Kentucky couple followed circling vultures to body believed to be highway shooting suspect

A Kentucky couple spent six days looking for a body believed to be the highway shooting suspect that authorities have been hunting for over a week — and eventually found it by following circling vultures, they said Thursday.

Fred and Sheila McCoy discovered remains that police believe are of Joseph A. Couch on Wednesday in Laurel County and will receive $25,000 in reward money.

Authorities had been searching for Couch, 32, since the Sept. 7 shooting next to Interstate 75 that seriously injured five people near the city of London, Kentucky.

Even though authorities had described Couch as armed and dangerous, Fred McCoy said he's a retired police officer and has found that fugitives quickly run out steam while on the lam. So capturing Couch wasn't as far fetched as it might seem, the couple said.

"None of us are getting out of this world alive," Fred McCoy told NBC News. "We're Christians and if we go, you know, if you're a Christian, your last breath here on earth is your first in a better place."  

Fred McCoy — who claims lineage to the famed Hatfield and McCoy clans of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia — gave credit to his wife, a former elementary school aide, for first taking note of a foul odor that turned out to be a decomposing body.

"The smell was terrible, it was horrible," said Sheila McCoy, 59. "And so when I got up here and saw that, that really freaked me out. It shocked me that, because I've never seen anything like that, I wasn't expecting him to be that deteriorated or in that kind of condition."

The couple were live streaming their search on YouTube and spotted at least 40 vultures circling, which was their telltale sign of human remains.

"When you got that many vultures, you've either got a livestock, a horse, a cow or you've got a human," said Fred McCoy, 67. "That many birds don't feed on a raccoon."