Suspect in 3 other killings now linked to teen girl’s 1988 cold case murder: Virginia police
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(NORFOLK, Va.) — A man suspected of killing at least three other people has now been identified as the suspect in a teenager’s 1988 cold case murder, Virginia authorities announced.
Laurie Ann Powell, 18, was last seen alive on March 8, 1988, walking along a road in Gloucester County, which is about 60 miles east of Richmond, Virginia State Police spokesperson Robin Lawson said at a news conference on Friday.
Powell’s body was found on April 2, 1988, in the Elizabeth River near Craney Island, which is just off of Norfolk, Lawson said. She had been stabbed multiple times, Lawson said.
Alan Wilmer Sr. — who died at his Virginia home in December 2017 at the age of 63 — has now been linked to Powell’s case via DNA, and if he was alive today, he would be charged with her murder, authorities announced.
Last year, investigators determined Wilmer was also the suspect in three other murders: David Knobling and Robin Edwards from 1987 and Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell from 1989, officials said.
The murders of Knobling and Edwards were from “a series of double murders collectively known as the Colonial Parkway murders,” Lawson said.
Investigators are now looking into if Wilmer is suspected of committing additional crimes, she said.
“We are still seeking the public’s help through our continued efforts to seek justice for the victims of these and other unsolved crimes,” Lawson said.
“Any tip could be useful in solving other cold cases,” Virginia State Police Capt. Timothy Reibel added.
Powell’s sister, Cindy Kirchner, spoke at the news conference about the 18-year-old’s short life, saying, “She didn’t wait for life to happen — she made it happen.”
“She was bold, brave, spontaneous, full of life, witty, smart and beautifully herself. A true firecracker,” Kirchner said. “She spoke her mind, followed her heart and never apologized for being herself.”
“After 37 years of heartbreak and unanswered questions, our family has finally received the long-awaited news that the murder of our beloved daughter, sister, Laurie Ann, has been solved,” Kirchner said, overcome with emotion. “While nothing can erase the pain of losing Laurie Ann, today we find comfort knowing that the truth has come to light.”
(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, has called “rapidly reusable, reliable rockets” the key to humans becoming a multiplanetary society. And when it comes to his company’s Falcon 9, SpaceX has shown that a rocket can do all those things.
The Falcon 9 has now completed 542 missions, 497 landings and 464 reflights, according to the SpaceX website.
But to reach the Moon and Mars and establish settlements on both, SpaceX will need its larger, more complex and significantly more powerful Starship and its Super Heavy booster to reach Falcon 9’s level of reliability and reusability.
Soon, SpaceX will have the chance to show that Starship’s successful August flight, the first to complete all its primary mission goals, was no fluke.
Barring a delay due to bad weather or mechanical issues, the stainless steel Starship and Super Heavy booster will conduct its 11th flight test on Monday, Oct. 13, at 7:15 p.m. ET, from the company’s Starbase in South Texas. A mission the company hopes will build on the much-needed success of its previous test. SpaceX will be operating Starship autonomously and there will be no astronauts aboard during the flight.
In late August, Starship and its Super Heavy booster successfully reached space on a suborbital trajectory at a near-orbital velocity, deploying a series of Starlink simulators before returning to Earth with such navigational precision that the reentry was captured on a camera attached to a remote buoy in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
“I would give [flight test 10] an A-plus. That was an A-plus performance. The only thing that was a little bit off was that there was some damage in the aft skirt compartment of Starship during the flight, but most of the mission objectives were achieved,” said Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at MIT and editor-in-chief of the “Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets.” “I don’t think this could have gone much better,” he added.
But now, de Weck says SpaceX needs to demonstrate that it can build on its August success and move the program forward with new mission objectives.
“I think the next step is to actually land the Starship, still not go into orbit and stay over multiple orbits, but actually land and recover the actual Starship,” said de Weck. “Recovery of the Starship, an upright landing, with retro propulsion on a fixed platform, that’s the next step.”
SpaceX is not planning an upright, fixed platform landing for the upcoming 11th flight test. Like the previous mission, the Starship will splash down in the Indian Ocean. The Super Heavy first stage booster, with its 24 Raptor engines, which SpaceX said was previously used during flight test eight, is also scheduled to splash down in the ocean. In several previous missions, it returned to the launch site and was caught by the tower’s mechanical “chopstick” arms.
The development of Starship hasn’t come easily for SpaceX, with several high-profile setbacks along the way. However, despite an explosion on the launch pad during a pre-flight engine test and several explosions and mechanical failures during previous test flights, Musk has long maintained that learning from failures is an integral part of SpaceX’s engineering process.
“I’m not surprised where the program is. It’s moving forward through the usual SpaceX iterative development model, and not surprisingly, it’s behind SpaceX’s ambitious schedule projections,” said Greg Autry, associate provost for space commercialization and strategy at the University of Central Florida. “But that wouldn’t make it any different than almost everything else that they’ve done in the past, other than that the scale of this is so large,” he added.
Autry is President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the chief financial officer of NASA.
Autry says he’s confident that SpaceX is headed in the right direction and said that Elon Musk and his companies tend to prove their critics wrong in the long run, delivering results even if it takes longer than anticipated.
“About ten years ago, Elon Musk promised me I was going to have a self-driving car shortly, and a lot of people said that was completely crazy. It wasn’t shortly, but I now have a self-driving car. I literally get in my car, push the button, and fifty miles later, I arrive at work. It is amazing. He delivers eventually,” Autry said.
