A man accused of a murder in Lake Township more than 25 years ago remains incompetent to stand trial.

Samuel Legg, 52, who is at Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare Hospital, appeared via video Tuesday in the courtroom of Wood County Common Pleas Judge Matt Reger.

Reger said to start of the review hearing that he had received a report from the center in February that Legg remains incompetent to stand trial.

DNA led to Legg’s August 2020 indictment for the murder of Victoria Jane Collins.

He also has been charged with murder in at least two other jurisdictions.

Two psychiatric tests done in August 2021 stipulated that Legg was incompetent.

Defense attorney Merle Dech Jr. asked the court to adopt the findings that Legg remains incompetent to stand trial and recommend he remain committed at Twin Valley, which is the least restrictive environment.

Reger adopted the report.

Ohio Revised Code stipulates the first review hearing needs to be done after six months of treatment.

Legg’s next review will be in two years. He will remain at Twin Valley, located in Columbus, which is a maximum-security facility where he was involuntarily committed in September 2019 after being extradited from Arizona. He is not permitted to leave.

Dech asked that the psychiatric report be sealed, and Reger agreed to do so.

Collins’ nude body was found Dec. 20, 1996, behind the Union 76 Truck Stop in Lake Township. Collins, a dancer from the Cleveland area, was reported missing Dec. 18,1996 by her boyfriend, and was last seen on Dec. 16 or the early morning hours of Dec. 17 of that year.

She was 27 years old.

Wood County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Alyssa Blackburn has said at previous hearings that Collins was out with some friends partying in the Cleveland area just days before her death. An argument with the people in the vehicle in which she was riding resulted in her being let out around Interstate 90.

That was the last time she was seen alive, Blackburn said at the August hearing.

Investigators learned Legg was a truck driver. He admitted he would occasionally pick up women in his truck and have sex with them, said Douglas Kinder, senior investigator with the Wood County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

Kinder said when Legg was interviewed in February 2019, “he did finally admit to picking up Victoria Collins.”

“He admitted to choking all three women and even demonstrated how he did it,” Kinder said in Reger’s courtroom in August.

Collins’ homicide is similar to that of Sharon Kedzierski, who was found dead at a truck stop near Youngstown in 1992.

Legg also has been indicted in Lake County, Illinois, for the murder of Julia Konkol, who was found strangled in 1997 at an abandoned truck stop.

Legg’s Wood County indictment is for two charges of aggravated murder and one charge of murder, all unclassified felonies; and one charge of rape and one charge of kidnapping, both first-degree felonies.

DNA taken from the Wood County and Illinois cases was logged and matched a 1992 homicide in Mahoning County. DNA taken from a rape in Medina County matched the three murder cases. Legg was a suspect in that rape.

That DNA was a familial match to Legg’s brother, and a family tree profile was developed. The ages of all the men in that lineage at the time of the offenses was checked and ruled out, except Legg.