DNA Just CAUGHT the Monster Behind Rhonda Marie Fisher’s Murder 

DNA Just CAUGHT the Monster Behind Rhonda Marie Fisher’s Murder 

On April 1st, 1987, investigators in rural Douglas County, Colorado knelt beside a woman’s body on an embankment off a back road south of Denver. She’d been strangled. As part of standard procedure, they placed brown paper bags over her hands and sealed them to preserve whatever trace evidence might be underneath her fingernails.

Then they put the bags in an evidence box in Castle Rock. The bags sat in that evidence box for the next 38 years. Other items were tested and came back empty. Nobody thought to open the paper. When a forensic scientist finally did in 2025, the killer’s DNA was on the inside.

 Her name was Ronda Marie Fisher. She was 30 years old, born in New York on November 12th, 1956. She’d grown up in the New York City area with her parents and an older brother. By 1987, she was living in Denver, far from her family. She had a young child, though the child wasn’t with her in the weeks before her death. Ronda had no fixed address.

 She was staying with various acquaintances across Denver, sleeping in spare rooms and on couches. The people she stayed with knew her casually, but couldn’t say where she went between visits. Investigators later couldn’t piece together her movements in those final weeks. Denver in the late 1980s had neighborhoods where women went missing and nobody reported them.

 East Colfax Avenue, which runs east-west through the city for roughly 26 miles, was one of the city’s roughest corridors. Cheap motels, uh bars, pawn shops, and women working the streets who disappeared without anyone calling it in. Ronda’s world overlapped with that corridor. On the night of March 31st, 1987, Ronda was last seen walking north on Monaco Boulevard toward the intersection with Leetsdale Drive in southeast Denver.

 She was on foot and alone. Somewhere between that stretch of road and a rural embankment 35 miles south, she got into a vehicle with the person who killed her. Her body was found the next morning by a passing motorist about 20 ft down an embankment on the east side of South Perry Park Road south of Sedalia.

 She’d been sex and strangled. Her body had been there for hours. Nobody had seen anything the night before. South Perry Park Road is lightly traveled, mostly ranchers and rural residents. Should the drive from where she was last seen takes about 45 minutes on I-25 south, then west on back roads through ranch country.

 There are no streetlights out there, no traffic cameras, nothing that would have captured a vehicle heading south in the middle of the night. Investigators from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation processed the scene through the morning and into the afternoon.

 They documented the location with photographs and measurements and collected everything they could find. Douglas County detectives worked the case through the spring and summer of 1987 out of Castle Rock, the county seat about 30 miles south of Denver. They started with the people closest to Ronda and worked outward. An acquaintance she’d been staying with was the first suspect.

 They checked his background, ran his criminal history, and tried to place him near Douglas County on the night of March 31st. He had no vehicle matching any reported sightings, and his fingerprints didn’t match anything from the scene. After weeks of investigation, they cleared him. They also looked at Ronda’s boyfriend and other men she’d been seen with. None of it matched.

 Tips came in from across the Denver metro area and from neighboring counties. Detectives ran down every name. They pulled arrest records for sex crimes in a 50-mile radius and contacted the Denver PD vice unit for information on men known to operate along East Colfax and checked with the Colorado Department of Corrections for recently released inmates with sex or homicide convictions. Nobody matched.

The technology in 1987 couldn’t extract a usable DNA profile from the physical evidence they had. Without DNA, the case had no engine. The detectives’ final report noted no suspect, no credible witness, no vehicle information, no fingerprint match. 35 miles between where Ronda was last seen and where her body turned up.

 She got into a car with someone. Whether she knew him or he was a stranger, investigators couldn’t tell. The file went into a cabinet in Castle Rock. Ronda’s parents were in New York. Her older brother was back east, too. So the case didn’t have a community around it holding it open. Ronda had been moving through Denver with no fixed address, no workplace, no anchor that connected her to a group of people who would call the Sheriff’s Office every year asking for updates.

There was no memorial bench, no former co-workers speaking to reporters on anniversaries. The people who knew Ronda knew her casually, and when the case went cold, there was nobody on the other end of the phone reminding detectives that it was still open. Over the decades, cold case investigators at the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office periodically pulled the file.

New detectives read the original reports and looked for angles. They ran names from the tip file against updated criminal databases as the Colorado Bureau of Investigation expanded its records through the 1990s and 2000s. Without a DNA profile, they had nowhere to go. The file grew thicker with review notes, but not with leads.

 Every few years someone would pull it, see the same dead ends, and put it back. In 2017, the office pulled items from the evidence box and sent them to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation lab in Lakewood for DNA testing. It was the first time anyone had attempted DNA extraction on the Fisher evidence.

 They sent clothing and materials from the crime scene and the autopsy. Lab technicians tried standard extraction, running swabs on fabric surfaces, targeting areas most likely to retain biological material from physical contact. Three decades of degradation had destroyed the genetic material. Everything came back empty.

