You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together
with Kristin Dilley. My name is Kristin Dilley. I'm a writer, a
researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social
media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind of a Murder. I'm Kristin
Dilley and I'm Bill Thomas, and we're here for an exciting and much overdue
episode of Ask Us Anything, Colonial park Murders Edition. Now, Kristen,
I know you expressed some disappointment that the questions didn't involve some of your favorite
questions, and we'll get to those later. I think, yes, But
before we get into that, do fill us in a little bit. Mister
Thomas about your trip to Austin, Texas for the True Crime Podcast Festival.
Inquiring minds want to know how it went. Did you love it? Was
it great? It was great for the benefit of our listeners. We were
both planning on going, and Kristen's schedule got a little bit full with school
starting up, and she was not able to attend. So I had to
solo this thing, which was not as much fun as when Kristen's there all
thank you and everyone was asking for her. I made it clear that she
was fine and she was just busy with school and not able to attend.
Because for some reason, they start school in Williamsburg and maybe in the South,
I'm thinking earlier than lots of other places around the country. We used
to have the Labor Day law where you didn't start school before Labor Day,
and that was largely because we've got the big amusement parks around here and you
wanted teenagers to work those as much as possible. But recently there's been that
change over the last couple of years where you can start earlier and hopefully finish
earlier. So we started on August the twenty eighth this year seems against the
natural law of things. It feels a little weird, but yes, but
that does mean that we have a four day weekend because they give us the
first Friday off and then Saturday Sunday than Labor Day Monday. About to do
a four day weekend, I'm okay with that understood. Truclome Podcast Festival was
terrific. It's more of a conference of podcasters. There are fans there,
but there are a lot of truecrime podcasters from around the country, many of
them we know, and then many others. I was excited to meet terrific
group. I was glad that Truecrime Podcast Festival is mostly an indoor sport.
Because it was one hundred and five degrees in Austin, Texas. It was
brutally hot. I actually went outside the Double Tree Hotel where the event was
held once or twice and got to the front door and said nah, and
went back inside. Nope, it's too hot even for Texas. It was
awful now. The atmosphere inside was nice and cool. The hotel was very
nice. They had set up so there were two big rooms. One was
the main room where they presented cases and discussed important issues. A lot of
discussion about ethics and true crime. And then there was a secondary room,
which was a similar presentation room set up like a small auditorium with a screen
at the front and microphones and comfortable chairs, and I presented on the Colonial
Parkway murders along with the absolutely terrific people from the podcast Murder in the Rain,
and they presented on one of their cases. They were absolutely lovely,
So we had a one hour session and they went first and we went second,
and then we saved room for questions at the end, and the audience
was very interested. They asked a lot of great questions. Adjoining those two
rooms was a medium sized ballroom that was packed with all of the various podcasts
having set up so you could go around and talk to the podcasters. Of
course, there was only me, so I could only be in one place
at one time, so there was a lot of running around. There were
so many terrific presentations. I wanted to hear what many of the other investigating
officers and forensics experts and especially true crime podcasters had to say. And there
were a number of survivors and victims families there presenting on unsolved cases, which
is very interesting, but it's also heartbreaking because you're hearing family members talk about
missing and murdered loved ones, and that's always difficult. It's like a smaller
scale version of Crime Con I really enjoy. Next year is going to be
in Denver. Sounds beautiful and as terrific location. They're moving it further back
into this summer because everybody agreed that August in Texas was pretty toasty. I
know, I imagine so, and it would be definitely better for those of
us that have back to school type jobs or I think for some people probably
just back to school kiddos. Yes, to be able to do something a
little further from the start of the school years. We'll see about doing Denver
next year. I've never been to Denver. I think that would be cool.
We'll see, and we are looking forward to crime Con here, which
is only twenty one twenty two days away now. I'm very excited. Buy
we're going to have an absolute blast. Yeah, it's gonna be great.
