HARDIN COUNTY, Ky. (LEX 18) — When Joshua Cottrell was arrested on double murder charges, Renie Phillips was overcome with emotion. LEX 18 spoke with her by phone at her Elizabethtown home.
"We just broke down and cried," Phillips said.
In 2003, Phillips' son, Richie Phillips, vanished from an Elizabethtown motel, only to be found dead eight days later. Cottrell was accused of stuffing the 36-year-old's body in a suitcase, then dumping it at Rough River Lake in Breckinridge County.
He was originally charged with murder, but a jury convicted the then-21-year-old of a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter after Cottrell testified he killed Phillips in self-defense, claiming Phillips made unwanted sexual advances toward him.
Phillips' mother remembers sitting in court at Cottrell's 2005 trial when she says Cottrell made a chilling statement.
"When the judge asked would he do it over? Would he kill him again? He said, yeah," Renie Phillips said.
Cottrell received a 20-year sentence, but with credit for time behind bars before the trial, he was released after two and a half years in prison.
"We always feared of him returning to the area but as far as I know he didn't, so and for my family I was thankful for that," Phillips said.
Phillips says Cottrell was a loner who had no family and that her son had befriended him.
"Even before he killed our son his grandmother had put him in prison for stealing from her and he had just gotten out then whenever my son tried to help him make a better life for himself and he turned on him," Phillips said.
Phillips hopes Cottrell never walks free again.
