Vincent Groves died in prison in 1996 with three homicide convictions. He was found guilty of killing 17-year-old Tammy Sue Woodrum in 1981 and, after he was paroled, of killing Juanita Lovato, 19, and Diann Mancera, 25. Prosecutors at the time believed he had killed many more women around Denver, but a judge kept those cases out of his trials, and he never told investigators anything about them.
DNA testing continued after his death. In 2012 the Denver District Attorney's Office announced that a cold-case team had linked him to three unsolved killings from 1979 and attributed a fourth, from 1988, to him. In December 2025 the Douglas County Sheriff's Office said DNA on evidence kept since 1987 tied him to the death of Rhonda Marie Fisher, 30. The sheriff's office now says DNA and investigative leads link Groves to at least 12 homicides, an attempted murder and a sexual assault in the Denver area, and that the true number is likely higher.
Groves grew up in Wheat Ridge, a suburb west of Denver, the oldest of three sons. His father was a postal worker and a deacon at a Baptist church, and his mother was a teacher who played the church organ, according to a 2012 account by Robert Sanchez in 5280, the Denver magazine. At Wheat Ridge High School he was a finalist for prom king, sat on the student council and played basketball. He grew to 6 feet 5 inches.
His team reached the 1972 state title game and lost it to Denver's Manual High School, 64 to 60, according to the Colorado High School Activities Association, as reported by the Associated Press in 2012. The Douglas County sheriff, Darren Weekly, said in 2025 that Groves had been an athlete there, then went to college, did poorly, and began using and distributing drugs before he turned to violent crime.
The college was Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he played basketball for two years before dropping out in 1974, 5280 reported. He came back to Colorado to help care for his grandmother. By 1978, when he was 24, he was working as an electrician at the Gates Rubber Company near downtown Denver.
5280 described a double life in those years. He drank at a Denver lounge, spent nights in a part of the city known for street prostitution, and supplied cocaine to pimps and women working the street. The Douglas County Sheriff's Office, in its 2025 release, said he had documented involvement in sex trafficking and drug distribution. Later his work as a janitor and janitorial supervisor took him to job sites around the Denver area, which, investigators said, gave him access to many places and people.
Groves came to police attention in 1978. A 17-year-old girl he knew, Jeanette Baca, was found dead in Jefferson County in June 1978. Police questioned him, but he was not charged, according to 5280. A woman he had lived with, Norma Jean Halford, 21, disappeared in August 1979, when her empty car was found near Georgetown. She has never been found. Groves was never charged in either case, and no court has found him responsible for either.
Over the same year, 1979, three young women were killed in Denver: Emma Jenefor, 25, in March; Joyce Ramey, 23, in July; and Peggy Cuff, 20, in November. All three were strangled. The cases stayed unsolved for more than three decades.
On March 23, 1981, Groves married a bank employee, 5280 reported. Friends of the couple came to believe he was drinking heavily.
In August 1981 Groves went on a camping and fishing trip in the mountains with two friends and their 17-year-old daughter, Tammy Sue Woodrum. His wife had objected to the trip. The next morning, according to 5280, he drove his wife into the mountains and told her that Tammy had died of a cocaine overdose. At his wife's urging, he turned himself in to the Lakewood police.
The overdose story did not hold. Evidence showed that Tammy had no drugs in her system and that she had been strangled. In 1982 Groves was convicted of second-degree murder in her death. He was sentenced in the summer of 1982 to 12 years in prison, 5280 reported.
In prison he taught other inmates and took college courses. His wife asked him to tell her the truth about that night. He refused, and she divorced him; the divorce was final by 1985, according to 5280.
Groves served about five years. On February 13, 1987, he was released on mandatory parole. Sheriff Weekly said in 2025 that his office did not know why Groves had been released early.
His father gave him a used car, a 1978 AMC Concord, 5280 reported. He worked as a church janitor and then as a janitor at a department store. The late-night hours let him return to the same part of the city.
In March 1987 a woman was attacked in Denver and survived. She reported the attack about a week later but did not know her attacker's name. In August 1988 she saw Groves driving in Denver and flagged down a police officer, who questioned him briefly and let him go, according to 5280. A jury later acquitted Groves of attempting to kill her.
