Richard Vance, a 34-year-old White/Caucasian man from Branchland, West Virginia, was fatally shot on the evening of October 13, 2022, along Sand Gap Road in Lincoln County. West Virginia State Police and other Hamlin-area units were called to the area shortly after 6:30 p.m. Authorities said the shooting occurred at a residence in the 100 block of Sand Gap Road. Vance suffered a gunshot wound after a single round was fired from a long gun.
Emergency personnel arranged for Vance to be transported by HealthNet helicopter to Cabell Huntington Hospital in Huntington. Despite the effort to get him to emergency medical care, he was pronounced dead at the hospital. Investigators quickly treated the shooting as a homicide and identified another Branchland resident, Cory Donahue, as the person suspected of firing the shot that struck Vance.
Police located Donahue a short time later along Sand Gap Road, not far from where the shooting had occurred.
He was taken into custody without incident. Donahue, who was 30 at the time, was formally charged with murder in connection with Vance's death and was booked into the regional jail system. Authorities publicly accused him of firing the single long-gun round that caused Vance's fatal injury.
The initial reports did not disclose what led to the confrontation, whether Vance and Donahue had been arguing beforehand, or what investigators believed motivated the shooting. They also did not describe additional suspects or indicate that anyone else had been arrested in connection with the killing. State Police said at the time that the investigation remained ongoing.
Available online reporting located for the case consistently documents Donahue's arrest and murder charge, but it does not provide a reliably verified later account establishing the ultimate disposition of that charge, such as a guilty plea, trial verdict, acquittal, dismissal, or sentence. Accordingly, the publicly documented case history establishes that Cory Donahue was arrested and accused of Vance's killing, but a subsequent conviction or other final court outcome cannot be confirmed from the available reporting.
