A 43 Year Michigan Cold Case Was Just SOLVED and Nobody Saw It Coming –
Using a DNA analysis and forensic genetic genealogy, police were able to identify a potential suspect in the murder and sexual assault of 16-year-old Sherry Jo Elliott. The suspect did not voluntarily give up a DNA sample, but then he took his own life. On the morning of November 16th, 1983, a 16-year-old girl left her house on Seneca Street in Flint and headed toward the bus stop at West Dartmouth and Clio roads.
It was 6:30, still dark. She had made the walk every weekday for 2 years. That morning a vehicle stopped near her between her front door and the corner. Whoever was inside got her in, and nobody on the street saw it happen. Her seat in first period at Carmen High School was empty. 4 days later, her body was found in a ditch on a rural road 30 miles north of Flint.
She had been sexually assaulted and shot four times. A brass casing lay on the ground beside her. The biological material pointed at the man who took her, but in 1983, no laboratory could read it. This is how they found her killer. Her name was Sherry Jo Elliott. She was born March 27th, 1967 in Charlotte, Michigan, the only child of Joyce Schultz.
She shared a house on Seneca Street with Joyce and her stepfather, Robert. Her father, Harland Elliott, did not live with them. She had only turned 16 the spring before the morning she vanished. The route to the bus stop ran through a residential neighborhood on Flint’s west side.
Modest houses with small yards and aging driveways. Sherry Jo had walked it for 2 years since she started high school. She left around 6:30 the morning of November 16th with the eastern sky just gray enough to see the shapes of parked cars along the curb. She never reached the corner. When Sherry Jo did not come home from school that afternoon, Joyce called the Flint Police Department.
Officers took the report and began looking. Joyce’s sister, Judy Siaca, joined the family in putting up missing person flyers in shop windows and on lamp posts throughout the neighborhood. The hour had been still. At 6:30 on a Wednesday in November, most people are inside their houses and the only light comes from porch lamps and the headlights of cars passing through.
Whatever took place in the three blocks between Sherry Jo’s front door and the corner had happened in the time it takes for a car to pause at a curb. For four days, the Flint Police searched the city and the family waited. Officers drove the routes Sherry Jo could have taken.
Detectives chased tips that came in from neighbors and strangers and led nowhere. Joyce kept the phone close and worked through every name she could think of, calling relatives, neighbors, and the parents of her daughter’s classmates. None of it produced a sign of her. On the morning of Sunday, November 20th, a muskrat trapper was working his trap lines along Muller Road in Blumfield Township, a farming community in Saginaw County, 30 miles north of Flint.
The road ran through flat agricultural land, two-lane blacktop with drainage ditches on either side. The ditch beside the road had been empty when he passed by on Saturday. By Sunday morning, Sherry Jo’s body was lying in it. She was partially clothed. The shots had come from a small-caliber weapon.
A brass shell from one of them lay on the ground a few feet from her. The medical examiner who worked the body found something the search teams had not been prepared for. Sherry Jo had been alive as late as November 19th. The body had been in the ditch for only hours when the trapper walked past it. That finding reshaped the case.
Detectives had not been chasing a man who took a girl and killed her right away. They were chasing a man who had kept her alive for 3 days somewhere within driving distance of Miller Road. A basement, a garage, a back room. Hidden enough that nobody had heard or seen anything worth a call to the police. The location was never identified.
PART 2 ↘️
Detectives collected and logged the casing and the biological material from her clothing. They were the two strongest pieces of physical proof the investigation would produce. In the days and weeks that followed, the Flint Police Department and the Michigan State Police worked the case together. They canvassed the blocks around Seneca Street and the intersection at West Dartmouth and Clio, knocking on doors and asking neighbors what they had seen that Wednesday morning.
They asked about vehicles that didn’t belong, men who seemed out of place, anything that broke the routine of an ordinary school day. Detectives also interviewed Sherry Jo’s classmates and teachers at Carmen High, asking whether anyone in her life had reason to harm her. Detectives looked first at the people closest to Sherry Jo.
Robert Schultz, her stepfather, was one of the first they checked. Joyce told them he had nothing to do with what happened to her daughter. And what they found backed her up. Robert was cleared and stayed in the house with Joyce. From there, the search widened. Detectives ran down every man with a record of sexual violence in Genesee and Saginaw counties.
