As of Tuesday, the McLean County Sheriff’s Office has reported that seven arrests have been made regarding an investigation for criminal conspiracy for trafficking methamphetamine in the county stemming several months.

Five arrest warrants were executed with the assistance of the Pennyrile Narcotics Task Force (PNTF), Ohio County Sheriff’s Office and the Owensboro Police Department on June 14, which included Wayman Henry, Jr., 33, of Calhoun, Michael Chambers, 44, of Livermore, James Rachal, 62, of Livermore, Matthew Abney, 40, of Livermore and Nathan Humphrey, 37, of Hartford.

On June 16, both Steven Strong, 54, of Livermore, and Troy Edmonds, 45, of Owensboro were arrested on warrants related to the case.

The sheriff’s office has obtained a total of 11 arrest warrants for individuals who reside in the counties related to the case.

McLean County Sheriff Kenneth Frizzell said that the agency began this investigation in September 2021 and has been building since due to receiving a wealth of information and tactics from surveillance, assistance from the sheriff’s office’s digital forensics investigator Cheryl Purdy, interviews, controlled buys and more.

Frizzell said that much of the information to help build the case has been through cell phone communications and phone calls.

By the end of May, Frizzell said the department met with Commonwealth’s Attorney Clayton Adams about the case and how to proceed.

“We talked about possibly a criminal syndicate into organized crime,” he said. “As we looked at that, a couple weeks went by and Adams said that we’re probably missing just a couple small pieces for that. He told us to go over the case again (and) that there’s probably something there; but instead of putting it all together in one, kind of look at the cases a little bit more individually.

“...We broke the case down and we saw that we had a lot of conspiracy cases involved with the people.”

According to Frizzell, they were able to make a case of 11 of the 13 people they were looking into, extending into Ohio and Daviess counties.

Frizzell said collaborating with other agencies has been vital in seeing movement in the case considering the amount of people involved.

“We’ve had a conspiracy trafficking case before where there was just (two people) involved,” he said. “In this case, there’s several different ones and we’ve kind of wrapped it all into one big web, so this one is a little bit more unique.”

As of Tuesday, all arrested parties were being lodged at the Muhlenberg County Detention Center in Greenville, with Frizzell saying some of them have previous trafficking charges pending.

Frizzell said additional people who were unrelated to the case were present during the arrests. They were also “scooped up” for previous warrants, such as Daviess County making an additional trafficking case on one individual.

“There’s about four more additional people that got arrested either on warrants that stemmed from this 11,” he said.

Frizzell said that cases like this can take time to uncover, especially for an office in a small county.

“When you’re a department of our size (and) you’re doing an investigation, the calls don’t stop coming in,” he said. “You still got to respond to accidents; we’ve still got to help transport prisoners for court; … we have all these different responsibilities and when you’re a department of our size, everyone can’t just stop what we’re doing and work on this alone.”

Frizzell said there has been “a lot” of data in the case that needed to be looked at including phone calls, text messages, Facebook Messenger conversations and that they need to be able to prove their findings in order to move forward in the case.

“It’s combing through data and building a better and better case,” Frizzell said. “There’s a lot of difference in knowing something and being able to prove something in the court of law. The prosecution’s got to prove beyond a reasonable doubt; we can know something that’s going on but we got to get enough information together that we can prove that in court … without violating any people’s rights and so forth ....”

As of Tuesday, the sheriff’s office reports that the four remaining arrest warrants are to be served.

Your comment has been submitted.

There was a problem reporting this.

Keep it Clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language. PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK. Don't Threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated. Be Truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything. Be Nice. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism that is degrading to another person. Be Proactive. Use the 'Report' link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts. Share with Us. We'd love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article.

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular images.

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos.

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular commented articles.