A Mother Vanished in 1987… 38 Years Later, 2 Paper Bags Told The Truth

Uh, today we are here to talk about Ronda Marie Fisher. Not just a case file, but a woman who is loved by her family. Ronda was born in New York on October 12th, 1956. And she was 30 years old at the time of her murder. She was last seen near the area of Leetsdale Drive in Monaco in the city of Denver on March 31st, 1987.

Ronda was a mother. She was a daughter. A sister. A cousin. And a niece. And her family members >> On the night of March 31st, 1987, Ronda Marie Fisher was seen for the last walking north on South Monaco Parkway toward Leetsdale Drive in Denver, alone, on foot, moving through the night in a city that had no idea what was happening on its streets.

 The next morning, April 1st, 1987, a motorist driving along South Perry Park Road, south of Sedalia in rural Douglas County, saw something down an embankment and stopped. It was Ronda, nude, strangled, sexually assaulted, 25 miles from where she had last been seen alive, which meant someone had driven her there, had chosen that embankment deliberately, had left her there, and driven back into Denver like nothing had happened.

For 38 years, nobody could prove who that someone was. Two people had long been suspected. One of them was a man named Vincent Daryl Groves, a serial killer so prolific that Denver’s own district attorney once said he believed Groves was killing two women a month at the height of his activity. A man linked to at least 12 homicides.

 A man who had been convicted of murder, served less than 5 years, walked out of prison, and kept killing. But suspicion is not proof. And for 38 years, through multiple investigations, multiple DNA testing rounds, multiple detectives, the proof was not there. It was in two paper bags.

 Paper bags that had been placed over Ronda Fisher’s hands at the scene of her death in 1987 to protect trace evidence at the crime scene. Paper bags that had been sealed, logged, placed into evidence storage, and never once opened for DNA testing in 38 years. In October 2025, investigators finally tested what was inside them. Two weeks after Christmas, the answer had been waiting inside two grocery bags for nearly four decades.

 This is Ronda’s story. Denver in 1987 was a city in flux. The oil boom of the 1970s had collapsed. The economy had taken the kind of hit that leaves scars on working families for a generation. Colfax Avenue, the long unbroken east-west artery running through the heart of the city, was by the mid-1980s one of the most heavily trafficked strips of street-level vulnerability in the American West.

 Motels, bars, liquor stores, and the slow commerce of survival. A corridor where desperate people made dangerous decisions and predators like Vincent Groves moved freely because they understood that the women on Colfax Avenue were not always reported missing quickly. And that when they were the investigation did not always carry the same urgency.

 Ronda Marie Fisher was born in New York on November 12th, 1956. She was 30 years old in the spring of 1987. She had made her way to Denver. How and when and by what path is not fully part of the public record. What is known is who she was to the people who loved her. She was a mother. She was a daughter. She was a sister, a cousin, a niece.

 She was a friend. Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly said all of those things about her at the press conference on December 2nd, 2025. Deliberately, carefully, one word at a time. Because in cases like Rhonda’s, the first thing the world needs to hear is not the details of the crime. It is who the person was before anyone did anything to them.

Her parents are gone now. Her brother is gone. Her immediate family, the people who stood at the center of her life, did not live to hear the answer. By the time the paper bags finally spoke, the only surviving family member investigators could notify was a cousin. That cousin, when told that Rhonda’s case had been solved after 38 years, expressed relief, gratitude, the specific kind of peace that comes not from justice, because there is no courtroom, no sentences, no moment of confrontation, but from knowing.

From having the question answered. From being able to say the name of the person responsible and close the chapter that has been open for four decades. On the night of March 31st, 1987, Rhonda Fisher was walking north on South Monaco Parkway toward Leetsdale Drive in Denver. It was the last time anyone who loved her saw her alive.

On the morning of April 1st, 1987, a motorist was driving south along South Perry Park Road in rural Douglas County. A two-lane road through open country south of Sedalia, 25 miles almost from the Denver streets where Rhonda had last been seen. Something caught his eye down the embankment at the 3500 block.

 He stopped. He looked. He called for help. Rhonda Marie Fisher’s body was at the bottom of that embankment. She had been stripped. She had been sexually assaulted. She had been strangled. The cause of death was strangulation. The same quiet, deliberate, close contact method that would become the signature of the man eventually identified as her killer.