They pulled open files in the surrounding jurisdictions for similar patterns or earlier victims, ran the bullet casing through ballistics, and chased tips that came in from the public. Nothing they found was enough to charge anyone. The biological material from Sherry Jo’s clothing went into evidence storage with the rest of the file.
Detectives who had worked it carried other open cases on their desks. The proof was sitting in the locker. By the mid-1980s, the file had gone cold. Joyce Shultz buried her only child and went on living in the house on Seneca Street. Robert stayed with her. Joyce later told reporters that getting Sherry Jo’s body back in 1983 had been the one thing she could hold on to because she had never been left wondering where her daughter was.
November brought the anniversary every year. March 27th would have been Sherry Jo’s birthday, the day she should have turned 17, then 18, then 19. Joyce kept photographs on the walls and in albums and marked both dates without her daughter year after year. Flint changed around the family. The auto plants closed one after another.
The layoffs at General Motors deepened and the neighborhoods on the west side thinned out. Houses were boarded up. The city Sherry Jo had grown up in became a different place. By the time the case was reopened in 2023, Flint’s population had fallen by more than a third from where it had been in 1983.
Joyce stayed. Robert Shultz drove to the Flint Police Department year after year asking detectives if there was anything new in the file. The answer was always the same. He kept making those visits until the end. Robert carried the question for the rest of his life and was buried in 2025, the year before the answer came.
40 years later, the file had no suspect, no name, and nothing in it that pointed clearly to one. Her mother, still alive, was still asking. After Robert’s death, Joyce was alone in the house. Eight months passed before the call came that the case had been solved. The Michigan State Police and Flint Police revisited the file periodically.
New detectives came in, read the old reports, and ran the same names a second time. The leads of 1983 went nowhere all over again. Crime Stoppers of Genesee County kept the case in its files year after year, listing Sherry Joe among the unsolved homicides on the region’s roster and offering rewards for tips that never came in.
Anniversary stories ran in the local papers on the round years. In 2023, 40 years after the killing, the Michigan State Police Third District Cold Case Unit reopened the Elliot file. The state police partnered with Michigan University Cold Case Program, where students help detectives work through decades of paper records.
The juniors who signed on went through confidentiality training and had to pass a vetting process before they could touch any of the case material. What they walked into was a file room. The Elliot records had moved through boxes and filing cabinets across multiple jurisdictions for 40 years.
Handwritten witness statements on department forms from 1983, transcripts, photographs, ballistics reports, lists of names that had been checked and crossed off by different detectives over the years. The students cataloged the material, transcribed the older pages, organized the interviews, and ran open-source deep dives on every person of interest the original investigation had ever touched.
They retyped names from 1983 legal pads, cross-referenced them against modern databases, and ran them through public records that did not exist when the case opened. Several of them were the same age Sherry Joe had been when she vanished. They were college juniors who had grown up in a Michigan that looked very different from the one she had walked through in 1983.
What had changed since 1983 was the science. In 2025, the Michigan State Police Forensic Science Division sent the sample to Astrium, a private laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas, that specialized in pulling DNA profiles from old and degraded evidence. The technique was called identity inference.
It could put a name to a piece of DNA without having any known sample to match it against first. Astrium built a full profile from the 1983 material using a method it called forensic grade genome sequencing. With that profile in hand, the work moved to genetic genealogy. Since 2018, when authorities in California used it to identify the Golden State Killer, investigators had used it on dozens of unsolved cases across the country.
It did not look for an exact match. It looked for relatives, distant cousins, second cousins, anyone who had voluntarily uploaded their own genetic data to ancestry sites and who shared enough markers to suggest a family connection. The partial matches that came back pointed to a family, and from there the work shifted from a laboratory to a research desk.
Detectives and genealogists worked the tree forward and backward through generations, pulling census data, marriage certificates, and death records, cutting branches that didn’t fit the geography of 1983 Flint and the timeline of the crime. It took months. The work happened in 2025, 2 years after the file had been reopened.
The tree pointed to a man in Grand Blanc, a small city 10 miles south of Flint. He was 75 years old. In November 1983, he was 33. He had lived in the Flint region for nearly his entire adult life, and his address in 1983 fit the geography of the crime. By late 2025, detectives had a name and a genealogy tree pointing at one person.
