Dellmus Colvin

Victims
2 convictions - a third indictment in 2010 - 7 or more from his own account and the charges
Years active
1987 / 2000 - 2005
Location
Ohio and New Jersey, USA
Method
Strangulation - Suffocation
Status
Pleaded guilty. Sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole on October 2, 2006. Indicted in 2010 over a 1987 killing in Atlantic County, New Jersey.

Colvin was born in 1959 and drove long-distance freight, based in Ohio.

He picked up women at truck stops and roadside services, most of them working as prostitutes, killed them by strangling or suffocation, and left the bodies at points along his routes. He kept a notebook.

The women named in the record are Donna Lee White, twenty-seven; Valerie Jones, thirty-eight; Dorothea Wetzel, forty; Jacquelynn Thomas, forty-two; Lily Summers, forty-three; Jackie Simpson, thirty-three; and Melissa Weber, thirty-seven.

He was arrested on November 20, 2005 and pleaded guilty, and on October 2, 2006 received two life sentences without the possibility of parole. He was subsequently indicted for the murder of a woman in Atlantic County, New Jersey, in 1987.

His case is one of those that led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to establish its Highway Serial Killings Initiative, a database of murders along interstate routes set up because the victims are transient, the crime scenes are hundreds of miles apart and no single police force sees the pattern. That initiative is the useful thing to take from this entry.

The figure of seven or more is his own account together with the charges. Two convictions plus the New Jersey indictment are what the record establishes.