Serial Killer's Podcast Confession Prompts Victim Search In IL

LA SALLE COUNTY, IL — A search with cadaver dogs was stopped due to heat Wednesday in LaSalle County after a convicted serial killer spoke out on a podcast claiming to have disposed of a victim's body near an abandoned Illinois truck wash. Former long-haul trucker Dellmus Colvin, 61, is incarcerated in Ohio after admitting to the murders of at least seven women. He has since claimed to have killed between 47 and 52 women across the United States between 1987 and 2005.

On Aug. 26, Florida criminal profiler Phil Chalmers released audio of a phone interview he did with Colvin from an Ohio prison for an episode of his "Where the Bodies Are Buried" podcast. He asked Colvin to help him find one of his undiscovered victims, and Colvin agreed — but refused to discuss any crimes he'd committed in death penalty states, including Texas.

On Wednesday afternoon, investigators and crime scene technicians from the sheriff's office and La Salle and Peru police departments were at the scene of an abandoned truck wash with cadaver dogs, the Herald-News reported. Sheriff Tom Templeton said the dogs were struggling in the 85-degree heat, telling the paper the search was discontinued and will resume in one week — Sept. 9 — when the weather is expected to be cooler.

Evidence was collected during the investigation, including two bones that were later determined not to be human.

During his phone call with Chalmers, Colvin was willing to talk about a murder he claimed he committed in Illinois, which officially abolished the death penalty in 2011. He said the body of a woman he killed in LaSalle would be the easiest to find.

"I was at the Flying J (truck stop)," he said, when a woman knocked on the door of his truck. Colvin claimed he initially told her to leave, but the woman came back. Colvin said he let her into the sleeper area of the truck, where he strangled her before pulling out of the truck stop and driving her to an abandoned truck wash.

"The road is deserted," Colvin said. "No one comes down there, it's dark and it's scary."

He said he took the woman's body 30 to 40 feet into a wooded area and left her there. Colvin claimed he dumped the woman's clothes, a Tweety bird T-shirt and sweat pants, in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Colvin, who said he never knew his victims' names, described the woman as white with dishwater blonde hair. He didn't say what year she was killed.

Asked how many of the 50 states he'd committed murders in, Colvin said, "Quite a few. Quite a few."

In September 2006, Colvin pleaded guilty to killing 33-year-old Jackie Simpson and 37-year-old Melissa Weber in Toledo, Ohio, and admitted to killing 38-year-old Valerie Jones, 42-year-old Jacquelynn Thomas and 43-year-old Lily Summers. A month later, he also admitted to killing 40-year-old Dorothea Wetzel in Toledo. In 2010, he was also charged with the 1987 murder of 27-year-old Donna Lee White in Atlantic City and pleaded guilty to White's murder.

Colvin is serving a mandatory life sentence at Lebanon Correctional Institution in Ohio.