CRIME HUNTER: Was beloved funk musician a secret serial killer?
· Toronto Sun
Everybody loved Roni Collins.
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He was known around Flint, Michigan and his suburban neighbourhood of Grand Blanc for his musical ability and community involvement. Always sporting a high-wattage smile and frequently wearing a matching Michigan State Wolverines T-shirt and hat, Roni was “good people.”
Collins played bass and sang in a funk oldies group, the Waybacks, and was an iconic figure in the bars and blues joints of hard-scrabble Flint. He was reportedly pretty good, too.
But the dental hygenist was carrying heavy freight in his heart and soul.
His horrifying secrets
In January, friends and admirers were stunned when he “died suddenly at home” at 75. The sour truth was that Roni took himself off the board. Why would he do such a thing?
Then, on April 14 it emerged that Roni possessed a horrifying secret he had buried for 43 years.
By January 2026, his filthy secrets were poised to come out.
If these horrors ever bothered him, he never let on and no one suspected the darkness within him.
Sherri Jo Elliott lived in Flint, a once-bustling auto manufacturing hub. She attended Emanuel Lutheran Church and was a sophomore at Carman High School.
Shot four times, sexually assaulted
Around 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 16, 1983, she was last seen waiting for the bus to take her to high school. Sherri Jo, 16, was never seen alive again.
Cops, residents and other volunteers spent hours scouring the area, looking for her and knocking on hundreds of doors but to no avail.
Four days later, on Nov.20, 1983, the pretty blond’s fully-clothed body was found along a rural road in Blumfield Township, Michigan. The largely rural area is 50 km north of Flint, close to Saginaw.She had shot been four times and sexually assaulted.
Cops believed the killer snatched the girl from her bus stop and then held her hostage until he tired of her. There would be no witnesses so he snuffed out her young life.
One year after the murder, the case went cold. The science to solve it was years in the future.
Her heartbroken mom Joyce told the Flint Journal: “It seems that she could not just vanish without being seen. Someone, somewhere, had to see her when she was abducted or when she was kept somewhere for three days.
“She was the only child I had. She doesn’t deserve to be out there in that cemetery.”
In 2013, cops said they had a DNA profile of the killer. They were unable to match it to anyone. In 2023, Michigan State Police detectives again reopened the probe.
The magic bullet was genetic geneology. The MSP Forensic Science Division and Othram Labs used forensic-grade genome sequencing to develop a profile of an unidentified person they believed was Elliott’s killer.
DNA pointed the finger at Roni Collins.
Now, cold case detectives are looking at the possibility Collins may have been a minor-league serial killer.
On Halloween Eve in 1969, 15-year-old Pam Hobley and 16-year-old Patricia Spencer vanished into thin air after leaving school early.
Oscoda is a tiny hamlet on the shores of Lake Huron. Roni Collins stood out there.
Now, Michigan State Police have revealed that Collins was a person of interest during that terrible autumn of 1969. He was in the tiny town. People knew him.
Hobley’s sister, Mary Buehrle, was just eight years old when her sister and Spencer disappeared. She remembered the smiling bass player.
‘He took the girls’
“He used to hang out down by the beach, where the little park was, and he drove a van,” Buehrle said. “My emotions are up and down but I truly believe he took the girls.”
At the time of the disappearances — and presumed murders — Collins was around 19 years old and was something of an itinerant musician. Calling himself Hendrix, he regularly played gigs in the Oscoda area.
Cops questioned him but, no, he knew nothing about the shocking disappearances.
According to cops, Hobley and Spencer were last speaking to a person driving a van. And then they were gone. On that Halloween night in 1969, Collins was in Oscoda.
That day the plan had been, Hobley told her family, to attend her school’s big homecoming football game. Afterwards, there was a Halloween party she planned to attend. But when the family returned from trick-or-treating, there was no sign of Hobley.
Her fiance said the teenager never arrived at the party.
Other parents were informed and it emerged that Spencer was a no-show as well.Teens ran away from home in 1969
In 1969, a lot of teenagers picked up and left their dreary hometowns. Cops initially believed the two teens were part of young America on the move.
That theory didn’t fly with the victims’ families. The two teens were in the right demographic but tiny Oscoda, Michigan wasn’t exactly ground zero for the Woodstock generation.
Both girls were close with their families and their purses, IDs and clothes had been left behind.
Investigators eventually agreed and the probe was categorized as a missing persons investigation. And there were growing fears that the pair had met with foul play. No trace of the girls has ever been found.
Now, detectives across the Midwest are scouring their files to see if the late Collins’ DNA matches any of their unsolved cases.
Chances are that they will indeed.