So thank you to everybody who showed up. We know we did have some
fans who showed up to talk to Bill, and I wish I could have
been there as well. The school job pays the mortgage, so that's the
one I have to give precedence to. We do hope to see everybody at
Crime con here fairly soon and about like I said, twenty one twenty two
days, Yeah, looking forward to it. Well, let's go and jump
into our questions. We went ahead and posited to not only our social media
group from Mind Never Murder, but also the Colonial Parkway Murderers group, what
questions do y'all have on the case? And boy did people deliver? They
sure did. The questions are fantastic and really thought provoking QUESTA come up with
this idea? She said, we haven't done this in a while, and
I said, you're right, and I thought, let's see what kind of
response we get. Not only are the questions fantastic, but every single day
when we would look at social media, there were more and more interesting questions
and nuanced questions. Thanks to everybody. It was so interesting to see what
you're curious about, what you're thinking about people's ideas and theories. So I
hope people will enjoy these episodes. Yeah, it's going to definitely be two
and maybe possibly even three episodes. When I was going through and looking at
all of the questions, I compiled them into a large list here. We're
going to go in categories here, and the first is going to be just
case related, This second set is going to be suspect related questions, the
third set is going to be DNA and FG related questions, and then the
fourth set is going to be everything else, including just a couple of random
things that people through in. We like random, yes, no, random
is good. And I actually put in our post like when we say ask
us anything, that means you can ask us about like our favorite dinosaurs,
our favorite zoo animals. Nobody asked about either of those two things. By
the way, I was alone as I discuss with you earlier today. I
think you are the co host and producer of this podcast. You have every
right to add any question you want. And so we're going to at least
answer the favorite dinosaur questions. Yes, well not now, No, not
right now, but we will at some point figure out both Kristen and Bill's
favorite dinosaurs. Why not? Okay, So we're gonna go ahead and just
kick it off here, and we're starting with in the category of general colonial
Parkway murders, case related questions. As we do with these episodes, I'm
going to go ahead and give first name, last initial as to who asked
the question, and then I'll pose it Bill and I will answer it,
and we'll move on from there, and we'll just do as many as we
have. We have a battle a list of about thirty, so we'll see
how we do. It's going to be multiple episodes, all right. So
we're going to start with the question from Charlie C. Charlie C asks,
with the parkway being federal property, why was the Virginia State Police and York
Pacuson Sheriff's Office called to the scene when the National Park Service rangers should have
secured the scene and called the FBI to handle the scene and collect the evidence
and handle a proper investigation. There are too many agencies involved at this crime
scene. Now, keep in mind, Kristen and I weren't there. And
the Colonial Parkway murders kicks off in October nineteen eighty six with the death of
my sister Kathy Thomas and her girlfriend Rebeccadowski, followed by the other murders.
So I feel like this person, Charlie, thanks for the question, is
kicking us off off of the question that might be mostly focused Initially, I
think on the Thomastowski crime scene. Charlie, You're absolutely right. The parkway
is federal property. It's a national park, and as we've discussed before,
if you are murdered in a national park or go missing for that matter,
the National Park Service investigative rangers have jurisdiction, and if it's a murder specifically,
the FBI is called in. From the very beginning, as we understand
it from the people that were there that night, there were a number of
different agencies that reported to the scene, and this happened in the other incidents
in the Colonial Parkway murders as well. National Park Service and FBI would have
had jurisdiction. We know for certain that both Virginia State Police and York Pacosan
County Sheriff's off officers were on scene, and there were first responders, probably
some firefighters and rescue workers as well, because specifically in Kathy and Becky's scene
at the Cheetahmanic's Overlook, the car was actually pulled off the embankment along the
York River before the bodies could be taken out of the car. We're not
experts on this, but we know these other agencies were there mostly in an
assist role, and as far as we know, the first people on seen
our National Park Service rangers and the person that is mentioned as breaking the back
window of my sister's Honda Civic, which obviously is problematic, especially in retrospect.
That person is supposed to be a National Park Service ranger. The ranger
who was probably first or maybe second on seen when what was originally called in
as a traffic accident. When he reported there, he didn't know he was
dealing with a murder scene. He just knows he's got a Honda Civic that's
down the embankment, caught up in brush with its nose fairly close to the
water of the York River, and he's trying to figure you're out. Have
the people inside the car? Have they driven over the edge of the grassy
embankment in an accident. He doesn't know that they've been murdered. So he's
trying to get down and get a look at the vehicle. The doors won't
open because the two door car is wedged in that underbrush with its nose in
that downward position, he can't really see very well through the glass, and
so he makes a decision to break the window, probably with his baton or
something like that, and so he shatters the back window of the Honda.
