He Held Her for 3 Days, Dumped Her Body – Then Lived Freely in Her City for 43 Years | Michigan 1983

He Held Her for 3 Days, Dumped Her Body – Then Lived Freely in Her City for 43 Years | Michigan 1983

Around 6:30 in the morning on November 16th, 1983, a 16-year-old girl left home to go to school in Flint, Michigan. She never made it back alive. Her body was found 4 days later, dumped along a rural road 40 miles away. She had been shot four times and sexually assaulted. Investigators collected and preserved the DNA the killer left on her body. Over the next 43 years, they compared it to suspect after suspect. The killer was eventually identified, but he was never prosecuted. This is the story of Sherry Jo Elliott.

Flint, Michigan in the fall of 1983 was already feeling the pressure of economic change. Michael Jackson’s Thriller had just come out. A Christmas Story was a few weeks from hitting theaters. And on Seneca Street, a 16-year-old girl named Sherry Jo Elliott was trying to settle into a new life. Sherry Jo had grown up in Charlotte, Michigan, a small town about 40 miles south of Lansing. She had been living with her biological father, Harland, but that year, she made a decision. She wanted to go back to her mother, Joyce, so she packed up and moved to Flint.

She enrolled at Flint Carman High School as a junior. She found a part-time job babysitting for families in the area. She attended Emmanuel Lutheran Church. She was shy, she was smart, and she was always careful around strangers. Sherry was her mother’s only child. Her aunt, Judy Sica, has never stopped thinking about her. Years later, she described it simply: “I see her all the time in my head. I can see her walking in the door and giving me a hug and saying, ‘Hi, Aunt Judy.'”

On the morning of November 16th, Sherry Jo left the house on Seneca Street just before 6:30. She walked toward her bus stop at the corner of West Dartmouth and Clio roads. That was her normal route. And that morning, someone saw her there at that corner waiting for the bus. That was the last confirmed sighting of Sherry Jo Elliott alive. Sometime after that, something happened at or near that bus stop. There were no witnesses to a struggle. No one reported anything unusual. She was simply there, and then she wasn’t.

By the time the school marked her absent that morning, she was already gone. By the afternoon, Joyce was calling police. A search began around the bus stop and along the streets she would have walked. That evening, the missing person signs went up. Neighbors helped. Volunteers walked the streets. Stores put her picture in their windows. Judy Sica was there through all of it. “It was terrible,” she said. “We went and passed missing signs to everybody in the neighborhood, in town, and stores would put the missing in the windows.”

Day two passed, then day three. Investigators were working every lead they had. And some of those leads led somewhere painful. Early in the investigation, police looked hard at people connected to the family. There were false starts. Joyce would later confirm one of them. Her husband, Robert Schultz, Sherry Jo’s stepfather, was at one point considered a suspect. He had nothing to do with it. He was eventually cleared. But he had been placed under that suspicion at the worst possible time, and it stayed with him. Robert Schultz would carry those years for the rest of his life.

Day four came. November 20th, 1983. A muskrat trapper was working his lines on Molar Road in Bloomfield Township, about 40 miles north of Flint. He had come down that same road the day before. There had been nothing there. But on the morning of the 20th, he found something in the drainage ditch. A body. He immediately called the police. The first detail the trapper gave investigators reframed everything. She had not been there the day before. He was certain of it. He checked his lines every day.

What the autopsy found was difficult to sit with. Sherry Jo had been shot four times. She had been sexually assaulted. There were fractures to her bones and lacerations to her skin and brain. She was found partially clothed in a ditch 40 miles from the bus stop where she had last been seen standing four days earlier. The official cause of death was exsanguination. She had bled out from her wounds.

And then came the finding that no one wanted to say out loud. Based on the condition of the body and the trapper’s account, medical examiners determined that Sherry Jo had almost certainly still been alive as late as November 19th—three full days after she vanished, one day before her body appeared in that ditch. She had not been killed at the bus stop. She had been taken somewhere, held against her will for at least three days, then killed, then driven 40 miles north and left on a road that almost nobody traveled. Somewhere between that bus stop and that ditch, something far longer and worse than a murder had taken place. Somewhere no one was watching and no one heard a thing.

National DNA databases didn’t exist yet. The technology to trace unknown DNA through genealogy records was still decades away. So, the DNA investigators had secured sat in storage waiting for science to catch up. Joyce Schultz, 43 years later, said this: “I am just grateful that they found her. Because if they hadn’t found her, I wouldn’t have been able to survive not knowing where she was, if she was being harmed. I wouldn’t have been able to survive that.”

Within a year of the murder, the case had effectively gone cold. The investigation had been thorough, but there was nothing left to pull on. The man who killed Sherry Jo Elliott walked away without a trace. Years passed, then decades. Joyce raised no more children. Robert Schultz lived with the knowledge that he had once been a suspect in the death of his stepdaughter, even after being cleared. Judy Sica kept seeing Sherry Jo in her memory, at that door, arms out for a hug. Sherry Jo was buried at Crestwood Memorial Cemetery in Grand Blanc, and her case file sat in storage at the Michigan State Police 3rd District.

