Town note
Native Americans were there first, thought to be a group of Iroquois, said to have been slaughtered by another group in the later 17th century.
about 0:08:49The story
Tercy Elizabeth Cooley, 71, lived in a small house in Edinburg, Virginia, in Shenandoah County, a town of about 1,300 people in the Shenandoah Valley.
He was attempting repairs around the trailer, doing them badly, and blamed Penny for his failures, shouting at her as the afternoon went on. He had assaulted her several times before. Penny decided to leave before the evening got worse, packed the two boys into the El Camino and drove off. She had left him once before and gone to her mother's house in Edinburg for a few days before returning. This time she went to her friends Amanda and Leonard Funkhouser instead. On the way she stopped several times to telephone her mother so that the older woman would know where she was, but Tercy Cooley did not answer.
She refused and shut the door. He left, then returned about an hour later, at roughly one in the morning. He was refused again. Instead of going home he stayed in his car in the driveway for the rest of the night, which the hosts took to mean he was waiting for the household to leave. In the morning the Funkhousers would not leave Penny alone in the house. Leonard took her to work with him and then suggested that she go on a commercial truck run to Ohio and Pennsylvania with a friend of his, a trip of three or four days, to get her out of the way.
He told her he had done something really bad and asked her to say, if asked, that he had been with her from half past seven until midnight.
At about noon on 21 September Penny's sister Linda went to their mother's house in Edinburg. She found the screen door pushed in and a pane of the kitchen door broken. She called out, got no answer, and walked through the house to the bedroom, where she found Tercy Cooley dead on the floor, wearing only a bra, a mattress pulled partly over her head, her lower dentures lying about four feet away and a washcloth beneath her leg. The bedroom was in disarray, with clothes and bedding scattered around. Linda called 911.
The assistant chief medical examiner for the Northern Virginia district, Francis Patricia Field, performed the autopsy. Cooley had multiple injuries to the head, including abrasions and bruises on the right forehead, beside the right eyebrow, on the white of the right eye, along both jawlines, on the neck, the right cheek, the chin and the mouth, and large bruises across the upper chest and lower neck. Her inner lips were bruised, and the injuries to her gums and lips were consistent with her dentures having been in place when she was struck, so that a blow knocked them out of her mouth. She had 24 fractured ribs. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the chest with a rupture of the heart, with compression of the neck as a contributing cause; a tear inside the heart let blood spill into the chest cavity, and she died within two or three minutes.
Sheriff Larry Green of Shenandoah County set up a traffic canvassing detail on the road by the house, stopping drivers who had passed between seven in the evening and half past eleven the next morning. Green stood in the centre of the road with a flare. A car approached, and before the sheriff could ask anything the driver asked what was going on, saying it was his mother-in-law's house. He was invited to speak to officers and walked over to a police car and got into the front seat uninvited, where an officer told him of the death and read him his Miranda rights. He was fingerprinted at the sheriff's department, read his rights again, and said he had been at a gas station near the house at 2.52 a.m. and again at 6.35 a.m., keeping receipts because he was on probation. He agreed to go to hospital for a physical evidence recovery kit.
On 26 September he returned to the sheriff's office at eight in the evening with the receipts, was read his rights again and interviewed. He then said that he had in fact broken into the house, but that a black man was already there, standing over his mother-in-law's body, and that he had killed this man, disposed of the body and could not say where it was. He said he had cleaned the dead woman's vaginal area with soap and water, masturbated and inserted his finger, smearing semen on the bed, so that his wife would not have to know her mother had been raped by a black man. Asked about semen found in the anal cavity, he said he had not touched that. He said he had broken in through the screen and the window pane and found her already dead, and that he had assumed Penny had done it, so he had planted his own semen to draw suspicion onto himself and away from her.
Forensic analysis found semen in both vaginal and anal swabs. Sperm was also found on a sheet and pillowcase.
The court rejected the arguments, holding the roadblock reasonable and the samples voluntary.
On 23 June 1999 a doctor found his competency restored. Testing gave him a verbal IQ of 73, a performance IQ of 86 and a full-scale IQ of 77. A psychologist concluded that he suffered from depression but was malingering, acting crazy rather than stupid, and a letter to his wife admitted he was putting on a show.
In the penalty phase the Commonwealth put forward his long record and called Hazel Buckley, who said that over a two-week period he had anally raped her nine times and that she had not reported it because he threatened her and her daughter. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed.
After the 2002 decision in Atkins v. From 2005 to 2015 the case went back and forth over whether he was fit to take part in the hearings, with a court-appointed expert finding him actively psychotic. In 2015 he was returned to the Marian Correctional Treatment Center from Central State Hospital because officials feared he was trying to escape, having faked chest pains to get hospital transfers.