Important to note: The date on the money bands. At the time, in 2010, when I called the bank to ask about tracing the account to my dad, they said only the Executor could do that. (Or the law, but they didn’t wanna know about any of that). I was only able to officially match the numbers several years later and after one of the Fiduciary Commissioner reports. Yet there it is for all to see … # 051502421.
Cash was taken from Willards bank account before he was dead. It took a few years for me to match the numbers, to PROVE it since the law turned their heads. To this day, none want to address it.
I’ve showed these bands to EVERY local ‘official’ as well as the Fiduciary Commissioner(s) in this case.
If Willard was SO sick that he needed hospice, how was $17,000 taken from his account by the Executor and his wife, according to eye witness? None have yet addressed that cash withdrawl. Not one person in Gilmer County has ever responded to that question. How do you get more than $15,000 in cash from a man’s bank account without him there and giving permission?
For 9 years I’ve been asking these questions. I have gotten no answers.
If he was SO sick, why weren’t there there the night before he died when I talked him and Ruthie on the telephone?
Willard was recovering from pneumonia. His daughter Venita, (an RN), had been in WV but had left to go home, despite Willard’s dire condition! Two days later his long time companion Ruth convinced him to go to the hospital.
I still have trouble comprehending that the ‘caring’ daughter would leave him in such a condition!
I remember Venita calling me on their way home, she had just left dads house, the reason she was there not clear. She wasn’t saying much but she DID say “Well, we think he has cancer”.
Very close to death, but not quite there. Willard Cottrill wasn’t ready yet.
After several weeks of hospitalization and nursing home rehab, Willard was discharged to home, at his request. Nothing terminal. Activities as tolerated. Sitting up, laughing and happy to be going home. I had been there for two weeks sitting by his bed in the ICU and nursing home. When he was discharged to home, I felt comfortable enough to return to New York as I had a full time job to get back to.
6 days later he was dead by liquid morphine. Maybe they didn’t expect him to survive? but he was a tough old mountain man, and he didn’t die … so they ‘hurried him along’.
The Certificate of Death and hospital discharge papers will be posted soon.
While most of the house had been looted … there was a small folder overlooked. This, in my sister’s writing, then someone else. Xanax, Morphine and unspecified ‘pain pill’ crushed in a spoon with a dollop of pudding. This note corroborates the testimony of the eye witness, and was shown to Deputy Michael Wheeler at the time it was found.
I immediately requested an autopsy, which was denied without reason. I was the oldest next of kin and there was no obvious reason for his sudden death. When I questioned Deputy Wheeler, he said he had talked to Mr. Ellysen at the funeral home who reportedly chuckled and said, “you don’t know what you’re asking”.
Is this traditional ‘hospice care’? I think not. A call to the doctor who issued the prescription for liquid morphine confirmed morphine was ordered, patient unseen. Venita Murphy and Freda Cottrill picked it up. Six hours later, Willard was dead.
The problem is, there is Nothing written that says he was either terminal OR in any extreme pain. Eye witnesses corroborate.
“I DO BELIEVE THEY KILLED WILLARD, I WAS THERE ON THE DAY HE DIED!”
“I’M Mad because Willard is Gone!”
This man was like a son to Willard and is an expert marksman and hunter like many people in West Virginia. This witness to murder was more like a son to Willard Cottrill than his own sons!
He says he was talking to Willard just hours before he was murdered and said….
“Willard was laying in bed .. I asked him how he felt and he said he felt pretty good !”
“He said he was doin a little better, but that his back hurts.”
Note: The statement is from the friend of Willard that found the yellow sticky note (JH). He and his wife accompanied me everywhere for the next two weeks as I talked to law enforcement and they were witness to every conversation. Willard always had back pain from spinal degeneration issues and had nothing to do with his condition.
“At the time Venita Cottrill said, ‘ I can help you daddy’ .. and then came and gave him a dose of what I now know was morphine!”
“I never saw the man alive again, and I am a little upset about it, just as if it happened yesterday, it feels just as bad now as it did then to lose him.”
“The truth is the truth, and I am not on anybody’s side, not on yours, not on theirs, but the truth will come out and I believe he was killed with drugs on purpose—for the money and his land—and I believe that to be true. Willard Cottrill was a wonderful man and I miss him.”
“The truth is the truth!”
On the 20th of October the day Willard Cottrill was murdered, Venita came back with the hospice nurse to show them how to use the lethal dose of morphine just after Willard had a beer.
The nurse changed her mind at the house and then said, “I cannot show you because I am not authorized,” so she sat on the couch and drew pictures to hide how nervous she was.
Venita took 2 Xanax, and an Oxycodone, crushed it all up good in a spoon, put morphine on top of that and then forced the drug cocktail into the mouth of Willard Cottrill.
Willard kept turning his head from side to side, because just hours earlier he had told Ruth Mitchell he thought his own daughter was going to kill him. Days earlier, Sally Bozeat, the ex wife of Willard told someone on the porch that Venita was really the daughter of Melvin Cottrill, Willard’s brother, and that is why she grew up in the home of Melvin’s house instead of her own fathers house. We are not sure why Sally Bozeat told that story on that particular day, but it made sense to many when it was found out that Venita ordered the morphine, brought the morphine to the house and crushed it up into a cocktail of other drugs mixed with pudding to hide the taste.
A clipping from a website covering the story for many, many years…
Venita Cottrill is the person of interest in the latest inquiry of Dr Miller. Miller lied about much of what she stated and said Venita was Willard Cottrill’s sister. She is in fact the daughter of Willard Cottrill. Wouldn’t you know that local Glenville Dr. Hilary Miller would have an inquiry that was totally rigged with false facts. Venita Cottrill administered a deadly dose of Morphine according to eye witnesses, mixed with other drugs when the now dead Freda Cottrill forcibly held the head of Willard Cottrill so they could get the deadly drugs down him.
It was reported that Venita could have walked off with about 20,000 in a lock box in cash while Willard Cottrills dead body was still warm. SO FAR Gilmer law enforcement have cooperated fully with Venita Cottrill-Murphy’s husband Mike Murphy the executor of the estate where much of the money in the bank account of Willard Cottrill cannot be accounted for in the current accounting being done by the Gilmer County Commission. The local Sheriffs office back when the murder occurred tried to order Ruth Mitchell out of her own house by gun point after the family made requests she be removed. The Supreme Court stepped in and said Ruth could stay as long as she liked.
When you come to GILMER COUNTY WEST VIRGINIA REMEMBER you are in a Gangsters Paradise…
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