Christopher Brian Colbert
Dallas Police announced today (Thursday, March 3) that murder suspect Christopher Brian Colbert has been arrested in Los Angeles and is being held there awaiting extradition.
Colbert was arrested on warrants for tampering with a governmental record, securing execution of a document by deception and money laundering. He is also a suspect in the murder of Dallas gay man Ronald David Shumway.
Shumway, 57, was last seen alive in April 2015, shortly before his supervisors at Dallas Area Rapid Transit received an email purported to be from Shumway in which he resigned his job as a DART driver. His home at 725 N. Winnetka Ave. was then put up for sale and a man claiming to be Shumway appeared at the closing for the sale of the home in June, although he did not have his ID with him, faxing an altered copy of Shumway’s driver’s license to the office later on.
The new owner of the house on Winnetka found the unidentified torso of a man in a plastic bag beneath a concrete slab in the backyard of the house in September, prompting police to launch a search for Shumway. Because of posts made to his Facebook account after he supposedly resigned from his job, police believed Shumway had moved to Austin to live with a man he met online.
Investigators determined in February, through DNA testing, that the remains found in the backyard were, in fact, Shumway’s, and that’s when their attention turned to Colbert. Witnesses identified Colbert as the man who had represented himself as Shumway at the real estate deal closing last June, and police issued warrants for his arrest.
