by Ann Rule
They were all beside themselves with anticipation; they hadn't had a chance to really visit with Ronda since Mother's Day, when they'd had brunch with Ron and Ronda. That had been perfectly pleasant, and there were no warnings at all that the Reynoldes' marriage might not be as sound as it looked.
Probably Ronda herself had no concerns about that. Her first husband, Mark Liburdi, had married again and Ronda was friendly with both Mark and Krista. In a phone conversation with Krista Liburdi in the spring of 1998, Ronda had bubbled with enthusiasm, saying, "I only hope that you and Mark are as happy as Ron and I are."
Mother's Day was when Ronda had put an adorable tumble of black puppy fluff in her mother's arms. This was Young Daisy, or just plain Daisy. She was a good-size dog now, and Barb wanted to show her daughter what good care she had taken of her. Ronda also had a new filly she hadn't seen since Mother's Day when the colt was only a few days old. And, of course, there was Clabber Toe. He would recognize Ronda at once, and it wouldn't be long before the two of them would go galloping off across the Spokane acreage.
Freeman pulled up in front of the Spokane airport, and Barbara asked him if he wanted to go to the gate to meet his sister.
"No, Mom. You go. I think I can wait. I'll watch the door and get her baggage when you guys get back here."
He hadn't quite brought his car to a complete stop when Barb leaped onto the curb and whirled around to close the door.
"Slow down, Mom," he laughed. "She's not going anywhere. You have plenty of time."
Barb Thompson walked into the main terminal, realizing at once that she'd forgotten the airport was in the midst of a massive remodel. She had to walk all the way to the far north end of terminal to reach the Alaska and Horizon airlines arrival gate.
It suddenly became intensely important that she glimpse Ronda and give her a big hug. But when she got to the gate, she found out that Ronda's flight had been canceled, and the next flight from Seattle wasn't scheduled to arrive until just before 3 P.M.
Freeman's face dropped when he heard that. "She's on flight 2198 now," his mother told him. "It's due in at 2:55 P.M. It's not that much longer."
It was just a little over two more hours, but it seemed an eternity to Barb and Freeman. They drove home, not stopping at Gramma Virginia's house. The phone was ringing as they walked in the door. Barb expected it to be Ronda, calling as she always did if she had a change in plans so they wouldn't worry. But it was her own mother, demanding to know why they hadn't dropped in with Ronda.
"Her flight was delayed, Mom," Barb said. "We have to go back to the airport at three. Freeman's on his way to your house now to grab a bowl of cereal. He'll pick me up at two-fifteen."
"Darn," Ronda's grandmother said. "I don't know if I can wait that long."
Barb tried to make her mother feel better by telling her that Ronda would surely have called if she had changed her mind and wasn't coming. Ronda always called.
"You're right, Mom," Barb said, soothing Virginia Ramsey. "I just want her here now, too. Maybe she'll decide to transfer after her probationary six months at Macy's, and take a store security job with them in Spokane. Then we'll have her here all the time. Wouldn't that be great? Don't get your hopes up, though. You know how she feels about the weather over here."
Barb busied herself loading the dishwasher, and just as she'd put the last plate in its slot, she glanced out the window over the kitchen sink. She saw a green and white squad car parked at her mother's house. It looked like a Spokane County sheriff's unit.
She wasn't alarmed. Whenever there was a loose or injured horse, the deputies usually came to her to ask her who owned it. She was the "go-to" expert on horses in her end of the county.
Daisy sat by the door expectantly, her whole body wiggling with delight as she was about to meet someone new. Daisy knew no strangers. She was always looking for someone to play with.
Barb was usually glad to help round up wayward horses, but it never took less than two hours. Right now she didn't want to be delayed when she was just about to go back to the airport to pick up Ronda.
But she realized that she couldn't refuse to help; she lived so close to a four-lane, much-traveled highway. Ronda, of all people, would understand and she could call Gramma Virginia when she landed if Barb wasn't home.
She opened her front door, and an older man stood there, gazing with some doubt into Daisy's brown eyes. Barb grinned at the stranger, and said, "She's okay--she doesn't know she's a Rottweiler. She's hoping you've come to play with her."
At that point, Barb Thompson saw that her visitor had a bar with writing etched on it pinned to his shirt. She leaned forward and read "Chaplain."
But what was he doing at her front door? Her world tilted only a centimeter off its axis, and she felt a knot in her stomach. A chaplain usually meant something bad had happened to someone.
She would not allow herself to believe that had any connection to her.
"Are you Barbara Thompson?" the gray-haired man asked.
"Yes, I am," she said, opening the door wider. "But I only have a couple of minutes. We have to get to the airport to pick up my daughter."
