In the late summer of 1989, 18-year-old Annamaria Phelps and 21-year-old Daniel Lauer vanished while on a journey to Virginia Beach, Virginia. The pair had left Amelia County on the night of September 4, 1989, heading eastbound on Interstate 64 in Lauer's 1972 Chevrolet Nova. When they failed to arrive at their destination, their families reported them missing.
A day later, on September 5, Virginia State Police discovered Lauer's abandoned car at a westbound rest stop on I-64 in New Kent County, pointing away from their intended direction of travel. The keys were still in the ignition, and Phelps's purse was found inside, suggesting that robbery was not the primary motive.
The search for the missing pair came to a grim conclusion on October 19, 1989. A group of hunters stumbled upon their skeletal remains in a wooded area off a logging road, about a mile from where the car had been found. The bodies were covered with an electric blanket that had been in Lauer's car. Due to the advanced state of decomposition, investigators at the time could not definitively determine the cause of death or whether a sexual assault had occurred. However, there were indications that Annamaria may have been stabbed.
For decades, the case of Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer remained cold, one of a series of unsolved homicides in the area known as the 'Colonial Parkway Murders.' These cases, which occurred between 1986 and 1989, targeted young couples. The various causes of death in the series included strangulation, shooting, and stabbing. A significant breakthrough in the larger investigation came in January 2024 when authorities announced a link in two of the other murders to a deceased local fisherman named Alan Wilmer Sr. While not conclusively linked to the Phelps-Lauer case through DNA, Wilmer has been named as a primary suspect in their deaths. No arrests have been made as Wilmer died in 2017. The investigation into the full scope of the Colonial Parkway Murders remains ongoing.
