Around dusk on Oct. 12, 1986, a passerby happened upon a white Honda Civic leaning nose-first over the edge of a 15-foot embankment just off Virginia’s picturesque Colonial Parkway. The car looked like it had been driven, or perhaps pushed, into a thick stand of woodsy brush along the York River, and was mostly hidden from view to anyone driving by.
Something obviously wasn’t right, and the man called police. Responding officers thought at first they were dealing with a drunk driving accident. The car doors wouldn’t open and a park ranger on the scene shattered the Honda’s rear window in an attempt to rescue the two women trapped inside. But first responders soon realized they wouldn’t be saving two lives, but recovering two bodies.
The car was registered to the driver, 27-year-old U.S. Naval Academy graduate Cathleen Thomas, whose remains were found underneath the hatchback. The passenger, 21-year-old Rebecca Dowski, was a senior at the nearby College of William & Mary. Her body was found in the backseat.
Both women were fully clothed, and neither had been robbed. Bound and strangled with nylon rope, their throats had been slashed, Thomas’ cut so deeply that she was nearly decapitated. Thomas’ wallet and the car’s glove box were found open, suggesting she may have been reaching for her driver’s license and registration when she died.
The interior of the car and both corpses were soaked in diesel fuel, and investigators found a number of discarded matches nearby. It appeared as though someone had tried to torch the evidence, but was stymied by diesel fuel’s higher ignition point as compared to gasoline—diesel can’t be ignited with household matches.
Because the parkway is on federal land, the FBI was called in to lead the investigation into the slayings, which were the first of four double homicides over a three-year span that would come to be known as the Colonial Parkway Murders. A moniker created by the media to begin with, the Colonial Parkway Murders captured the imagination of citizen sleuths who convened on scores of message boards devoted to trying to solve the killings. Although authorities have reportedly scrutinized some 150 persons of interest so far, they have not yet made any arrests.
“Because we’re a cold case, we’re always at the back of the line,” Bill Thomas, Cathleen Thomas’ older brother, told The Daily Beast. “But nobody’s been standing in this line longer than my family has.”
Some of the victims’ cars were found with the driver’s side window rolled partway down, and the victims’ wallets lying nearby, open. Investigators have long believed this suggested the possibility of an official interaction of some sort. According to Bill Thomas, the FBI briefed his family shortly after Cathleen’s murder, saying that she and Rebecca could have been led to their deaths by an “authority figure.” Confused, Bill inquired further. The agents explained that they meant law enforcement. Or, possibly, an imposter “presenting as” law enforcement.
After a successful career in the entertainment industry, Thomas has in recent years devoted the bulk of his waking hours to keeping Cathleen’s name, as well as the names of the other seven Colonial Parkway victims, in the public’s consciousness. In doing so, he has become a spokesman of sorts for all eight families involved. There is no physical evidence that all of the murders were in fact connected or carried out by the same person or people, but there are common elements throughout each: Couples parked in cars along “lovers’ lanes” were killed, with little sign of any struggle. None had been robbed or sexually assaulted.
“Are they related? Are they not related? Is this the work of a serial killer? Or are these potentially independent events?” said Thomas. “I don’t know which is more frightening: the idea that there was a serial killer in the peninsula area of Virginia from 1986 to 1989, or that these double homicides are not related and we have multiple murderers wandering around killing people at random.”
Cathleen Thomas was the only daughter among Joseph and Evelyn Thomas’ four children. Joseph, the patriarch of the family, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1953. He spent 20 years in the military before taking a job as a college professor in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. Richard, the oldest, also went to the Naval Academy, graduating in 1975. He went on to medical school where he trained as an epidemiologist, then served aboard Navy vessels as a doctor. Cathleen kept up the family legacy, being admitted to the Naval Academy in 1977, only the second class to allow female cadets.
“If you ever met my sister, you would totally get why we’re doing this,” said Bill Thomas.
Cathleen learned Russian at the Naval Academy, and was among the first women in the Navy to become Surface Warfare Officer-qualified, Bill said. But she was also gay, which was grounds at the time for being kicked out of the service. It probably didn’t help that Cathleen was already dating a female shipmate.
Under military law at the time, even a consensual same-sex relationship could mean five years in the brig and a dishonorable discharge. In the spring of 1984, Cathleen was put under formal investigation by the U.S. Naval Investigative Service (NIS, today known as NCIS) on suspicion of homosexual activity. Facing a possible court martial—and significantly dimmed career prospects even if she were to be acquitted—Cathleen decided to leave the Navy once her five-year obligation was up. In May 1986, Cathleen separated from the service and got a job working as a stockbroker in Virginia Beach. She was happy living her life openly, and began dating Rebecca Dowski, a senior at William & Mary.
