Of all the questions Barb Angel wants answered about her daughter's murder, it is this: Why?
"She was such a nice, bubbly, happy girl," said Ms. Angel of her daughter, Joan Elaine Palacio, who according to Ms. Angel was lured by drugs into a life of prostitution before her body was found in a weedy East Toledo lot Sept. 15, 2002.
"I want to know how anyone could do this to her - to anyone," Ms. Angel said.
Earlier this month, Ms. Angel hoped she might get the answer to another question about her daughter's death: Who killed her?
In a tense Lucas County Common Pleas Court on Oct. 2, Toledo long-haul trucker Dellmus Colvin admitted to strangling and suffocating five prostitutes and dumping their bodies in remote areas in and around the city. Ms. Angel's daughter was not among the victims.
The next day, police connected him to a sixth murder. Police said they are now considering Colvin's links to a seventh murdered prostitute, Debra Dixon.
They're not done.
Because this much has been known for years: Hookers are easy targets, especially for serial killers.
"All your lives you tell your children, 'Don't talk to strangers' and 'For God's sake, don't ever get in a car with strangers.' Then these people go up and try to talk their way into the car with those strangers," said Sheriff's Lt. Clarke Fine of Hendricks County, Indiana.
As in other detective offices across the country, Toledo investigators are taking a fresh look at old murders.
They're relying on forensic databases and other new technology to connect missing persons reports to unidentified bodies and serial killers to prostitutes - now trying to connect series of murders rather than investigating each as an isolated case.
For two years, Lieutenant Fine has been searching for the killer of Buffie Rae Brawley, a Toledo prostitute whose body was discovered at an abandoned truck stop outside Indianapolis.
He and other investigators working the cases of murdered prostitutes face an exasperating paradox: For as easy as prostitutes are to prey upon, their killers are often impossible to catch.
Prostitutes are marginalized, transient, often drug-addicted, and leery of police. Especially in the case of truck-stop prostitutes, disdainfully dubbed by some as "lot lizards," their disappearance often goes unnoticed until someone discovers a body.
That happened to Yvonne Mipe, 43, and Felita Thomas, 36, victims of a pair of Toledo men later convicted in their deaths. The murders in September of 1999 - about the same time that Colvin went on his murderous spree - weren't discovered until their bodies were found in January of this year in a frozen Monroe County farm field.
All the while, serial killers like Colvin can find anonymity in plain sight as a truck driver, living as a loner and, through a legitimate profession, crisscrossing the country.
Colvin's case underscores another frustration for investigators: At least once, Colvin killed inside his truck cab, dumped the body outside, and pulled away.
"Your crime scene literally is portable. The crime scene might be in Nebraska by the time you find a body," said John Helm, an investigator with the Wood County prosecutor's office.
In Lake Township, two cases continue to stymie investigators. One of them, Victoria Collins, an exotic dancer from Cleveland whose naked, frozen body was found in 1996, most likely died elsewhere but was dumped in Lake Township, Mr. Helm said.
Worst of all for investigators, there's no obvious motive - a critical, tell-tale clue to any homicide investigation - and often no other link between victim and killer.
"A random act of violence is very hard to solve, and compound that with [a killer] who might travel 1,200 miles a day every day all over the country," said Lake Township Police Chief Mark Hummer.
That's the heartbreaking realization for loved ones who might wait years, even decades, for a killer to be identified.
It has been almost 10 years since Helen Zedaker learned that her pregnant daughter's body was discovered partially clothed on a Spencer Township farm. Left in a watery ditch for several days, Heidi Theisen's only injuries indicated she'd been asphyxiated.
Investigators have interviewed friends, family, and acquaintances. They have run Ms. Theisen's photo to the news media and tracked down leads.
There have been no arrests.
"I think about her all the time," said Mrs. Zedaker, 68, from her home in New Bavaria, Ohio. "I don't know if it will ever get solved."
Even with an arrest, convictions in a prostitute's murder are far from guaranteed.
Witnesses might be other prostitutes or drug users with credibility problems. DNA isn't lock-solid evidence either.
Michael Bates, 42, was arrested last year in the 1990 murder in Monroe County, Michigan, of Connie Baker Slayton, 24, whose partially clothed body was discovered by a passer-by along Albain Road near I-75.
She had been stabbed once in the chest.