And then once he shatters the crime scene with broken glass, he's peering in
and he realizes he's got two people, both deceased, My sister Cathy in
the way back in the hatch area and her girlfriend, Rebeccadowski in the back
seat on an angle. I think at that point he steps back and realizes
he's got something far worse than a traffic accident on his hands. There's some
mixed versions of the story. We don't know exactly when the FBI arrived on
scene. We've heard a couple of different versions of the story. And one
of the things that's going to be a through line here in some of these
answers we give you is we can't always tell. And we've certainly asked FBI
and Virginia State Police at different times, but they don't answer questions in a
very straightforward manner. They have the attitude that they ask the questions and don't
answer questions. I'm not saying they've never answered questions, but very frustrating and
sometimes I feel foolish because people will say to me, what about this what
about that? And I'll have thought to myself and Kristen, I'm sure you'll
want to weigh in here. We've thought we ought to know the answer to
that unless someone who was there on the law enforcement side won't answer the question
in a straightforward manner. It's still kind of guesswork with a lot of these
questions, and they're all excellent questions. I was responding to people on our
various pages saying, yes, we'll address that, and a lot of times
I've found myself having to type law enforcement will not tell us that, but
we will speculate, or law enforcement will not answer that, but we'll do
the best we can. There is so very much here that we want to
know, just as badly as all the rest of you. But until the
FBI or the VSP decides to cough up information, we're as in the dark
as the rest of you are, and we can only use the information that
we do have in some informed speculation along the way to try to provide you
with answers. I'll add something else too, I agree. I do want
to make it clear our guesses, if you will, our educated guesses.
We have interviewed a number of different law enforcement people over the years, particularly
for the television series which we actually shot twice, the Lover's Lane Murders series
on Oxygen. So there's dozens, if not hundreds of hours of footage and
I was there for almost all of it, and Kristen was there for a
fair amount as well. So we interview a number of people that are in
that kind of first responder FBI, VSP, your county, and other agencies.
I've spoken to most of these people one on one, particularly when they're
retired. They're often more willing to be frank about what they remember because we
are talking about cases that stretched back thirty three to thirty seven years. Now,
these are educated guesses. We're basing our responses on what people who were
there have told us they remember about those days and nights working the investigation in
all four crime scenes. Let's go and move on to the next question.
This is from Shelley R. Shelley asks, I'm curious why the county will
not let anyone come with cadaver dogs over the years to see if remains were
driven further up the parkway and dumped in the woods. No evidence they were
dumped in the water besides the scent followed to the bridge in the initial investigation.
If their remains can be located, they could contain evidence. I do
want to actually ask something about the phrasing and Shelley's question, Bill, is
it the National Park Service that is not allowing the cadaver dogs or is it
York County itself? Can you shed some light on that before we go into
the actual question. National Park Service has actually been the responsible agency. For
instance, I think Shelley is talking mostly about the Keith Call Cassandra Hailey disappearance.
Yes, that's the one where Keith's Toyota Celica is found on the Colonial
Parkway at the York River Overlook, which is, what do we say,
one to two miles away from the site where Kathy's Yeah car was found a
year and a half prior. So. The responding agency has always been the
National Park Service, and about ten years ago they did allow cadaver dogs after
much back and forthing with the families. The Call and Hailey families had arranged
for cadaver dogs to be brought in and they did search some specific areas,
overcoming resistance from the National Park Service. The Park Service was completely bizarre.
