Between the years of 1981 and 1990, a serial killer was believed to be stalking Interstate 71 in Ohio, murdering at least nine women and girls during his nearly decade-long reign of terror. Although several suspects for this monster have been investigated, his identity remains unknown, and he is referred to as either the Ohio Prostitute Killer or the I-71 Killer, but perhaps his most famous nickname is Dr. No.
On April 24th, 1981, a farmer discovered the body of a young, red-haired woman lying in a ditch off Greenlee Road near Troy, Ohio. The victim was barefoot, but otherwise fully dressed, and clad in a fringed deerskin poncho that gave the initially unidentified woman her nickname: Buckskin Girl. The victim had not been raped, but had been beaten severely, and had been strangled to death.
For decades, the identity of the murdered young woman was a mystery, but at last, in 2018, the DNA Doe Project was able to restore her name: she was twenty-one-year-old Marcia King, who had been traveling around the United States and who had last made contact with relatives in Little Rock, Arkansas in late 1980.
Whether Marcia King was the first victim of the serial killer who would come to be known as Dr. No is still uncertain, but there are a few similarities between her case and the alarming number of comparable murders that would take place in the same area over the ensuing nine years.
The next possible casualty didn’t materialize for more than four years, however. On June 12th, 1985, twenty-five-year-old sex worker Marcia Matthews, also known as Pepper, was found by a trucker about a mile away from the Union 76 truck stop in Austintown, Ohio. This particular truck stop, the largest in the state, would serve as a hub of sorts for the burgeoning serial killer, as a number of his victims were picked up from there. The women who worked the truck stop were believed to have communicated with potential clients via CB radio.
Marcia Matthews was still alive when she was found alongside Interstate 71, though she had been beaten severely in the head, an attack which had fractured her skull. Sadly, the victim would never recover from her injuries; she died a little over two days later.
Another year passed, and the killer seemingly took another hiatus. Then, in July of 1986, another sex worker, twenty-three-year-old Shirley Dean Taylor, was trawling for clients at the same Union 76 truck stop. Witnesses later told police that she’d had an appointment with a regular client that she referred to by his CB radio handle of Dr. No, but after going to meet this individual, she mysteriously disappeared.
On July 20th, her lifeless body was discovered behind a guardrail in Medina County, also alongside Interstate 71. Like the previous victims, she had been beaten in the head and strangled. Several items of her clothing—notably her shoes and her underwear, as well as pieces of her jewelry—were missing and have never been recovered.
Months later, an almost identical murder occurred, when eighteen-year-old sex worker April Barnett likewise vanished from the Austintown truck stop, only to be found dead near a rest area in Ashland County along I-71 on December 4th, 1986. She was also beaten, strangled, and had several pieces of clothing and jewelry stolen.
A little more than two weeks later, the same killer seemingly struck again, though this time he had crossed state lines. On December 19th, 1986, the body of twenty-eight-year-old sex worker Jill Allen turned up alongside Interstate 70 in Springfield, Illinois, beaten and strangled to death much as the previous women had been. Her underwear, bra, and shoes were missing and never found, an indication that the perpetrator was keeping trophies of his crimes.
Back at the truck stop in Austintown, twenty-seven-year-old Anne-Marie Patterson was worried. She was picked up by the police for criminal trespassing on February 7th, 1987, but she seemed unconcerned about that minor charge. Instead, she told authorities that she was fairly sure she knew who was murdering these women but was afraid to tell officers any information for fear she’d be killed herself.
And tragically, it would seem that her fears were completely justified. On February 8th, according to later accounts, Anne-Marie, whose CB handle was Sleeping Beauty, received a radio call from a client who called himself Dr. No. Initially, Anne-Marie turned down his request; she had trouble with him before, she told friends, and like many of the other women working the truck stop, she was afraid of him.
When he called a second time later that night, however, she agreed to see him, perhaps out of fear or desperation. Witnesses claimed that Dr. No drove a dark blue or black Peterbilt truck, which Anne-Marie was heading toward the last time she was seen alive.
For more than a month, the young woman’s whereabouts were unknown. Then, around mid-March of 1987, Anne-Marie’s remains were discovered wrapped in a sleeping bag, lying in a few inches of water in a drainage ditch along Interstate 71 near Cincinnati. The location was approximately two-hundred-fifty miles from the truck stop where she’d vanished from, and since Anne-Marie had a strict rule that she never allowed her clients to leave the truck stop while she was with them, it was assumed that the killer had knocked her unconscious or killed her before driving off.
The victim’s head had been bashed in, and an autopsy determined that the perpetrator had killed her only a day or two after her disappearance, and kept her body frozen somewhere for several weeks before dumping it where it was found. Anne-Marie had also been six months pregnant at the time of her murder.
