State Police turn to Facebook for leads

Virginia State Police investigators are trying a new way to solve an old murder.

The agency launched a Facebook page Tuesday, the anniversary of an unsolved case that has haunted investigators for 14 years — the disappearance and death of Alicia Showalter Reynolds.

“Hopefully by opening this case up to a new audience of millions we can obtain fresh new leads, and hopefully that one piece of information we need to finally solve this case,” spokeswoman Corinne Geller said.

Reynolds, 25, vanished March 2, 1996, as she drove from Baltimore to Charlottesville to shop with her mother. Police determined she was a victim of the “Route 29 Stalker,” a man who stopped, or tried to stop, nearly two dozen female drivers between February and March of that year by blowing his horn and flashing his lights. All of the incidents were between Manassas and Charlottesville.

One victim was a Quantico woman who stopped for a man in a small blue truck along Route 234 near Dumfries. After getting into the man’s truck and driving a short distance, he attacked and threatened her with a screwdriver. She jumped out the passenger’s door to escape, breaking her leg.

Alicia Reynolds was not as fortunate. She was last seen along U.S. 29, her car pulled to the side of the road with its hood up and a blue truck parked behind.

Two months later, in May, her body was found in a logging camp in the Lignum area of Culpeper County. Investigators never determined how she died.

In 2004, a Prince William County jury indicted a Maryland man, Darrell Rice, in connection with the abduction along Route 234. Prosecutors at the time believed him to be the 29 Stalker, but evidence in the case was sketchy.

Rice pleaded guilty to a lesser crime in the Prince William abduction amid doubts by some investigators and attorneys that he had anything to do with it at all. Though they have tried, police and prosecutors have never linked him to Reynolds’ disappearance.

State and Prince William County police have used YouTube and Twitter to get the word out about fugitives, traffic tie-ups and department news, but the Facebook phenomena expands the reach.