They were almost obsessed with the fact that not one blade of grass could be
disturbed by these dogs. It they behaved as if the flowers, plants,
and trees and grass of the gorgeous area we know as the Colonial Parkway was
somehow more important than finding the remains of Keith and Sandy, which a number
of us found pretty objectionable. However, when the families amped up the pressure
and began to call out the Park Service publicly, the park Service did back
down and they did allow the search to continue. There've been discussions over the
years about having additional searches of the parkway, and the FBI has conducted their
own searches. Now they don't run into the problem with the National Park Service
that the families from the Colin Haley family did. I know there have been
searches conducted, and I've seen photographs of people and dogs searching the parkway and
the water looking for particularly I think, for Keith and Sandy's remains, So
we know it's been searched multiple times, and the County has not played a
role. As far as I know, It's always been the National Park Service
allowing and sometimes standing in the way of cadaver dog and other types of searching.
My current concern that I've mentioned both to Bill and to the Call family
and the Haley family as well, is that right at the moment, the
Parkway is undergoing a massive, multimillion dollar rehabilitation project over the next three years,
and right now there is a ton of construction happening in the area around
the York River overlooking the Cheatham Annex Overlook, with lots of heavy construction equipment.
I sincerely hope that someone from the FBI or the NPS or some other
responsible agency has put the word out to the construction crew that is doing all
of this work and said, hey, can you please be on the lookout
for two sets of human remains and we are still potentially looking for murder weapon
and Kathy and Becky's case. I sincerely hope a responsible party, and I
would hope it would be the FBI, would have come to the construction crew
and said this is something we are still looking for, please be aware.
I don't have a lot of confidence that has happened, but I'm willing to
be surprised and pleased by the outcome if so. I agree, and we
just don't know if they've put the word out. It would be great if
they did. Now I'm not there, I know I'll be in Virginia with
you, Kristen, and other family members for memorial service that's planned for Keith.
Call. That'll be the first time I'll have been on the Parkway in
the last year or two. I would say, I don't exactly know,
except based on what you've told me what those construction projects look like. Are
they most to the settings of Thomastowski and Call Haley, Yes, they are.
They're right up along those areas right at the moment. Based on what
they're doing, they are closer to Kathy and Becky's scenes than they are to
where Keith's car was found. As our question or Shelley had asked, I
don't think it's outside of the realm of possibility that Keith and Sandra's bodies were
moved. And if that's the case, then every construction crews they go through
the phase of this project should be on the lookout for potential human remains,
because they might not just have stayed in that area where the car was found.
It could be anywhere on the Parkway. That's true. One other reply
to Shelley, interestingly, in that incident that I was describing where the Call
and Haley families had brought in cold ever dogs. The Cadever dogs actually did
hit on something. And the way the coldever dog's work is they're trained to
smell. They're looking for the smell of human remains, and they did hit
and they sit down. They stop and they sit down, and they're indicating
to their handlers this is a spot. After pushing past all that resistance from
the National Park Service, we were lessantly surprised. It was a very hot
Sunday afternoon. Temperatures were in the nineties. There were news crews on scene
being held back at some distance. The dogs actually did hit on one of
the suggested areas, and the FBI on a Sunday afternoon zoomed in there with
an evidence recovery team and took over the scene and did a dig, got
the dogs and everybody else out of there. It turned out the remains were
much older, and as Kristen can tell you, there's a lot of history
there in that part of the room, and there are unmarked graveyards and even
unmarked graves that don't have anything to do with the last thirty thirty five years.
So there were remains found, and they did figure out, you know,
this is a much much older grave site. Now the dog has no
way of knowing that. So the dogs did their job under really difficult circumstances,
because they do better when the web there's cooler. But I will say
that after pushing past the resistance of the Park Service, when the families found
something, the FBI just swooped right in and took immediate control. And we
were actually very impressed by the level of response from the Bureau Evidence Response team.
Next question is from David R. Longtime listener and frequent respondent on our
page. It's really more of a sort of a supposition than a question,
and I'll go ahead and read it out though. David says, I would
like to know where the killer or killer's first crossed the victims pass. My
general theory is that the killer was a prowler who trolled the area searching for
victims. So I would like to know where he spotted these victims and how
he approached them. And I think that's definitely a question. We all have
a bill. Do you want to expound on your theory as related to Kathy
and Becky. Yeah, David's asking a great question here. You know,
one of the things that's key, David, is are these people, the
victims involved in a chance encounter with someone who is there at these locations looking
for a couple pulled over who may or may not be involved in sexual or
romantic behavior, or may just be two people sitting in a car, or
are they being followed somehow? I think in some of these examples, and
I know some other people have asked us this, and we'll get into some
more detail as we move forward, I'm not sure that all of the Colonial
Parkway murders are even related. As I've said before, the more I learned
about these cases, the less I personally think they're all related. I think
there's a very good chance that Kathy and Becky, for example, were stalked
that as someone was following them at the same time. When you move into
incident number two, Robin Edwards and David Nobbling, I think they may have
actually planned to meet someone at Ragged Island, perhaps to do a low level
drug deal by some pot or something like that. In incident number three,
which is Keith Colling Cassandra Haley coming home from the party Christopher Newport University apartments.