It was at this stage in the police investigation that detectives began referring to the unknown serial killer as Dr. No, after his purported CB radio alias.
Another victim turned up on August 10th, 1987, this time in Englewood, Ohio. The young woman had been strangled and had her top and bra stolen, though her jeans and underwear were left around her ankles. It was believed her killer had thrown her body out of a vehicle.
Initially a Jane Doe, her distinctive jewelry and tattoos eventually led to her family identifying her in 2010 as twenty-one-year-old Paula Beverly Davis, originally from Missouri. Although her slaying is linked to the others due to the proximity to other victims and the similar modus operandi, some investigators theorize that Paula may have fallen victim to a different assailant, such as serial killer Lorenzo Gilyard. Gilyard, also known as the Kansas City Strangler, was convicted of six counts of murder in 2007 but is believed to be responsible for the rapes and murders of at least thirteen women and girls between 1977 and 1993.
A little over two months after Paula Davis was killed, Dr. No was apparently on the move again, as his next victim was found in another state. Nineteen-year-old Lamonica Cole had been working the truck stops across several states for the previous few months, eventually checking into a motel in Breezewood, Pennsylvania with her boyfriend and pimp, twenty-four-year-old Derrick Mims, and her nine-month-old daughter Chavelle.
At around three a.m. on the morning of Saturday, November 21st, 1987, Lamonica went out to meet a client who drove a blue semi truck with white stripes down the side, according to Derrick Mims. However, Lamonica never returned from this outing, and Mims phoned Lamonica’s brother and sister, Greg and Sharon, to tell them what was going on. They immediately came to the motel to join in the search.
Sadly, on Sunday morning, Lamonica’s brother Greg was the one to discover her body, dumped over a hill behind the truck stop near the motel. She had been suffocated by her own handkerchief, which was stuffed down her throat, and items of her clothing were missing, leading investigators to assume that she had fallen victim to the same killer that was slaughtering sex workers in Ohio, where Lamonica was originally from.
The next woman to die was also well off the killer’s regular hunting grounds. Thirty-one-year-old Terri Roark had last been seen alive on March 21st, 1988, leaving a mental health facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Eight days later, she was found dead on Twin Bridges over the Mohawk River in Clifton Park, New York, having been beaten savagely in the head with a blunt object. Her duffel bag was discovered about ten miles away and was believed to have been thrown from a vehicle. The underwear and shoes she’d been wearing were never recovered.
Dr. No seemingly returned to the familiar territory of Ohio afterward, though his next victim would not appear until more than two years later. On April 19th, 1990, an employee of a Pilot gas station discovered the remains of a nearly nude young woman near a dumpster behind a rural truck stop at the intersection of Interstate 70 and Ohio 37. She had been viciously beaten in the head, resulting in a brain injury that caused her death, and was left wearing only her underwear. An autopsy determined that she had either been raped or engaged in consensual sexual intercourse between twelve and twenty-four hours before her death.
The woman was nicknamed Jane Doe 2 for many years until she was identified in 2017 as twenty-nine-year-old Patrice Anita Corley, a military veteran and mother of one from Louisville, Kentucky. No one was quite certain how Patrice had ended up so many miles away from home, though after she was identified, it was revealed that her sister-in-law had attempted to report her missing after not hearing from her for a significant period after December 4th, 1989.
Another woman whose murder has been tenuously linked to the Dr. No series is forty-three-year-old Sharon Lynn Kedzierski, who was last seen in late October of 1989 in Miami Lakes, Florida, and turned up beaten to death and with missing clothing near a truck stop in Youngstown, Ohio on April 9th, 1992. Sharon was only identified in February of 2013.
In this particular case, a suspect was arrested and charged: truck driver Dennis Hetzel, whose teeth reportedly matched bite marks found on the victim’s body. Some investigators doubted the accuracy of the forensics in that regard, though, and Hetzel never stood trial for the murder. He was extradited to Texas in 1995 to stand trial for the rape of his two daughters, aged five and seven, and after his conviction was sent to prison, where he later died.
The investigation into the Dr. No murders was wide-ranging and complex, and comprised thousands of interviews with truck drivers, sex workers, and truck stop employees. From these efforts, police were able to cobble together a picture of their probable perpetrator, though details were inconsistent. Witnesses stated that the supposed Dr. No was a tall, largely-built, fair-skinned white man with dark hair, aged between twenty-five and forty, who wore glasses and talked with an accent that suggested the Northeastern United States. In contradiction of a few other descriptions of his vehicle, several witnesses claimed he drove a silver semi truck with a red hood. Because many of the victims of the serial killer were sex workers, DNA gleaned from semen samples proved all but useless.
One of the first solid suspects for the prolific murderer was thirty-six-year-old truck driver Alvin Wilson, originally from Lake County, Ohio. Strands of his hair had been found on a few of the victims, and credit card receipts placed him in the same area as three of the Ohio murders at the time they occurred.
