Town note
Pemberton is located on Soak Creek.
about 0:05:40The story
In 2002, when he was eighteen, his mother called him while her boyfriend was punching her in the jaw. That year he graduated from Oak Hill High School, where he wrestled, and in 2003 he joined the US Navy. He served as a diesel engineer during the Iraq war, keeping the engine room of a guided missile cruiser running and refuelling it. When he came home he took a job at a Texas Steakhouse in West Virginia, where he met Lisa Meador, who worked there too. He soon left for a job in the coal mines and moved into her trailer in Pemberton.
Drink and pills took over. Around 2007 he began abusing oxycodone, Roxicodone and Xanax, and he could no longer hold a job. By 2011 the couple were arguing constantly about drink, pills and money.
He drove to Redden's trailer, parked out of Lisa's sight and spent about three hours drinking two one-litre bottles of Lord Calvert whisky with Redden and Ronda McCoy, snorting pills as well. In the early afternoon McCoy began dancing, lifted her shirt and then demanded twenty dollars each from the two men for the dance. She argued with him and he called her a bitch and a whore. Redden sent him home and told McCoy, who was very drunk, to go and sleep it off, then locked the door and passed out.
She told him it was mud. A couple of hours later he announced he was going back to Jeff's for more beer. He was gone ten or fifteen minutes. When he came back he was pale as a ghost and covered in blood, with a cut on his hand. He made growling noises, vomited in the bathroom and Lisa ran and locked herself in. At about 1.30 or 2 a.m. he left with his mother for her home in Beckley.
On the morning of 19 June Redden woke to find the door open, McCoy's purse spilled across the living room floor and her body in the spare bedroom under a pile of clothes. She had been stabbed twenty-three times in the head, neck, torso and upper extremities, her throat cut so deeply that she was nearly beheaded; her trachea and two arteries were severed and she took some minutes to die. Redden called 911. A friend told him McCoy had been murdered and he told his mother he had stabbed her, then threw the knife out of the car window at a second roadblock.
He said he stabbed her in the throat first and then kept going. McCoy's family said they planned to spread her ashes.