Years later, search for Colonial Pkwy. pair resumes

YORKTOWN

William Phelps knows what it's like to not know.

You are a character in a horror film - you must be - because people don't vanish in real life.

You spend six weeks as an outsider looking in at your life.

Then one day, two hunters stumble on a pair of skeletons less than three miles from the abandoned car your sister and her friend had been in.

Science will confirm what you already know.

You bury your sister. She is 18. You are 16. Nothing is ever the same after that fall day in 1989.

But there is a measure of closure.

Three more stories unfolded much like this one in Hampton Roads during the late 1980s.

One had a different ending. Some say it had no ending at all.

On Saturday - 22 years later - Phelps and a dozen others hoped to change that.

 Phelps gave Petra a pat on her golden head. He and the Labrador stood at the Colonial Parkway overlook where a young couple went missing a year and a half before his sister and her friend.

Petra is a cadaver dog with K-9 Alert, a group from Powhatan that aids in search and rescues in Virginia. Petra and her handler were one of six teams who came to Yorktown on Saturday to search for the remains of Richard "Keith" Call and Cassandra Hailey.

The couple is one of four believed to be the victims of a serial killer. Theirs are the only bodies never found.

None of the cases was ever solved.

More than 20 years after the slayings of young couples on and near the Colonial Parkway inexplicably stopped, the FBI and Virginia State Police are retesting evidence from each of the cases using new DNA technology.

The news has brought the victims' families together again.

If a serial killer really was at work, the missing couple might be within three miles of where their car was found - just like Phelps' sister and her friend.

This parkway overlook was Hailey's teenage hangout.

She and one of her best friends, Amanda Wimmer, would park here to smoke and drink beer before dances. Few people ventured down this unlined road then.

But Wimmer is sure that their remains are within miles of this spot, she said Saturday.

If the search teams turned up empty-handed on this day, Wimmer said, she would come back every day and look herself.

"It's a long shot," said Joyce Call-Canada, the sister of one of the victims. "But it's a shot."

If the killer buried the couple, the odor of decomposition would have spread over time, making their exact location difficult to pinpoint. If they were not buried, wildlife may have scattered their bones.

But a cadaver dog is keen enough to locate a body underwater from a boat. It is keen enough to sniff out decades-old remains.

Petra and her search team emerged less than an hour after they entered the woods adjacent to the overlook.

The FBI had scoured this area again recently. They'd worked for hours, searching the woods and the roadside and the shore of the river. They'd stopped just short of a place called Belfield Plantation, about two miles from where the missing couple's car was found.

As far as the families knew, no one had ever searched farther.

Now they would.

An FBI agent led a caravan of vehicles piled with dogs and handlers and family and friends of the lost.

The Belfield Plantation area is beyond a side road blocked to regular traffic that juts off Colonial Parkway.

Trees cast tall, cool shadows, and towering cattails pop from sticky marshes farther back. There are paths and fields.

Three cadaver dogs went to work.

Well-trained canines will race past a decomposing deer. They will sit on a spot where they sense human remains. This is called a hit. Some dogs bark. Others refuse to move.

At a single place at Belfield Plantation, near a tree and just off a path, all three cadaver dogs made a hit.

Nothing was visible to the human eye. But the dogs remained adamant.

The area was roped off with red tape and readied for excavation.

Days could pass before investigators know what's there.

It might be nothing.

It could be a century-old burial site.

Or it could be Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey, overlooked all these years.

Kristin Davis, (757) 222-5208, kristin.davis@pilotonline.com