Rebecca Auborn was thirty-three when she was indicted in Columbus, Ohio in October 2023, and thirty-six when she was sentenced in February 2026. She was addicted to fentanyl during the period of the killings and, according to her lawyers and to the sentencing judge, was being sold for sex by a man the judge described as her handler and pimp. Neither fact was disputed by the prosecution, and neither was accepted as an excuse. Her date of birth and background before 2022 have not been published, and this entry does not fill them in.
The pattern was simple and the same each time. She met a man for paid sex, usually in the North Linden area of north-east Columbus, an area investigators later bounded by Interstate 71, State Route 161, Cleveland Avenue and East 17th Avenue. She gave him fentanyl without his knowledge, 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, in one case more than two thousand dollars of tools from the vehicle afterwards.
The first man, on December 13, 2022, survived. 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, 2023. Wayne Akin, sixty-four, of the north-east side, died in April 2023 and was found on his sixty-fourth birthday; the Attorney General’s office dates his death to April 13 and Columbus television reporting to April 17, and this entry does not pick between them. Guy Renda Jr, forty-two, of Belpre, Ohio, 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.
On October 30, 2023 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. In February 2025 Judge Karen Phipps of the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas found her competent to stand trial. In December 2025 she changed her plea, admitting four counts of murder and one of felonious assault; the remaining twenty-three counts were dismissed.
On February 19, 2026 Phipps sentenced her to four consecutive terms of fifteen years to life, a minimum of sixty years before parole can be considered. The courtroom was full of the men’s relatives. Christyn Akin, Wayne Akin’s daughter, addressed her directly, saying her father would never have hurt her and was not like any man she had encountered, and said afterwards that the family could now grieve. Auborn read a letter apologising to the families by name, said that the person in front of the court was not the person who had committed the crimes, and said she was not the victim and took full responsibility. She looked, reporters noted, nothing like her booking photograph.
Four convictions, four victims, one survivor. The Attorney General’s suspicion of more was never substantiated and no further death has been attributed to her.