Prosecutors are moving forward after police said they found a blood trail, a wood club and a body near a truck ramp in a garage.
MOUNT WASHINGTON, Ky. — A Bullitt County judge set a $1 million cash bond for Richard L. Chesher after police accused the 67-year-old Mount Washington man of killing his wife, Bonnie Chesher, and trying to move her body before officers could stop him.
What had been a late-night police response on March 6 became a formal homicide case by the next business day, with Chesher jailed on charges of murder involving domestic violence, tampering with physical evidence and abuse of a corpse. The speed of that shift matters because the public record in the case was built almost entirely from what officers said they saw immediately on arrival: a body on a garage floor, a suspect covered in blood, and physical evidence spread between the house and the garage. A preliminary hearing set for March 17 is the next step likely to test that early narrative in court.
By the time Chesher appeared in court on Monday, the allegations were already stark. Police said they had responded shortly after 9 p.m. Friday to a home on Williamsburg Court in Mount Washington. There, according to the arrest citation summarized in multiple local reports, officers found Chesher standing at the garage area with blood on him and Bonnie Chesher lying nearby. He was taken into custody without incident. The Monday appearance did not resolve the central factual questions in the case, but it fixed the legal framework around them. Chesher remained held in the Bullitt County Detention Center after the bond ruling, and the charges signaled that investigators believed not only that a killing had occurred but that there had also been an attempt to move or conceal evidence afterward.
Police tied that second part of the case to what they said was found at the home. Investigators reported a pickup truck backed to the garage door and wooden boards arranged as a ramp up to the truck bed. Bonnie Chesher’s body, according to the early reports, had been wrapped with a garden hose. Officers also reported finding a trail of blood from inside the residence to the garage and recovering a club-like piece of wood that appeared to have blood on it. Those details are important because they form the backbone of the tampering and abuse-of-a-corpse allegations, not just the murder count. Police said Bonnie Chesher had been beaten so badly around the face and head that she was “unrecognizable,” language that has appeared repeatedly in local coverage drawn from the arrest paperwork and follow-up reporting.
The sequence described by investigators suggests the case may turn as much on reconstruction as on eyewitness testimony. Public reporting has not indicated that police found an outside witness to the killing itself. Instead, officers appear to have built their initial account from the scene: where the blood was located, where the body was found, how the truck was positioned and what object may have been used in the assault. That makes the physical evidence especially significant going forward. An autopsy, crime lab testing and any forensic review of the wood, clothing, hose, garage floor and interior rooms could all become central later, even though those results were not laid out in the early reports. The case also leaves open questions about what triggered the police response and whether anyone besides the couple was at the house before officers arrived.
Outside the courtroom, the case landed hard in Mount Washington, a city better known for subdivisions and commuter growth than for a homicide scene that drew regional attention. Neighbors described shock and sadness. One resident across the street told local television the case was “concerning” and said she felt for the family and the neighborhood. That reaction underscored the tension between the ordinariness of the setting and the severity of the allegations. Even before prosecutors publicly laid out a fuller case, the image of a garage turned into a crime scene gave the story unusual force: an open door, police arriving, and a prosecution beginning almost in real time.
The next public test comes at the preliminary hearing scheduled for March 17. Prosecutors may use that appearance to sketch the evidence supporting the charges, while the defense will get its first real chance to push back against the state’s account. Until then, Chesher remains jailed, and the case is defined by a short but powerful record: what police say they walked into on a Friday night and how that scene translated into three criminal counts by Monday morning.
As of the latest reports, the bond remained set at $1 million cash, Chesher remained in custody, and the case was moving toward its March 17 hearing with major factual questions still to be tested in court.
Author note: Last updated April 2, 2026.