Six months later, both would be dead. The pair were last seen on the evening of Thursday, Oct. 9, leaving a computer lab on the William & Mary campus together. Their bodies were found that Sunday.
Over the next four years, three more double homicides occurred under similar circumstances, leading some investigators—but not all—to believe a serial killer was responsible.
Eleven months after Cathleen and Rebecca were murdered, David Knobling, a 20-year-old who worked for his father’s landscaping business and had just taken a new job in sales, and Robin Edwards, 14, were shot to death execution-style in the Ragged Island Wildlife Refuge, along the James River. Knobling’s truck was found abandoned in a parking area with the windshield wipers on and the radio going; their bodies were found on the riverbank about a mile away.
On Apr. 9, 1988, Christopher Newport University students Cassandra Hailey and Richard “Keith” Call went to a movie together, then a party, in Newport News, Virginia. Call’s red Toyota Celica was found the next day at an overlook along the Colonial Parkway. Their bodies have never been found.
Then, in the fall of 1989, Annamaria Phelps, 18, and Daniel Lauer, 21, went missing while driving to Virginia Beach. Phelps was dating Lauer’s brother. On Sep. 5, 1989, Lauer’s gold Chevy Nova was found unoccupied at a rest stop. Six weeks later, a group of hunters stumbled upon their badly decomposed bodies along a logging road near Interstate 64, between Williamsburg and Richmond. Authorities were unable to determine a cause of death, although further examination by experts at the Smithsonian Institution found that a knife may have been used.
Not all of the murders took place on the Colonial Parkway proper, but they began there and were thus forever linked, at least in the public’s eye, by proximity or modus operandi.
“It just never goes away,” Keith Call’s older sister Joyce Call-Canada told The Daily Beast. “You lay there in the bed at night and you don’t know where your brother’s body is, you don’t know where he is, and it’s an awful feeling. You just don’t know what to do.”
Two of the cases, the tandem slayings of Cathleen and Rebecca, and Cassandra Hailey and Keith Call, were—and continue to be—overseen by the FBI. The other two, by dint of geographical happenstance, fell under the jurisdiction of the Virginia State Police.
“We were actually quite optimistic, thinking it’s an FBI case,” said Bill Thomas. “You know, they’re the best in the world and all that sort of thing.”
But then the investigation seemed to go cold.
“My father was very actively involved for a few years. But as the case cooled off, we just kind of let it go. And it wasn’t until September 2009, when I decided to get involved much more heavily in the case, that we began to build this momentum again,” he said
Acutely aware that the 23rd anniversary of his sister’s death was approaching, Bill decided, on a whim, to google “Colonial Parkway Murders” one evening after work. He stumbled onto a news story that revealed 78 highly graphic FBI crime scene photos—including ones of his sister’s remains—had somehow been leaked.
Bill promptly became a squeaky wheel, and the FBI agreed to redouble its efforts in solving the murders. That was more than a decade ago, and the case still hasn’t been cracked. Working with the FBI has not always been easy, Thomas explained.
“I’ve told them flat out, ‘You people are impossible to do business with,’” he said. “And I’m not talking about Republicans versus Democrats here. I’m talking about inside the FBI. Who’s in, who’s out, who’s got the inside track, who’s got the resources, and this impacts cases like ours directly.”
Getting information from the FBI “really has been frustrating,” said Joyce Call-Canada, who works as a realtor in Gloucester, Virginia. “Throughout all these years, never has it not been frustrating.”
The FBI declined to comment on a detailed list of questions sent by The Daily Beast, which included a query about the status of the investigation. To that end, an email sent to a tip line set up by the bureau in 2010 was returned as undeliverable.
“There’s just some cases that bug the shit out of me,” retired Milwaukee homicide detective Steven Spingola told The Daily Beast. “Cathy Thomas is one of them… Here she goes out, takes an oath to protect us, and she winds up getting killed—and no one can help her. I mean, it’s really a sad deal.”
In the fall of 2001, Spingola was chosen to attend the highly selective 10-week professional development course at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia. One of the cops there had recently been promoted to a top position within a homicide unit in Virginia, and had some police reports with him that were related to the Colonial Parkway Murders. It was shortly after the 9/11 terror attack, and Spingola said he and the other officers attending had been asked not to leave the campus on weekends. To occupy himself during this unexpected downtime, he began reading through the Colonial Parkway case files.
Over the next few years, Spingola couldn’t stop thinking about it. In 2010, he reached out to the Colonial Parkway Murder victims’ families and volunteered to fly to Virginia and re-investigate the case himself. The families picked up Spingola’s expenses, which Thomas said were minimal.
“Everybody sort of had an idea that it might have been somebody with military and law enforcement experience,” said Spingola, who doesn’t believe the four Colonial Parkway double homicides are linked. “The window [on the driver’s side] was rolled down a little bit like there was a traffic stop involved. Like they were going to pass out a wallet or something.”
