LASHMEET, W.Va. – A West Virginia man was booked on a murder charge after deputies say he gouged out a neighbor’s eyes over a loud rooster that was also killed, according to reports.
Benny Foutch, 72, and the rooster he lived with were killed Sunday in Lashmeet, West Virginia, MetroNews reported.
Richard Ellison, 47, was arrested and charged with murder. As a result, he is being held in the Southern Regional Jail, the Mercer County Sheriff’s Office said.
The investigation began when the Princeton Rescue Squad was called to a residence on Reese Harmon Ridge Road in the Rock area for an unrelated complaint and found the body of the victim outside his residence. EMS requested law enforcement and the Mercer County Sheriff’s Department responded. During the course of the investigation Ellison was identified as a suspect and taken into custody, Bluefield Daily Telegraph reported.
The Princeton Rescue Squad was first on the scene, according to the criminal complaint filed by Detective M.S. Horn. They found the victim, Foutch, on his porch, and “blood was coming from his orbital sockets.”
“He went up there and killed the rooster first and then he killed the deceased. He gouged out his eyes,” Detective M.S. Horn told MetroNews.
“He had a prosthetic leg and he had cancer but he had injuries to his eyes,” Horn said, according to the news organization. “It looked like someone had gouged out his eyes. It was the only significant injuries we could observe.”
Horn later interviewed Ellison.
“He motions using his thumbs like up toward the eyes saying he killed him and that’s how he did it,” Horn said.
At one point during the interview, Ellison told Horn that “Lucifer” made him do it.
According to the report, Ellison waited until Foutch died and then walked back to his home with the dead rooster. However, police were not immediately contacted, Horn said. Law enforcement did not become involved until Ellison’s son reported there was a mental health issue with his father. Yet nothing was mentioned to dispatchers about a body.
Horn said he believes from talking to Ellison he knew what he was doing.
“For him to know, ‘Hey, I need to wash my hands. Hey, I’m up here until I know he’s dead,’ that goes into a different category,” Horn said.
“When looking at the victim, the gouging out of his eyes appeared to be his cause of death,” the compliant said, but the body was being sent for autopsy.
Ellison’s girlfriend told investigators that “Richard had made some comments about the rooster belonging to Benny Foutch bothering him with the noises it made,” the Bluefield Daily Telegraph reported. “She advised he went up there and that she heard some beating noise on the building area where the rooster was kept and then she heard some angry yelling,” Horn said. “She had left because she was afraid of Richard Ellison and how he was acting. She later came back and advised that Richard Ellison admitted to her that he killed the rooster and that he killed him, pointing up to Benny’s residence,” Horn said in the report.
Ellison was arraigned by videoconference before Magistrate Mike Flanigan. Flanigan set a $200,000 cash-only bond.