Authorities are analyzing bones found in Illinois to determine if they are the remains of a woman whom a convicted serial killer imprisoned in Ohio claims he killed about 15 years ago.
Investigators found two small bones that could be human on Wednesday at a now-shuttered truck wash in Peru, Illinois, where Dellmus Colvin said he dumped the woman’s body after killing her, LaSalle County Sheriff Tom Templeton told the Journal Star in Peoria. The bones were taken to an Illinois State Police forensic anthropologist for analysis.
Colvin, 61, claims to have killed dozens of women. He is serving two life sentences in Ohio for the 2003 slayings of two prostitutes and later pleaded guilty to killing four other women in Ohio and New Jersey. He has said that the woman in Illinois worked as a prostitute outside the truck stop.
Authorities have not found any missing persons cases from that period that match the scenario Colvin described, but there is a possibility that the woman was not from the area and perhaps never reported missing.
“Individuals who work a high-risk lifestyle tend to move around a lot,” Templeton said.
The discovery of the bones came after Colvin was interviewed by criminal profiler Phil Chalmers during Chalmers’ podcast, “Where the Bodies are Buried.” Colvin told Chalmers that in 2004 or 2005 he met a woman at the Flying J Travel Center along Interstate 80 outside LaSalle. He said he killed, then drove to a truck wash in Peru, where he dumped her body.
Templeton said his detectives then spoke to Colvin. Preliminary results of the tests on the bones are expected to come next week and Templeton said investigators will search the area where they were found next week as well.