On April 1, 1987, a passing driver saw a body down an embankment off South Perry Park Road, in rural Douglas County south of Denver. Rhonda Marie Fisher, thirty by the sheriff's count and thirty-one by another, had last been seen in Denver; she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. "Rhonda was a mother, she was a daughter, a sister, a cousin, and a niece," Sheriff Darren Weekly said in December 2025, when his office announced that DNA recovered from two brown paper bags kept in evidence since 1987 matched a man who had been dead for almost three decades. Her parents and brother had died waiting.
The man was Vincent Darrell Groves. Born in 1954, he grew up in Denver, where he was a tall, powerful athlete on a state championship basketball team in the 1970s. Investigators later said he was involved in drug dealing and in pimping, and that he preyed on women he knew who were using cocaine and on sex workers he picked up along Colfax Avenue, the corridor historically known for prostitution, as well as on acquaintances his various jobs brought him into contact with. He was intelligent, a cold-case detective said, and could coax women into dangerous situations. He strangled most of them and left many nude or partly clothed in alleys, fields and the mountains west of the city.
He was convicted first in 1982, of second-degree murder in the 1981 killing of Tammy Sue Woodrum, seventeen, in suburban Denver. He served about five years and in 1987 was released on mandatory parole. For roughly the next year, as prosecutors later described it, police around Denver were finding a body a month. On September 1, 1988, he was arrested again. In 1990 he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Juanita "Becky" Lovato, nineteen, and to twenty more years for the second-degree murder of Diane Montoya Mancera, twenty-five, killed in Douglas County.
Groves was diagnosed with hepatitis C in prison, and his liver failed. He died on October 31, 1996, at forty-two, at University Hospital in Denver while in the custody of the Department of Corrections.
His DNA outlived him. When he killed in 1979, the technique of DNA identification was still years away, and when he was paroled in 1987 Colorado had only just begun collecting profiles from sex offenders. In 2012 the Denver District Attorney, Mitch Morrissey, announced that a cold-case unit had found a DNA profile of Groves in an old murder file and matched it to three killings from 1979: Emma Jenefor, twenty-five, found in her bathtub in March; Joyce Ramey, twenty-three, found in an industrial park in July; and Peggy Cuff, twenty, found in an alley in November. The 1988 killing of Pamela Montgomery, thirty-five, found in an alley after a witness saw her with a man matching his description, was also laid to him; reports differ on whether DNA or strong circumstantial evidence made that link. "These families deserve answers," Morrissey said. "They thought their cases had been forgotten," said the Denver cold-case detective Mylous Yearling.
Rhonda Fisher's case was the latest. Groves had long been a suspect in it, but so had another man, and the sheriff's office waited for DNA confirmation before closing it. Officials said they did not know how Groves had met her and found nothing to suggest they knew each other. Douglas County now counts him responsible for at least twelve homicides, an attempted murder and a sexual assault around Denver, and says the true number is probably higher; prosecutors have put the possible total as high as twenty.