Home Scandal and Gossip Williamsburg KY man arrested after missing girlfriend found in his garbage can

Williamsburg KY man arrested after missing girlfriend found in his garbage can

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John Meadows Williamsburg KY
John Meadows Williamsburg, Kentucky man arrested after the body of missing girlfriend Donna Lay found in garbage bin.
John Meadows Williamsburg KY
John Meadows Williamsburg, Kentucky man arrested after the body of missing girlfriend Donna Lay found in garbage bin.

John Meadows Williamsburg, Kentucky man arrested after the body of missing girlfriend Donna Lay found decomposing in his garbage can. 

A Kentucky man has been arrested after a body believed to be his missing girlfriend was found in his garbage can, authorities said.

John P. Meadows, 58, of Williamsburg, was on Monday charged with murder, abuse of a corpse and tampering with physical evidence, WKYT reports.

The remains are believed to belong to his 57-year-old girlfriend, Donna Lay, police said.

Of note, police learned Meadows searching the internet for information on how a body decomposes and had supplies to try to disguise the odor.

A neighbor had reported Lay missing on Jan. 27 after not seeing her in several weeks, the News Journal reports. The woman who had run into Meadows last week described the man as ‘happy go lucky.’

Meadows had been living with the remains for three weeks

Police interviewed Meadows about his girlfriend’s disappearance the following day.

‘His story didn’t make a whole lot of sense,’ Williamsburg Police Chief Wayne Bird told the News Journal.

Bird said they then obtained a search warrant for his home, where a trained cadaver dog alerted officers to the remains.

‘After the dogs alerted, we opened the garbage can and there was a human body inside,’ Bird told the Times-Tribune.  

Police Chief Bird also told of smelling what appeared to be a decomposing order whose smell had seemingly been asked during the search of Meadow’s apartment.

The medical examiner hasn’t confirmed the identity of the remains, but an autopsy determined that the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head.

Authorities believe that Meadows had been living with the remains for three weeks before the macabre discovery.

He’s being held in the Whitley County Detention Center and is set to be arraigned Thursday.

Not immediately clear is what led to the man allegedly killing his live in girlfriend.

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