Rhonda Marie Fisher was born in New York on November 12, 1956, Denver7 reported. In the weeks before her death she had been staying with various acquaintances in Denver. On the night before she died, she was seen walking in Denver. She was found dead on April 1, 1987, in rural Douglas County, south of Sedalia. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled, the Douglas County Sheriff's Office said.
Detectives looked at many people. One of the acquaintances she had stayed with became a person of interest early on and was later cleared. Investigators also studied several serial offenders active in the Denver area from the 1970s through the 1990s. None of the leads produced a charge. Groves was long a suspect, Denver7 reported, but so was another man, and the sheriff's office wanted DNA confirmation before closing the case. Sheriff Weekly said in 2025 that Fisher may have been looking for a ride, and that Groves preyed on hitchhikers.
Juanita Lovato was 19. She was found dead in April 1988 near Strasburg, in Adams County, east of Denver. DNA testing later linked Groves to her death, 5280 reported. Diann Mancera was 25. Her body was found in Douglas County, south of Denver. The Douglas County Sheriff's Office and Denver7 date her death to 1988; 5280 says she died in 1987. DNA testing also linked Groves to her death.
Pamela Montgomery, 35, was killed in Denver in August 1988. A witness last saw her getting into a loud, battered car with a man who matched Groves's description, the Associated Press reported in 2012.
By the late summer of 1988, about 28 investigators from several police agencies were reviewing nearly 20 unsolved deaths of women in the Denver area, most of them strangled, that they linked to Groves, according to 5280.
On September 1, 1988, police arrested him on a charge of attempted first-degree murder in the March 1987 attack. In an interview that ran past midnight, he denied trying to choke the woman and said she had stolen $1,600 from him. He admitted knowing many of the dead women. "You've done your homework," he told an investigator, adding, "It looks real bad for me," 5280 reported.
The attempted-murder case went to trial in early 1989. Prosecutors asked the judge to let the jury hear about eight killings that investigators linked to Groves. The judge refused. His lawyer told the jury the case rested on her word alone. On February 16, 1989, after about 90 minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted him, 5280 reported. According to the Associated Press, the prosecutor who tried in 1988 to bring in evidence of eight other assault and homicide victims, among them Joyce Ramey, was Mitch Morrissey, Denver's district attorney by 2012.
The acquittal did not end the case against him. In Adams County, testing linked Groves to Juanita Lovato's death. In Douglas County, DNA from evidence in Diann Mancera's case matched his profile, 5280 reported.
In 1990 he was convicted in both cases. The AP and CBS News reported that he was sentenced to life in prison for the slaying of Juanita Lovato and to 20 years for the second-degree murder of Diann Mancera. 5280 reported that he received life sentences in both cases. The Douglas County Sheriff's Office says the cases that produced his convictions for the 1988 murders of Diann Mancera in Douglas County and another victim in Adams County were among the earliest successful uses of DNA evidence in Colorado courts.
On October 8, 1992, a division of the Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed a first-degree murder conviction entered against Vincent Darrell Groves on a jury verdict (People v. Groves, 854 P.2d 1310). The opinion, by Judge Tursi with Judges Metzger and Plank concurring, describes a victim found dead in Aurora after disappearing overnight. Witnesses placed Groves with her on the night of her death, and one testified that Groves had admitted choking her. A pendant at least similar to one she owned was found in his car, and DNA testing produced a probable match with his DNA.
At trial, the prosecution had been allowed to present three other incidents to show identity and method: a 1981 killing to which Groves had confessed; a 1982 attack on a young woman, in which charges were dropped when she did not appear; and a 1988 strangling in Douglas County for which, the court said, he had never been charged, where DNA had been linked to him at odds the expert put at 8.4 billion to one.
The appeals court held that the first two were properly admitted. It held that the 1988 Douglas County homicide should not have been admitted: the shared features were too general, nothing showed the woman had any known connection to Groves before the DNA testing, and DNA, the court wrote, "is not the type of evidence used to establish modus operandi." The court found the error harmless because the rest of the evidence was strong. It also rejected his arguments about two denied continuances and the lack of a hearing on the DNA statistics, and affirmed the conviction. The Colorado Supreme Court denied review on July 6, 1993.
Prison officials described Groves as an "average" prisoner. A Department of Corrections spokeswoman, Katherine Sanguinetti, said in 2012 that he had not been a troublemaker, according to the AP.