Experts say that making the next generation of U.S.-designed and built rockets and spacecraft work is critical to achieving NASA’s goals of not only returning to the Moon but building a permanent lunar settlement and doing it before the Chinese.
During a late September ceremony at the Johnson Space Center announcing the new class of NASA astronauts, Acting NASA Administrator and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy spoke about the competition for space dominance.
“Now some are challenging our leadership in space, say, like the Chinese, and I’ll just tell you this, I’ll be damned if the Chinese beat NASA or beat America back to the Moon,” said Duffy. “We are going to win. We love challenges. We love competition, and we are going to win the second space race back to the Moon,” he added.
Autry, who first wrote about a new space race with China back in 2010, says China is determined to reach the Moon and dominate low-Earth orbit, but he believes the global competition will push American efforts forward.
“There are very credible people saying that they’re about to eclipse us in the next five years. I think that’s great for the prospect of competition that spurs us to work harder and take our role more seriously, and frankly to put funding into programs that we badly, badly need to fund,” said Autry.
Autry says that today’s space race should be compared to the “Age of Exploration” in the 15th and 16th centuries. He points out that while China had “an ambitious sailing-exploration program” in the early 1400s, European countries overtook the Chinese when the Europeans accelerated their global exploration efforts later in the century, at a time when China was pulling back.
“We are at that same moment in time right now. The countries that aggressively pursue going to the Moon and using the assets of space will dominate human history for the next several hundred years,” Autry said.
Autry believes that the billions of dollars being spent by companies like SpaceX and the federal government to support space exploration, return to the Moon and potentially get to Mars is money well spent.
“The countries that choose to take advantage of space resources will be wealthy, prosperous and happier than the countries that don’t. We have plenty of history to show that,” Autry said.
Autry says you just have to look at the first space program to see the benefits of this kind of investment.
“We would not have the computing environment, AI, the internet, solar power, fuel cells, and a variety of technologies at the level they are now if we had not made those investments that drove so much effort into engineering development and STEM education. It created the boom we’ve experienced since the second half of the 20th century,” he added.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’s pulling back on his decision to send troops to clean up crime in San Francisco this weekend.
Trump claimed on social media that he spoke with the city’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, Wednesday night, who asked the president to “give him a chance” to turn things around.
“The Federal Government was preparing to ‘surge’ San Francisco, California, on Saturday, but friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge in that the Mayor, Daniel Lurie, was making substantial progress. I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around,” Trump wrote on his social media platform.
Trump said the move could be a mistake, that he could fix things “much faster,” but ultimately said, “Let’s see how you do.”
“Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday,” Trump concluded.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — Lawyers for President Donald Trump are asking a federal judge in Florida to deny a request by the Wall Street Journal and its parent companies, Dow Jones and News Corp, to dismiss a $10 billion defamation lawsuit over the paper’s reporting on the bawdy letter allegedly penned by Trump that appeared in a birthday book for disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a court filing late Monday, Trump’s lawyers argued that the July article and surrounding coverage were a “deliberate smear campaign designed to damage President Trump’s reputation” and subject the president to “public hatred and ridicule.” They also requested oral arguments over the Journal’s recent motion to dismiss.
“Defendants did not publish the Article on the front page of The Wall Street Journal based on a mere harmless joke between friends,” Monday’s filing said. “Indeed, such an assertion strains credulity beyond repair. The Article, and the surrounding media around it, were all a deliberate smear campaign designed to damage President Trump’s reputation.”
Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding and participating in Epstein’s trafficking of underage girls, told Justice Department officials in August that Epstein had asked her to coordinate contributions to his 2003 50th birthday book from friends and associates, but said she could not recall if Trump, then a private citizen, was among those who responded.
Last month the House Oversight Committee released records from Epstein’s estate that included a copy of a birthday book with the alleged letter from Trump that the newspaper had described.
Trump, who filed suit against the Journal in July, has continued to argue the letter is fake and that the signature on the letter is not his.
Acknowledging the release of the letter by the House Oversight panel, Trump’s lawyers alleged that the Wall Street Journal was still “deliberate and malicious” because the reporting suggested that the letter was not only authored by Trump but also on-brand for the president.
“Defendants cannot hide behind a few words buried within the text — words that refer to the letter ‘bearing Trump’s name’ — while simultaneously ignoring their deliberate portrayal of the letter as being authored and sent by President Trump to Epstein in 2003,” the filing said.
The Wall Street Journal has stood by its reporting.
“Because Plaintiff has publicly admitted that he was Epstein’s friend in the early 2000s, his reputation cannot be harmed by the suggestion that he was friends with Epstein in 2003. Indeed, he was listed in the Birthday Book as a ‘friend’ of Epstein. The fact that his relationship with Epstein may now be a political liability — over 20 years after the Birthday Book was presented to Epstein — does not change this conclusion,” the Journal contended in its request for dismissal.
While the Journal’s reporting included a denial from President Trump, his lawyers argued in Mondays filing that the publication still acted with a “reckless disregard for the truth” because the request for comment was rushed and the reporting allegedly cast doubt on the president’s claim.
“Although Defendants included Plaintiff’s denial, they did so in a way that made it seem as if Plaintiff’s denial was false. This kind of reckless disregard for the truth by Defendants provides a sufficient basis for an inference of actual malice,” the filing said.