 The hairs and fibers collected in 1987 were gone. The case went back into the file. Here’s what makes this case different from most cold cases solved by DNA. In most of those cases, the problem is that the killer’s profile isn’t in any database. CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database, only works if both sides are there, the crime scene profile and the offender’s profile.

 The system launched in the late 1990s. When someone gets convicted of a qualifying crime, their DNA goes in and the system checks it automatically against unsolved cases. If the killer was never convicted of a qualifying crime, his DNA isn’t in the system and there’s nothing to match against. In Ronda’s case, the killer’s DNA was already in CODIS.

It had been sitting there for decades, entered after a 1990 murder conviction in Denver. The database had the answer the whole time. Douglas County couldn’t get their side into the system. The 1987 evidence failed. The 2017 retesting failed. The match was right there, waiting for a crime scene profile that didn’t exist yet.

 At that point, the evidence box still contained items nobody had tested. Um the brown paper bags were in there. They’d been skipped in 2017 because nobody expected paper that old to hold DNA. The 2017 team chose clothing and autopsy materials instead. The bags stayed in the box. In early 2025, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit reopened the case one more time.

 The previous attempts had come up empty, but the unit had been on a run. They’d cleared six cold homicides since 2018 by resubmitting old evidence for modern testing. They pulled everything out of storage and went through every item with a forensic scientist named Shane Williams from the Unified Metropolitan Forensic Crime Lab.

 Williams looked at the bags. The logic was simple. Whatever biological material had been on Ronda’s skin in 1987 would have transferred directly to the paper’s interior when investigators sealed them over her hands at the scene. Skin cells from her attacker, pressed against the inside of the bag, protected from the air for 38 years.

Touch DNA from skin cells is hard to recover under the best conditions. The quantities are microscopic, sometimes a few hundred cells on a surface. On porous material like paper, they break down over time. Most forensic scientists would have called a usable profile from bags that old unlikely. Williams found usable DNA inside them anyway.

 He recovered a mixed profile, part Ronda’s, part an unknown male. He separated the two and built a complete male profile strong enough to upload to CODIS. The whole process took weeks. Williams had to isolate the male DNA from Ronda’s own cells, then build a set of genetic markers strong enough for the database to read. In late October 2025, the profile went in. The database matched it immediately.

Not to an unknown offender, to a man who’d been in the system since 1990. Should the DNA from the bags match biological evidence from three unsolved strangulations in Denver in 1979, cases that had already been linked to a man convicted of two other murders in Denver in 1990. His profile had been sitting in CODIS for decades.

 He’d been dead for nearly 30 years. He’d been killing women across the Denver area since the late 1970s. He was born in 1954 in Wheat Ridge, a suburb about 8 miles west of downtown Denver. By the late 1970s, he was living on the east side of Denver, involved in sex trafficking and drug distribution along East Colfax, controlling women who worked the streets and taking a cut of what they earned.

 He had a criminal record by his mid-20s. His first known murder was in 1978. Janette Baca, 17 years old, found strangled in the woods in Jefferson County, west of Denver. He’d brought her into the sex trade the year before. Nobody with information was talking to the police. In 1979, three more women were killed across the metro area over an 8-month stretch.

 Emma Jenefor, 25, strangled in January and found in Denver. Joyce Remy, 23, Joe strangled in June in Jefferson County. Peggy Cuff, 20, strangled in August back in Denver. Different jurisdictions worked each case separately. Denver PD handled Jenefor and Cuff, while Jefferson County handled Remy. There was no shared system, no mechanism to connect the cases.

 Each department was looking at its own file in its own building. DNA testing decades later linked all three to the same man. In August 1981, he picked up 17-year-old Tammy Sue Woodrum, a hitchhiker near Denver. He drove her into the mountains west of the city and strangled her. Her body was found at a campsite off a forest road in Clear Creek County.

This time, witnesses placed him with Woodrum before she died. A campsite attendant recognized him and picked him out of a photo lineup. Sh- Jefferson County detectives tracked him down and arrested him at a residence in Denver. He was charged with first-degree murder. The jury came back with second-degree instead.

A Jefferson County judge sentenced him to 12 years. He went to the state penitentiary in Cañon City, 115 miles south of Denver in the Arkansas River Valley. He served 5 years. On February 13th, 1987, he walked out on mandatory parole. Colorado law at the time required the state to release inmates after they’d served a set portion of their sentence minus good time credits.

The parole board couldn’t keep him locked up even if they wanted to. He’d been convicted of strangling a teenage girl in the mountains and the state put him on a bus back to Denver. He was 32. Within days, he was back on East Colfax, back in the same neighborhoods he’d operated in before prison.

