Michigan 1983 Cold Case Solved in 2026 – Suspect Shocked Community

For nearly 43 years, Sherry Jo Elliott’s family has been left wondering who killed the 16-year-old in November of 1983. Thanks to advanced DNA technology, a man has been identified.  I see her all the time in my head, you know. I can see her walking in the door and giving me a hug and saying, “Hi, Aunt Judy.

”    You know, it’s it’s just been so long.  At 6:00 a.m. in the morning on November 16th, 1983, a 16-year-old girl named Sherry Jo Elliott walked out of her house on Seneca Street in Flint, Michigan, carrying her school books. She was heading to the bus stop at West Dartmouth and Lavelle Road.

 She never got on that bus. By 5:30 p.m. that evening, she missed a babysitting job she never, ever miss. And 4 days later, a muskrat trapper walking a stretch of empty farmland 40 miles away found her body in a drainage ditch. For the next 42 years, the man responsible walked free. He played bass guitar in local bars.

 He went by the nickname Hendrix. He lived his entire life a few miles from where Sherry Jo grew up. And then, in January of 2026, just as police were closing in on him with a piece of science that didn’t even exist when he committed the crime, he made one final decision which changed the entire course of investigation.

 This is the story of how a drainage ditch in Saginaw County, a box of preserved evidence, and a group of college students in a locked room at Western Michigan University finally answered a question that had haunted one family for four decades. To understand why Sherry Jo Elliott’s disappearance hit her family and her community so hard, you have to understand who she was before any of this happened.

 She’d only recently arrived in Flint that same summer in 1983. She’d left her father’s home near Battle Creek in Charlotte to come live with her mother, Joyce Schultz, in a house on Seneca Street on Flint’s West Side. It was a fresh start, a new school, Carmen High, where she was a sophomore, and a new routine that she settled into almost immediately.

 And that routine is what made her disappearance so alarming so fast. Sherry Jo wasn’t the type of teenager who wandered off, who skipped class, who lost track of time with friends. Neighbors and family described her as shy, careful, almost wary around people she didn’t know well. She had a part-time babysitting job she took seriously, and on the afternoon of November 16th, 1983, she was supposed to show up for it at 5:30 in the evening.

She didn’t show up, and for a girl like Sherry Jo, that single missed appointment was as loud as an alarm bell. Her family didn’t wait to see if she turn up. They started calling around immediately, and within hours, what began as concern turned into full-blown panic. What nobody knew yet, what nobody could have known, was that Sherry Jo had vanished that same morning, hours earlier, somewhere between her front door and the bus stop at West Dartmouth and Lavelle Road.

 She had been seen waiting there, and then nothing, no further sighting. No witness who saw what happened next, just an empty stretch of road and a girl who never came home. Within a day, local police and swarms of neighborhood volunteers were canvassing the area, taping missing person flyers to the windows of every store they could find in Flint.

 They searched around that bus stop for days, but the answer wasn’t in Flint at all. It was 40 miles away in a place none of them had any reason to look. On November 20th, 1983, a muskrat trapper working a remote stretch of Muller Road in Blumfield Township, Saginaw County, came across something that stopped him cold.

 In an 8-ft deep, waterlogged drainage ditch that fed directly into Cool Creek surrounded by nothing but empty agricultural land, he found the body of a teenage girl. The only other living thing anywhere near the scene was a starving, abandoned dog lying 50 yards away. It was Sherry Jo. The moment that followed is one of the quiet, devastating details of this entire case.

A responding officer drove to the Seneca Street home and handed Joyce Schulz a piece of jewelry, a ring that Sherry Jo’s father had given her. It had been recovered from the body in Bloomfield Township. That ring was how a mother learned her daughter was dead. The autopsy that followed painted a picture far more disturbing than anyone had feared.

 The medical examiner determined that Sherry Jo had likely survived in captivity for as long as 3 days after her abduction, meaning she was probably still alive through most of the search effort happening back in Flint. While volunteers were putting up flyers, she may have still been out there somewhere. Her estimated time of death was around November 19th, just 1 day before she was found.

The cause of death was exsanguination. She bled to death from four separate gunshot wounds. The examiner also documented that she had been sex assaulted and that she had suffered severe blunt force trauma resulting in multiple skeletal fractures along with extensive lacerations to her skin and brain. One detail from the crime scene stood out to investigators at the time.

