Angela Dawn Bittinger-Burchett, a 41-year-old White/Caucasian woman, died on April 8, 2019, after a shooting at a residence in the Spring Hill Acres area of Boothsville, Taylor County, West Virginia. Although some records associate her with Fairmont, contemporary news coverage placed the shooting at the Boothsville home. Another person, Kenneth Junior Cottrell, was also killed in the incident.
Authorities were called to the Spring Hill Acres residence after shots had been fired.
When officers arrived, they found Cottrell dead inside the home. Bittinger was still alive but had suffered a gunshot wound. Emergency personnel transported her by air to Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, where she later died from her injuries. A third person was inside the residence when officers arrived but was not injured.
The deaths initially prompted an active investigation by the West Virginia State Police. In the first hours after the shooting, Taylor County authorities did not publicly identify a suspect or explain what had led to the gunfire. News reports described the scene as a double-fatal shooting and said investigators were working to determine the circumstances surrounding the deaths. Cottrell was identified as a resident of Boothsville, and his obituary stated that he died unexpectedly at his home on April 8.
Later records describing the investigation identified the deaths as a murder-suicide. Those records state that Bittinger shot and killed Cottrell, who was described as her boyfriend, and then shot herself. This accounts for why investigators did not ultimately announce that they were searching for another gunman or make an arrest connected with the two deaths.
Because Bittinger died from the self-inflicted gunshot wound, there was no criminal prosecution arising from Cottrell's killing. No arrest, indictment, trial, or conviction followed against her, and available reporting does not identify another person as having participated in the shootings. The third individual who was present at the home was reported to have been unharmed and was never publicly identified as a suspect. The case therefore developed from an initially unexplained double shooting into an investigation ultimately characterized in later records as the fatal shooting of Kenneth Cottrell by Angela Bittinger followed by her own death by suicide.
