What’s the Matter With Mingo County?

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A couple of really weird, troubling stories out of one county in West Virginia. First, the chief judge in the county has been arrested after what has to qualify as one of the most mind-boggling abuses of office I’ve ever heard of. Judge Michael Thornsbury had an affair with his married secretary Kim Woodruff. When she wanted to cut it off Thornsbury went on a four year crusade to frame Woodruff’s husband Robert of any number of crimes including drug possession, larceny and assault.

Meanwhile, Mingo’s the same county where we had that assassination of the County Sheriff earlier this year during what at first appeared (wrongly) to be a string of white supremacist murders across the country. Well it turns out that killing may be tied in some way to what appears to be a covered up rape from more than a decade ago. In 2001, Crum, the murdered sheriff, had sex in the backseat of a patrol car with an apparently barely conscious 19 year old women as two troopers sat in the front seats blaring the radio to drown out the noise. She claimed she’d been raped but police decided the sex was consensual and no charges were brought.

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