That one is the biggest mystery to me. Yeah, because I can't
figure out whether Keith and Sandy might have encountered somebody at this college party involving
multiple apartments and kids going from place to place, or if someone followed them
from the party. The odd thing about Keith and Sandy is, as we've
talked about before, they end up on the parkway, but that's not on
the way home to her parents home in Grafton. It's right, what did
you say, Kristin fifteen to twenty minutes out of the way, it's definitely
further away from where they should have been. I've always wondered. I'm coming
around this idea based on something a friend told me or speculated about this.
We spend a lot of time speculating about this. I'm wondering if they didn't
get accosted in the parking lot leaving the party and that someone just put a
gun to their head and said drive, or if somebody was waiting in the
back seat of the car. I don't know, but you're right, it
is the biggest mystery out of all of them. Incident number four, phelp
Slower. I'm to the idea that enemy of Phelps and Daniel Lauer may have
made plans to meet someone, perhaps to buy some pot or something like that.
And again I'm not passing any judgment here. These are young people doing
young people things. It's not like they're the only kids in America that ever
bought a bag of pot or smoked a joint in a car while listening to
music. Something about that crime scene up there off Interstate sixty four feels very
different from the other Colonial Parkway murder scenes. I think that in Phelps Lauer
they may have planned to meet someone that they knew. The money that Daniel
was carrying sixty eight hundred dollars from painting jobs that he had done that summer
with his father. That money disappeared. Robberies a potential motive and incident number
four. So Phelps Lauer feels very different to me as well. So back
to David's initial question, is he thinking this is somebody who trolled the area
looking for victims. It's a reasonable question, David, but I'm not sure
that's actually what's happening here. Yeah, I think it really does have to
do with whether you want to fall in line with the idea that so many
people have embraced over the years. Is there one serial killer stocking couples on
and off the Parkway. If so, David's question is great and valid.
If not, then you do have to approach it in the piecemeal. How
did each group of victims, assuming they're all related, come across their assailant.
I think there's really no way that we're going to know until we have
an arrest, get at a confession hopefully, or something along those lines.
But it's a great supposition. David, and I know that David comments offen
and on our posts, so I know that this is something that he thinks
about quite a lot. Thank you for Wayne and David and your concern and
pondering of the case is very welcome. We appreciate it. You're listening to
Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors.
We're back here at Mind over Murder. We've got a question from Nancy,
and honestly, I think this is I don't think this is a question either
of us have seen before. Bill Nancy E asks, we're uniformed patrols on
night shifts for places like Carter's Grove. Ever considered for anyone who doesn't know
Carter's Grove is a plantation. Here in Williamsburg, we have many old plantations
from the very early days of the colony, some of which have been rebuilt
and turned into tourist destinations, and Carter's Grove is one of those. I've
never actually been to Carter's Grove in all my years here. But it's the
question of are there people I don't even know if there are uniformed patrols,
private or otherwise out of the plantations. And I don't think we've ever had
anyone bring up the idea of anyone from Carter's Grove. Have you heard that
ever anywhere? Bill, No, I'd never heard of Carter's Grove until we
were talking about it today in preparation to record this session. I want to
maybe step back Nancy's question a little bit. First of all, if Nancy
has more information for us, we welcome hearing from her again about why she
would think Carter's Grove, which appears to be plantation, it's a historic home,
it looks beautiful in the photographs. I think the step back for me
is are there uniformed patrols in any of these locations? Yeah? Number one
and let's go through this as we understand it. And again we weren't there,
and we can only rely on the law enforcement people that have talked to
us about this. The Colonial Parkway was exceptionally lightly patrolled at night, and
one veteran police officer, they'll remain nameless for the moment, there's been very
helpful to us behind the scenes, had said to us, if people knew
just how lightly patrolled the Colonial Parkway was at night, they would have never
gone there because it was that dangerous, is what I'm saying. People like
Choice Called Canada have told us when they were kids, young teenagers, they
knew you could go to the Colonial Parkway and drink beer and hang out and
make up with your boyfriend or whatever, because there were essentially no patrols,
particularly when you get into the third shift. You know that eleven pm to
seven am late shift. At different times. Over the years, sometimes York
County would patrol the Parkway with some sort of service arrangement with the Park Service.
