Left: Chelsea Perkins (Santa Rosa County Jail). Right: Matthew Dunmire (Claytor Rollins Funeral Home).
A U.S. Coast Guard vet turned OnlyFans model is headed to prison for decades after she lured a man she claimed raped her into the woods of a national park in Ohio and shot him in the back of the head.
Chelsea Perkins, 35, on Tuesday was sentenced to 22 1/2 years behind bars for the murder of Matthew Dunmire at Cuyahoga Valley National Park near Cleveland, the U.S. Attorney”s Office for the Northern District of Ohio said in a press release. She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in May.
“It was a coldly, calculated intention to cause his death,” prosecutors said during the hearing, according to a courtroom report from local CBS affiliate WOIO.
Perkins claimed Dunmire had raped her a few years earlier in Virginia but there was not enough evidence to file charges.
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“What I see here today is a lack of remorse,” prosecutors said.
They also noted how she tried to cover her tracks after the murder. Cops found a fake suicide note on Perkins’ phone that she apparently wrote but later deleted. The government also pointed out that after she murdered Dunmire, she drove to Michigan to get a tattoo of a noose inked on her forearm.
For her part, she told the court she took “full responsibility” for her actions.
“I was in the Marine Corps and never met anyone as evil or vile,” Dan Dunmire, the victim’s uncle told the court, per WOIO.
Perkins’ family members spoke as well, saying she is a good person.
Said Matthew Dunmire’s father: “My son was a good person, too, and now his children have no father.”
As Law&Crime previously reported, hikers in the Terra Vista Natural Study Area of the park found the 31-year-old 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 became 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 remained free, 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.”
