Welcome back to another week of Unsolved, everyone. This week’s case appears very similar to a case we talked about a couple weeks ago, the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. This one, though, took place in Virginia in the 1980’s.

From about October 1986 to September 1989, 8 people are presumed to have been murdered near Colonial Parkway in Eastern Virginia. Three pairs were definitively murdered, but another couple went missing but were suspected to have been targeted by the same killer.

One of the more interesting aspects of this case is that the murders were not very similar to each other besides that the victims were killed in pairs and in their vehicles. They were not killed in the same manner, though, which is unique for a serial killing case. The first pair, Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski, were found in their car along Colonial Parkway and their cause of death of strangulation by a rope. Their throats were also slashed afterwards and diesel fuel was poured on the scene in what appears to be an attempt to hide evidence, but the fuel never caught fire, so that didn’t happen. Some important evidence was collected from this first murder, as well, because Thomas was found holding some of the attacker’s hair in her hand and it was hypothesized that it was pulled out during the struggle. There was no evidence of theft or sexual assault, so motive was unclear and made the investigation difficult, however it was later thought that it was a hate crime against lesbian couples.

The second pair was shot to death quite a ways down the road from Colonial Parkway, and neither victim was found in the car. The car was found first with the victims’ clothes inside, and it took another three days to find the bodies along the James River. The 14-year-old female victim may have been sexually assaulted based on how she was discovered, but besides this, very little evidence to go off of was found. The third pair was reported missing, but they are presumed dead and linked to the other killings. The final pair seemed to have been stabbed to death and were again found outside of their vehicle. They were found by a group of hunters in the area, and their car was later found at a rest stop about a quarter mile away from their remains. The victims were once again young adults on the road alone, so this was used to connect them to the rest of the murders

There was very little progress made for about 20 years, but then a group of the victims’ families called detective Steve Spingola to help them because he was retired and available for hire. He proposed that the case was actually committed by multiple killers and were not really interconnected, which was not an unfair hypothesis because the main connection was just that the pairs were all killed along the same road.

There were three main theories about who the killer may have been. One suspect was Darrell Rice, who was found after an attempted vehicular homicide to have restraints in his car that were also at one of the crime scenes. He was also in the same park that the second pair of victims were found in during the same week as their murders, but no physical evidence could tie him to the killings so he was let go. Another suspect was Fred Atwell, a former Sheriff’s deputy in Gloucester County. He was not a very solid candidate because one of the reasons why he was considered a suspect was because he made an enemy of the FBI investigator. He did, however, have a criminal past that included scamming the families of the victims for their money when he said he would use it to help the investigation. The most agreed-upon theory, though, is that the killer was a police officer. Several of the incidents involved the car of the victims having their driver’s side window rolled down, as if they had been pulled over, and there was not another more likely reason that that pattern would exist. That would also have explained why some of the victims’ wallets were found on the dashboard of the car.

This case grew in popularity in the 2010’s but there has still not been any significant progress made since the initial investigation. Maybe Spingola was right and the investigators are wasting their time looking for common threads between the individual killings, or maybe a rogue police officer really did get away with using his power to kill eight people, but we may never know the truth.