That twenty three mile long ribbon of land was extremely lightly patrolled. In
the two incidents that are on the Colonial Parkway, we can say pretty definitively
the road was very lightly patrolled. In incident number two, noveling Edwards at
Ragged Island, the cops did swing through there and still do. And interestingly,
Ragged Island the parking area is actually quite close to the James River Bridge.
State troopers and other local police do swing through there pretty frequently, so
that one's probably reasonably well patrolled. And certainly law enforcement officers saw David's pickup
truck in the parking lot. Now, obviously there were no bodies at that
point, as far as we know, they had already been murdered and their
bodies had been dumped in the water. The police officers did see the abandoned
vehicle and we're checking it out. An Incident number four, Phelpslour Interstate sixty
four is pretty well patrolled by the Virginia State Police. But again the police
found the vehicle abandoned at the wrong way rest stop, heading back towards Amelia
County instead of in the direction of travel towards Virginia Beach. That hunting ground
off sixty four I think had no patroling whatsoever. No, it's private property.
Yeah, very interesting question there from Nancy. And again we would urge
anybody who has information but Nancy in particular, if you have information that might
help us understand a little bit more about your question, please to send it
to us. We do appreciate that. Next question is from Bart D and
I think this is a great question and it does involve a little bit of
supposition from us that I think that's fine. Bart asks, I question if
keys car was dumped at the Parkway after disposing of the bodies elsewhere and utilizing
an accomplice to pick up the murderer. This could be a possibility at the
New Kent rest area as well as the victim's car was found at the westbound
rest area when the victims were traveling eastbound. Possibly they were objected at the
eastbound rest area, driven to the site where their bodies were found in the
car dropped at the westbound rest area, with an accomplice either following behind or
an agreement to meet back there. So yeah, not really a question,
more supposition and I think it's pretty solid. Yeah, I think so too.
Let's break this down a little bit. So Bart first asks about Keith
calls Toyota Celica. Now, this is Keith and Sandy heading home from the
party in Newport News at the university apartments. I do think that the car
is abandoned at the York River Overlook. I don't think the murder took place
there. It's essentially a disappearance, but I don't think they were made to
disappear at that location. And I do agree that the car was likely dumped
there. Given the fact that we're talking distances of miles, I would say
it's probably pretty likely that if they dumped the Toyota FeliCa at the York River
Overlook, the murder took place elsewhere. Yeah, I think there has to
be an accomplice following in another vehicle. Driver takes the Toyota, drops it
off, gets out of the car, leaves that location in a vehicle likely
driven by someone else. Now, Bart makes a lot of really good points
in the Phelps Slour Incident number four. This is out on Interstate sixty four
about they're traveling eastbound, as I had mentioned a moment ago, and yet
the vehicle is found in the westbound mirror image rest stop there on both sides
of the divided highway. They're Interstate sixty four. I don't think it's necessary,
though, that there be a second vehicle, one of the things that
was pointed out to me by one of the investigating officers is if you encountered
Anna, Maria and Daniel in the eastbound rest stop and then say asserted control,
maybe produced a gun or whatever, and told them to drive one exit
further eastbound, and then to get off there. Then turn and take a
left, go over the highway. If I'm not mistaken, turn onto a
dirt road which leads you to the Hunt Club area. After killing them,
that individual could have then driven the Chevy Nova back west bound about a mile
or so and stopped at the rest stop. He or they could have left
the vehicle there and run across the grassy and wooded median from one side of
the highway to the other. It might not be necessary to have a second
vehicle in that supposition. Let's just say and Daniel make arrangements to meet someone
at that eastbound rest stop as they're driving towards Virginia Beach, perhaps to make
that pot deal that I talked about. It's also possible this could be a
random encounter at that rest stop with a police officer or a wannabe or someone
you know presenting as a police officer. It would be possible to do all
this by leaving the offender's vehicle parked at the rest stop. He gets into
the Chevy Nova with the two of them and then forces them to take the
journey I just described. Then drives the car back the Chevy, parks the
Nova runs or walks across the median. It's late at night. If he
