Solved cold cases in Virginia
2 documented cases.
David Knobling
David Lee Knobling, a 20-year-old man from the Newport News area of Virginia, was shot to death in September 1987 alongside 14-year-old Robin Margaret Edwards at the Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge in Isle of Wight County, on the south bank of the James River. The two had driven out in David's black Ford Ranger pickup; his truck was found abandoned in the refuge parking area with the engine running, and the bodies of the two victims washed ashore days later, both shot in the head. The killings became associated in the public mind with the so-called Colonial Parkway murders, a cluster of unsolved homicides of young couples in the Tidewater region of Virginia in the late 1980s. The case stayed cold for more than 36 years. In January 2024, the Virginia State Police announced that DNA recovered from the crime scene, developed through forensic genetic genealogy and confirmed by the Virginia Department of Forensic Science, had identified the killer as Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., a waterman from Lancaster County, Virginia, who had died in December 2017 at age 63 before he could ever be charged. Because Wilmer had no felony record, his DNA had never been in any database and could only be lawfully obtained after his death. The same DNA work has since tied Wilmer to additional Virginia killings from the 1980s, including the 1989 murder of Teresa Lynn Howell, the 1988 murder of Laurie Ann Powell, and the 1986 Colonial Parkway murders of Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski.
Nancy Dunning
Nancy Dunning, a 62-year-old Alexandria real-estate agent and the wife of then-Sheriff James Dunning, was shot dead in the front hallway of her home on December 5, 2003 after answering a knock at her door. The killing baffled investigators and went cold for a decade. It was only after two strikingly similar daytime door-step shootings of prominent Alexandria residents -- transportation planner Ronald Kirby in November 2013 and music teacher Ruthanne Lodato in February 2014 -- that ballistics testing linked all three crimes to the same extremely unusual ammunition and type of firearm, an uncommon North American Arms .22-caliber revolver. That forensic firearm linkage transformed the unsolved Dunning case into one node of a serial pattern and focused the investigation on Charles Stanard Severance, a man who harbored a grudge against the city's leaders after losing custody of his son. A jury convicted Severance of all three killings on October 29, 2015.