Wilson became a suspect in 1991 after the boyfriend and pimp of victim April Barnett, murdered in December of 1986, reported his license plate to police. Wilson had also assaulted and attempted to murder a woman in October of 1989. After his arrest, another young woman from Akron, Ohio claimed that Wilson had picked her up for sex, but then beat her and tried to strangle her.
Wilson seemed a promising candidate, but it was found that he was in jail at the time of some of the killings, and therefore couldn’t be the mysterious Dr. No. Wilson was later convicted of the 1989 attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Also in 1991, a man named John Fautenberry came to the attention of authorities after being arrested for a series of five murders that had taken place in Oregon, New Jersey, Ohio, and Alaska between 1990 and 1991. After his capture, Fautenberry also confessed to a sixth murder in 1984 for which another man had been convicted. The serial killer was executed for his crimes in 2009, and though he was briefly considered as the elusive Dr. No, it was determined that his victim profile was far too different; Fautenberry targeted fellow male truck drivers, whom he would befriend, kill, and rob.
Three years later, another plausible suspect emerged in the form of thirty-six-year-old trucker and Ohio native James Robert Cruz, Jr. Cruz was convicted in 1994 of raping and strangling seventeen-year-old Dawn Marie Birnbaum and dumping her body near State Route 26 in Spring Township in March of 1993. Dawn had run away from a boarding school in Maine before crossing paths with her killer.
Because articles of Dawn’s clothing were missing when her body was found, police hypothesized that Cruz could be Dr. No, but subsequent testing yielded insufficient evidence to charge him with any of the crimes. He received a life sentence for the rape and murder of Dawn Birnbaum, however.
In 1995, yet another truck driver appeared on investigators’ radars: twenty-eight-year-old Sean Patrick Goble, who was originally from North Carolina. Suspected of killing a North Carolina woman as well as two sex workers in Tennessee, Goble was a person of interest in a number of other killings across ten states. While he seemed a strong contender for the Dr. No slayings, he was too young to have perpetrated the earliest crime, as he was still in high school in 1981. It was also discovered that he was in the Army and stationed out of state during the mid-1980s, and therefore could not have been responsible for the murders occurring in that time frame.
A decade went by with no significant progress on the case, but then, in 2005, DNA profiling identified yet another truck-driving serial killer, Dellmus Colvin, who was forty-six years old at the time of his arrest. Colvin was initially charged with the murders of thirty-three-year-old Jackie Simpson on April 16th, 2003, and thirty-seven-year-old Melissa Weber on May 9th, 2003. Both victims were killed in Toledo, Ohio.
Following his capture, Colvin agreed to confess to more murders to avoid the death penalty; the crimes he owned up to included the 2000 murder of thirty-eight-year-old Valerie Jones; the 2000 murder of forty-two-year-old Jacquelynn Thomas; the 2000 murder of forty-year-old Dorothea Wetzel; and the 2002 murder of forty-three-year-old Lily Summers.
Later, he also confessed to killing twenty-seven-year-old Donna Lee White in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1987. Colvin would subsequently be convicted of seven counts of murder and two counts of rape, and handed several life sentences.
Although Colvin would later claim that he had murdered fifty-two women between 1983 and 2005, these statements could not be verified, and though it remains possible that he is responsible for the Dr. No murders, no direct evidence links him to the crimes, and he has denied his involvement.
In 2013, another breakthrough in the case occurred with the identification via DNA of suspect Samuel Legg III, a former trucker who was indicted in 2020 for the 1992 murder of Sharon Lynn Kedzierski (a murder for which Dennis Hetzel was arrested and charged, but never prosecuted).
Legg had previously been a suspect in the 1997 rape of a seventeen-year-old girl in Medina County, and would also be charged with two more counts of murder, including the 1997 slaying of thirty-nine-year-old Julie Konkol, found strangled behind a truck stop near the border of Illinois and Wisconsin; and the murder of twenty-seven-year-old Victoria Collins, who was found behind the infamous Union 76 truck stop a few days before Christmas of 1996. Legg was also a suspect in the 1990 murder of his own stepdaughter, Angela Hicks.
Though it’s strongly suspected that Samuel Legg III may indeed be the notorious Dr. No, it’s unlikely he will ever see justice for his crimes; in 2019, he was ruled incompetent to stand trial due to severe mental illness and was committed to the maximum-security Twin Valley Behavioral Health Center in Columbus, Ohio. Biennial reassessments of Legg’s mental state have remained unchanged so far, and though he is due for another evaluation in 2025, it’s unclear when or if he will ever stand trial for any of the other homicides in the Dr. No series.
As of 2024, therefore, Dr. No remains officially unidentified, and the crimes attributed to the evasive serial killer are likewise unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 