Her Killer was the Last Person Anyone Suspected
Her Killer was the Last Person Anyone Suspected
I used to think that if you encountered a murderer, you would intuitively know they were a murderer. But criminals who manage to evade justice for forty-plus years possess a chilling ability to hide the fact that they are, in truth, monsters. This is the story of Sherry Joe Elliott, a girl who was just minding her own business, living her life, until she was stolen away.
Sherry was a normal teenager, the kind who would never dream of getting into a car with a stranger. She was simply walking to her school bus one morning, and she never made it there. She was held for three or four days, during which she was subjected to unspeakable horrors, and ultimately, she was found lying face down in a watery ditch, shot in the back of the head. It was a cold, calculated, and incredibly violent execution. For decades, this case haunted countless people. Every time you would see a man walking down the street, you couldn’t help but wonder: Is that him? Is he the one who took Sherry? The silence lasted for years, and for a long time, it seemed as though they would never find him. Everyone in the community liked him; he had no criminal history, but you truly never know the monsters who might be living right next to you.
Jerry Elliott, her mother, Joyce Schultz, remembers her clearly. When she was little, Sherry just loved to color. At two years old, she would sit for hours with a thick coloring book. She was disciplined and bright. She had a signature style, never leaving the house without every hair in place and every article of clothing perfectly matched. She was shy, reserved, and incredibly respectful. She loved visiting her cousins and spending time with her family. To most people, she was the favorite niece—a sweetheart.
The morning she vanished, it was cold. Joyce had told her to dress warmly because she had a two-block walk to the bus stop. Joyce remembers telling her, “No, Sherry, it’s not safe. I don’t want the police coming to my door to tell me you’ve been murdered.” Sherry had replied, “Okay, love you,” before heading out. That was the last time. When she didn’t come home after school, the panic began. When her father also hadn’t heard from her, they called the police. Initially, the police were dismissive, suggesting she had simply run away. But her family knew better. She wouldn’t have left with nothing but the clothes on her back.
The original missing person’s complaint was taken by the Flint Police Department. Detective Sergeant William Art, then with the Michigan State Police, notes that at the time, there was little to indicate a crime of this magnitude. Her family began searching dumpsters and alleys, passing out flyers, and reaching out to everyone they knew. They lived in a state of constant, gnawing anxiety. Every man seen in a restaurant or on the street became a potential suspect.
On November 20, 1983, about fifteen miles north of Flint, a local trapper found Sherry’s body in a ditch. The police response was immediate. The crime scene was limited; there was very little evidence left behind. It was not an attempt to hide the body so much as an attempt to discard it. Her pants were unbuckled, and it was obvious she had been shot. She had been left in a drainage creek, her head partially submerged in water for so long that she was disfigured. When her father eventually identified her body, he knew it was something Joyce would never have survived. The autopsy confirmed the brutality of the act: she had been shot four times—once in the abdomen, twice in the back, and once in the back of the head. Investigators believed she had survived for a time in that ditch, eventually dying from loss of blood.
In the 1980s, Flint was a powerhouse of automobile manufacturing. It was a bustling city where people were earning good wages, and crime wasn’t supposed to be an everyday occurrence. The community was outraged. Thousands of tips poured in. Some claimed they saw her getting into a white van; others insisted it was a yellow Camaro. Investigators created spreadsheets of thousands of vehicles, running down every lead until they were exhausted. Years later, it was revealed that the person who claimed to see her in a yellow Camaro had been lying through his teeth, wasting precious investigative resources.
Suspicion naturally turned toward those closest to the victim. Investigators focused on Robert Schultz, her stepfather, as he was the last person to see her alive. He was subjected to intense questioning and inconsistencies in his stories were highlighted, though he maintained his innocence. The police even attempted to use a wiretap, having Joyce call him to see if he would incriminate himself, but nothing came of it. Over the years, the case went cold. Joyce lived in a state of perpetual fear, plagued by nightmares of Sherry asking, “Mom, why haven’t you found me?”
In 2002, a violent crime task force in the Flint area decided to reopen the case. They reinvestigated the old leads, the white van, the Camaro, and re-interviewed the family. Joyce, exhausted by the trauma, eventually begged them not to bring her back to that place unless they had something new. DNA technology was in its infancy at the time, and although they collected samples from over a hundred people, they found no matches. The case remained stagnant in the national database, COTUS, which didn’t go into full deployment until the mid-nineties.
The breakthrough began in 2022. A border patrol agent in Utah contacted investigators regarding a man who had been a neighbor of Sherry’s. He had been caught using a false name, living under an alias for sixteen years, and had left Michigan shortly after the murder. They secured a DNA sample, but it was not a match. However, this sparked a new hope. Detective Art and his team began a meticulous process of digitizing tens of thousands of pages of old files, working with students from Western Michigan University to organize the investigation.
By late 2025, they reached out to Othram, a company specializing in forensic genealogy, to see if the DNA from the crime scene—found on a sanitary napkin—could be analyzed. The DNA was degraded, but it was suitable for forensic-grade genome sequencing. This process translated the evidence into a profile consisting of hundreds of thousands of genetic markers. This allowed them to trace the ancestry of the unknown suspect. The results pointed to a lady in Wichita, Kansas, as a relative. She had seventy-nine grandchildren, which initially seemed like a daunting task. However, after further testing, investigators narrowed it down to a candidate: Ronnie Collins.
Ronnie Collins was seventy-five years old. He would have been in his early thirties in 1983 and was living in the area at the time. When police finally tracked him down, he was living a quiet life. He had been a dental hygienist, worked at a prison, and played in a band. He was considered a “good guy” by his community. Detective Art tried to arrange an interview, but Collins kept putting him off. When Art finally secured a search warrant for his DNA, he arrived at Collins’s home only to find that the man had committed suicide the very day the interview was scheduled.
It was the ultimate coward’s way out. Subsequent testing confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ronnie Collins was the man who had raped and murdered Sherry Joe Elliott. He had been right there, in plain sight, living as a respected member of society.
For Joyce, the news brought a strange mixture of relief and deepened grief. It didn’t bring her daughter back; it only confirmed the horrific details of her final hours. She realized that while she had spent forty years wondering, the monster had been hiding behind a facade of normalcy. There are suspicions that Collins may have been involved in other cold cases, including the 1969 disappearance of two girls, Hobley and Spencer, who were also reportedly picked up by a man in a white van.
Ultimately, the case of Sherry Joe Elliott highlights the necessity of using advanced technology as soon as a crime occurs, rather than waiting for a serendipitous match. It serves as a reminder that these cold cases are not just files in a box; they are lives interrupted, families shattered, and communities scarred. Sherry deserved a life, she deserved to grow up, to potentially have children of her own. While justice was delayed by four decades, the truth finally surfaced, ensuring that a monster could never hurt anyone else again. As Joyce says, she will tell Sherry every day: “We finally got him.”
