CULTURE FEATURES

In 2022, NoVA Police Solved Multiple Murders Stretching Back To 1987. They Were The Work Of One Man.

Charles W. Helem was arrested for murdering his ex-girlfriend in Chantilly. From there unraveled the solution to cold cases spanning decades–and the identity of a serial killer.

By David Hodes May 18, 2022

The appearance of Eige Sober-Adler’s body in a field behind a hotel in suburban Northern Virginia remained a horrifying mystery for 35 years.

In 1987, the 37-year-old woman from Kensington, Maryland, was murdered in a parking lot near the Dulles Toll Road on Centreville Road in Herndon, where she had abandoned her car for reasons unknown. Construction workers found her nude and beaten body behind a Days Inn, according to a report in The Washington Post. An autopsy determined her cause of death was a skull fracture and cerebral hemorrhage caused by an unknown object.

It was a “brutal and cold-hearted” murder, according to Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis. ... But it wasn’t the only murder that followed that pattern in Fairfax County. ... Jennifer Landry, 19, from Randolph, Massachusetts, was found in August 2002. Police would later learn that she was picked up in Washington, DC, then taken to Mount Rainier, where she was killed.

Neither murder had a solution or apparent leads. The parents of Landry and Sober-Adler died before knowing what happened to their daughters. ... But even though the murders were 15 years apart, they were the work of one man: a serial killer still at large. And he wasn’t done killing yet.

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This story originally ran in our May issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to our monthly magazine.