On April 1, 1987, a driver stopped on a rural road in Colorado and looked down an embankment. There was a woman. Her name was Rhonda Marie Fisher. She was 30 years old.

She was found about 35 miles from where she was last seen alive, with no evidence of how she got there. Investigators made an unusual decision at the crime scene. Before Rhonda’s body was moved, paper bags were placed over both of her hands. At the time, no one could have known that those bags would eventually hold the evidence that would solve her case.

For the next 38 years, the bags sat in an evidence facility in Douglas County, Colorado, carrying an answer no one could yet read. When that answer finally emerged in October 2025, it confirmed something the case had never publicly revealed. There had been two suspects all along. This is the investigation into the murder of Rhonda Marie Fisher.

The incident occurred in the 3500 block of South Perry Park Road, south of Sedalia, a stretch of fast rural highway in Douglas County. A driver traveling the road that morning noticed something that did not belong at the edge of the embankment, stopped, and called for help. Law enforcement arrived and secured the location. The victim had not fallen there.

She had been placed below the sightline of the road, out of view of passersby, a decision made deliberately by someone. The medical examiner’s findings confirmed this was a criminal case, and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office opened a homicide investigation. Investigators quickly identified an acquaintance Rhonda had been staying with recently, who was brought in for questioning. That path led nowhere.

The central question driving the case had nothing to do with who she knew. It was about who brought her there. Public records about Rhonda Marie Fisher are limited. What is known about her comes largely from the official statement made by Douglas County Sheriff Darren Weekly in December 2025.

She was a mother, a daughter, a sister, a cousin, a niece, and a friend. She lived in the Denver metro area. In the weeks before her death, she had no fixed address, moving between different residences and staying with various acquaintances. Her living situation made her absence difficult to notice.

When she disappeared, she was not immediately reported missing. No concern was raised. No search was launched. That gap in time mattered to the investigation.

A victim with no permanent home and no missing person report left investigators working with limited and uncertain information from the start. The person identified in those first days, the one she had been staying with, was thoroughly investigated. Statements were taken. The details of her final weeks were examined and checked against all available records.

At the close of that process, according to official records, that individual was cleared. They had no documented connection to her death. The first path the investigation took did not hold up. Investigators then moved to a second path, reviewing serial offenders active in the Denver metro area during the same period.

That review also produced no confirmed connection to her case. Two separate threads, no arrests, no confirmed suspect. The investigation was losing momentum. March 31, 1987.

The last confirmed sighting of Rhonda Marie Fisher alive was that evening in Denver. She was seen walking north on Monaco Parkway toward Lydsdell Drive. Monaco was a busy road at that hour, with streetlights, residences, and businesses along it. It was not the kind of location where someone simply disappears.

Yet no one came forward. No witnesses reported seeing anything unusual that evening. No emergency calls came from that stretch of road. Whatever happened along Monaco Parkway on the night of March 31, 1987, happened without any documented testimony.

In December 2025, Sheriff Darren Weekly provided a specific detail about Rhonda’s movements that night. She was walking on foot, he said, and based on the information available to investigators, she may have been looking for transportation. That detail connects directly to how this case was ultimately understood. Investigators would later document that the person linked to her death had a consistent and deliberate pattern, offering rides to women he met on the streets of Denver, women traveling on foot who needed to reach a destination.

It was a method used repeatedly. When the medical examiner finished examining Rhonda Marie Fisher, the cause of death was confirmed and placed in the case file. The paper bags placed on her hands were a deliberate investigative decision. When physical contact occurs between a victim and an offender, biological material, skin cells, trace evidence, or anything transferred during that contact may remain on the victim’s hands.

Paper, not plastic, is used to cover them because paper preserves evidence without creating the moisture that damages it. The bags were put on at the crime scene itself, before Rhonda Marie Fisher was moved, to protect any contact evidence still present. They were sealed, labeled, and stored inside the Douglas County property and evidence facility. What those bags actually contained was not known until decades later.

The first criminal conviction in the United States using DNA evidence was in 1986, one year before this crime. There was no national DNA database. Colorado was the first state to require DNA collection, but not until 1988, and only from convicted sex offenders. The FBI’s CODIS database did not become operational until roughly a decade later.

