Kathy Anderson, a 54-year-old White/Caucasian female from Letart, West Virginia, died on August 12, 2014. The following day, the case came sharply into focus when she was found shot to death inside her home in Letart, a small community in Mason County. What initially confronted authorities as a fatal shooting soon developed into a search for Kathy’s husband, Charles Anderson, whom West Virginia State Police were seeking in connection with the killing. Contemporary reporting described Charles as wanted for Kathy’s murder.
The search for Charles moved beyond Mason County as investigators attempted to locate him. On Friday, August 15, a passing motorist noticed an abandoned truck along Sandy Hollow Road in Roane County. The location was near the Jackson County line in the Liverpool-Reedy area. West Virginia State Police responded and determined that the vehicle was connected to Charles. Officers then searched the surrounding area, turning their attention to the nearby woods.
The search ended when police discovered Charles dead in the wooded area near where his truck had been abandoned. State police reported that he appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His death came only a short time after Kathy had been discovered and before authorities could arrest him and move the homicide case into the court system.
Because Charles died while police were searching for him, there was no opportunity for authorities to arrest and prosecute him for Kathy’s killing. As a result, there was no criminal trial, guilty plea, or conviction arising from the case against him. The available contemporary reporting does not identify another suspect or accomplice as having been arrested or charged, nor does it provide a publicly established motive for the shooting.
Kathy’s death therefore ended without the kind of courtroom resolution that normally follows when investigators identify a murder suspect. Police had focused their search on her husband and were looking for him for her murder, but his apparent suicide brought that search to an abrupt conclusion. The sequence left Kathy’s shooting attributed by investigators to the husband they had been pursuing, while his death prevented the evidence against him from ever being tested before a jury.