He had hepatitis C and chronic liver disease. In 1996 his health declined sharply and he was moved between hospitals. That fall, Lakewood detectives questioned him about the 1987 death of Zabra Mason, 19, and got nothing useful from him, 5280 reported. Before he died, Denver detectives asked him to tell them what had happened to the women he was suspected of killing. He refused, Morrissey said in 2012.
Groves died on October 31, 1996, at University Hospital in Denver, aged 42, while in the custody of the Colorado Department of Corrections. The Denver Gazette reported that his death was attributed to health problems from liver failure and hepatitis C.
In March 2010, Sergeant Anthony Parisi of the Denver Police Department applied for a federal grant called "Solving Cold Cases with DNA." The U.S. Department of Justice approved it in September 2010, and it paid for a review of more than 250 unsolved Denver murders from 1970 to 1984, according to 5280 and CBS4 in Denver. Detective Mylous Yearling joined the cold-case unit that year.
Two of the cases he took up were those of Emma Jenefor and Peggy Cuff. Emma Jenefor worked for a film distribution company; she was found dead in Denver on March 26, 1979. Peggy Cuff disappeared after a shift at a collections agency and was found in Denver on November 3, 1979. Suspect DNA from both cases had produced no match in the national CODIS database, 5280 reported. Yearling first pursued a man Emma Jenefor had dated; a DNA check in June 2011 cleared him.
Yearling then turned to the case of Joyce Ramey, found in Denver on July 4, 1979, and found Groves's name in the old files. In September 2011 he asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for a DNA profile of Groves, but none existed. On October 5, 2011, at a meeting with other agencies, he learned that the Lakewood police might hold Groves's DNA from the Woodrum case. A Lakewood sergeant supplied the report, Yearling found the profiles matched, and the Denver crime lab confirmed the match to the Cuff and Jenefor cases. In January 2012 the lab linked the Ramey case, according to 5280.
Yearling said the cases were "more than coincidences," and DNA confirmed the connection, the AP reported. The Lakewood Police Department and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation assisted, according to CBS4.
On February 9, 2012, the Denver District Attorney's Office cleared the cases of Emma Jenefor, Joyce Ramey, Peggy Cuff and Pamela Montgomery, 5280 reported. On February 14, Yearling and Parisi met the families. Yearling told Peggy Cuff's brother, "We wanted to let you know that we didn't give up." Joyce Ramey's parents were relieved to have an answer. Emma Jenefor's sister asked why Groves had chosen her sister. Pamela Montgomery's family did not respond, according to 5280.
On March 7, 2012, District Attorney Mitch Morrissey and Denver Police Chief Robert White announced publicly that the four killings were linked to Groves. DNA from one of the earlier murders linked him to the strangling deaths of Emma Jenefor, Joyce Ramey and Peggy Cuff, the AP and CBS News reported. In the Montgomery case, Yearling described the evidence as strong and circumstantial; a witness had seen her with a man matching Groves's description in a car that looked and sounded like his. 5280 reported that the witness recognized the sound of his Concord.
Yearling said the women had been "trying to live their lives," CBS4 reported, and that the families "thought their cases had been forgotten," according to the AP. Morrissey said Groves "destroyed lives" and "destroyed families." He said investigators estimated that Groves had been killing two women a month, called him "maybe the most prolific serial killer in the state of Colorado," and said he expected more cases to be linked. A DA's office spokeswoman, Lynn Kimbrough, credited the cold-case team's "extensive investigative and forensic work."
Westword reported Kimbrough as saying that Morrissey estimated the total could be as high as 24, but that many of the old cases might have no biological evidence left to test.
The Douglas County Sheriff's Office reviewed Rhonda Fisher's case periodically for nearly four decades. Renewed DNA testing in 2017 did not produce complete profiles. In early 2025 the office's Cold Case Unit reopened the case and went through all of the evidence with a forensic scientist from the Unified Metropolitan Forensic Crime Laboratory and staff from its property and evidence facility. More items were sent for DNA testing.
Among them were paper bags that investigators had placed over Fisher's hands in 1987 to preserve trace evidence for the coroner. The bags had been kept but never tested. The forensic scientist, Shane Williams, said skin cells from her hands had transferred to the inside of the bags, Denver7 reported, and testing found a mix of her DNA and Groves's. In late October 2025 the national CODIS database returned a case-to-case match: the DNA on the bags matched evidence from three 1979 Denver homicides that the sheriff's office attributes to Vincent Darrell Groves. The office called a usable profile from bags that old exceptionally rare.
