The wife of a U.S. Coast Guardsman in Virginia drove her husband’s car to Cleveland, where she spent the night with a 31-year-old father of two, then executed the aspiring musician in a nature preserve with a bullet to the back of the head before heading to Detroit to get a tattoo, a newly unsealed federal complaint alleges.
Chelsea Perkins, also 31, is accused of fatally shooting Matthew John Dunmire, whose body was found last March near a “haunted” cemetery in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Perkins, who is now charged with murder, was arrested Thursday in Pensacola, Florida.
“I think about a week prior to all of this, Matthew was so excited because he was trying to stop drinking,” a former coworker of Dunmire’s, 30-year-old Jaimee Magyaros, told The Daily Beast shortly after the charges against Perkins were unsealed. “He was really proud of himself, he was turning his life around. I remember he made a comment about having his whole life ahead of him—and then this happened.”
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On March 5, 2021, four days before Dunmire was found dead, he was out at a local bar, the Tiki Underground, with a group of colleagues from the screenprinting shop where he worked. While there, Dunmire, an avid guitarist who was originally from Virginia, told his supervisor that he was planning to meet a woman from out of town who was staying over in the Cleveland area. The exact relationship between the two, or how they met, is unknown, and no apparent motive has been revealed by authorities.
At around 6 p.m., Dunmore got a text. “She’s here,” he announced to his coworkers, and walked out of the Tiki with his supervisor, the complaint states.
The supervisor, who is not identified by name in the complaint, watched Dunmire get into a white Smart car with Virginia plates and a brown-haired woman behind the wheel. There was a Coast Guard sticker on the rear window, along with a Bauhaus sticker and a third sticker, reading “Virginia is for Lovers,” beneath the rear license plate.
Perkins and Dunmire drove to a nearby Airbnb that Perkins had booked using a credit card under her own name, according to the complaint. Along the way, video surveillance from a nearby BP station showed Dunmire entering the gas station convenience store, where he bought cigarettes and a bottle of Aquafina water.
At roughly 8 p.m., the two stopped at a nearby sandwich shop. Surveillance footage from a neighboring Verizon store showed the pair, both in dark clothing, walking down the avenue together, the complaint says. Dunmire then headed back to the Airbnb with Perkins to spend the night, according to the complaint. While there, Perkins contacted a tattoo artist in Detroit via Facebook Messenger and made plans to get inked the following day after “making a stop first,” the filing states.
“On the morning of March 6, 2021, [Dunmire] texted his girlfriend, identified herein as ‘A.W.,’ that he had just woke [sic] up, was going to donate plasma, and would come back to their apartment,” the complaint continues. “[Dunmire] asked A.W. not to be upset and said he did not ‘sleep with her.’ At approximately 8:39 a.m., [Dunmire] texted A.W. again saying that he was ‘guessing’ that she (his girlfriend) did not miss him and was mad at him last night. [Dunmire] said further: ‘Well I pissed this chick off anyway so I hope yer happy.’”
About 20 minutes later, Dunmire and Perkins left the Airbnb and headed south on Brecksville Road, according to GPS data from their phones, the complaint says. Dunmire’s phone was used to search for the location of the Terra Vista Natural Study Area, a scenic butterfly habitat within Cuyahoga Valley National Park. They arrived around 9:45 a.m., and left Perkins’ car in the parking lot. Approximately 45 minutes later, Dunmire texted his girlfriend again, saying, “OK. I’ll see you in a little while.”
Sometime between 11:30 a.m. and 11:50 a.m., a couple enjoying the peaceful nature preserve heard a gunshot and “decided to leave the area,” and spotted the white Smart car in the parking lot on their way out, according to the complaint.
A second couple said they had been hiking near the Terra Vista Study Area that day, and “encountered a young woman in the woods,” alone. They added that the woman, who had dark shoulder-length hair, told them she was looking for the Terra Vista Cemetery “and became lost,” states the complaint. The two “found it odd that the woman was not dressed in hiking attire; rather she was wearing all black clothing, black knee-high boots, and a black hoodie,” according to the complaint, which says the couple described the woman as “confused,” and that she “expressed no emotion.”
They told investigators that they walked with the woman for “a short distance until their path split,” and the woman “headed toward the direction of the cemetery.”
Perkins left Cleveland around 1 p.m., according to EZ-Pass records, which showed the Smart car getting on the Ohio Turnpike and heading west toward Toledo. There, the car—which was registered in Perkins’ husband’s name—turned north toward Michigan, and eventually arrived at a Detroit tattoo parlor called Family Ink.
A Family Ink employee said Thursday that she didn’t remember Perkins or anything about her.
“The FBI came down and questioned me, and I told them the same thing,” the employee, who did not want to be identified, told The Daily Beast. “I don’t know anything about it, man.”
In the early morning hours of March 7, the white Smart car left Michigan, heading east. It again traveled through Ohio, and exited the turnpike in Somerset, Pennsylvania, the complaint states, citing EZ-Pass records.
Around 11 a.m. on March 9, officers with the Valley View Police Department in Ohio responded to the Terra Vista Cemetery “regarding the discovery of a deceased male” by a group of hikers. An ID card in the dead man’s pocket identified him as Dunmire, who was wearing black fingerless gloves, a black leather jacket, a black hoodie, black jeans, and black boots. A plastic Aquafina water bottle was found next to Dunmire’s body.
Forensic testing identified Perkins’ and Dunmire’s DNA on the mouth and cap of the Aquafina bottle. Perkins’ DNA was found on Dunmire’s pubic hair, and under his fingernails. An autopsy determined the cause of death to have been homicide by a single gunshot wound to the back of Dunmire’s head.
Later that month, investigators searched the Virginia home Perkins and her husband shared. They seized three 9mm pistols, one of which was inside a “woman’s purse/backpack, which also contained an identification card for Chelsea Perkins,” states the complaint. A ballistics test linked one of the guns to the bullet recovered from Dunmire’s skull, it says.
The complaint does not account for the time period between the slaying and Perkins’ arrest today in Pensacola. She does not yet have a lawyer listed in court records, and her husband was unable to be reached for comment.
Dunmire’s father, John McQuillen, acknowledged that an arrest had been made but said he didn’t have any details. He told The Daily Beast on Thursday, “I really don't want to talk about it. I can’t discuss anything about it at this time.”
Magyaros, Dunmire’s former coworker, said Dunmire’s kids were back in Virginia and that he had moved to Ohio “to better his life.”
“He always seemed so happy, and it just made my day,” Magyaros told The Daily Beast. “I’m pretty picky about the people who I become friends with, and he was one of the people I felt like I could really connect with. The night that it happened, my coworkers and he were at the Tiki lounge… I’m kicking myself, [because] I ended up not going. I wish I was there, it would've been the last time I could have spent time with him. You can’t predict these things. It’s just very sad and unfortunate. But I’m so glad the person who did this was caught.”
Perkins faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.
