Left: Chelsea Perkins (Santa Rosa County Jail). Right: Matthew Dunmire (Claytor Rollins Funeral Home).
A U.S. Coast Guard vet turned OnlyFans model is facing a decades-long prison sentence for luring a man she claimed raped her into the woods of a national park in Ohio and executing him.
Chelsea Perkins pleaded guilty on Tuesday to second-degree murder in the 2021 death of 31-year-old Matthew Dunmire at Cuyahoga Valley National Park near Cleveland, court records say. Hikers in the Terra Vista Natural Study Area of the park found Dunmire’s body around 11 a.m. March 9, 2021, according to a probable cause arrest affidavit. He had a single gunshot wound to the back of the head and an Aquafina water bottle next to him.
FBI agents later learned Dunmire had gone out with friends and co-workers to a bar four days before the discovery of his body. Dunmire told them he was going to meet a woman who was in town for the weekend. The woman showed up in a white car and his boss watched him get inside and leave.
License plate readers showed the car belonged to Perkins’ husband. Investigators later learned that the pair drove to an Airbnb that the defendant had rented using her credit card. After spending the night with Dunmire, Perkins sent a Facebook message to her tattoo artist in metro Detroit that she was in Cleveland and was going to “make a stop first” before driving to Michigan, according to investigators.
The pair drove to the national park on the morning of March 6, 2021. Hikers said they heard a gunshot between 11:30 a.m. and 11:50 a.m. Another pair of hikers reported encountering a woman later confirmed to be Perkins, who was walking and appeared to be lost. They thought it was odd she was wearing knee-high boots and not hiking gear.
Perkins then drove to the tattoo parlor in Michigan. Agents keyed in on Perkins as a suspect and found the same car parked outside her husband’s home in Virginia a couple of weeks later.
The suspect’s DNA was also found on the Aquafina bottle as well as on Dunmire’s body, per cops.
After her short stint in the Coast Guard, Perkins went on to become an OnlyFans model under the name Sabrina Savage, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. As for Perkins’ rape allegation against Dunmire, police in Virginia Beach said there was not enough evidence to move forward with the charge, the newspaper reports.
The case took a twist in November 2021 when Dunmire’s parents, upset that Perkins had not yet been arrested, took matters into their own hands. Dunmire’s mother, Tommie Lynn Dunmire, and father, John Nelson McQuillen, drove to Washington, D.C., with plans on killing Perkins, according to feds.
Tommie Lynn Dunmire dressed as a UPS driver and knocked on an apartment door. When a woman answered, she shot her twice in the abdomen.
The problem? The woman who answered the door was not Perkins — the older Dunmire had just shot a woman who had nothing to do with her son’s murder.
Tommie Lynn Dunmire and McQuillen changed license plates on their vehicle, but cops still tracked them down. She shot herself to death as officers were closing in. The woman she shot survived her injuries, and federal agents arrested McQuillen, who later pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact to assault with intent to kill. He received a three-year prison sentence.
Matthew Dunmire’s obituary described him as a “free spirit who loved music, loved playing his guitar, and loved being with his friends.”
Perkins faces between 20 and 25 years in prison when she’s sentenced on Sept. 9.
