Arrest made in Perry County 1992 cold case murder
Perry County’s 1992 disappearance of Michael Woolum moved toward a courtroom after 34 years, with Troy Fugate arrested and charged in the case.
Thirty-four years after Michael Wayne Woolum vanished from Bonnyman, Kentucky State Police arrested Troy Fugate and charged him with murder, abuse of a corpse and tampering with physical evidence in a case that had lived for decades in Perry County memory.
Investigators tied the arrest to Woolum’s disappearance on April 26, 1992. Woolum was 31 years old when he was last seen in Bonnyman, the coal community in Perry County where old disappearances and long-unsolved crimes can remain part of local conversation for years.
The case took a major step forward with witness statements that linked Fugate to the killing. A witness told investigators that Fugate admitted killing Woolum and described when and where it happened. The same account said Woolum’s body was wrapped in clear plastic, placed in a car trunk, then moved and disposed of. Fugate was lodged in the Kentucky River Regional Jail after the arrest.
The charging decision matters because it shows investigators were able to rebuild probable cause around a case that had gone cold for more than three decades. Woolum’s missing-person file remains listed in NamUs as MP20766, and the long gap between his disappearance and the arrest underscores how heavily cold cases depend on witnesses, old records and renewed detective work before a filing can be made.
For Perry County, the arrest brings movement to a case tied to a county of 28,473 people, where the loss of one resident can echo far beyond the original investigation. It also leaves key questions unresolved. A charge is not a conviction, and the arrest does not by itself answer every detail of what happened to Woolum in April 1992 or where every piece of evidence may lead next.
Still, the case shows that old homicide and missing-person files are not always closed for good. Kentucky officials have pointed to federal grant funding that supported cold-case work, including a sexual-assault cold-case unit, reflecting a broader push to revisit stale evidence when new information surfaces. In Perry County, that effort has now produced the first major legal break in a disappearance that began in Bonnyman and ended, for now, with murder charges three decades later.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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