 The nature of the gunshot wounds suggested this wasn’t a chaotic public struggle. It looked more like something that happened in a controlled setting, which led some investigators to theorize she may have known her attacker or that he’d successfully gained her trust before she ever got in a vehicle with him.

 But here’s the detail that would end up mattering more than anything else recovered from that ditch. Biological fluid containing the killer’s DNA was found on her body. In November of 1983, that evidence was essentially useless. Forensic DNA profiling as a tool in criminal investigations didn’t even exist yet.

 It wouldn’t be used anywhere in the world until 1986 in England. And it wouldn’t become standard in American courtrooms until the early 2000s. So investigators did the only thing they could do. They carefully preserved that evidence and put it into storage with no idea if it would ever be useful and no idea that it would sit there for over 40 years before finally telling them exactly who had done this.

Eight months after Sherry Jo’s murder, in July of 1984, the Flint Journal reported a lead that seemed for a moment like it might crack the case wide open. A witness came forward describing a man in his 30s or 40s with graying hair dragging a young girl into a dark-colored vehicle around the same time and general area where Sherry Jo had disappeared.

 It was specific, chilling detail, and it went absolutely nowhere. Investigators canvassed the area, conducted interviews, chased down whatever they could, but without a way to test the physical evidence they’d preserved, a witness description alone wasn’t enough to identify anyone. The case stalled, and then it stalled again, and again.

 For nearly 40 years, the Sherry Jo Elliott case followed the same painful pattern that defined so many cold cases from that era. The Michigan State Police Third District Cold Case Team reopened the file multiple different times over the decades, each time hoping new techniques or fresh eyes might reveal something the original investigators had missed, and each time they ran into the exact same wall.

 There was no database to compare the preserved DNA evidence against, and no reference sample from any known suspect to test it with. The one thing that never changed through all those decades of dead ends was the fact that the original evidence technicians had done their job properly. That biological sample sat in storage waiting for forensic science to catch up to it, but by the early 2020s, nobody working the case had any reason to believe that day would ever come.

 It did. And it came from a direction nobody expected, not a police lab, but a university sociology department. 2023 marked the 40th anniversary of Sherry Jo Elliott’s murder, and it became the turning point for the entire investigation. The MSP Third District Cold Case Unit reopened the file with a strategy that combined two very different kinds of resources, advanced molecular science on one side and raw administrative manpower on the other.

Because here’s a problem that rarely gets talked about with cold cases this old. The paperwork itself becomes an obstacle. Four decades of handwritten reports, interview notes, evidence logs, and witness statements all sitting in boxes, none of it digitized, none of it searchable. Detectives working active cases simply don’t have the hours to comb through 40 years of disorganized files by hand.

 That’s where Western Michigan University’s cold case program came in. Under the direction of Dr. Ashlyn Kursten, a sociology professor, student investigators were brought in to help. But this wasn’t some loosely supervised internship. Every student underwent rigorous background checks and intensive confidentiality training before they were ever allowed near the file.

 They worked inside a secure, locked room in Wood Hall, treating the material with the same seriousness as sworn investigators. Their job was to take decades of scattered paper records and turn them into something usable, comprehensive digital timelines, searchable databases, and organized background profiles.

 And beyond just digitizing the past, they went further. The students conducted deep dive background investigations into multiple historical persons of interest using open-source research to map out where these individuals had lived, worked, and moved throughout the years surrounding the murder. This freed up MSP detectives to focus on something they’d never had the ability to pursue before, actually testing the DNA evidence that had been sitting in storage since 1983.

Using science that, by 2023, had become extraordinarily powerful. While the WMU students worked through the paperwork, the MSP forensic science division turned to a private lab called Astrium, headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas. Astrium’s entire purpose is to solve exactly the kind of problem that had kept the Elliott case frozen for 40 years.

 Evidence with no matching profile anywhere in a criminal database. Traditional forensic DNA testing, the kind used in CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, only works if the perpetrator’s DNA is already on file, meaning they’ve been arrested or convicted before, and their profile got entered into the system. If a killer has no criminal record, CODIS has nothing to compare the sample against, no matter how good the DNA evidence itself is.

Authram uses a different approach entirely called forensic grade genome sequencing. Instead of a narrow set of markers, this method builds out a single nucleotide polymorphism profile, mapping hundreds of thousands of genetic markers across the entire human genome. That level of detail does something CODIS never could.

