Photo by Danny Fulgencio
A former hair stylist and photographer pleaded guilty this week in the death of Oak Cliff resident Ron Shumway four years ago.
Christopher Brian Colbert, 46, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for Shumway’s murder. Colbert admitted to police he strangled Shumway to death when they were both drunk and fighting at the duplex Shumway owned on North Winnetka, where both men lived.
Colbert drove to Home Depot on Fort Worth Avenue and bought bags of cement. A home investor found Shumway’s decomposing body, hands and feet bound with neck ties, under a slab of concrete in the home’s backyard in 2015.
Colbert posed as Shumway to sell the home, in the 700 block of North Winnetka, that Shumway had inherited from his mother. He sold the house for about $110,000, and he used Shumway’s debit card to retrieve the cash.
He was arrested in California in 2016.
Shumway, who died at 57, was born and raised in Oak Cliff and worked as a DART bus driver.
The Dallas Morning News reports that Colbert also pleaded guilty to tampering with a government record, securing execution of a document by deception and money laundering. He was sentenced to 20 years for each of those crimes, but it’s unclear whether he will serve those sentences at the same time as the murder conviction.