 The location told investigators something critical from the very first hour. The gap between where she was last seen, South Monaco Parkway in Denver, and where her body was found, South Perry Park Road in Douglas County, was 25 miles. She had not walked there. She had not wandered. Someone had driven her or driven her body to that embankment.

This was not a crime of spontaneous, localized violence. This was a crime that required transportation, premeditation. A killer who was comfortable crossing county lines and comfortable disposing of a body in open country and driving back to the city. Investigators processed the scene immediately and thoroughly. Evidence was collected.

Rhonda’s hands were covered with paper bags, a standard forensic technique used to protect any trace evidence that might be on her hands or under her fingernails. Those bags were sealed. They were logged into the evidence chain. They were placed in storage, and they were never tested for DNA. Not in 1987, because forensic DNA testing for criminal cases did not yet exist in Colorado in any meaningful form.

 Not in the years that followed, because each time the case was revisited, the paper bags were overlooked, or the technology of the moment was applied to other items from the scene, or the particular combination of science and attention that would eventually crack the case simply had not yet arrived. Those bags sat in a Douglas County evidence facility for 38 years, sealed, waiting, holding something nobody had yet thought to ask them for.

 To understand why Rhonda Fisher’s case took 38 years to solve, you have to understand who Vincent Darrell Groves was and how completely for years he was able to operate in plain sight. Vincent Darrell Groves was born on April 19th, 1954 in Denver, Colorado. He grew up in Wheat Ridge, a suburb just west of the city.

 He attended Wheat Ridge High School where by all accounts he was an athlete. A basketball player with the kind of physical presence that made him visible and respected in the way that young athletes are in working-class communities. Whatever he was at Wheat Ridge, what he became afterward was something else entirely. He became a predator, methodical, patient, and deeply embedded in the street ecosystem of Denver’s Colfax Avenue corridor, the strip that by the late 1970s had become the primary hunting ground for what investigators would eventually

recognize as a sustained, decade-long pattern of murder. His method was strangulation. His victims were primarily women, vulnerable women, women on the margins, women whose disappearances did not always generate immediate attention. He was a known drug dealer among the pimps and prostitutes of Colfax Avenue.

 He held multiple jobs that moved him across the Denver metro area. He was, in the words of investigators who eventually reconstructed his history, the kind of man who was everywhere and nowhere. Visible to the people he targeted, invisible to the systems that should have caught him. In 1982, Groves was convicted of second-degree murder for the killing of 17-year-old Tammy Sue Woodrum. He was sentenced.

 He served less than five years. He was released on mandatory parole in 1987, convicted of murdering a 17-year-old girl, released in less than five years, back on the streets of Denver. Rhonda Marie Fisher was last seen alive on March 31st, 1987. Groves had been out of prison on mandatory parole for mere months. He went back to Colfax.

 He went back to what he knew. Investigators believe Groves was responsible for at least 12 homicides. Denver’s own district attorney said at one point that he believed Groves may have been killing as many as two women a month during the height of his activity in the late 1970s and 1980s. The true number of his victims remains unknown.

Because Groves, when he was dying in prison in 1996 and detectives came to him and asked him to account for what he had done, refused to speak. He died on October 31st, 1996. He was 42 years old. He took his victim count with him. What he could not take was his DNA. In the immediate aftermath of Rhonda Fisher’s murder in 1987, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office investigated aggressively.

 Multiple people were questioned. Including an acquaintance Rhonda had been staying with in the weeks before her death, who became a person of interest early in the case and was ultimately cleared. Serial offenders active in the Denver metro area from the 1970s through the 1990s were examined. Leads were run down across the region.

Vincent Groves was considered a possible suspect from early on. The profile matched. The geography matched. The method matched. But there was another potential suspect also being investigated. And without the science to definitively separate them, the case remained open. The investigation split between two possibilities.

 Groves was arrested in September 1988, not for Rhonda’s murder, but for the killings of Waneta Lovato and Dianne Mancera in Douglas County and Adams County. His cases became some of the earliest successful uses of DNA evidence in Colorado courts. He was convicted. He was sentenced to life. He died in prison in 1996. The case against him in Ronda’s murder remained unresolved.

In 2017, 30 years after her death, investigators submitted evidence from the case for updated DNA testing. It was the right instinct. The technology had advanced enormously since 1987, but the testing of 2017 produced no usable DNA profile. No suspect could be identified. The case went back into cold storage. Eight more years passed.