waits until no cars are coming, it doesn't see any headlights. He scampers
across the first part, hides in the trees, waits in the median until
there's no cars coming eastbound, runs across the two lanes of traffic there,
and then he gets back in his car and drives away. It does make
perfect sense, and this was explained to me by an FBI agent several years
ago. It's not like sixty four is so heavily traveled that there is never
a time when there are no cars on the road. There are definitely times
where there would be no headlights, no cars coming that you could make that
trek like you were describing Bill on foot, with no worry that you're going
to get slammed into by an eighteen wheeler. If you just wait in the
dark and you don't even have to stand that far back. If you're standing
behind the tree line in the middle of that median, you just wait,
you listen, and then wait till whatever cars or trucks are going by.
I recognize inter Stay sixty four does have traffic twenty four seven, but there
are gaps between clusters of cards and trucks. Yeah. Absolutely, And it
is dark out there at all times. It doesn't even matter that there are
rest areas with well lighted parking lots. It is dark no matter what.
It's an interesting bid of subposition, and that's definitely something that makes sense thinking
about it. We've already hit on this question from Gary S, but let's
go ahead and just put it out there on the record anyway, because it
is a great question. Gary S asks, how convinced are we that these
four crime scenes are actually related? What evidence actually links them if any.
We do need to talk about the second half of this question, for sure,
because shoe the best of our knowledge, and again this is with the
assumption that we have all of the facts, and we don't. Unfortunately the
FBI does not like to share. But to the best of our knowledge,
there is no forensic evidence linking all four crime scenes. Correct and We've asked
this question repeatedly, and we is a number of the Colonial Parkway murders family.
Now, we haven't had a group face to face meeting with the FBI
since January twenty ten, which is unacceptable from my perspective, but we have
had individual meetings with the FBI and the Virginia State Police much more recently.
We've asked them the question over and over again, and the answer continues to
be, according to the FBI and the Virginia State Police, there is nothing
in the forensics that links these four crime scenes. Kristen, what you're saying
continues to be accurate as far as the information has been provided to us by
law enforcement. I do agree with Bill that I think it is very likely
that as some of these cases get solved, others will come off the table.
I do not think at this point that Anna, Maria and Daniel's case
at New Kent is connected to the others. I think that is going to
be the first to go off the table because it just seems more likely to
me, given the fact that there is money missing from Daniel, that what
happened to them may have something to do with a robbery gone bad. Very
low level drug deal gone bad. I think that is more likely than the
theory that I know so many people like, which is that there is a
serial killer walking around and stocking couples, or driving around and stocking couples.
I think if anything is going to fall off the table, so to speak,
first, I think it will be Daniel and Anna Maria. I agree,
and at the same time, I still openly question whether even the three
remaining Colonial Parkway murders are necessarily all related. I could be completely wrong.
I certainly have been wrong before. That's just where I am in twenty twenty
three, based on lots of additional research and as I said, interviewing many
FBI agents, Virginia State Police agents, crime scene reconstruction experts, and not
all of the discussion that we had ended up in the television series. I
sat through lengthy interviews and in many cases twice for hours, discussing the details
of these crime scenes. And again, they're not going to remember everything,
but they remembered a lot. Their observations are firsthand. I'm way less than
convinced that these four double homicides are necessarily all related. Someone a little bit
later down our question list does make a point, she asks whether or not
Lauriane Powell might be considered a parkway case. We consider Laurian Palm, Brian
Pettinger, I call them the parkway adjacent cases. I don't think it's out
of the realm of possibility that either of them might be connected to a leading
suspect that may be connected to one of the four primary parkway cases. Maybe
it's entirely possible that we're going to have to re name and rethink what we
consider the Colonial Parkway murders cases, even accounting for these four and maybe taking
one off the table, Anna, Marie and Daniel. Do we even have
all the cases? Should we be considering Laurie and Brian as part of it?
