May 14th, 2000 was Mother’s Day, and Delialah “Dee” Rollins planned to stop by her mom’s house in Barberton, Ohio to celebrate the holiday with her. But in a horrifying twist of fate, she would never get the chance.
When Dee arrived that evening, she found her mother, thirty-seven-year-old Michelli “Mickey” Wilson, lying dead in her bed inside the residence on Bell Street. She had been shot. Her boyfriend, thirty-year-old Edward Rhodes, had also been gunned down alongside her.
The couple had last been seen alive at around midnight on the previous day.
The motive for the slaying was unclear; Edward Rhodes had spent some time in prison, but no connection was found between his former incarceration and the murder of him and his girlfriend. Michelli Wilson, according to friends and relatives, had been a hard-working, happy, and much-loved woman who wasn’t the type of person to have enemies.
Several leads were followed up on, but all were dead ends. Making the crime exponentially more tragic was the fact that Michelli’s first husband Samson Rollins–Dee’s father—had also been shot to death in the same house on Father’s Day of 1987. Dee witnessed the whole incident as a four-year-old, cowering under the kitchen table.
In that case, the killer was arrested; Ronald Brandt had been a friend of Samson’s. He was charged with voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to thirteen to twenty-five years in prison. He died behind bars in 1991.
Dee Rollins and Michelli’s grandson Nick Teter have both made pleas in the media for information to help in finally solving the case. As of February 2025, however, they are still waiting.
Crime Immemorial 