In early 2025, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit reopened Ronda’s file. Not because a new tip had come in. Not because a witness had come forward. But because the unit had committed to a systematic, comprehensive review of all evidence in every open case. Looking at everything with fresh eyes and the most current forensic tools available.

 A forensic scientist from the Unified Metropolitan Forensic Crime Laboratory joined the review. Staff from the property and evidence facility went through every item logged in 1987. And they found the paper bags. Two paper bags placed over Ronda Fisher’s hands at the crime scene on April 1st, 1987. Sealed that day. Logged that day.

 Stored that day. Untouched for 38 years. Inside those bags, preserved by the seal, preserved by time, preserved by the simple act of a 1987 investigator following standard procedure and covering a dead woman’s hands in were skin cells. Microscopic traces of biological material. A mixture of DNA, Rhonda’s own, transferred from her hands onto the interior surface of the bag, and someone else’s.

 Late October 2025, CODIS returned a match. The DNA inside those paper bags match biological evidence from three homicides committed in Denver in 1979. The homicides of Emma Gene Forr, Joyce Ramey, Peggy Cuff, all three killed by Vincent Darrell Groves. Shane Williams, forensic scientist at the Unified Metropolitan Forensic Crime Laboratory, explained what had happened inside those bags during 38 years of sealed storage.

Whatever skin cells were on Rhonda Fisher’s hands at the time of her death had transferred to the interior surface of the paper bags when they were placed over her hands. Skin cells shed constantly, invisibly, silently, without anyone intending it. When Groves strangled Rhonda Fisher, his hands were on her. His skin cells were on her.

 And when investigators placed those paper bags over her hands to protect trace evidence, they also, without knowing it, sealed those skin cells inside. For 38 years, those cells sat in the dark. Paper does not degrade DNA the way plastic does. Paper breathes. Paper, properly stored and sealed, can preserve biological material for decades in a way that other materials cannot.

 Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly said it plainly at the press conference. Obtaining a viable DNA profile from paper bags nearly four decades old is exceptionally rare and underscores the extraordinary value of meticulous evidence preservation and periodic forensic reevaluation. Exceptionally rare. Not impossible.

Exceptionally rare. The CODIS match came back pointing to three 1979 Groves homicides. A case-to-case match, meaning the DNA profile from Rhonda’s bags matched the profile already established in those three earlier murders. Groves himself had died in 1996, so there was no living suspect to compare against. But the match to his established profile was unambiguous.

 The same hands that had strangled Emma Genevieve in 1979, the same hands that had strangled Joyce Ramie, the same hands that had strangled Peggy Cuff. Those same hands had been on Rhonda Marie Fisher on the night of March 31st, 1987. The DNA confirmed what investigators had long suspected. Groves had been a possible suspect for 38 years.

The other potential suspect in the case was cleared, and Vincent Darrell Groves, dead for 29 years, buried beyond any courtroom, was named as Rhonda Fisher’s killer on December 2nd, 2025. Crime analysis supervisor and accredited investigative genetic genealogist Michelle Kennedy made the call to Rhonda’s cousin.

 She had been working cold cases long enough to know that these conversations are not simple. That a resolution after 38 years does not feel like victory. That what the family receives is not justice in the form the law usually provides. A trial, a verdict, a sentence, but something different. A name, a confirmation, an ending to a question that has been open for nearly four decades.

 The cousin was relieved. The cousin was thankful. That is what 38 years of not knowing fi- finally looked like on the other end of the phone. Vincent Groves was convicted of murder in 1982 for the killing of 17-year-old Tammy Sue Woodrum. He served less than five years. Mandatory parole released him back into Denver in 1987, the same year Rhonda Fisher died, the same year he is now confirmed to have strangled a woman and driven her body 25 miles from the city to a rural embankment and left her there.

 The system had already seen what he was capable of. It had his conviction on record. It had sentenced him to prison for killing a teenager, and then it opened the door and handed him back to the streets of Colfax Avenue. Denver’s District Attorney later said he believed Groves may have been killing two women a month at the height of his activity.

Investigators believe he is responsible for at least 12 homicides. Some estimates put the number above 20. The full truth died with him in a prison cell on October 31st, 1996. Between his release in 1987 and his final arrest in September, 1988, 16 months, Groves is believed to have killed multiple women. Rhonda Fisher was one of them.