The evidence in this case had been properly preserved. But the science needed to read it did not yet exist. A 2017 attempt at DNA review produced no usable profiles, and the paper bags were not included in that submission. The evidence remained completely intact.

What the investigation still needed was a name connected to the case. There was a man already in the system. While Rhonda Fisher’s case sat in the cold files, something else was happening in Denver. According to reports from Denver Westword and CBS News, authorities in the late 1980s were finding roughly one body per month in the metro area.

Women targeted and abandoned, all likely connected to one another. A multi-agency task force was formed to investigate whether a single person was responsible. Denver investigators were already facing multiple murders that might be linked across jurisdictions that did not automatically share case data. One name under consideration belonged to a man already convicted of murder, released on mandatory parole in the same year Rhonda Fisher was killed.

Vincent Darrell Groves was born in Denver, Colorado in 1954 and grew up in Wheat Ridge, a suburb west of Denver. He was a locally known athlete in high school, and after graduating he attended college in Iowa on a basketball scholarship before dropping out and returning to Colorado. But what developed alongside that apparent path told a different story. Groves became addicted to cocaine.

He frequented a gym in Denver, and at night he drove along a 5-mile stretch of East Colfax Avenue, a corridor known for prostitution and drug dealing. He became involved in those networks, supplying cocaine and eventually running a prostitution operation himself. In late 1977, he recruited 17-year-old Janice Baca into prostitution. On June 11, 1978, her body was found half a mile from a park in Jefferson County.

Investigators questioned Groves. No charges were filed. It was his first documented contact with police. On August 24, 1979, 21-year-old Normine Halford, who had been living with Groves, disappeared.

Her car was found abandoned on a mountain road outside Georgetown. Her body was never found. On August 14, 1981, Groves was camping with 17-year-old Tammy Sue Woodrum when she died. He told his wife that Woodrum died of a drug overdose, and at her urging he repeated this account to authorities.

The medical examiner’s findings contradicted that. Groves was convicted of second-degree murder in 1982 and sentenced to 12 years. He served five. On February 13, 1987, Colorado’s mandatory parole system opened the doors for him.

Vincent Darrell Groves walked out of prison. He found work as a janitor, bought a blue Concord, and returned to East Colfax Avenue. In March 1987, a 20-year-old woman named Sheila Washington was near East Colfax when a man driving a blue Concord offered her a ride. He drove her to a motel.

She was beaten but survived the attack. She identified Vincent Darrell Groves as her attacker. He was not arrested immediately. That same month, in the final days of March 1987, Rhonda Marie Fisher was killed.

DNA evidence examined by the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in 2025 confirmed Groves at her crime scene. Sheila Washington lived. Rhonda Marie Fisher did not. Two other women died during that parole period.

Zabrina Mason, 19, of Lakewood, in September 1987, and Carolyn Walker, 18, of Aurora, on July 5, 1987. On April 29, 1988, the body of Wanita Becky Louvado, 19, was found in a rural area east of Denver. A witness told investigators he saw Louvado get into Groves’ car on the night she died. On July 25, 1988, 25-year-old Dianne Montoya Mancera was killed in Adams County.

A friend confirmed she was seen riding in Groves’ car shortly before her disappearance. On September 1, 1988, investigators arrested Groves. He denied any involvement. A blood sample was taken.

His parents, his ex-wife, and several acquaintances were interviewed. His car and his apartments were searched. No additional incriminating evidence was found. He was only charged with the assault on Sheila Washington.

In February 1989, Groves stood trial on that charge. He claimed self-defense, alleging Washington had stolen money from him and attacked him first. Her prior conviction for cocaine possession was used in his defense. He was acquitted.

DNA evidence linking Groves to the deaths of Louvado and Mancera kept him in custody. In 1990, he was convicted of first-degree murder in the Louvado case and sentenced to life in prison. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for Mancera, adding 20 years to his sentence. Prosecutors also presented evidence linking Groves to eight additional murders in the Denver area.

