The Chelsea Perkins Case: A Veteran, a Double Life, and an Execution in the Woods
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In March 2021, the body of Matthew Dunmire, 31, was found in a remote ravine inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Valley View, Ohio. The federal homicide investigation led agents to Chelsea Perkins, a 35-year-old United States Coast Guard veteran who had driven 300 miles from Alexandria, Virginia, to commit the crime. Forensic evidence including GPS tracking, DNA analysis, and a recovered deleted file from her phone resulted in a federal conviction. On May 27, 2025, Perkins pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 270 months in federal prison.
She had two lives running at the same time and managed both with a discipline most people cannot apply to a single one. A military veteran, an adult content creator named Selena Savage, and a woman quietly carrying a grievance that had been building for years. When she finally decided to act on it, she packed a 9mm pistol, got into her husband's Smart car, and drove three hundred miles to meet the man she was planning to kill. She spent the night with him first. Then she walked him into the woods of a national park. Investigators later recovered a fake suicide note she had written in the victim's own voice, and it tells you everything about how long she had been thinking about this.
#TrueCrime #TrueCrimePodcast #CuyahogaValley #SelenaSavage #ChelseaPerkins #FederalMurder #NationalParkMurder
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | She was a Coast Card veteran and an adult film actress who ran two completely separate lives, |
| 0:07.0 | and she managed both of them with the precision that most people reserved for one. |
| 0:11.0 | On March 6, 2021, she drove 300 miles from Virginia to Ohio to spend the night with a man that she was planning to kill |
| 0:20.0 | and walked him into the woods of a national park the next morning. |
| 0:23.9 | This is the Chelsea Perkins case. |
| 0:55.6 | The... There's something you have to understand about Chelsea Perkins before any of the rest of this makes sense. She was not someone who had fallen apart. |
| 0:58.2 | She was not visibly unraveling or struggling to hold things together. |
| 1:03.0 | By all outward appearances, she was completely functional, highly functional, actually. |
| 1:09.1 | She had served in the United States Coast Guard and military service build something specific |
| 1:13.4 | inside a person, a tolerance for difficult conditions, a capacity to perform under stress, |
| 1:20.7 | and a relationship with discipline that most civilians never quite develop. |
| 1:25.0 | That training doesn't really leave you when the service ends. It travels |
| 1:28.4 | with you, quietly embedded, and how you move through the world. When Chelsea left the military, |
| 1:34.5 | she built a second career that could not have looked more different on the surface. Under the |
| 1:40.0 | name Selena Savage, she became an adult content creator with an Instagram presence and an |
| 1:45.9 | only fan's account. She controlled every image, every interaction, every dollar. She decided |
| 1:53.1 | what the audience received and how it was seen. For someone who had spent years inside a rigid |
| 1:58.4 | military structure, having complete ownership over |
| 2:01.3 | her own story probably felt exactly right. She maintained two lives simultaneously, each |
| 2:08.3 | requiring a different version of the same person. And here's what matters most before we go |
| 2:13.1 | any further. Matthew Dunmire was a real person, 31 years old, living in Ohio with a history that |
| 2:19.9 | intersected with Chelsea Perkins in ways the public record doesn't fully detail. Chelsea would |
... |
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