I don't know. It is definitely something that comes to mind when I
start considering the name as a whole, things that keep us up at time.
Yeah, no, seriously, it is, and we're not alone in
that regard. And by the way, anytime we're talking about any of the
parkway adjacent cases, we're not minimizing the importance of those cases. We're just
saying these four double homicides have been grouped together and referred to as the Colonial
Parkway murders by the media, not by the investigators. Yeah, exactly.
The name itself is a media creation that came out of local Virginia newspaper,
television, and radio coverage back in the nineteen eighties, and they began referring
to them as the Colonial Parkway murders. I've even said, Kristens, there
have been times when I've thought that even the name the Colonial Parkway murders,
it's a little bit misleading because only two of our incidents even happened on the
parkway, and even then maybe only partially on the parkway. As we were
talking about with Keith and Sandy, I'm not sure whatever happened to them even
transpired on the Colonial Parkway. Yeah, in a way, the name itself
is a rabbit hole because we've all assumed that all of these cases, particularly
for folks around the country and around the world that are learning about these cases,
they think they all happened inside the National Park, when the reality is
they didn't. And the interesting thing too, that sort of comes out of
that is the fact that for thirty it's gonna be thirty seven years in October.
For your sister's case, the oldest of them, the case has become
branded, if you will, in this way. There is no way that
we could change that, Moniker. Now we've become so used to referring to
the case in this way that if we started referring to the case by any
other name or by I'm sorry it's sad to say, but it's true.
We started just addressing the cases by the names of the victims. Most people
aren't going to know who we're talking about. They know Colonial Parkway murders as
a whole, they know what that looks like. But a lot of times,
and I include myself in this, before I started working with you,
by the way, I didn't know the names of the victims for a long
time. I knew for double homicides, but as an amorphous whole, that's
what I knew them as. And so it's now. It's weirdly this question
of if the case has to be branded in any way, and as true
crime becomes much more like a media constructs and a publicity machine. You almost
have to brand it in a particular way. If it has to be branded
as anything, it's just the Colonial Parkway murders. I can't think of anything
else we would call it. Certainly we wouldn't call it the Lover's Lean Murders.
That was a goofy decision from Oxygen, and I don't care if they
know it. They didn't pay me, so they didn't pay me to work
on the show they paid you. You can't say anything about it, but
I can. Lovers Lay Murdis was a stupid name, right, How use
would we refer to it? Even though it is a little misleading. I
can't think of any other way we would refer to it. For the record,
I didn't care for the name either. We have twenty one more questions
in this grand line up that we need to answer, and we haven't even
gotten to suspects yet, and certainly not to DNA, which I think most
everyone wants information on. So we are going to have to continue this for
one and possibly two more episodes. If in the meantime you do think of
more burning questions, send them our way. We are happy to respond to
them, either online or right here on the podcast, and we will do
our best. We are entering what I unfortunately have to think of as anniversary
season here because Anna, Maria and Daniels anniversary is Labor Day weekend, and
then come Robin and David's and then Kathy and Becky's. We're going to spend
a lot more time over the next couple of weeks answering questions, putting up
information about the case on our Facebook and Instagram And do we even have a
Twitter page anymore? Oh? I'm sorry? Do we have an X page
anymore? Yes? We do. We have an X page. Okay,
so we'll put stuff up on Facebook and Insta an X. I just can't
call it that, that's ridiculous. But as we continue to move forward,
so please feel free to reach out to us at any of our social media
pages. That is going to do it for this episode of mind Over Murder.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Mind
Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive
producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Our theme music is by Kevin McLeod. Mind Over Murder is distributed in
partnership with Coral Space Media. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter,
or Instagram. You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway Murders on
Facebook and finally, You can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at Bill Thomas.
Five six Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder.