John Raymond Tucker was a 33-year-old White/Caucasian man who served as a patrolman with the Fort Gay Police Department in West Virginia. A contemporary obituary reported that Tucker was born on April 4, 1952, in Wadsworth, Ohio, the son of James G. Tucker and Ethel Booth Tucker. By 1985, he had spent eight years serving the Fort Gay community as a police officer. He and his wife, Frankie Parson Tucker, had been married for 12 years and were raising their three children in the Fort Gay area.
On Saturday, April 20, 1985, Tucker was working his regular police duties. Shortly before 10:00 that night, he was sitting inside his patrol car conducting radar enforcement when he was shot and killed. Law-enforcement memorial records identify the weapon used in the killing as a shotgun and classify his death as a line-of-duty gunfire fatality.
The surviving account does not describe Tucker making a traffic stop or confronting anyone immediately before the shooting; instead, it records that he was inside the patrol vehicle running radar when the fatal attack occurred.
The investigation produced developments within days. Three days after Tucker was killed, authorities apprehended two suspects in connection with the shooting. One of those suspects had previously served as a patrolman with the Fort Gay Police Department, meaning investigators were dealing with someone who had once been associated with the same small police agency in which Tucker served. The publicly accessible law-enforcement memorial record does not identify either suspect by name or explain what evidence led authorities to them.
Despite the arrests, surviving online sources provide very little information about what happened afterward. No reliable publicly accessible source located for the case identifies the two suspects, specifies the criminal charges ultimately brought against them, or provides a documented account of a trial, plea agreement, conviction, acquittal, or sentence. Because of that gap in the surviving record, it would be speculative to attach a name to the former Fort Gay officer or to claim that either apprehended suspect was ultimately convicted of Tucker's killing. What can be established is that authorities considered the investigation sufficiently developed to apprehend two people within three days and that one had previously served on the Fort Gay police force.
Tucker's death left behind a wife and three children: daughters Chrystal Lynn and Amanda K. and son John E. Tucker. His obituary also listed five sisters and five brothers among his surviving family members. Funeral services were arranged for April 24, 1985, at Big Hurricane Baptist Church, with the Rev. Herman Wellman officiating. Tucker was to be laid to rest in Tucker Cemetery near Fort Gay, only days after the nighttime shooting that ended his police career and his life.
His killing has continued to be recorded among West Virginia's line-of-duty law-enforcement deaths. The circumstances preserved publicly remain stark: Tucker was performing routine radar duty inside his patrol car shortly before 10:00 p.m. when he was killed with a shotgun; two suspects were apprehended three days later; and one had previously been a Fort Gay patrolman. Beyond those facts, the identities of the suspects and the final judicial outcome of the homicide are not documented in the reliable online sources currently available.
