Family of serial killer’s latest victim learns the truth

It was March 8, 1988.

A car with several young people inside careened down a deserted stretch of Hickory Fork Road in Gloucester County.

About 11:30 p.m., Laurie Ann Powell, 18, and her boyfriend of three years, Chris Cutler, began to argue. She demanded he stop the car and let her out.

“Laurie Ann stormed out of the car near Route 17 in White Marsh,” the Daily Press reported at the time.

Powell’s mother, JoAnn Compton, now 74, said her daughter was upset the 20-year-old Cutler was driving erratically. “She wanted him to let her drive, and he wouldn’t do it,” she said.

About 40 minutes after he dropped off Powell, Cutler returned to look for her. But he couldn’t find her. Residents at nearby homes and employees at a convenience store also hadn’t seen her.

About three weeks later, on April 2, 1988, a boater on the Elizabeth River in Portsmouth spotted a woman’s body floating near Craney Island, and called the Coast Guard.

It was Laurie Ann Powell, stabbed multiple times.

The case went unsolved for 37 years. But earlier this year, the Virginia State Police sent semen traces found on Powell’s body to a Florida laboratory for testing — and matched it to a serial killer.

On Nov. 13, the State Police linked the slaying to Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., a Lancaster County man who died in 2017 at age 63. If Wilmer were alive, police added, he would be charged with murder.

‘Worse than we thought’

It was only a few days before the news conference that Powell’s family learned that she also had been sexually assaulted 37 years ago.

And while the DNA from that assault was what solved the case, learning she suffered such a fate was tough to take.

“I always told my husband that God didn’t want this case solved, because once we learned about it, we would find out it was worse than what we thought,” Compton said. “And it turned out to be just that.”

She and her husband, Powell’s stepfather John Compton, now 81, thought for decades that the teen was likely killed during a sudden argument.

Powell’s friends and family have said that she and Cutler often got into physical scraps, which helped fuel decades of suspicions.

“Your mind kind of goes a particular way,” JoAnn Compton said. “It never occurred to me that she was attacked — raped and somebody slit her throat. It’s just more than a person can handle.”

“It puts it on another level … that she was sexually assaulted before she was murdered,” added Powell’s sister, Cindy Kirchner, 58, of York County. The wound to the throat, she said, was also a newly provided detail.

Wilmer’s fourth killing

This is the fourth killing linked to Wilmer. Revelations are coming out piecemeal as investigators compare his DNA case-by-case to local slayings — and there’s still no telling how high his body count is.

In January 2024, the State Police announced Wilmer was tied to the September 1987 slaying of 20-year-old David Knobling and 14-year-old Robin Edwards in Isle of Wight. That was one of the so-called “Colonial Parkway Murders” — a series of slayings of young couples on so-called lover’s lanes.

But it’s now clear that Wilmer also targeted women who were alone.

Aside from Powell, he was linked to the July 1989 slaying of Teresa Howell, a 28-year-old woman found sexually assaulted and strangled in Hampton.

But Wilmer’s implication in the Powell case has led Cutler to be cleared once and for all.

At the November news conference, the State Police said Powell’s former boyfriend was eliminated as the source of the DNA found on his then-girlfriend.

For years, Cutler — who died in 2016 — regretted leaving Laurie Ann on the deserted roadway that night.

“It haunted him for so long,” said his widow, Marla Cutler, who married him in 2002 and lives in Tennessee. “That’s the last thing you want to happen to your old lady when you leave her on the side of the road.”

It bothered him, she said, that so many people suspected him.

“He said everybody in town accused him, but nobody would believe him,” she said. “And after so long of telling people that he didn’t do it, he just quit talking about it, because people didn’t believe him.”

Cutler moved to Alaska for a commercial fishing job shortly after Powell’s death, and moved to Tennessee in 2005. But in October 2016, the 49-year-old father of three died of an accidental fentanyl overdose during a fishing trip off the Massachusetts coast, his widow said.

Marla Cutler said that if her husband was still alive, he would be happy to know that everyone now knows the truth. “It’s too bad that they didn’t say something when he was alive,” she added. “He was a good man.”

Young woman missing

Laurie Ann Powell’s family moved to Gloucester from Hampton in 1984, with the teen graduating from Gloucester High School in 1987.

