EKB News

On Thursday afternoon a Pike County Jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty on charges of Murder, Robbery and Tampering with physical evidence in the case against 19 year old Corey Chaney of Elkhorn Creek.

Chaney and Arthur Adkins who was also indicted for the same charges were accused of committing the murder of Gregory D. Fleming in June of last year. The defense had argued that Chaney was just a quote kid and that Adkins was the one who actually committed the murder.

The commonwealth however argued that Chaney was the one with a motive to commit the murder, having stolen a large quantity of marijuana off of Fleming and a sexually explicit tape of Fleming and Chaney surfacing, charges which the defense didn’t deny.

We spoke with Commonwealths Attorney Rick Bartley today, posing the question of what’s next in this case. “Well what we’ll do is try to evaluate what went wrong for the prosecution in this case. We’ll probably try to talk to one or two of the jurors to see what they thought about the evidence in general. There has been no decision made yet that we will or will not try Arthur Adkins on the Murder Charges.”

The reason for not pursuing charges against Adkins would be due to the fact that Adkins is already facing a significant prison sentence for being a convicted felon in possession of a fire arm, and for being a persistent felony offender.

We then went on to ask Bartley, if the Adkins case does continue to trial, will Chaney be called as a witness.
“Well we have not talked to him or his attorney about that, he could be subpoenaed and could be forced to testify” Bartley continued “Now what he would tell the jury at this point I don’t know. We’ll just have to try to talk to his attorney and make that determination as we continue to evaluate the case against Adkins.”

One of the factors that could cause the prosecution to be apprehensive about calling Chaney is that theoretically he could testify that he was the one that committed the murder, and therefore provides an alibi for Adkins, due to the fact that Chaney cannot be tried again for the Murder.
As of right now Adkins is set to stand trial in Pike County Circuit court on November 27.