Detectives reopened it more than once over the years. Each time, the same wall. A DNA profile, preserved evidence, and no name to match any of it to. By 2013, forensic science had advanced far enough that investigators could develop a fuller profile from what they had. They ran it. Nothing came back. The man who killed Sherry Jo had no criminal record and wasn’t in any database anywhere. Three years later, Crime Stoppers offered $2,500 for information. Nobody called. Judy Sica said it plainly: “We did all lose hope. Unfortunately, we did.”

Then in 2023, the third district cold case unit reopened the case one more time. But this time was different. This time they had two things they had never had before: a private forensic laboratory in Texas that specialized in exactly this kind of problem, and a team of college students who would go through that case file until they knew every document inside it. What came out of that work would take two more years. And when it was done, the name that came back was one that nobody expected.

The Western Michigan University Cold Case Program works alongside Michigan State Police on real active cold cases. Students apply. They’re fingerprinted, background checked, and trained under strict confidentiality requirements. They can’t discuss the cases with family or friends. They work knowing they may spend months on a file and never see it resolved. When the Sherry Jo Elliott file landed in front of them, they were looking at close to 40 years of accumulated material. Thousands of documents, interview records, forensic reports, witness statements—all of it built up across multiple reopenings stretching back to 1983. None of it organized. Most of it not digitized.

The students worked through everything. They reorganized it, built timelines, created family trees, and ran detailed research on persons of interest. They made the case workable in a way it had never been before. One of those students, Ella Bilky, said this: “I was about the same age as Sherry. It kind of hit home. It meant a lot that I was able to help.”

At the same time, Othram Labs in The Woodlands, Texas, was working the DNA. Using a process called forensic-grade genome sequencing, they built a complete genetic profile from the evidence preserved since 1983. Then they applied forensic genetic genealogy—the same class of technology used to identify the Golden State Killer—to trace that DNA through public genealogy databases. Distant relatives, family trees, generation by generation, narrowing toward a specific man in a specific age range living in a specific part of Michigan. The students were reconstructing the paper trail. Othram was following the biology. And in 2025, both lines of work pointed at the same name: a man who had been living in the Flint area the entire time, all 43 years of it.

Investigators identified him. They needed one more step: a voluntary DNA sample to confirm the match. They made plans to approach him. They didn’t move fast enough. His name was Ronnie Collins. In the bars and music venues of Genesee County, Ronnie Collins was a familiar face. He played bass guitar and sang in funk and oldies groups for decades. People who heard him play gave him a nickname: Hendrix. He performed with groups called The Waybacks and later The Goodfoot. He turned up at venues across the area in his Michigan Wolverines shirt and cap, warm and easy to talk to, someone everyone seemed to know.

In January of 2026, the announcement went out that Ronnie Collins had died suddenly at home at the age of 75. His music community mourned him. Friends left condolences. Obituaries went around. No one had any reason to ask questions.

Then, on April 13th, 2026, Michigan State Police announced the resolution of the cold case homicide of Sherry Jo Elliott. The man responsible, they said, was him. Born February 9th, 1950, he was 33 years old on the morning he drove up to a bus stop in Flint where a 16-year-old girl was standing alone in the dark before school. Police confirmed there were no known ties between Collins and Sherry Jo. She hadn’t been targeted. She was simply at that corner at that hour, and he took her. He had then gone home, continued his life, played his music, treated his patients, and smiled for photographs for 43 years while Joyce Schultz buried her only child, while Judy Sica put flyers in store windows, while Robert Schultz lived under a shadow he never deserved and died in 2025—one year before the announcement—without ever learning who was actually responsible.

Which brings us to why he was never prosecuted. When Michigan State Police identified him as their suspect and moved to get a DNA sample, Collins died by suicide. The DNA collected during his autopsy confirmed the match to the evidence from 1983. He knew they were coming, and he made sure he would never have to face what he had done.

Joyce Schultz said this: “It’s not going to change anything in my life. I still miss her every day. That’s something you never get over. No parent ever does.” But Michigan State Police confirmed something else in the days after the announcement. Quietly, almost as a footnote, Ronnie Collins had been a person of interest in another case, a much older one, one that has never been solved.

Halloween night, October 31st, 1969, Oscoda, Michigan. A bomb threat had cleared out the local high school early that afternoon. In the confusion, two girls left campus together, even though they were not close friends. Patricia Spencer was 16 years old. Pamela Hobley was 15. They made it into downtown Oscoda. Witnesses saw them talking to someone in a van, and then they were gone. Ronnie Collins was 19 years old that Halloween. He was in Oscoda that night playing in bands in the area. He drove a van. When police came to question him, he said he knew nothing about it. The bodies of Patricia Spencer and Pamela Hobley have never been found. That case is still officially open.

Pamela Hobley’s younger sister, Mary Bierley, was 8 years old when her sister disappeared. 57 years later, after Collins was named in the Elliott case, she said this: “I truly believe he took the girls. There is no DNA to test in that case. There is no confirmation, and the one man who had the answer died in January of 2026 without ever being asked.”

One man, 43 years, a community that knew him by name and never suspected a thing. A family that waited more than four decades. A stepfather who died one year too soon. And a man who took his own life rather than face a courtroom, leaving two other families with nowhere left to go.

Now, I want to hear from you. Do you think Ronnie Collins was responsible for what happened to Patricia Spencer and Pamela Hobley that Halloween night in 1969? And if so, why? Drop your thoughts in the comments below. And if this story stayed with you, please like this video, share it with someone, and subscribe to the channel. It genuinely helps us keep telling stories like this one.