Monroe County sheriff's Detective Dave Davison said a break in the case came in 2004 after investigators at the Michigan State Police Crime lab ran a test on semen collected from the scene 14 years earlier. The DNA led detectives to Mr. Bates.
But on June 15, after a four-day trial, a Monroe County jury found Mr. Bates not guilty of the murder.
"The jury felt it was proved that he was the last person who had sex with her but not the person who killed her," Detective Davison said. "Because she was a prostitute, I believe that weighed in the jurors' minds."
Yet, there are the unexpected breaks.
In Colvin's case, it came with a plea agreement hours before the third day of his trial for murdering two prostitutes was to resume in Lucas County Common Pleas Court.
Colvin admitted responsibility for the deaths of Jackie Simpson, 33, whose decomposed body was found April 23, 2003, under bushes near a tanning business on Creekside Avenue, and Melissa Weber, 37, whose body was found May 9, 2005, under a couch in a vacant trucking terminal behind 1045 Matzinger Rd.
He also admitted his role in the unsolved slayings of three other Toledo-area prostitutes: Valerie Jones, 38, a grandmother whose skeletal remains were found Jan. 6, 2000, near the Ottawa River and Hoffman Road landfill; Jacquelynn Thomas, 42, whose body was found Sept. 2, 2000, just across the Michigan line near Smith and Telegraph roads in Bedford Township; and Lily Summers, 43, a mother of two whose body was found April 8, 2002, in a 45-foot tractor-trailer behind B&B Repairs, 4400 Martin-Moline Rd., near Metcalf Field in Lake Township, Wood County.
All five women had been strangled or smothered, their bodies wrapped in sheets and blankets, and dumped.
Colvin pleaded guilty under a plea agreement to four counts of aggravated murder and one count of complicity to aggravated murder. In exchange, prosecutors lifted the death-penalty specification against him; they also dismissed rape charges in the sexual assaults of a 47-year-old Toledo woman in April, 2004, and a 31-year-old city woman in July, 2003. Both lived through their attacks.
Judge Thomas Osowik immediately sentenced Colvin to five consecutive sentences of life in prison.
The next day, police said, Colvin admitted his involvement in the death of 40-year-old Dorothea Wetzel of Toledo, whose skeletal remains were found Aug. 5, 2000, by a man walking his dog near the Maumee River in South Toledo.
Police said they are now investigating Colvin's possible role in a seventh murder: the death of 44-year-old Debra C. Dixon, a prostitute whose battered and severely burned body was found in an empty wooded lot in the 4100 block of Creekside Avenue early Christmas Eve, 2000.
Colvin's confessions have prompted investigators to examine other area cold-case murders, particularly those involving prostitutes. Police have also contacted more than 100 police departments nationwide where the Toledo truck driver was known to have traveled.
"We have no idea what they have or what we'll find," Toledo police Sgt. Steve Forrester said.
Colvin has repeatedly denied requests for media interviews unless he's paid.
In a brief telephone conversation with a Blade reporter, he wanted to know first: Would he be compensated for his information?
He was told paying for stories is neither ethical nor negotiable, and no news organization most likely would pay him for his story.
He disagreed.
"Oh, they will. Believe me, they will," he replied. "There's a lot of things you don't know [that] people want to know. Thank you and good-bye."
He hung up.
Later, he sent a letter from jail to The Blade, criticizing the newspaper's unwillingness to pay him for an interview.
In Harrisburg, Pa., last week, Colvin's case was presented at the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program's Truck Driver Serial Killings meeting, where investigators nationwide swap information about still-unsolved murders and still-unidentified bodies.
In Wood County, Mr. Helm continues to scan headlines and police databases as serial killers, and their travels, continue to be identified.
And in a tidy Oregon home, Ms. Palacio smiles in snapshots taken years ago: as a little girl in her Brownie uniform and later with T-ball equipment, as a high school senior, and as a young mother with her infant son.
Colvin's confession refreshed Ms. Angel's pain, but hope that her daughter's killer will be found diminishes with each passing day.
"First you go nuts. It's all you can think about. You can't sleep. You can't drive well. You're crazed," she said. "Then you realize: I have to accept that I may never have those answers."
Contact Robin Erb at:
robinerb@theblade.com
or 419-724-6133.
First Published October 24, 2006, 12:40 p.m.
