When 63-year-old Alan W. Wilmer Sr. died in December 2017, Virginia authorities needed to identify him and took a DNA sample – genetic material that six years later linked him to the killings of three people in the 1980s, officials said Tuesday.
— Read on amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/01/09/us/virginia-cold-cases-dna-resolution/index.html
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https://blainepardoe.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/two-of-the-colonial-parkway-murders-solved/
Thanks for the link. The information and reporting from the past few days seems a little murky and incomplete. I didn’t read in any of the reporting that Wilmer had taken and passed a polygraph back in the day. Piecing together a few news reports it sounds like the Virginia Department of Forensic Science identified a common suspect “a couple years ago” based on DNA in the Isle of Wight and city of Hampton killings, but because Wilmer had no criminal record his DNA was not in CODIS and at that point law enforcement was left with a DNA connection between two of the serial cases but no link to a suspect. Law enforcement refers to a recent extensive review of the initial suspects in these murders, learning Wilmer had died in 2017, “legally obtaining” his DNA, and getting a hit this past June to the DNA developed a few years ago. Apparently there was no genetic genealogy analysis done on the DNA when it was developed “a couple years ago.”
So, like Rex Heuermann in the Gilgo Beach serial murders, Alan Wilmer, Sr., was an early suspect. They and their vehicles are right there in the early days of the investigation, as is often the situation. Why the OCCK cold case was never approached in this manner–a close, painstaking review of all initial suspects and sophisticated DNA testing to not only try to establish a solid link between the four murdered kids, but to attempt to develop nuclear DNA that could now yield answers, will forever mark this serial murder case as “unsolvable.” Of course the initial tips in my brother’s murder were lost by Birmingham PD, thus erasing the valuable initial leads, but there were three prior murder’s worth of “initial suspects,” many of whom were dismissed by polygraph or alibi. DIGITIZE THE CASE FILE AND SUBMIT THE EVIDENCE TO A THIRD PARTY LAB. You can’t even tell the public you have conducted adequate testing to connect the four victims; you apparently never considered multiple child killers or multiple participants. But you can now, if you are serious about closing this cold case. Then you, too, can give some murky press conference and be rid of people like me who just want some measure of “justice” for the child victims from Oakland County.