During the 1980s and early ’90s the bodies of multiple women were found in ditches in seven different Ohio counties. Each woman had been beaten or strangled to death and each had jewelry and clothing removed from her body. All were found partially or fully nude along a major interstate, all frequented truck stops, and, perhaps most tellingly, all the identified women were either known or suspected prostitutes. Although several of the victims were found to have been killed by different perpetrators, many of the murders remain unsolved and are believed by some investigators to be the work of a killer who preys on prostitutes.

Prostitutes make ideal targets for a serial killer because they live transient lifestyles and their disappearances are often not reported. In addition, many believe law enforcement does not diligently investigate a working girl’s murder because the profession is frowned upon.

Investigative apathy is not an issue in the Ohio murders. Many police hours and manpower were used, but many of the murders remain unsolved.

Murdered Ohio Prostitutes

In the 1980s, a sex-for-sale industry permeated truck stops across the Buckeye State. Using C.B. radio, a prostitute gave her handle and a catchphrase; the trucker answered by giving his location at the truck stop. Once services were rendered, the girl used that trucker’s C.B. to radio her next customer.

A man identifying himself as “Dr. No” always said yes when the madams called.

‘Dr. No’s’ Identity is Unknown

The first victim some believed is linked to ‘Dr. No’ was discovered on April 24, 1981, near the city of Troy, just north of Dayton in Miami County. After attempts to identify her failed, she was dubbed the “Buckskin Girl,” after the tasseled buckskin jacket she was wearing at the time of her murder.

The identity of the Buckskin Girl was unknown for nearly thirty-seven years. On April 9, 2018, she was identified as twenty-one-year-old Marcia King of Little Rock, Arkansas. In addition to being strangled, she suffered trauma to the head and neck and had a lacerated liver. Although she had been placed along the road in a fetal position, there were no signs of rape or other sexual activity.

Although Marcia lived a transient lifestyle, there is no evidence she was involved in prostitution, leading many investigators to question whether she was a victim of the so-called prostitute killer. Though her identity is unmasked, Marcia’s murder remains unsolved.

                                  Composite Of The        Marcia King   

                                    “Bucksin Girl”

The next possible victim of Dr. No was another Marcia, found four years later.

On June 26, 1985, twenty-five-year-old Marcia Matthews was found unconscious one mile from the Union 76 truck stop just off Interstate 70 in Richland County. She had been beaten with a blunt object which caused a traumatic brain injury. She died two days later without regaining consciousness.

Marcia Matthews

The body of twenty-three-year-old Shirley Dean Taylor was found behind a guard rail at a rest area off Interstate 76 in Medina County, three miles from Interstate 71, on July 20, 1986.  She had been beaten and strangled to death. Her underwear and shoes were never found.

Shirley Dean Taylor

Five-and-a-half months later, on December 4, eighteen year-old April Barrett was found strangled and dumped behind a guardrail on I-71 in Ashland County. She too had been beaten and strangled to death; some of her clothes were also missing.

April Barrett

On the evening of February 8, 1987, twenty-seven-year-old Anne-Marie Patterson was working a truck stop in Austintown, seventy miles southeast of Cleveland. She was seen entering a black or dark blue Peterbilt truck shortly after midnight.

On March 4, Anne-Marie’s body was found in a drainage ditch, wrapped in a sleeping bag along Interstate 71, northeast of Cincinnati, approximately two-hundred-fifty miles from where she was last seen. Her head had been bashed in, the result of an excessive beating. An autopsy revealed she was six months pregnant and had been killed within forty-eight hours of her disappearance. Her killer appeared to have kept her body in a refrigerated truck for nearly a month.

Anne-Marie Patterson

A woman was found beaten to death in Hebron, Ohio, near Columbus, on April 19, 1990. She was known as “the Licking County Jane Doe,” until 2017 when she was positively identified as twenty-nine-year-old Patrice Corley.

                                      Licking County           Patrice

                                           Jane Doe                   Corley

The partially nude body of twenty-six-year-old Kathryn Hill was found in a Lake Township truck stop parking lot near the Ohio turnpike on November 5, 1990.  She had also been beaten to death.

Kathryn Hill

The victims were all prostitutes who had been seen at truck stops along busy sections of Interstates shortly before they were murdered.

The Trail Of Bodies

The murders of three more prostitutes found along Interstates in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York could also be the work of the alleged Ohio prostitute killer.

Twenty-eight-year-old Jill Allen was found strangled to death in Springfield, Illinois, on December 19, 1986. Nineteen-year-old Lamonica Cole was found with a scarf stuffed in her throat at a truck stop in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, on November 22, 1987. The body of thirty-one-year-old Terry Roarke was found in Saratoga County, New York, on March 29, 1988. She died of blunt force trauma to the head after likely having been dumped from a car.

                                         Jill           Lamonica          Terry

                                       Allen             Cole               Roark 

The body of “Englewood Jane Doe” was found on August 10, 1987. Englewood is between Dayton and Cincinnati.

The woman, beaten and strangled to death, was, for many years, believed to be a possible victim of Dr. No until she was identified in 2010 as twenty-year-old Paula Davis from Kansas City, Missouri. She was not known to be a prostitute and nothing was found suggesting she had ever engaged in related activity.

