Summary of Offense:
Born on April 30, 1966, William Joseph Burns was sentenced to death in Shenandoah County for the murder, rape and forcible sodomy of his wife’s 73-year-old mother, Tersey Elizabeth Cooley, fatally beaten at her home in Edinburg.
Burns was drunk and abusive on September 20, 1998, when his wife, Penny Marlene Cooley Burns, fled their trailer in Baker, West Virginia and took shelter at a friend’s house. Earlier when Burns was abusive, he knew she had gone to her mother’s house.
The next day Cooley’s other daughter discovered her mother’s unclothed body on the bedroom floor of her home.
The house had been broken into and it was later determined Cooley had been raped, sodomized and beaten -- suffering abrasions and bruises on her head and 24 rib fractures. One broken rib punctured her heart.
When questioned by investigators, Burns initially denied going to Cooley’s house. Then he said he was there and encountered a man who had killed Cooley so he killed him.
He said he hid the body because he did not want his wife to learn a black man had raped and murdered her mother.
Eventually Burns gave up that story and claimed that he broke into the house, found Cooley dead and thought his wife had killed her mother. He said he then masturbated and used his hand to insert his semen in her body so the evidence would lead to him instead of his wife.
DNA in sperm found in the victim’s vagina and anus was a match with Burns. During the penalty phase of the trial, the jury learned of Burns’ prior convictions for felony theft, breaking and entering, malicious destruction of property, resisting arrest, battery, assault, disorderly conduct and a third-degree sexual assault.
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