Wayne Akin was found dead in April 2023, on his sixty-fourth birthday. His daughter, Christyn Akin-Crockett, said later that the police at first showed little interest in treating his death as suspicious, even after she passed on a text from a tipster about a woman called becka who was killing people. The woman was Rebecca Auborn, and Akin was the third of four men in north-east Columbus, Ohio, to die of fentanyl she had given them without their knowledge.
The pattern was the same each time. She met a man for paid sex, usually in the North Linden area, a district investigators later bounded by Interstate 71, State Route 161, Cleveland Avenue and East 17th Avenue. She gave him fentanyl without telling him, in at least one case by mixing it into a crack pipe. When he was unconscious she took whatever he had: credit cards, cash, a vehicle, and in one case more than two thousand dollars of tools from the vehicle afterward. She was addicted to fentanyl herself and, according to her lawyers and the sentencing judge, was being sold for sex by a man the judge called her handler and pimp. The prosecution disputed neither fact and accepted neither as an excuse.
The first man, Richard Bixler, sixty-one, of Columbus, survived an overdose on December 13, 2022. Four who followed did not. Joseph Crumpler, thirty, of North Linden, died on January 15, 2023. Robert Snoke, fifty-four, of Pataskala, died on April 1. Wayne Akin, of the north-east side, died in April; the Attorney General's office dated his death to April 13 and Columbus television to April 17. His daughter has said it is not clear he was ever a customer at all. Guy Renda Jr., forty-two, of Belpre, died on June 17, 2023.
The case did not begin as a homicide investigation. The Central Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force received information in 2023 that a woman was meeting men for sex in the north-east of the city and dosing them to rob them. Columbus police homicide detectives and agents of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation took it up together. In April 2023 she was arrested at a Days Inn for prostitution and for mixing fentanyl into a man’s crack pipe, after which she had taken his cards and his vehicle; in July she was arrested again for stealing the tools from that vehicle on West Weber Road, which she admitted, saying she had taken them to a drug house. She was arrested on the first murder count, for Crumpler, in September 2023, and told detectives that she had supplied him with the drugs that killed him and had stolen from him while he lay incapacitated.
Accounts place the indictment in September or October 2023; on October 30 she was arraigned on a twenty-eight-count indictment covering murder, involuntary manslaughter, aggravated robbery, felonious assault, drug trafficking, corrupting another with drugs and tampering with evidence, and pleaded not guilty. Attorney General Dave Yost’s office called the deaths serial killings and said it believed there were further victims; it continued to investigate her movements between December 2022 and August 2023. No additional victim was ever charged.
Her lawyer asked for a competency evaluation in June 2024, and in February 2025 Judge Karen Phipps of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas found her competent to stand trial. On December 19, 2025 she changed her plea, admitting four counts of murder and one of felonious assault, with a maximum exposure of sixty-nine years to life. The other twenty-three counts were dismissed. Yost said the evidence had left no doubt that a conviction was coming.
At sentencing on February 19, 2026 the courtroom was full of the men's relatives. Mark Crumpler, Joseph's brother, said no punishment could bring him back. Christyn Akin-Crockett spoke to Auborn directly: her father, she said, would never have hurt her, he was kind and gentle and awkward and tender, and she could not bring herself to hate her. Auborn's lawyer, Mark Hunt, said she had not meant to kill anyone and had been trafficked and abused for years. Auborn asked the families' forgiveness by name and said she took full responsibility. Phipps imposed the sentence prosecutors had asked for, four consecutive terms of fifteen years to life, and Auborn will not be eligible for parole for sixty years. Reports gave her age that day as thirty-five or thirty-six.