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On June 10, 2020, lawn mowers found Wanda Palmer lying unconscious in a pool of her own blood in her West Virginia house. There were no weapons, no leads, no witnesses, and no suspects. Police did not expect Palmer, who had suffered massive head trauma from the attack, to recover from her injuries.
According to WHCS, while talking about the victim, Jackson County Sheriff Ross Mellenger said:
"I wouldn’t have wagered a nickel for her life that morning. She was in that bad of shape. Quite honestly, she was unconscious, circling the drain medically. Massive, massive amounts of head trauma, consistent with some sort of machete or hatchet-type injury."
Wanda Palmer, however, made a miraculous recovery after two years of falling into a coma. On June 27, 2022, she started to mutter words, and by the time police decided to visit her nursing home in Wetzel County, Palmer had recovered enough to immediately identify her brother as her attacker. A couple of days following this, police arrested 55-year-old Daniel Palmer on July 15.
In a Facebook post made on Friday, the Jackson County Sheriff's Department stated that Daniel Palmer was charged with Attempted Murder and Malicious Wounding of his sister who was "attacked, hacked, and left for dead."
Wanda Palmer was "left for dead" by her assailant in the deadly attack
Eileen Palmer, the victim's mother, was the one who reported her daughter's attack to the police in 2020. After lawn mowers found Palmer injured in her house in Ravenswood, they rushed to inform Eileen, who lived close to her daughter's residence. In an interview, Eileen told WTAP:
"They came Wednesday morning to mow her grass and they found her in a pool of blood. They said they ran up on the hill real fast and told us, and I called the police.”
Wanda Palmer was hospitalized, where she fell into a coma. Despite initial suspicions, police had no solid evidence implicating her brother. Mellenger told West Virginia MetroNews:
"We had a little bit of an idea what happened but the problem was with the nuts and bolts of the case we had nothing to go on. There was no eye witnesses. Nobody lived in the home, no surveillance footage, no cell phone records. There was virtually nothing there to move forward on.”
Palmer's ability to identify her attacker has finally lifted the veil of mystery from the case. WCHS reported that Daniel Palmer was "combative" during his arrest and his arraignment was done at the sheriff's office. According to further reports, he was taken to a hospital for evaluation.
According to reports, Wanda is now lucid and speaking, but she is unable to hold full-length conversations.
