This is pretty harrowing all the way through. No one’s getting away with anything, so there’s that small comfort. But what motivates a well-liked sheriff of a small county in Kentucky to cross every possible line and kill a judge in his own chambers?
The facts, as they were first presented by numerous sources, did nothing but raise questions reporters were either incapable of or unwilling to answer:
Letcher County Sheriff Mickey Stines has been arrested in connection with a shooting incident at the Letcher County Courthouse.
Stines is accused of shooting District Judge Kevin Mullins in his office, located off the Letcher District Courtroom. The shooting occurred on, prompting an active shooter situation.
There’s a typo in this quote, which simply omits the date of the shooting. There’s more information, but much of what was published was in the early stages of the investigation. What was known at that point was that Sheriff Stines was the most likely suspect in the shooting of Judge Kevin Mullins. He was arrested without incident and was the only other person in the room with the judge at the time of the shooting.
There’s no other record of this shooting due to facts that would become highly-relevant in subsequent reporting. But at this point, a shooting was confirmed, the judge was dead, and pretty much every county entity was put into lockdown mode (including nearby schools) the moment shots were reported.
The weird thing is that both the victim and the (alleged) perpetrator were liked and respected. Judge Mullins handled criminal cases but also made active efforts to steer drug offenders to rehab and other social programs, rather than simply lock them up. Stines appeared to be a law enforcement official who actually believed in the power of community policing, spending a lot of his time interacting with locals and participating in lots of charitable and social functions.
But after a day or two, a possible motive has emerged. It’s barely hinted at in this CNN report, and even that hint is clouded by language that undercuts the severity of the crime.
Earlier this week, Stines was deposed in an ongoing federal lawsuit involving a former deputy who coerced a woman to have sex with him in Mullins’ chambers in 2021.
Sabrina Adkins and Jennifer Hill filed the suit against Stines and deputy Ben Fields in 2022, claiming the deputy said he would keep Adkins out of jail and on home release, while avoiding paying the fees associated with an ankle monitor, in exchange for sex.
Fields was charged with multiple felonies and a misdemeanor – including rape and tampering with a monitoring device – and was given a suspended jail sentence as part of a plea deal earlier this year, according to the Mountain Eagle newspaper.
Hill has since died and criminal charges against Fields related to her were dropped, but her estate is continuing to pursue the lawsuit against Field and Stines, court records show.
While the reporting does use the term “rape” (which it definitely was), it sells out the victims of Deputy Ben Fields’ criminal acts. Jennifer Hill didn’t simply “die.” She died of a drug overdose shortly after the civil lawsuit against Fields was filed. And her death allowed Fields to walk away from roughly half of the criminal charges filed against him. (The civil lawsuit, however, is being handled by his dead victim’s family.)
There’s also this detail from earlier reporting on the deputy’s criminal acts, which makes it clear the department Sheriff Stines ran was being subjected to greater judicial scrutiny. Ben Fields was still a deputy, even if his duties were limited to providing court security — a position he leveraged to deactivate court-ordered ankle monitors in exchange for coerced sexual acts. One of Fields’ preferred venues was none other than the (murdered) judge’s chambers because of its lack of CCTV cameras.
The women claimed Fields told them he would not make them pay for the monitoring if they would do him “a favor.” Fields disabled the devices, told the monitoring company that bail conditions had been changed so the devices were not required, and then used threats of arrest to force the women to have sex with him. When Letcher Circuit Judge James W. Craft II asked Fields for GPS coordinates for one of the subjects for a court appearance, Fields said he couldn’t locate her and filed an escape charge against her, court records show.
Fields would collect his payment (so to speak) but still wouldn’t hold up his end of this disgusting “bargain” when it was his own freedom on the line.
Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Sheriff Stines (the accused murderer of the judge) did the right thing and fired Deputy Fields for “conduct unbecoming.” Maybe the Sheriff thought that would be the end of it. It obviously wasn’t. The civil lawsuit continues, with Stines and his office named as defendants.
While plenty of reporting suggests residents of the community are confused and concerned by this turn of events, very few reporters seem willing (at least at this point) to connect dots or dig deeper into the most immediate intimation of a motive: the deposition Stines gave only days before murdering the judge.
Stines was deposed on Monday in a lawsuit filed by two women, one of whom alleged that a deputy forced her to have sex inside Mullins’ chambers for six months in exchange for staying out of jail. The lawsuit accuses the sheriff of “deliberate indifference in failing to adequately train and supervise” the deputy.
Speculation without facts in evidence is equally careless. But the most apparent line of questioning is this event happening immediately prior to the shooting of a judge. Questions like: did the deposition make it apparent Stines had a good chance of being held at least indirectly responsible for his deputy’s acts. Or, did the judge have his own recording devices in his chambers? Or was it something else? Did the sheriff expect some sort of favor from the man he’d worked closely with over most of the last decade?
There aren’t a lot of solid answers at this point. But if there’s anything worth keeping an eye on, it’s the deposition and the subsequent shooting. The deputy was fired two years ago and sentenced this January. The lawsuit survives, along with its allegations that the sheriff ignored his deputy’s unlawful acts for years. Maybe that was enough to push the sheriff into this act. But trading a possible lawsuit dismissal for what looks to be a guaranteed murder charge doesn’t make any sense. Whatever went wrong with the Sheriff’s office would have to be far deeper and darker than what’s been uncovered so far for this killing to make any sense.
This isn’t the end of this story. This is only the beginning. The real surprise here is that everyone is too shocked to offer up the normal exonerative bullshit about what happened here. But, even with these unanswered questions, no one should feel comfortable shrugging off the fact that an elected sheriff walked into a room he knew didn’t contain any cameras and (allegedly) killed a judge in an act that elevated him to judge, as well as jury and executioner.