 And less than 7 weeks later, Rhonda was dead. Strangled the same way he’d killed every woman before her. Her body left off a rural road 35 miles south of Denver in the same kind of isolated spot he’d been using for a decade across the Front Range. After Rhonda, he kept going. In 1988, he murdered Juanita Lovato, 19, in Denver. Her body was found in an alley off East Colfax, the same corridor where he’d been operating for years.

 In 1989, he killed Diane Mancera, 25, in Adams County north of Denver. Mancera’s body was found in a field near Commerce City, an industrial area along Interstate 270. Denver PD connected the two killings through witness accounts, physical evidence, and women on Colfax who placed him with both victims before they died.

He was arrested in late 1989 at a residence on the east side of Denver. But the jury convicted him in 1990. Life for Lovato and additional 20 years for Mancera. He went back to Cañon City. He was never charged with Rhonda’s murder during his lifetime. He was never charged with any of the 1978 or 1979 killings, either.

 Those connections came from DNA testing decades after he died. Starting in the mid-2000s, Denver PD’s cold case unit began running old crime scene evidence through CODIS and matched his profile to unsolved cases across the metro area one by one. Each match connected another dead woman to him. Investigators believe he killed at least 12 women between 1978 and 1989, all in the Denver metro area and surrounding counties.

 Denver PD said the actual number could be higher. But women who survived encounters with him along Colfax in the 1980s had given statements to vice detectives years earlier describing a man who matched his description. Those statements sat in separate files across multiple departments and were never connected to homicide cases until the DNA started linking them.

 The women he targeted were vulnerable, often without stable housing or family nearby. The kind of cases that didn’t make the news or generate public pressure on investigators. In 1994, Denver and Jefferson County investigators went to the prison in Cañon City and asked him to confess to the other killings. They had a list of unsolved strangulations from the late 1970s and 1980s that fit his pattern.

 Same method, same victim profile, same geography along the Front Range. He refused. He wouldn’t say a word about any of it. His name was Vincent Daryl Groves. He died on October 31st, 1996 in the prison infirmary at the correctional facility in Cañon City. Hepatitis C and liver failure. He was 42. His body was released to his family in Wheat Ridge and buried in the western Denver suburbs.

 He never confessed to anything beyond the two murders he’d already been convicted of. On December 2nd, 2025, Sheriff Darren Weekly held a press conference in Castle Rock. He announced that the 1987 murder of Rhonda Marie Fisher had been solved and named Groves as her killer. He walked reporters through the full timeline.

 The 1987 crime scene, the paper bags placed over her hands, the failed 2017 retesting, the 2025 extraction by Williams, and the CODIS hit that connected the DNA to a man who’d been dead for almost three decades. Williams told reporters that obtaining a viable DNA profile from paper bags nearly four decades old is exceptionally rare. It worked because the investigators in 1987 followed standard procedure.

They bagged her hands, sealed the paper, and put it in storage. They had no way of knowing that what they were preserving would matter 38 years later, but it did. Sh- Weekly credited the cold case unit detectives who pushed for the retesting and the property and evidence staff who maintained the storage conditions over four decades.

Evidence degrades faster in poor conditions. Heat, humidity, exposure to air. The bags survived because the evidence room in Castle Rock kept them sealed, dry, and untouched. He noted that Rhonda’s case was the seventh cold homicide Douglas County had solved in 7 years through DNA advances, going back to a 1981 case cleared in 2018.

The office had begun systematically resubmitting old evidence for modern testing and it was working. Seven cases in 7 years. Rhonda’s parents and her older brother were all dead by the time the case was solved. Her mother died in the early 2000s. Her father a few years later. Her brother before 2020.

 At none of them ever heard a detective say Groves’s name. None of them ever got the call saying the case had been closed. The closest living relative investigators could find was a cousin back in New York. She told them she was relieved to finally know what had happened to Rhonda. She’d assumed Rhonda had died years ago, but never had confirmation until the detective called.

Groves can’t be prosecuted because he’s been dead since 1996. The Douglas County District Attorney’s Office reviewed the evidence and said if he were alive, they’d have charged him with first-degree murder and kidnapping. Rhonda Marie Fisher was 30 years old. She was from New York, living in Denver, far from her family, with no fixed address and no one nearby to push the case forward when it stalled.

She had a young child she wasn’t able to care for. She and the man who killed her had already murdered at least four women before her and killed at least two more after. He’d been convicted of strangling a 17-year-old hitchhiker in the mountains and sentenced to 12 years. Colorado put him back on the street after five.

 Seven weeks later, Rhonda was dead on an embankment off a back road in Douglas County. The brown paper bags that investigators placed over her hands at the scene in 1987 sat in a box in Castle Rock for 38 years. They were skipped in the first round of DNA testing. They were skipped in the second. The clothing failed. The autopsy materials failed.

 Nobody thought the paper would hold anything. When a forensic scientist finally opened them in 2025, the answer was on the inside.