Solved cold cases in Virginia
4 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.
Eige Sober-Adler
Eige Sober-Adler, 37, of Kensington, Maryland, was found dead on September 8, 1987, behind a Days Inn under construction on Centreville Road in Herndon, Virginia. Her car, in running condition and apparently abandoned, was about half a mile away on the Dulles Toll Road. Fairfax County detectives collected numerous items of evidence and, a police major later said, talked to a man who was a person of interest, but no one was charged and the case went cold. That man, Charles Helem, was later convicted of strangling his ex-girlfriend Patricia Bentley in 2002. In 2010 and 2017 he wrote to Maryland police claiming knowledge of the 2002 death of 19-year-old Jennifer Landry, then refused to be interviewed. In September 2021 Prince George's County cold case detectives tried again and he agreed; he confessed to Landry's death and gave information about an unsolved Fairfax County murder. Fairfax detectives interviewed him in October 2021, and police said he confessed to killing Sober-Adler with details only the killer would know. A grand jury indicted him on January 18, 2022. On December 8, 2022, Helem pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life without parole. The Fairfax police chief said her parents had both died never knowing what happened to their daughter.
Karen Lee Spencer
Karen Lee Spencer, 12, of the Huntington area of Fairfax County, Virginia, was last seen alive on November 29, 1972. On December 2, 1972, a group of young boys found her body in Fifer's Field, a wooded area near what is now the Huntington Metro station. An autopsy found she died of blunt force trauma. In the weeks afterward, police gave polygraph tests to young people in the neighborhood and identified several persons of interest, including 16-year-old James "Jimmy" Edwards, who was believed to have been her boyfriend. Edwards denied involvement and died on August 23, 1997. The case stayed open for nearly five decades. In summer 2018, two independent acquaintances of Edwards told Fairfax County detectives that in the early 1990s he had confided that he killed a girl and buried her in a field when he was a teenager. After a June 2019 public appeal and a FOX 5 report, and over the following year and a half, more tips supported that account, and other persons of interest were ruled out. In December 2019 the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office determined there would have been enough evidence to arrest and prosecute Edwards had he been alive. Police announced the case solved on April 1, 2020. Edwards was never charged or tried.
Nancy Dunning
Nancy Dunning, 56, a real estate agent known as the Queen of Del Ray and the wife of the sheriff of Alexandria, Virginia, was shot in the front hallway of her home on December 5, 2003, after failing to meet her husband and son for lunch. Nothing was taken and there was no forced entry. The case went unsolved for a decade, during which suspicion fell unfairly on her husband, who died in 2012. In November 2013 and February 2014 two more prominent Alexandria residents, Ronald Kirby and Ruthanne Lodato, were shot at their front doors in daylight within about two miles of the Dunning home. Firearms examiners found all three sets of bullets were rare Remington .22 subsonic hollow points fired from North American Arms five-shot mini revolvers, ammunition the examiners had seen in no other case. The investigation focused on Charles Severance, a former mayoral candidate with a grievance against the city's courts from a custody case in which orders had been served in the sheriff's name. He was arrested in West Virginia in March 2014 and convicted of all three murders on November 2, 2015. He was sentenced to three life terms plus 48 years.