Spingola reviewed the FBI crime scene photos that had recently caused a stir, and got the impression that Cathleen and Rebecca were likely killed somewhere else and then stuffed back into the Honda because there wasn’t much blood in the car or on the ground nearby for such a vicious slaying.
“I mean, Cathy’s head was almost severed, decapitated,” said Spingola. “The wounds were angry, it was unbelievably brutal. To me, it always reeked of some guy who didn’t like homosexuals.”
According to Spingola, an FBI source told him the bureau looked into a male NIS agent who had been heavily involved in the investigation into Cathleen’s private life.
In the spring of 1984, the NIS began staking out the Hershee, an iconic gay bar in Norfolk, according to Blaine Pardoe and Victoria Hester’s 2017 book A Special Kind of Evil. Cathleen had reportedly been spotted at the Hershee more than 10 times, often with another member of the Navy. On her last visit, Cathleen showed up with a civilian whom she introduced as her girlfriend, Pardoe and Hester wrote.
Although the Navy was now accepting women into the fleet, many senior male officers didn’t like it. The NIS, which also investigated members of the Marine Corps, embarked on so-called witch hunts for lesbians among the ranks. In one instance, a female sailor was nearly thrown out of the Navy after she resisted a male colleague’s advances. Derailing a woman’s naval career, especially a woman who graduated from the Naval Academy, “would validate the all-male mentality that some leaders shared; proving that integration of women was a misguided mistake,” according to Pardoe and Hester.
NIS agents began tailing Cathleen, and spotted her with a woman in her white Honda Civic, Pardoe and Hester wrote. In May 1984, the lead NIS investigator showed up at Cathleen’s home for an unannounced visit. But Cathleen didn’t answer the door. NIS agents interviewed postal workers about the sorts of mail Cathleen received, and interviewed former shipmates to find evidence of Cathleen’s sexuality. In June, the NIS summoned Cathleen for questioning.
One of the men was particularly obsessed with Cathleen, said Spingola.
“He accused her of being homosexual, and they were going to court martial her,” he continued. “She basically told him, ‘Hey, go fuck yourself, you ain’t talking to me that way.’ And this guy took it personally, and he had made some threats.”
After an intervention by the captain of Cathleen’s ship, the investigation was closed without further charges. The NIS agent was apparently infuriated about this, said Spingola, adding, “Now, whether the Navy intelligence people ever looked at that, I don’t know.”
In his conversations with the FBI, Bill Thomas has noticed that, if there is one recurring theme among suspects, it’s that there are “a lot of people from law enforcement. I mean a lot.”
“National Park Service rangers, who patrol this 23 mile long Colonial Parkway, several different county sheriffs, a number of people from local law enforcement, federal law enforcement, retired law enforcement,” he said. “This makes some of the investigators very uncomfortable, but it is what it is. I’m not saying any of these people are guilty, but the investigation is going to go where it goes.”
Over the years, a long list of possible suspects emerged but none have ever been charged. One, a security guard in Virginia named Ron Little who emigrated to the U.S. from New Zealand, outed himself as a suspect in the Colonial Parkway Murders via a rambling, nine-page letter he sent to the media in 1989. Little was subsequently deported back to New Zealand. His current whereabouts are unknown.
Another suspect, a former Gloucester County, Virginia, deputy sheriff named Fred Atwell, denied any involvement in the murders. His behavior always seemed strange to the victims’ families, who thought Atwell knew more about the killings than he admitted. After a descent into homelessness and petty crime, Atwell died in 2018.
In 1990, a woman in Canada stopped her car in an unpopulated area to fix a flat. While she was changing the tire, a man snatched the woman and carried her into the woods. There, her abductor tied her to a tree and set her on fire. Investigators identified a person of interest who had been in the vicinity, and learned that he had also been convicted of a sex crime that took place near the Colonial Parkway. However, Canadian police cleared the man and arrested someone else, reportedly prompting the FBI to delete him from their list.
Then, of course, there’s always the possibility that Rebecca Dowski was the primary target. Spingola noted that Cathleen was Rebecca’s first same-sex relationship, and that Rebecca had broken things off with a male classmate at William & Mary in order to start dating her.
“He didn’t take it real well,” said Spingola, echoing a similar recollection by Thomas, who said the FBI told him they ruled him out after he presented agents with a plausible alibi.
One big reason the Colonial Parkway Murders remain unsolved likely has to do with decades of infighting and jurisdictional friction between the various law enforcement agencies involved, said Spingola.
The FBI, for example, kept local police in the dark about the Thomas-Dowski murders for more than two weeks after their bodies were discovered.