No further charges were filed. In the early 1990s, Groves was diagnosed with Hepatitis C. As his health declined, investigators visited him in the prison hospital and asked for names or confessions, anything that might give other families answers. He refused.

Vincent Darrell Groves died in a prison hospital near Denver on October 31, 1996. He was 42 years old. The cold case file for Rhonda Marie Fisher remained open. Groves was dead.

The forensic link to her murder did not yet exist in any documented file. The chance for justice had closed permanently. In 2010, the Denver District Attorney’s Office received federal funding to review 250 unsolved murders between 1970 and 1984. The review was led by an eight-member team of cold case specialists, including Denver police investigator Melecio Yerling.

The 2012 results confirmed four posthumous DNA links to Vincent Darrell Groves. Emma Jenifer, 25, March 1979, her death in a bathtub in Cherry Creek staged to look like suicide. Joyce Ramey, 23, July 1979, near 56th Avenue and Havana Street in Denver. Peggy Kuff, 20, a bank employee, November 1979, in an alley on South Ogden Street.

And Pamela Montgomery, 35, August 1988, near Locust and Leyden Streets in Denver. The Denver District Attorney at the time, Mitch Morrissey, described Groves as the most prolific serial killer in Colorado history. Investigator Yerling said of the newly connected families that they were very surprised. They thought their cases had been forgotten.

Rhonda Fisher’s case entered investigation discussions as a possible additional link to Groves, but evidence from her file did not produce a usable DNA profile. Those were discussions, not confirmations. In 2017, case evidence from the original investigation was resubmitted for modern DNA testing, including swabs and nail scrapings. No complete profiles were found.

A trace of male DNA was detected on the left hand only, insufficient for any analysis. The paper bags were not included among the evidence submitted. The paper bags had been in the Douglas County evidence facility since 1987. During every review, including 2017, they were not examined.

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office offered no public explanation for that decision. What the records confirm is that the decision to examine them was not made in 2017. It was made 8 years later. In early 2025, the cold case unit reopened the investigation, their seventh in 7 years, led by crime analysis supervisor Michelle Kennedy.

CODIS conducts two types of searches, matching an unknown profile against known offenders or comparing it to unknown profiles from other crime scenes in the system. The 2025 result came from the second type. The DNA was not matched to a specific name. It was matched to evidence from prior crimes already in the records.

A detective told the Douglas County News Press, since the paper bags had never been tested, they thought it would be a good option. Kennedy told CNN that the bags had been preserved and untouched for 40 years, so the belief was that any skin cells on those bags were still there. In late October 2025, CODIS showed a confirmed match. The DNA from Rhonda Fisher’s right hand bag matched three murders from 1979.

Emma Jenifer, Joyce Ramey, and Peggy Kuff. All attributed to Vincent Darrell Groves. Kennedy then revealed to CNN what had never been publicly stated. Groves had always been considered a possible suspect in this case, but there had been another suspect, and they needed the DNA confirmation to be sure.

On December 2, 2025, Sheriff Darren Weekly announced the case was solved. Kennedy’s statement confirmed that the investigation had involved two suspects for decades. DNA settled it forensically, but the identity of the second suspect was never publicly disclosed. The case was closed under exceptional clearance, the classification used when a perpetrator has been identified but cannot be prosecuted due to death.

Rhonda’s parents died without knowing the truth. Her brother also died without knowing. According to CNN, a surviving cousin was notified in December 2025 and expressed relief at finally having an explanation. Groves served 5 years of a 12-year murder sentence before mandatory parole returned him to Denver in 1987, the same year Rhonda Fisher was killed.

Sheriff Weekly stated that as science advances, the ability to uncover truth grows in evidence that previous technology could not read. Colorado retains nearly 2,000 unsolved cases, more than 1,400 of them homicides, each with a name and people waiting for answers. This case was not solved by a confession or a new witness. It was solved because someone asked what had not yet been tested.

The bags stayed in evidence for nearly four decades, ignored during the 2017 DNA review. That was the choice that mattered. The evidence sealed in 1987 and unexamined for nearly four decades had held the answer all along.