Management and Refuge Area on the banks of the James River in Isle of Wight.

Four days after their disappearance, the bodies of Knobling and Edwards were found on the shoreline of the wildlife refuge. Police said both victims had been shot in the back of the head, and Edwards had been sexually assaulted.

Two years later, in July 1989, the body of Howell — who was last seen on July 1, 1989, outside the now-defunct Zodiac Club in Hampton — was found in a wooded area after construction workers discovered women’s clothing at a nearby worksite. Howell had been strangled to death and sexually assaulted, police said.

The three homicides went unsolved for decades, but at a Monday news conference in Suffolk, authorities said they had used DNA evidence to determine that Wilmer was responsible for the crimes.

The DNA was gathered from Wilmer posthumously last year, police said, and proved to be a genetic match with then-unidentified DNA found on the bodies of Knobling, Edwards and Howell. As a result, police were able to mark the cases as solved.

But Geller stressed that resolving cases is not the same thing as closing them.

“We’re going to revisit the facts,” Geller said, and detectives will continue to investigate the murders and look into potential connections with other violent crimes.

Geller declined to comment on how Wilmer had been developed as a suspect and what prompted investigators to collect his DNA.

Wilmer was 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighed 165 pounds, police said. He had brown hair, blue eyes and often sported a close-cropped beard. At the time of the murders, Wilmer drove a “distinctive” blue 1966 Dodge Fargo pickup truck. He also owned a small commercial fishing boat, named the Denni Wade, in which he sometimes lived and which he docked in marinas around the Northern Neck.

He was a fisherman and avid hunter and ran a business called Better Tree Service, police said.

In a statement released at the news conference, the families of Knobling and Edwards said that the 36 years since the murders had been a “vacuum of the unknown.”

While the families said Wilmer’s death prevents them from getting answers to long-asked questions, they said they “have a sense of relief and justice knowing (Wilmer) can no longer victimize another.”

Knobling

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Lt. Col. Tim Lyon, director of the VSP Bureau of Criminal Investigation, expressed gratitude toward the families for their patience.

“Only those who have suffered the loss of a child in this way can truly understand the depth of their sorrow and the frustration over not knowing who was responsible for taking their loved one’s life,” Lyon said. “I do hope the identification of the killer brings some sense of closure and peace for them.”

‘We’re asking the public to come forward’

Geller said that while the public previously had connected the murders of Knobling and Edwards with a series of four double homicides that occurred between 1986 and 1989 in southeast Virginia, there is no evidence at this time that the killings are linked to the other so-called Colonial Parkway murders.

In addition to the deaths of Knobling and Edwards, the infamous murders included the October 1986 murders of Cathleen Thomas, then 27, and Rebecca Dowski, then 21, outside of Williamsburg; the April 1988 disappearances (and presumed murders) of Cassandra Hailey, then 18, and Richard Call, then 20, in Yorktown; and the September 1989 murders of Annamaria Phelps, then 18, and Daniel Lauer, then 21, in New Kent County.

Edwards

The bodies of Thomas and Dowski were found strangled, nearly decapitated and doused with gasoline in a car on the side of the Colonial Parkway.

The bodies of Hailey and Call were never found, but Call’s abandoned vehicle, in which he and Hailey had been traveling together, was located with the keys and much of the victims’ clothing inside at an overlook on the York River off the Colonial Parkway.

And the decomposed remains of Phelps and Lauer were found near a wooded logging road about a mile from a rest stop off Interstate 64 in New Kent County, where Lauer’s car had been discovered with the keys still in the ignition.

Howell

Authorities did not link the slaying of Knobling and Edwards to the other Colonial Parkway murders, but Brian Dugan, a special agent for the FBI office in Norfolk, said investigators are “look(ing) toward solving other crimes the suspect may have committed.”

“We’re asking the public to come forward and share information about any encounters they may have had with (Wilmer),” Dugan said.

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