The shocking murder of a Kentucky judge, allegedly by his sheriff friend, is being investigated as a possible sex scandal, police said Sunday.
Letcher County Sheriff Shawn “Micky” Stines was friends with Judge Kevin Mullins for decades and even had lunch with him on September 19 – hours before he was accused of walking into the judge’s courtroom and shooting him eight times.
Surveillance video from inside the chambers showed the men changing their cellphones and looking at something on them — before the sheriff walked up and shot the sheriff, sources said the Mountain Eagle.
“Our investigators have seized the two cellphones and they are being analyzed,” said Matt Gayheart, a Kentucky State Police trooper told the Daily Mail on Sunday.
When asked if the investigation was also considering a possible sex scandal as a motive, the trooper confirmed: “Absolutely. We are not ruling out anything as a possible motive.”
Gayheart did not elaborate on the sex scandal in question. However, the sheriff had been ousted for days in a lawsuit filed by two women, one of whom claimed a deputy forced her to have sex in Mullins’ rooms for six months in exchange for a stay out of jail.
The lawsuit accuses the sheriff of “deliberate indifference in failing to adequately train and supervise” the deputy, Ben Fields, who pleaded guilty to raping the female inmate while she was in the home.
Fields was sentenced this year to six months in prison and then six and a half years of probation for rape, sodomy, perjury and tampering with the prisoner monitoring device, The Mountain Eagle. reported. Three charges involving a second woman were dismissed because she is now dead.
Stines fired Fields, who succeeded him as Mullins’ judicial officer, for “improper conduct” after the lawsuit was filed in 2022, The Courier Journal reported at the time.
Stines and Mullins had been friends for 20 years before the murder. Stines was Mullins’ bailiff before becoming sheriff in 2018.
‘I never knew there was any kind of friction between them until it got to this point. We all got along well, we teased each other,” Letcher Circuit Clerk Mike Watts told local newspaper The Mountain Eagle.
Mullins and Stines even worked together on drug addiction and recovery projects that provided resources and education in a region ravaged by the opioid epidemic.
The sheriff reportedly came out of the courtroom with his hands up after the shooting. However, he pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.
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