 How many others there were in that 16-month window before investi- investigators finally brought him back in for the Lovato and Mancera murders remains one of Colorado’s most persistent unanswered questions. The DNA now connecting him to Rhonda’s case also matched three 1979 homicides, which means his killing had been confirmed to span at least nine years.

Nine years, from 1979 to 1988 with a brief interruption for a prison sentence that stopped him for less than 5 years before the door opened again. There are nearly 2,000 cold cases in Colorado’s statewide database as of 2025. More than 1,400 of them are unsolved homicides. Sheriff Weekly said at the press conference that he has no doubt there are other victims of Vincent Groves still waiting to be identified.

The DNA match in Rhonda’s case has now been placed in the system. As other cold cases are reviewed, other evidences tested, other CODIS comparisons are run, his profile will be there waiting to speak again. Rhonda Marie Fisher was 30 years old. She was a mother, a daughter, a sister, a cousin, a niece, and a friend.

 She was born in New York and made her way to Colorado. She was walking north on a Denver street on the last night of March 1987, and she never came home. Her parents are gone now. Her brother is gone. The people who stood at the center of her world, who waited, who wondered, who carried the wound of not knowing, they did not live to hear this answer.

That is the hardest thing about this case, not the DNA, not the paper bags, not the 38 years. The hardest thing is that people who loved her most did not live long enough to hear his name spoken on the record. But a cousin did, and that cousin said she was relieved, and that matters. Here is what else matters.

 An investigator in 1987 followed standard procedure and placed paper bags over a dead woman’s hands. Not because they knew what DNA was or what those bags would one day contain, not because they were thinking about technology that would not exist in Colorado courts for another several years. They did it because that is what careful investigators do.

 They protect every surface. They cover every possibility. They preserve everything, even the things they cannot yet read. Those bags sat in a Douglas County evidence facility for 38 years. They were there through every investigation that didn’t quite crack the case. They were there through the 2017 DNA testing that came up empty.

 They were there sealed and waiting until 2025 when a cold case unit said, “Let’s look at everything.” And a forensic scientist looked at two paper bags from 1987 and said, “We have never tested these. The answer was always there. It just took 38 years to ask the right thing the right way.” Vincent Durell Groves is dead.

 He has been dead since 1996. He will never face a courtroom for what he did to Ronda Fisher. He refused as he lay dying to account for a single victim. He took his silence with him to the grave, but he could not take his DNA. The skin cells he left on Ronda Fisher’s hands on the night he killed her, invisible, unconscious, impossible to retrieve, transferred to two paper bags that outlasted him by 29 years, and they will outlast him forever now because what they said is on the record.

 His name is attached to what he did. Ronda Fisher’s case is closed. Sheriff Weekly said it for every family member of every Groves victim still waiting to know there were other victims out there. I have no doubt there are probably going to be other victims identified of Vincent Groves. The DNA is in the system.

 The match has been made public. The profile is active. And for every woman he killed whose case is still open, the paper bags have shown that the evidence to answer it may already be sitting in a storage facility somewhere, sealed, untested, waiting for someone to finally ask. If Ronda’s story moved you, if you believe that a 30-year-old mother walking home on a Denver street deserves more than 38 years of silence, that a family that waited decades deserves to hear a name before they die, that a forensic scientist who thought to

test two paper bags from 1987 deserves to know that work mattered, Then right now, before you move past this moment, hit subscribe and leave a comment below. Tell us what part of Ronda’s story stopped you. Because Colorado has nearly 2,000 cold cases. 1,400 of them are unsolved homicides. And Vincent Groves’ DNA is now active in a system that is still being compared against old and old cases and old evidence lockers across the state.

More names are coming. More families are waiting. Every time you subscribe, every time you share one of these stories, every time you sit with a name that the world has been trying to forget, you are telling those families that the question is still being asked, that the answer is still being sought, that the evidence in those storage rooms still matters.

 Ronda Marie Fisher was a mother, a daughter, a sister, and a friend. She mattered then. She matters now. And somewhere in a Colorado evidence facility right now, sealed in a bag or a box or an envelope that nobody has tested yet, the answer to another family’s 30-year question may already be waiting. 38 years, 8 months, 1 day.

 The clock has stopped.