 It allows genetic genealogists to search public genealogy databases like DNAsolves, and trace family connections through shared ancestry, rather than needing a direct match to the suspect himself. This is painstaking work. Investigators build out family trees branch by branch, sometimes vetting more than a thousand individuals, slowly narrowing an enormous pool of distant relatives down to a small handful of people who could realistically be the source of the crime scene DNA.

 It’s less like finding a needle in a haystack, and more like reconstructing an entire haystack from a single strand of hay, and then working out who it belonged to. In the Sherri Jo Elliott case, that process worked. The genealogical search generated highly specific leads, and by late 2025, all of them were pointing toward the exact same person, a 75-year-old man living in Grand Blanc, Michigan named Ronnie Collins.

But identifying a genetic connection is only half the equation. Investigators still needed to figure out who this man actually he and whether his life lined up with what happened to Sherry Jo back in 1983. That’s when the WMU students went back to work, and what they found connected Ronnie Collins to something far bigger than a single murder.

Ronnie Collins was born on February 9th, 1950, which made him 33 years old at the time Sherry Jo Elliott was murdered. In 1983, he was living on Harry Street on the north side of Flint, putting him in close, uncomfortable proximity to where Sherry Jo lived and disappeared. He wasn’t a recluse or a drifter with no ties to the community.

 Quite the opposite. Collins was a well-known figure on the local Flint music scene, a traveling bass guitarist who performed under the stage nickname Hendrix. He played regularly with a band called The Goodfoot at Scooter’s Bar and Grill in Mundy Township. This was a man who was visible, social, and known by name to people all across the area, which is exactly what made him so easy to overlook as a suspect for over 40 years.

But as WMU students dug through his history, something far more disturbing surfaced. Ronnie Collins wasn’t just connected to Sherry Jo Elliott’s murder. His name had already come up once before in a completely different case, 14 years earlier. On Halloween night in 1969, two teenage girls, Patricia Spencer, 16, and Pamela Hobley, 15, vanished in Oscoda in Iosco County, Michigan.

At the time, Collins was 19 years old, playing in local bands around the Hale and Oscoda areas. He drove a white van, and he was known to frequent a park near the beach. Witnesses reported seeing Spencer and Hobley talking to someone inside a van shortly before they disappeared. That description led Flint police straight to Collins’ door on Harry Street, where they questioned him directly.

 He denied any involvement, and because no physical evidence existed, and neither girl’s body was ever found, the investigation had nowhere left to go. The case went cold. Mary Burrows, Pamela Hobley’s sister, has stated publicly for years that she believes Collins was responsible for what happened to her sister and Patricia Spencer. So, by the time WMU students reconstructed a geographic map of Ronnie Collins’ movements through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, they weren’t just building a case against him for Sherry Jo Elliott. They were staring at a

pattern, a man whose life as a traveling musician had put him in and out of small Michigan towns for decades with more than one connection to a missing or murdered teenage girl. Investigators now had genetic evidence pointing to Collins, a documented history of suspicion in an earlier disappearance, and a geographic footprint that placed him exactly where he needed to be in 1983.

 There was only one thing left to do, get a DNA sample directly from him, and see if the match was real. They never got the chance. In January of 2026, as the MSP Cold Case Unit prepared to approach Ronnie Collins and request a voluntary DNA sample, the 75-year-old took his own life in Grand Blanc. For the family, for investigators, and for the WMU students who’d spent years building this case piece by piece, it was a gut punch of an ending.

 Decades of work finally closing in on an answer, and the one man who could confirm it, or stand trial for it, made sure he would never have to answer for anything in a courtroom. But his death did not stop the investigation from reaching its conclusion. During Collins’ autopsy, medical examiners collected a postmortem DNA sample, standard procedure anytime a death requires forensic review.

That sample was sent directly to the MSP Forensic Science Division and compared against the DNA profile extracted from the evidence preserved since 1983. The result was conclusive. It was a match. For weeks, only a small circle of investigators and WMU students knew the truth. The students had spent years learning the details of Sherry Jo Elliott’s case, and now they were among the first people on Earth to know exactly who had killed her, and they had to sit on that knowledge in complete confidentiality while the official

process played out. On April 13th, 2026, the Michigan State Police made it public in an official press release they declared the 1983 kidnapping and murder of Sherry Jo Elliott solved, naming Roney Collins as the sole perpetrator. 42 years, almost to the exact anniversary, after a muskrat trapper found a teenage girl in a drainage ditch on Muller Road.