                                    Englewood                       Paula

                                     Jane Doe                          Davis

Investigators now believe Paula Davis was a victim of Kansas City serial killer Lorenzo Gilyard, who is currently serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of six other women. In addition to Paula, Gilyard is suspected of killing six more women between1977-93. Gilyard, known as “The Kansas City Strangler” after his chosen method of murder, is not a suspect in any of the Ohio Prostitute killings.

Lorenzo Gilyard

A woman’s body was found along Interstate 71 near Akron on April 9, 1992. In 2013, she was identified as forty-three-year-old Sharon Kedzierski, who had vanished from Miami Lakes, Florida, on October 25, 1989.

Like Paula Davis, Sharon was thought for many years to be another of the possible Ohio prostitute killer’s victims. Also like Paula, however, she was not a prostitute and following her identification, authorities announced they believed her murder was not at the hands of Dr. No.

Sharon Kedzierski

In the 1990s, three truck drivers were arrested in three separate murder investigations involving prostitutes. None could be connected to the Ohio murders, but all are still considered persons of interest.

In 1990, Alvin Wilson, a trucker from Lake County, Ohio, was arrested for the rape and attempted murder of an Akron prostitute in 1986 and of another woman in 1989. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Credit card receipts place Wilson in Youngstown, Ohio, around the time of three of the other Ohio prostitutes’ murders. While not a conclusive match, tests showed similarities between Wilson’s DNA and that found on several victims.

Alvin Wilson

Another Ohio truck driver, James Cruz, Jr., became a suspect in June 1994, after he was convicted of murdering seventeen-year-old runaway Dawn Birnbaum in Pennsylvania.  DNA testing, however, has not connected him to any of the Ohio murders, nor to the murder of Lamonica Cole in Pennsylvania.

James Cruz, Jr.

Dawn Birnbaum ran away from her Poland Spring, Maine, home in March 1993. One month later, her body was found along Interstate 80 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.  She was bound with a rope and had been killed by ligature strangulation.

Dawn Birnbaum

Another suspect is Sean Goble, AKA The Interstate Killer, convicted of killing two prostitutes in Tennessee and one in North Carolina in 1995. His victims were killed in a manner similar to the Ohio prostitutes.

Goble also drove a Peterbilt truck, the same make believed to have been driven by the Ohio killer. However, at the time of the first murder, that of Marcia King in 1981, he was still in high school, and in the mid-1980s, when the majority of the killings occurred, he was serving in the Army and was stationed outside Ohio.

Sean Goble

In November 2005, DNA profiling linked forty-six-year-old truck driver Dellmus Colvin to the murders of five prostitutes in Toledo, Ohio. Colvin later admitted to killing two others in New Jersey. All of the murders were committed between1987-2005. Colvin denies involvement in the Dr. No murders and nothing connects him to any of them.

Dellmus Colvin

Another suspect emerged in February 2019 when truck driver Samuel Legg was arrested after DNA evidence linked him to two murders in Illinois and four murders in Ohio, including that of Sharon Kezierski. All of Legg’s victims were found near truck stops, either nude or partially clothed.

Though on the surface a promising suspect, Legg, like Goble, is probably too young to have committed all of the Ohio prostitute murders; he was only eleven-years-old in 1981 and fifteen-years-old in 1985.

In May 2021, a judge ruled Legg, having been diagnosed with schizophrenia in the past, is incompetent to stand trial on the rape and murder charges. He was instead confined to a psychiatric facility.

Samuel Legg

Legg is also a suspect in the murder of his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Angela Hicks.  She disappeared from her Elyria, Ohio, home on July 21, 1990. Her body was found five weeks later. No one has been charged with her murder.

Angela Hicks

If the Ohio prostitute murders were the work of one person, he was skilled. Most serial killers leave their victims’ bodies in areas with which they are familiar and that often leads to their capture. Instead, the purported Ohio prostitute killer scattered his victims’ bodies, leading some investigators to believe he could be a security guard or a former police officer who knows law enforcement investigative techniques. He likely also knew it would be more difficult to connect the crimes by scattering the bodies in different police jurisdictions.

Two of the victims, Anne-Marie Patterson and Shirley Taylor, were last seen getting into a black or dark blue early 1980s Peterbilt tractor, similar to the one below, possibly pulling a refrigerated trailer.

A Peterbilt Tractor-Trailer

The driver may have used the C.B. handles Dr. No, Stargazer, or Dragon. In the 1980s, he was believed to be between twenty-five to forty years old, dark-haired, and possibly having a mid-eastern accent.

The composite is not confirmed as that of Dr. No; it is of a man who may only possibly be him.

A Possible Likeness

Of “Dr. No”

Forensic examination of small semen traces on many of the victims yielded mixed results due to the women being prostitutes and having engaged in frequent sexual activity. No other significant forensic evidence, such as fingerprints or hair samples, was found at any of the crime scenes.

Approximately one-hundred-fifty unsolved homicides nationwide fit the same basic pattern as the Ohio prostitute murders. Some investigators do not believe the murders were committed by the same perpetrator.

If you believe you have any information relating to the murders of any of the Ohio prostitutes, please contact the Ohio Attorney General’s office at 800-282-0515 or the Ohio Bureau of Investigation at 740-845-2000.

Are The Women’s Murders Linked?

SOURCES:
• The Courier-Tribune
• Ohio Attorney General Website
• Orlando Sentinel
• Pittsburgh Press
• Sun Sentinel
• Tribune Chronicle
• Unsolved Mysteries
• UPI
• WKYC NBC Channel 3 Cleveland