Key clue found in 53-year-old case
Witness comes forward in case of Dayton woman’s murder.
Detectives in Miami and Montgomery counties believe a former sex trafficking ring may be the clue they need to solve a 53-year-old murder case involving a Dayton woman whose severed body parts were found in two bodies of water in the Tipp City area.
A witness came forward in December with new information
about 43-year-old Daisy Shelton’s final days and told police a suspect in the case is still alive. Now, detectives are hoping others will contact them to corroborate the information, which includes allegations that a group Shelton may have been involved with had been trafficking teenage girls for sex.
On a humid evening in June 1964, a fly fisherman casting his line snagged a human arm in a gravel pit off Ohio 571. After divers brought up the other arm the next day, the recovery operation shifted into full gear. Fire trucks equipped with pumpers worked to lower the water level of the pit, which yielded no more human remains.
Within days, however, fishermen found the woman’s torso about a mile away in a section of the old MiamiErie Canal in Tipp City. The Dayton Daily News reported that “thousands of people, many with picnic baskets,” gathered to watch as crews recovered other body parts. The victim’s right leg was never found.
It took pathologists two more months to positively identify the victim as Shelton, whose adult daughter, Rita Bellisario, had filed a missing person’s report saying she hadn’t seen her mother since the previous September.
No one was ever arrested, as detectives were not able to trace Shelton’s last steps and associates.
Dayton Cold Case Detective Patricia Tackett said she first heard of Shelton last December when a potential witness contacted the department.
“Somebody has lived with this for a very long time and felt that they needed to come forward,” said Tackett, who
did not identify the witness or the suspect.
Tackett contacted Chief Deputy Steve Lord at the
M iami Co u nty Sheriff’s Office, which originally investigated the case and main- tains a trove of black-and- white pictures as potential evidence. Both departments have recently interviewed “persons of interest,” Tack- ett said.
Shelton’s two children, Bellisario and Rodney Shelton, are overjoyed about a possible break in the case.
Whoever did it should have to pay for it, Bellisario says simply. Rodney Shelton, 77, joined
the Navy after graduating from Kiser High School and hadn’t seen his mother for years when her remains were recovered. He knew she’d been laid off from her job at Delco and that his parents had split.
“They had a problem with alcohol, both of ‘em,” he said. Still, he remembers his mom as “a very nice person to me, and we loved her.”
Tackett recently took Rodney to Eastwood Park in Dayton, now believed to be one of the last places Daisy went before she was killed. The
park inside the Springfield Street entrance looks much different now that it did when Rodney last saw it in the late 1950s. He remembers a swim- ming pool with “hundreds of people. It was a big hangout.”
The new witness information revealed that Daisy lived across the street from Eastwood Park and frequented the nearby Lido bar. She became involved with a group that trafficked teenage girls for sex and lured
them with cookies and treats from the park to a house that stood in the 1500 block of Springfield Street, the witness told police.
It’s those girls, now women in their late 60s, to whom Tackett is appealing in hopes of solving the mystery. She wants anyone who was a victim of sex trafficking in 1963 or 1964, or who has knowledge of Daisy being involved, to come forward.
Rodney Shelton is hopeful his mother’s killer will finally be charged. Either way, he said, there will be justice. “He still has to face his maker,” Shelton said, “and you can’t lie to him.”