“I can tell you the FBI was not in any hurry to share information,” said Spingola. “The cops we talked to said that the FBI came in and kind of said, ‘Hey, look, we’re the FBI, we’re the paragon of investigative excellence, get the fuck out of our way.’ And that was basically it.”
Today, all of the original investigators on the Colonial Parkway Murders are retired. Many have died. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for cold case investigators to glean insights from anyone who was actually there. Moreover, homicide investigations today play out far differently than they did three decades ago.
If Cathleen Thomas had been murdered in 2021, law enforcement would be able to subpoena her emails and cellphone records and track her recent movements with automated license plate reader data. From there, investigators could start narrowing down a prime suspect. But she wasn’t, and they can’t.
Retired NYPD detective sergeant Joseph Giacalone used to supervise the Bronx Cold Case Squad. Now an adjunct professor at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Giacalone told The Daily Beast that it can be difficult to know where to start when digging into a seemingly unsolvable cold case: “I don’t have evidence. I don’t have interviews. I don’t have any people to talk to. I don't have any witnesses. What am I supposed to do?”
For one, DNA technology has improved by leaps and bounds. Las Vegas police recently announced a private testing lab helped investigators identify a suspect in a 1989 murder using just 15 cells of DNA evidence. In the Thomas-Dowski murders, the leaked crime scene photos show a section of rope in Cathleen’s hair, and the medical examiner reported giving the FBI fingernail clippings from both women. DNA associated with a clump of hair found in Cathleen’s hand, presumably yanked from her killer’s head, could also be tested. Other evidence that could now be looked at again includes blood samples, the clothing that Cathleen and Rebecca were wearing, and fabric and other materials from inside the car.
“I’ve been pushing the FBI very hard behind the scenes to do a new top-to-bottom review of all of the evidence available,” said Bill Thomas. “And I want them to go back and retest the evidence using the absolute latest forensic genomic sequencing, and see if there are some opportunities being presented there.”
Although the bureau said it has done some new testing on physical evidence, it is extremely slow going, according to Thomas. But new technology could offer a breakthrough. As for a complete re-analysis of DNA from the crime scene using the latest scientific methods, the FBI told Thomas that it could cost up to $30,000, and that the bureau might not be willing to pay. When Thomas said his family would put up the money, his FBI point of contact told him it was against the law for the FBI to accept that sort of gift.
“And I just went, ‘Look, we’re talking about a figure of $30,000,’” said Thomas. “After you’ve put tens of thousands of hours into my sister’s case, you’re telling me that for lack of $30,000—which, by the way, I think their figure’s high from talking to the same labs—but you’re telling me the FBI isn’t willing to spend $30,000 to put this case over the goal line?”
There are roughly 250,000 unsolved murders in the U.S. with about 6,000 new ones added each year. Police departments nationwide are solving a smaller percentage of homicides than in decades past, and those clearance rates continue to fall, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.
“This is a fatiguing, difficult thing to deal with,” Bill Thomas said, adding that experts tell him that his sister’s murder is a solvable case.
Thomas remains cautiously optimistic. Every couple of weeks, he gets a new tip from someone about the Colonial Parkway Murders. Although the FBI has made it abundantly clear they don’t like Thomas engaging these people, he doesn’t particularly care. If they have anything that seems useful, Thomas always asks if they would be willing to speak with the FBI. He then makes the necessary introductions.
Some of the tips come from people with new information about suspects whose names have already been made public. Often, he learns something that corroborates an existing suspicion. Other times, a tip can open up new avenues investigators may not have considered. One tip Thomas received took him all the way to Australia, after a source drew comparisons to a notorious killer known as “Mr. Cruel.” Another offered fresh insight into an old suspect, who reportedly acted inappropriately years ago with the tipster’s mother. Thomas monitors chat rooms and Reddit pages, sifting through countless numbers of crowdsourced theories for useful clues.
He said he doesn’t know if law enforcement follows up on what he brings them, but he’s determined to keep trying. Sooner or later, he hopes someone will say something that’s of value to investigators.
Eight of the 16 parents of the Colonial Parkway Murder victims are no longer alive, something that Thomas refers to as a “generational shift” in a case that has dragged on for so long. For the most part, the advocates now are siblings.
“My father was always out there beating the pavement trying to find answers, and he never let it go,” said Joyce Call-Canada. “Then there was a lull after my dad passed away, and then I just started contacting people again. And there was no rhyme or reason to it. The worst part for me was not doing anything.”
They are all hopeful that one day, the Colonial Parkway Murders will be cracked.
“You know, almost all killers talk,” said Steve Spingola. “It’s amazing… Because you would think, even if it’s your brother, that comes up to you and says, ‘Hey, you know, I did something really bad last night.’ I’d call the cops and say, ‘Hey, look, I got to talk to you.’ I mean, it’s just the way it is.”