On December 2, 2025, Sheriff Darren Weekly announced that the case was closed. "While Vincent Groves cannot be held accountable in a court of law," he said, he hoped the result would bring answers and a measure of peace to Fisher's family and friends. He described her as a mother, a daughter, a sister and a friend. Her parents and her brother had died; Michelle Kennedy, the office's crime analysis supervisor and an investigative genetic genealogist, said the office had contacted a cousin, Denver7 reported. Weekly said the case was the seventh cold case his office had solved in seven years, and that about 35 remained open.
Number of killings. Only three killings were proved in court: those of Tammy Sue Woodrum, Juanita Lovato and Diann Mancera. Five more have been attributed to him after his death by police and prosecutors: four by the Denver District Attorney's Office in 2012 and one by the Douglas County Sheriff's Office in 2025. None of these was tried. The sheriff's office says DNA and leads tie him to at least 12 homicides; Morrissey spoke of as many as 20 in 2012, and, according to Westword, of as many as 24. These are estimates, not findings.
The Montgomery case. The AP and CBS News reported that the 2012 link to Pamela Montgomery rested on strong circumstantial evidence, a witness and his car. CBS4 reported that DNA tests confirmed a direct link between Groves and the homicides announced that day, without separating the cases.
The Mancera case. Sources differ on the year of Diann Mancera's death (1988 in the sheriff's office release and Denver7; 1987 in 5280), on the sentence (20 years for second-degree murder in the AP and CBS News; life in 5280), and, in one Gray News report, on whether the life sentence covered both 1990 cases.
Earlier cases. Groves was questioned about the death of Jeanette Baca in 1978 and about the death of Zabra Mason in 1996, and Norma Jean Halford, who had lived with him, disappeared in 1979. He was never charged in any of these cases.
The 1987 attack. A jury acquitted him of attempted first-degree murder in February 1989. That attack is legally not his crime. The sheriff's office's count of "an attempted murder" is its own attribution.
Fisher's age. The sheriff's office gives 30; the Denver Gazette gives 31.
1972: Wheat Ridge High School loses the state basketball final to Manual High School, 64 to 60.
1974: Groves leaves Coe College in Iowa and returns to Colorado.
June 1978: Jeanette Baca, 17, found dead in Jefferson County; Groves questioned, not charged.
March 26, 1979: Emma Jenefor, 25, found dead in Denver.
July 4, 1979: Joyce Ramey, 23, found dead in Denver.
August 1979: Norma Jean Halford, 21, disappears; her car is found near Georgetown.
November 3, 1979: Peggy Cuff, 20, found dead in Denver.
March 23, 1981: Groves marries.
August 1981: Tammy Sue Woodrum, 17, killed on a camping trip; Groves turns himself in to Lakewood police.
1982: Convicted of second-degree murder; sentenced to 12 years.
February 13, 1987: Released on mandatory parole.
March 1987: A woman is attacked in Denver and survives (Groves later acquitted).
April 1, 1987: Rhonda Marie Fisher, 30, found dead in Douglas County.
April 1988: Juanita Lovato, 19, found dead near Strasburg, Adams County.
1988 (1987 in one account): Diann Mancera, 25, killed in Douglas County.
August 1988: Pamela Montgomery, 35, killed in Denver.
September 1, 1988: Groves arrested on the attempted-murder charge.
February 16, 1989: Acquitted of attempted first-degree murder.
1990: Convicted of the Lovato and Mancera killings; life sentence for Lovato.
October 8, 1992: Colorado Court of Appeals affirms a first-degree murder conviction.
July 6, 1993: Colorado Supreme Court denies review.
October 31, 1996: Dies in custody at University Hospital, Denver, aged 42.
September 2010: Federal "Solving Cold Cases with DNA" grant approved for Denver police.
October 5, 2011: Detective Yearling learns Lakewood police hold Groves's DNA.
February 9, 2012: Denver DA's office clears the Jenefor, Ramey, Cuff and Montgomery cases.
March 7, 2012: Public announcement of the four attributions.
2017: Renewed DNA testing in the Fisher case produces no complete profile.
Late October 2025: CODIS case-to-case match from the 1987 paper bags.
December 2, 2025: Douglas County Sheriff's Office attributes Rhonda Fisher's death to Groves and closes the case.