What they needed was a sample from a live man that matched the 1983 profile, and they planned to ask him for one. If he refused, they would seek a warrant. In January 2026, before they could approach him, he killed himself at his home in Grand Blanc. He left no explanation behind, no acknowledgement of what he had done in 1983, or what he was about to be asked.
Whether he had been tipped off, or had sensed something coming, the detectives never said publicly. The death did not end the work. During the autopsy, the medical examiner pulled a swab from his body. Analysts at the Michigan State Police Forensic Science Division ran it against the profile built from the 1983 evidence.
The two matched. The man on the table in Grand Blanc had killed Sherry Jo Elliott 43 years earlier. On April 13th, 2026, the Michigan State Police held a press conference and announced they had solved the case. Officials from the Third District Cold Case Unit spoke to reporters at the podium.
They named the suspect, summarized the DNA work that had pointed to him, and confirmed that he had died in January before they could approach him. Another lab had independently verified the match. Because Collins was already dead, there would be no prosecution, no trial, and no defendant to put in handcuffs.
The department also credited the Western Michigan University students who had spent months reorganizing and digitizing the records, saying the work could not have been done without them. The case file that had been open since the morning Sherry Jo did not arrive at school was about to get a name on it. His name was Ronnie Collins.
Collins was born on February 9th, 1950, which made him 17 years older than the girl he killed. He was living on Harry Street on the north side of Flint at the time of the killing, a short drive from Sherry Jo’s neighborhood on the west side. The intersection at West Dartmouth and Clio was in his city.
After 1983, Collins stayed in the Flint area for decades and later settled in Grand Blanc. He played bass guitar. Among the musicians who knew him, his nickname was Hendrix. Collins was a fixture in the local music scene, working with a band called the Goodfoot at Scooter’s Bar and Grill in Mundy Township and at venues across the region.
On weekends, he played for crowds in Saginaw County, where Sherry Jo had been buried. Lisa Baker, who owned Scooter’s, said the news had hurt many people in the community when it came out. The men and women who had listened to him on Friday and Saturday nights knew his face and his nickname. They had not known anything else.
The Elliot case file never had his name in it. He was not a suspect and was never interviewed in connection with Sherry Jo. He lived openly in the region where he had taken her year after year, and no police agency knew what he had done. But Collins had drawn the attention of Michigan law enforcement once before, 14 years earlier.
On Halloween night in 1969, two teenage girls vanished in Oscoda, a small community in northeastern Michigan. Pam Hobley was 15. Patricia Spencer was 16. The two had left school early that day and were last seen talking to someone in a van. Their bodies have never been found. Collins was 19 years old that fall.
He was in Oscoda that Halloween, playing music with a band that toured the Hale shoreline. The van he drove fit the description of the vehicle the girls had been seen with. Locals knew him as a young man who hung around the beach by the park. Flint police questioned him about the Hobley and Spencer disappearance.
He denied any involvement. Police listed him as a person of interest, but never charged him. Pam Hobley’s younger sister, Mary Burel, was 8 years old when Pam vanished. She told ABC 12 in 2026 that she truly believed Collins had taken the two girls. The Elliott case did not answer the question of what happened in Oscoda in 1969.
What it did answer, with no room for doubt, was that the DNA from Sherry Jo’s clothing in November 1983 belonged to Ronnie Collins. Joyce Schultz received the answer in the spring of 2026. She had lost Sherry Jo in 1983 and waited more than four decades for a name. The years between had been, in her own words, a long and hard road.
Robert had died eight months too early to hear it. Joyce later said she was relieved, after all that time, to know who had taken her daughter. She called her sister, Judy Seka, to say the case had been solved. Seka later said she had thought the call was a joke. After the disbelief came the weight of it.
She told reporters the years without an answer had been hell and that she had spent decades seeing her niece walking through the front door, saying hi. Collins would never face a courtroom. He was dead before detectives could ask him a single question about the morning Sherry Jo Elliott walked toward a bus stop and did not arrive.
Ronnie Collins is dead. Sherry Jo Elliott has been dead 43 years. The school bus came down West Dartmouth Road on the morning of November 16th, 1983, the way it always did. It made its stops at Cleo and rolled on. A 16-year-old girl who had walked toward that corner every weekday for 2 years did not get on that day, and she never did again.
It would be 43 years before anyone could say the name of the man who had stopped her three blocks short of the bus stop at West Dartmouth and Cleo. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.
