Werewolf Charged In Double Slaying

A Martin County man indicted on two counts of capital murder yesterday has at times "mentally devolved into a wolflike state," according to testimony at previous mental health hearings. Witnesses said a naked William "Billy" Sartin, 47, of Inez "would run free in the woods, not necessarily at a time he was being chased by law enforcement," said Stephen N. Frazier of Paintsville, who heard several cases involving Sartin before he retired. Sartin, who has a long history of criminal and mental health problems, was charged yesterday by a special Martin Circuit Court grand jury with murdering two Inez men, Jeffery L. Mattox, 53, and Billy Proctor, 41, and wounding Mattox's live-in girlfriend, Geraldine "Sue" Litton, 43, on Sept. 18. When he was arrested at home two days later by Martin County Sheriff Garmon Preece, family members said Sartin had been hiding in the woods and came home to take a bath.He was charged with two counts of murder, one count of attempted murder and kidnapping. Sartin is being held without bond in a Paintsville jail. An employee at the office of Commonwealth's Attorney Anna Melvin said he will be arraigned Nov. 20. The murder charges carry potential death sentences, the indictments said, but law requires the prosecutor to file a notice if she intends to seek the death penalty. "It's premature to start talking about this being a death-penalty case," Sartin's attorney, Assistant Public Advocate Theodore Shouse, said yesterday. Sartin twice has been found incompetent to stand trial on solicitation-of-murder charges. Prosecutors once had him involuntarily committed to a mental institution for three consecutive years. At one point, he walked out of a Central Kentucky mental institution where investigators said they discovered a "hit list" containing the names of people he wanted to kill when he got out. Frazier, the chief regional circuit judge in the mountains at the time, was on Sartin's list, along with several lawyers and some law enforcement officers.William "Billy" SartinSartin, on foot, was captured on his way home, Frazier said. "The heck of it is that where you or I would have gotten tired, he would have walked here and never stopped," Frazier said. "If he'd reached this area ... " Frazier recalled hearing a mental-health witness using the word "lycanthropy," defined in dictionaries -- but not in the mental-health manual used in court -- as "a mental illness in which one imagines oneself to be a wolf." Sartin is not a werewolf, Frazier said, but his strength and stamina always provided a problem for police. "I'm telling you, he was the fastest thing on two, or four, feet, whichever way you want to say it," Frazier said. "You couldn't catch him with a car, or a four-wheeler, if he was in the woods." If he was very fast, he also was very ill, the former judge said. "There was so much," Frazier said. "He had these motor skills -- he could sit perfectly still, not moving -- and then this sort of split-second, instant adrenaline. And whatever impulse came into his mind, he would act on it." Frazier ruled Sartin was incompetent to stand trial in two murder-solicitation cases. "He obviously couldn't," Frazier said. "He was so delusional."Sartin's mother, Tora Ann Bowen, 70, of Inez, said in an interview recently that her son was "smart as he could be when he was a little boy," but was forced to live with relatives after her house burned. Growing up among relatives who drank and abused him "put a mark on him," she said. "He took spells," she said. "He'd talk in circles and you couldn't make no sense out of it. He started hearing things. When he got older, about 14, his uncles would get drunk and he'd have to hit the hills." Bowen said she never saw her son run naked in the hills, "but when he got scared and was afraid, he'd take spells where he'd stay in the woods. He'd take out running as hard as he could run -- take out just a'flying." Before the slayings, her son had missed two counseling appointments at a mental health facility, but he was taking his medication, Bowen said. He told his mother that about two weeks before the shootings, Mattox and Litton put something in his coffee and he believed they had tried to poison him. "He was as sick as I'd ever seen him -- he had green foam coming out of his mouth -- but, no, I have no idea why he shot those people," she said.