Police continue to investigate 28-year-old murder (2024)

Nearly 30 years after Alicia Showalter Reynolds disappeared along U.S. 29 in Culpeper County, the Johns Hopkins pharmacology student’s younger sister has moved on with her life.

But she, and her family, still feel the impact of the unsolved murder.

“It was so random and so unexpected,” Barbara Showalter Josenhans said in a telephone interview this week. “It’s still unbelievable 28 years later.”

The Reynolds case has returned to the spotlight recently in part because March 2 marked 28 years since she vanished from the rural Virginia roadside. The case is gaining more attention also because of a pair of recent cold murder case developments — one in New York and the other in Stafford County.

On the afternoon of March 2, 1996, the 25-year-old Reynolds was driving her white Mercury Tracer along a rural and hilly stretch of U.S. 29 in Culpeper County, heading from Baltimore toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, which were visible to her on the western horizon.

Reynolds never reached her destination. She was heading to Charlottesville, where her mother waited to meet her daughter for a shopping trip. Later that day, Reynolds’ car was found about five miles south of downtown Culpeper, abandoned along U.S. 29.

Though the area is rural, there were then and remain numerous houses near that section of highway where Reynolds’ car was found. The spot is still marked at the end of a guardrail with a flower bouquet and wooden cross.

Josenhans said she had mostly given up hope on the case, but that started changing last year.

“I feel like there’s been some more movement in the last nine months,” she said. “And more and more cases are being solved. I’ve been following the Colonial Parkway situation,” a case in which DNA evidence identified a suspect.

In January, police said DNA linked Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., 65, to some of the parkway murders, which happened between 1986 and 1989, when three couples were killed and a fourth couple disappeared and have never been found. Wilmer died in 2017.

Potential suspects have been linked to Reynolds’ murder over the years, including Richard Evonitz, who kidnapped and murdered three Spotsylvania County girls in 1996 and 1997. Evonitz killed himself in 2002 as police closed in on him in Florida.

Yet, in the 28 years since the abduction and murder of Reynolds, no one has been publicly identified or charged by police in her case.

The lead agency in Reynolds’ case, the Virginia State Police, recently released a statement marking the 28-year mark of Reynolds’ murder.

The department said investigators “have received more than 10,000 leads in the 28 years they have investigated this case. State police remain hopeful that this case will come to a successful resolution and continue to encourage the public to come forward with any information related to the investigation.”

On the day of Reynolds’ disappearance, the Johns Hopkins University graduate student was reported by witnesses to be standing outside her car talking with a man. There was a dark pickup truck also parked on the shoulder.

Reynolds was last seen getting into the pickup, possibly a Nissan, with the man whose only remaining public trace to this day are sketches gleaned from passersby. At the time, he was described as a white man between 35 and 45 years old with a medium build and brown hair.

After Reynolds’ disappearance, reports started coming in from women who said a man driving a dark pickup truck on U.S. 29 had tried, and in some cases succeeded, to coax them to pull over using a ruse about their cars having mechanical problems.

From those reports and Reynolds’ slaying, law enforcement believed a killer was hunting along the highway, a person believed to be the so-called Route 29 Stalker.

The sketches from Reynolds’ case returned to prominence again recently as media noted a resemblance between the renderings and a suspect in the Long Island Serial Killer case, Rex Heuermann.

Heuermann, a 60-year-old Massapequa resident and architect in New York City, faces charges in the deaths of four women whose remains were first discovered in 2009 along Long Island’s Gilgo Beach. The remains of at least 10 victims were discovered in the area.

Heuermann, who was arrested in 2023, has ties to Virginia through his mother. She owns a home in a rural area near Charlottesville, according to media reports and an affidavit that was part of an investigation by John Ray, an attorney who has represented families of the Gilgo Beach victims.

In November, Josenhans talked about Heuermann’s resemblance to the sketches for an article in The U.S. Sun.

Josenhans told The Free Lance–Star she hadn’t been following the Heuermann case and only noticed the resemblance to the sketches after being contacted by a reporter.

She said the family has talked to state police investigators about Heuermann and were told investigators are “taking every angle possible to get the case solved.”

The Free Lance–Star asked the state police about any connection to Heuermann or others in Reynolds’ case.

“At this stage of the ongoing investigation into the murder of Alicia Showalter Reynolds, there is no evidence that connects her death to any other homicides within or beyond Virginia,” the state police said. “Investigators are continuously re-examining the case to identify any potential, forensic links to possible suspects and/or other crimes.”

DNA technology is something the Showalter family hopes can close the case.

“My brother and I, as well as our parents, are very interested in making sure there is some deeper DNA work” on the case, Josenhans said. “More and more cases are being solved with this forensic DNA research.”

She is confident the state police can close the case, explaining that investigators recently said they “are going through and reworking the case from day one and relooking at evidence and resubmitting evidence for testing.”

DNA technology’s use in a nearly 40-year-old unsolved Stafford murder could offer a glimmer of hope for Reynolds’ family.

The Stafford Sheriff’s Office announced last week that it arrested Elroy Neal Harrison, 65, charging him with the 1986 murder of county resident Jacqueline Lard, 40. Harrison also is a suspect in a 1989 Fairfax County homicide. He has not been connected to Reynolds’ death.