She made friends easily and often. A Daily Press story after her disappearance said she had “beauty contest good looks,” was a petite 5-foot-2 and 110 pounds, and competed in the 1987 Miss Teen Virginia contest.

After graduation, she began working at her mother’s video rental store, JoAnn’s Video, off Main Street in Gloucester.

The Comptons didn’t worry immediately when she didn’t come home immediately on March 8, 1988. She was scheduled to be off from work the next day, and Compton assumed she was staying with friends.

But by that Friday, she still hadn’t come by the store to get her paycheck. “And when she didn’t show up for work the day she was supposed to show up for work, I knew something was wrong,” Compton said.

The Gloucester Sheriff’s Office treated the disappearance as a likely runaway. Powell had run away once before — only to be found to be staying at a friend’s house a few streets from home.

But Compton pressed the sheriff to take the case seriously.

“It took me stirring the pot,” she said. “I contacted the media because I thought that seemed to be the only way that you can get any help.”

Compton made a poster with her daughter’s picture and other details: “If you have seen Laurie or have any knowledge of her whereabouts, we ask you to please contact the Gloucester Sheriff’s Department.”

Gloucester later used canines to search the spot where Powell was dropped off. Helicopters searched remote areas of the county. Residents scoured neighborhoods.

“Why would anyone want to hurt her?” Compton asked at the time. “She didn’t do anything to anyone.”

A story in the Daily Press said Powell would often thumb rides to get around. “She doesn’t like to rely on anyone,” Compton told the newspaper. “She walked or hitchhiked anywhere she went in the county.”

But Powell’s sister, Kirchner, said last month that the “hitchhiking” was more likely friends and acquaintances seeing Powell and stopping to give her a lift.

“I think everyone in the county knew her,” Kirchner said. “So if they saw her walking, they’d be stopping to pick her up because she was very popular.”

People began calling the video shop with their own theories. “I can’t tell you the number of people who came in and told me that the body’s been found,” she said. “And I would call the authorities, and they would say nobody’s been found.”

Body found in waterway

But weeks after her disappearance, on April 2, Powell’s body was found in the Elizabeth River. It was the day before Easter Sunday.

Later that week, hundreds of mourners attended her funeral at Providence Baptist Church. “There were people standing outside on the lawn because there wasn’t enough space inside,” Kirchner said. “And they were standing up along the wall in the church.”

One of Powell’s girlfriends who had been in the car with her that night struggled with years of guilt. “She dealt with it really hard,” Compton said. “She kept thinking if she got out with her, there would have been two of them, not just her.”

Kirchner, for her part, was only 20 when her younger sister was killed. “I went from being a sibling to being an only child,” she said. Though she laments the time lost, she said that “being her sister for 18 years was a privilege.”

“She had the fearless energy, the kind that drew people in and reminded them to appreciate every day,” Kirchner said at the November news conference, calling Powell “bold, brave, spontaneous, full of life, witty, smart, and beautifully herself, a true firecracker.”

Cracking the case

As her parents got older, Kirchner, an accountant by trade, became the primary liaison with the State Police.

This past February, a police investigator called her to say the police got a grant to test DNA in the case and were sending it off to a Florida laboratory.

Before that, the family believed any such biological material had washed away after the teen’s weeks in the water. At the time, Kirchner said, the agent “didn’t say they were looking at anyone specific,” Kirchner said.

“He said we would know something in a few months,” Kirchner said of the detective.

The State Police did not respond to a request last week on what caused them to investigate a link to Wilmer.

A State Police agent called Kirchner in October, asking to come to her home to talk, and she agreed.

“That’s when he let me know that they had identified Alan Wilmer as the suspect,” Kirchner said. “As the murderer.”

She said it was the first time anyone in the family had heard of Wilmer as having any connection to her sister’s killing.

State Police officials said they have not determined where Wilmer encountered Powell after she was dropped off. They don’t know where he killed her — or where he dumped her body into the water.

Powell’s mother said she appreciates the State Police taking a new look at the case.

“I never really thought it would go anywhere,” Compton said. “I never really thought anyone would care … especially as the years went on.”

“We’re very, very grateful to the State Police because they never gave up on it,” Compton added. “They kept going, going, and I’m just sorry that they didn’t find this man sooner, before he hurt someone else.”

Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com