Collins would never stand trial. There would be no courtroom, no verdict, no moment where he had to face the family of the girl he killed. But for the first time in over four decades, there was an answer. For Sherry Jo’s surviving family, the resolution of this case brought something complicated.

 Relief tangled up with resurfaced grief. Her aunt, Judy Sieca, has spoken about the agony of that original search in 1983, and the horror of learning her body had been found in a ditch. Sieca has described the mental weight the family carried for 42 years, saying that the trauma of that discovery never really left them, not even for a day.

 Long before the case was solved, Sherry Jo’s mother, Joyce Schultz, had spoken about a different kind of torment, not knowing what those final days actually looked like for her daughter. Haunted by the idea that she had been held captive somewhere, alive, while everyone searched for her in all the wrong places.

 The DNA match didn’t erase any of that. It couldn’t undo four decades of not knowing, and it couldn’t give the family a trial, a conviction, or a moment of justice delivered by a judge. What it did give them was certainty, a name, a face, a definitive answer to the question that had defined so much of their lives since November of 1983. Once the Michigan State Police went public with the resolution, the case didn’t just close quietly.

 It set off a wave of discussion across true crime communities, cold case forums, and podcasts. A lot of that conversation centered on the timing of Ronnie Collins’ death. Many amateur sleuths and researchers have speculated that Collins took his own life specifically because he sensed genetic genealogy was closing in on him, choosing to end things on his own terms rather than face prosecution.

 But, the bigger, more unsettling conversation has been about what else Ronnie Collins might have done. His connection to the unsolved 1969 disappearance of Patricia Spencer and Pamela Hobley has led to renewed calls from researchers and podcasters for police to take a second look at other unsolved disappearances of young women across Genesee, Saginaw, and Iosco counties throughout the late 1960s into the 1980s.

 The reasoning behind those calls is straightforward and hard to argue with. Collins spent decades as a traveling musician, moving through small towns across Michigan, playing shows, staying visible, and never raising enough suspicion to be seriously investigated. A transient lifestyle like that is exactly the kind of pattern that can hide a much longer history of harm.

And right now, there’s no way to know for certain whether Sherry Joe Elliott or even the Oscoda girls were the only lives Ronnie Collins ever took. Step back from the specifics of this one case, and there are three lessons here that apply to cold cases everywhere. The first is about preservation. If the original 1983 investigators and evidence technicians hadn’t carefully stored that biological sample, none of this would have been possible.

 There would have been no DNA to sequence in 2023, no genetic trail to follow, no answer for this family, ever. The entire resolution of this case rests on the discipline of people doing careful, unglamorous evidence work more than 40 years ago with no idea whether it would ever matter. The second lesson is about partnership.

The WMU Cold Case Program shows exactly how a resource-strapped police department can multiply its investigative capacity. Not by cutting corners, but by bringing in trained, vetted, supervised students to do the massive organizational work that detectives simply don’t have the hours for.

 That frees up actual investigators to spend their limited time on leads and lab work, not paperwork from four decades ago. And the third lesson is about the technology itself. Traditional CODIS testing only works if a suspect is already in the system, meaning killers with no prior record can hide behind a DNA match that has nothing to compare itself to.

Forensic-grade genome sequencing and genetic genealogy erase that limitation entirely. They don’t need the suspect in a database, they just need his relatives to be somewhere in the family tree of human civilization, and increasingly that’s proving to be enough. Sherry Jo Elliott’s case took 42 years to solve, and in the end, it wasn’t solved by an interrogation room or a courtroom confession.

 It was solved by a single preserved sample, decades of patient work by people who never gave up on her, and a science that finally learned how to listen to what that evidence had been saying the whole time. Roney Collins never had to answer for what he did to Sherry Jo Elliott. He never had to answer for what may have happened to Patricia Spencer and Pamela Hobley, either.

 But because of the work of the Michigan State Police, Authorize Labs, and a group of college students in a locked room at Western Michigan University, the truth came out anyway, and a family that spent four decades in the dark finally got their answer. If a case like this makes you wonder what else Roney Collins might have left behind, you’re not alone, because this isn’t the only Michigan disappearance with his name attached to it.

14 years before Sherry Jo Elliott vanished, two teenage girls disappeared on Halloween night in Oscoda, to and to this day, their bodies have never been found. I’ve put together the full story of Patricia Spencer and Pamela Hobley in the next video. Click through, because their case might be a lot closer to being solved than anyone realizes.