DNA Under a Murdered Woman's Fingernails Leads Toledo Prosecutors to Charge Truck Driver Dellmus Colvin
Colvin's DNA had been taken in a pending rape case. Within two weeks a grand jury indicted him in the killings of Melissa Weber and Jackie Simpson.
Published
Five months after Melissa Weber's body was found behind a vacant truck terminal, DNA from under her fingernails pointed to a suspect. On October 21, 2005, truck driver Dellmus Colvin was charged with her murder in Toledo.
Colvin, 46, was charged in Toledo Municipal Court with the murder of Weber, 37, whose decomposed body was found on May 9 at 1045 Matzinger Road in North Toledo. Assistant Lucas County Prosecutor J. Christopher Anderson said the evidence from Weber's fingernails matched DNA taken from Colvin in the investigation of an April 2, 2004, beating and sexual assault of a 40-year-old woman in the cab of a tractor-trailer, for which Colvin was awaiting trial. Anderson said Colvin's DNA also matched evidence in two other sexual assaults and was consistent with evidence in the 2003 killing of a 33-year-old woman, and that cold-case investigators were reviewing other unsolved killings of women. Colvin, held in lieu of $200,000 bond, had been sentenced in 1989 to three to 15 years in prison for felonious assault.
On November 4, a Lucas County grand jury indicted Colvin on four counts of aggravated murder, with death-penalty specifications, in the deaths of Weber and Jackie Simpson, 33, whose body was found on April 16, 2003, at a business on Creekside Avenue, about two miles from where Weber was found. The same day, a jury acquitted him of felonious assault and aggravated robbery in the 2004 attack and deadlocked on rape and kidnapping, and the judge declared a mistrial. "She was a fighter. She probably fought him off," said Weber's mother. Ohio prison records show that Colvin was sentenced in November 2006 to life without parole on aggravated murder counts from Lucas County.
Sources
- Offender Details: Dellmus Charles Colvin, A536490, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
- DNA analysis leads to arrest in woman's slaying, The Blade (Toledo)
- Suspect's rape trial ends with hung jury, The Blade (Toledo)
Related News
- June 25, 2010: Dellmus Colvin, Serving Life for Killing Toledo Women, Is Indicted in a 1987 Atlantic City Death Once Blamed on Cocaine