The search is over: Police halt murder probe outside La Salle-Peru truck wash

The search for human remains outside an abandoned truck wash has been halted – maybe for good.

La Salle County Sheriff Tom Templeton said Monday a team of search dogs was quietly brought in the middle of last week to resume the intermittent search of the Truckomat near the La Salle-Peru city limits. Search dogs again found no human remains but only pieces of animal bones, this time from deer.

Templeton said he and other investigators are convinced they would have turned up the remains of a murder victim by now.

“The handlers were pretty confident the dogs were not going to locate anything,” Templeton said, “so we have no immediate plans to resume the search at this time.”

That’s not to say police have discounted the claims of a serial killer whose interview set the search in motion. Templeton and two police chiefs listened closely to Dellmus Colvin’s claims of committing murder in La Salle and believe, then and now, his statements are credible.

“I believe that Colvin was and is telling us the truth about it,” Templeton said. “He knows so much about the area that what he says is probably correct. Fifteen years ago there was a girl that was lying there, at that location, that he had killed.”

But based on the animal activity discovered at the scene, Templeton and his peers have concluded any human remains would long ago have been scattered. Investigators had, notably, found a piece of a cow bone; but as there are no pastures nearby police concluded the fragment was buried at the truck wash by a coyote. Any human remains were likely to have been treated similarly, police theorize.

“Those of us in law enforcement tend to believe this guy,” said Peru Police Chief Doug Bernabei. “If we are correct, the sad reality is due to the years that have gone by a recovery and identification is highly unlikely.

“If we are correct about that as well then there is yet another tragedy because some family member somewhere will not get closure.”

La Salle Police Chief Mike Smudzinski agreed Colvin’s comments were hair-raising in their extensive detail – “Lord only knows what happened on that property 15 years ago” – but nearly two decades of cold, snowy winters and damp springs sharply reduced the odds he and his peers were going to find any evidence to support Colvin’s claim.

“There’s no reason to doubt this guy,” Smudzinski said, “but it doesn’t surprise me nothing has popped up yet.”

It is an anticlimactic end to a probe begun in late summer when author-researcher Phil Chalmers released a podcast, “The Interstate Strangler,” featuring portions of interviews of Colvin from the Ohio prison where he’s serving natural life for multiple murders.

In the podcast, Colvin delivered a remarkably detailed (and decidedly chilling) statement about how he killed a woman he’d met at Flying J Travel Plaza and then buried her a short distance away off La Salle Road. Colvin recalled small details such as the weather and the layout of the former truck wash and, when Chalmers asked for elaboration, said he killed her in 2005.

The location Colvin described matched an abandoned truck wash, located at a spot where the city limits meet unincorporated La Salle County. Cadaver dogs were sent for, but the search failed to yield any human remains.

Chalmers praised La Salle County authorities for acting as swiftly as they did.

“A lot of police, after 20 years, wouldn’t even have looked,” Chalmers said. “The fact they tried speaks volumes to their integrity.”

Even if the police had found human remains, identification would have been a challenge. The victim could have come from anywhere in the United States based on the facts and circumstances Colvin described. Though Colvin provided a limited description of his victim, and no name, Chalmers said Colvin tended to prey upon drifters (usually prostitutes and drug addicts) who hailed from both coasts and all points in between.

“It would have been great to have been able to find something,” Templeton said. “but I don't know that we would have been able to find out who the victim was.

“And I don’t think we’re going to have that chance.”