Remembering For Years, Remembering With Tears--Alicia Showalter Reynolds

Alicia Faye Showalter Reynolds 8/5/70-3/2/96

Just over 25 years ago, Alicia Showalter Reynolds, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins and recently married to her beloved Mark, was abducted and killed by an assailant who flagged her down along Rt. 29 near Culpepper, convincing her that something was wrong with her vehicle. Her body was found over nine weeks later in a secluded wooded area. 

Alicia, who was on her way to join her mother for some shopping in Charlottesville in preparation for her brother's wedding, was never seen alive again, and the case has yet to be definitively resolved.

As a long time acquaintance of her grieving parents, Harley and Sadie Showalter (who now are our neighbors at Park Village), I wrote the following lament at the time of Alicia's memorial service. Her mother Sadie read it as a part of a moving account she gave recently of their grief at our weekly neighborhood coffee hour at Village Hall: