Logan Willis received consecutive prison sentences after pleading guilty to four charges stemming from the 2025 attack near Kenna.

RIPLEY, W.Va. — A 22-year-old West Virginia man has been sentenced to eight to 36 years in prison after admitting to charges stemming from a violent attack on his pregnant estranged girlfriend, who authorities said survived after being left unconscious in a wooded area.

Fifth Circuit Judge Lora Dyer imposed the maximum sentence available under the plea arrangement on Logan Willis of Oak Hill during a July 28 hearing in Jackson County Circuit Court. Willis pleaded guilty to attempted murder, two counts of malicious assault and one count of domestic battery. The sentences will run consecutively, requiring him to serve at least eight years before he becomes eligible for parole. The sentencing resolved the central criminal case more than a year after the woman was found badly injured near Kenna.

The attack occurred June 6, 2025, according to contemporaneous local reporting. Willis and the woman were estranged but shared a young child. Jackson County Sheriff Ross Mellinger said they had arranged a custody exchange so Willis could have the child for the weekend. According to the sheriff, the woman entered Willis’ vehicle believing they would go to Walmart to buy items the child needed. Investigators said Willis instead drove her to a secluded area. Mellinger later said he believed the promised shopping trip had been used to get her into the vehicle, though that assessment was an investigative conclusion rather than a separate jury finding because the case ended in guilty pleas.

Authorities said the encounter became a sustained assault once Willis and the woman reached the rural location. Investigators accused him of repeatedly beating and strangling her until she lost consciousness. The criminal complaint described numerous serious injuries and said Willis indicated that he continued the assault until she was no longer breathing. Officials said he then dragged the unconscious woman into a wooded area and left, apparently believing she had died. Public reports have not provided a complete medical description of her injuries, and officials have generally avoided releasing unnecessary graphic details.

The woman was alive. Authorities said she eventually regained consciousness and made her way from the wooded area toward Pigeon Roost Road, where motorists began noticing a visibly injured woman attempting to get help. One passing driver called 911 after seeing her near the road, while another person stopped. Emergency recordings later released through a public-records request documented the effort to locate her, get medical help to the scene and reassure the person who had stopped to assist. The woman told those helping her that she was pregnant and feared Willis could return.

At almost the same time, Willis had driven to a gas station in the Kenna area and called 911 himself. Authorities said the couple’s young child was with him. Willis told a dispatcher that he had been involved in an altercation with the child’s mother and believed he might have killed her. In the recorded call, he described an argument involving their son and acknowledged hitting the woman. Dispatchers kept him on the telephone while a deputy traveled to the gas station. Other dispatchers were simultaneously receiving reports that the woman Willis believed to be dead had reached a roadway alive.

The overlapping calls created two urgent scenes for the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies had to take Willis into custody while other responders searched for and treated the woman. Mellinger later described the response as an unusual situation because law enforcement was working both ends of the case at once. Willis had identified himself and his location, while motorists were helping authorities find the surviving victim. Investigators also examined the rural location connected to the attack and followed evidence through the surrounding area as they began reconstructing the sequence of events.

The woman was taken to CAMC General Hospital in Charleston. Early news reports described her condition as very critical. Officials also stressed that she was in the late stages of pregnancy, adding another concern for medical personnel and investigators. Mellinger said authorities were worried about both the woman and the pregnancy. Later public sentencing reports continued to note that she had been pregnant at the time of the attack but did not provide a verified account of the pregnancy’s outcome. Detailed information about her longer-term medical recovery has also remained limited.

Willis was arrested and initially faced charges that local reports described as attempted murder, malicious assault and strangulation. His bond was set at $500,000. As with many criminal cases, the description of the pending counts changed as the prosecution developed and the matter moved through court. On July 1, 2025, Willis waived a preliminary hearing before Jackson County Magistrate Laura Pursley. That decision allowed the felony case to move forward without requiring prosecutors to present their probable-cause case at a contested preliminary hearing. The Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office opposed lowering his bond.

The prosecution ultimately ended without a trial. Willis entered guilty pleas to attempted murder, two counts of malicious assault and domestic battery. Those pleas are significant because they changed the status of the central allegations. Before the pleas, prosecutors bore the burden of proving the crimes beyond a reasonable doubt at trial. By pleading guilty, Willis admitted the offenses on which the court entered judgment. Investigative assertions that go beyond the elements of those admitted offenses, including the sheriff’s account of when Willis formed a plan to harm the woman, remain properly attributed to investigators.

Dyer ordered the sentences for the four convictions to be served consecutively. Local court coverage reported that the combined term was eight to 36 years, the maximum available under the agreement. The sentence is indeterminate, meaning it establishes both a minimum period Willis must serve before parole eligibility and a maximum term. Becoming eligible for parole after eight years does not guarantee that he will be released at that point. Any later parole decision is separate from the sentence imposed by the circuit court.

The woman appeared at the sentencing hearing and addressed the court before Dyer announced the punishment. Regional reports described her victim-impact statement as emotional, but a complete verified transcript was not available in the reporting reviewed for this article. Her exact words are therefore not reproduced here. Her presence in court nevertheless marked a major contrast with the first hours of the investigation, when Willis had told a dispatcher that he believed she had died after being left in the rural area.

The sentencing also brought attention back to the circumstances under which investigators said the woman entered Willis’ vehicle. The expected Walmart trip was not merely an unrelated errand, according to Mellinger. The sheriff said it was tied to a custody exchange and the needs of the couple’s child, giving the woman an ordinary reason to travel with her estranged boyfriend. Investigators said the destination then changed. Because no trial occurred, the public never heard prosecutors and defense lawyers test every piece of evidence concerning the alleged planning of that trip before a jury.

Willis’ 911 call likewise never had to be presented and challenged in a full trial. The recording became public during the investigation and helped explain why deputies were able to locate him quickly. It also captured his belief about what had happened before police knew the woman had survived. The woman’s emergence on the roadside supplied a separate account and allowed investigators to speak with a living victim rather than proceed with what Willis believed might be a homicide investigation.

Some parts of the case remain outside the public record. Reports reviewed after sentencing have not provided a comprehensive inventory of physical evidence, a complete transcript of the plea hearing or detailed information about the woman’s current health. They also do not establish the outcome of her pregnancy. Those gaps do not alter the four convictions entered against Willis, but they limit how far the public account can go beyond the facts established through law-enforcement statements, emergency recordings, court proceedings and the guilty pleas.

Dyer’s decision leaves Willis facing a potentially decades-long prison term for the four offenses he admitted. He will first become eligible for parole after serving eight years, while the 36-year figure marks the maximum term imposed by the court. The sentencing closes the prosecution without a trial and leaves the punishment, rather than disputed criminal liability, as the case’s defining legal outcome.

Author note: Last updated September 8, 2026.