In April 2004 a woman went to the police in Toledo, Ohio, and said a man had taken her from a truck stop, beaten her, robbed her and tried to rape her, and that she had got away. The man was Dellmus Colvin, a forty-four-year-old long-haul truck driver, and while he was held on that complaint investigators took blood and saliva for DNA testing to see whether he matched anything else.
He did. Jackie Simpson, thirty-three, had been smothered with a pillow at a motel in South Toledo; her decomposed body was found under bushes on April 23, 2003, a week after she was last seen. Melissa Weber, thirty-seven, was killed in Toledo on May 9, 2003. DNA recovered from under Weber's fingernails matched Colvin's profile, and the profile also tied him to Simpson and to a sexual assault. In November 2005 he was charged with both murders and with a rape that same year.
Colvin was born in 1959; one reference account gives the date as August 3. He had served prison time before, on a fifteen-year sentence; he was paroled in 1992, sent back in July 1993 for violating parole, and released again about three years later, when he moved to Toledo and found work driving trucks. People who knew him described increasingly impulsive and violent behavior toward women. Reporting after his arrest described him as also dealing drugs and running women out of truck stops, and he later said that some of the women he killed had worked for him.
All the women tied to him in Toledo were working as prostitutes, which is part of why the killings had gone unconnected. Their bodies turned up in the Toledo area over five years, and nobody treated them as a series.
His trial for Simpson and Weber opened in Lucas County Common Pleas Court in September 2006. Prosecutors suspected that a man who drove for a living had killed more, and they offered a deal: plead guilty and they would not seek the death penalty. On a Sunday night during the trial Colvin met police and prosecutors and talked. "He finally came clean about a number of other killings he had been involved with," Assistant Prosecutor Tim Braun said. The next day he pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and complicity to commit murder, covering Simpson and Weber and three more women: Valerie Jones, thirty-eight; Jacquelynn Thomas, forty-two; and Lily Summers, forty-three. According to Colvin, he lured Jones into his truck in January 2000, strangled her, and dumped her body in Lake Erie in Ottawa County. Judge Thomas Osowik sentenced him to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Reports date the plea to September 2006 and the sentencing to October 2 of that year.
In October 2006 he admitted a sixth Toledo killing, that of Dorothea Wetzel, forty, whose body had been found on the bank of the Maumee River on August 5, 2000.
The oldest case came from outside Ohio. Donna Lee White, twenty-seven, of Somers Point, New Jersey, had been strangled in 1987, and in 2010 Colvin was linked to her death and indicted in Atlantic County. He waived extradition, was arraigned at the courthouse in Mays Landing on April 5, 2011, with the public defender Raymond Lee, and at his second appearance pleaded guilty before Judge Charles Middlesworth Jr. He told the court that he had been driving a cab at the time, that he picked White up in Northfield, and that he killed her after finding her unconscious in his home on Tennessee Avenue in Atlantic City. "I strangled her," he said. "I put a plastic bag over her head and I left."
From prison he kept adding to the count, in ways that cannot be checked. In a podcast recorded by phone from the Lebanon Correctional Institution in 2020, at sixty-one, he described strangling a woman in the sleeper of his truck at a truck stop in LaSalle County, Illinois, driving her to an abandoned truck wash on a deserted road, and leaving her body thirty or forty feet into the woods. He said he dumped her clothes, a Tweety Bird T-shirt and sweatpants, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and that he never knew his victims' names. On September 2, 2020, searchers found possible human skeletal remains in the area he described; he later dated that killing to 2005. Asked in how many states he had killed, he said, "Quite a few. Quite a few." He steered away, reporters noted, from killings in states that carry the death penalty. In interviews he has put his total at between forty-seven and fifty-two women, from 1983 onward. None of those claims has produced a charge.
What the courts have established is seven murders: six in Ohio by his 2006 pleas and later admission, and Donna Lee White in New Jersey by his 2011 plea.