He hesitated for a moment, and then said, "I have a message here. I'm so sorry to tell you that your mother has passed away and you need to call your father."
Relief washed over Barb's body. Whatever had happened, it couldn't involve her or her family. "That can't be right," she said. "My father passed away years ago, and my mother lives right next door. You were just at her house."
The chaplain pressed on. "I have a message that you are to call your father at the coroner's office in Lewis County."
She felt dizzy. Lewis County? She didn't know anyone in any Lewis County. Lewis County, where? What state?
"Do you have a telephone number? Do you have a name?"
He shook his head, apologizing. "I'm sorry--but that's all I have."
"Was there anything about a Ramsey, or a Thompson, Liburdi, or Reynolds?"
Again, he shook his head. If he hadn't arrived in a sheriff's car, she would have thought the man was demented--someone who went around knocking on strange doors and scaring the hell out of people. Why didn't he have more information? This could all be resolved so quickly if he only had a name to give her.
"Your name is Barbara Thompson, right?" he pressed.
"Yes, that's me. But my mother is right next door and she is very much alive. There must be a mistake here."
"This is 7711 West Highway Two,* isn't it?"
"Yes."
"This is definitely the address and name I was given, and I was told to tell you that you need to call your father."
Barbara wished Freeman would show up. The "chaplain" was giving her the creeps.
She suddenly recalled that there was another Barbara Thompson living in Spokane, a woman who worked at the racetrack. In the past, she had received some of the other Barbara's mail and phone calls. She didn't have any idea where the other woman lived, but she was sure the sheriff's office could find out. Barb looked at her watch and told the chaplain that she really had to leave for the airport. He nodded and went to his car. Barbara called Freeman, reminding him it was time to go.
Once more, Barb jumped from her son's car and headed for the Alaska/Horizon arrival gate. Luckily, Ronda's plane wouldn't land for another fifteen minutes. Barb knew she had plenty of time, but she found herself running down the corridor, darting between people, baggage, children, and strollers. All the chairs were taken when she got to the gate, but she didn't care. She stood with her eyes glued to the double doors that would soon spring open and release scores of passengers. And Ronda would be one of them.
"It was Christmastime," Barb Thompson remembered a decade later. "Joy and laughter were in the air. We would be having Christmas together for the first time in nearly eight years. Ronda had to leave on the twenty-first to get back to her job, so we planned Christmas dinner and our gift exchange early. It was enough that we could just be together."
> It was 2:50 P.M. and Barb watched the incoming planes circle in the cold sky and then taxi in to their gates. Finally, she saw the Alaska Airlines jet and knew it must be Ronda's plane. She watched the ground crew wave their big orange wands and lead it into a covered ramp, and heard its engines winding down.
In her mind, she could see Ronda's face. She knew her daughter would be one of the last to deplane; she liked to let all those with babies, as well as the elderly and disabled passengers, exit safely, and Ronda always grinned widely when she saw her mother's face change from impatience to delight.
Barb stretched and strained her neck to see beyond the departing passengers as far as she could. At three, the last of them straggled in--a mother holding a baby in one arm, and a little girl about five crying and pulling on her other arm.
No one else. But that could not be. Two flight attendants walked past Barb, pulling their luggage, talking and joking, and the plane's door slammed shut behind them. She wanted to confront them and demand to know where Ronda was. But she didn't.
"I was suddenly nauseated," Barb Thompson recalled. "My mind whirled and I felt dizzy. Where was Ronda? I could see the chaplain's face in my mind now. His words were screaming in my ears. 'Your father wants you to call him at the Lewis County Coroner's Office.' It hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh, my God! My baby! No, no, it can't be! He hadn't been talking about my little girl. She must have just fallen asleep and didn't get off the plane. Any moment now the doors will swing open and there she'll be there."
But Ronda wasn't there. She hadn't been on the plane, or even on the manifest of passengers.
Barb made up every possible reason why her daughter hadn't arrived as she had promised--every reason but the one that tortured her the most. She simply could not face that possibility.
Finally, she dialed Information and asked for the number of the Lewis County Coroner's Office. When the operator asked her the state, Barb still didn't know. At length the operator came back on the line and gave her a number beginning with a 360 prefix. Barb's knees buckled. That was Ronda's prefix. But Lewis County hadn't meant anything to her; she thought Ronda lived in Thurston County.
Knowing what she didn't want to know, Barb Thompson called the number for the coroner's office. She identified herself to the female voice that answered.
"Are you Ronda Reynolds's mother?"
"Yes . . . I am."
"I'm sorry to inform you that your daughter died this morning."
"How?" Barbara didn't recognize her own voice. It was hollow.
"Your daughter committed suicide."
Barb didn't believe it.
She never did. For more than eleven years, Barb Thompson worked to discover the truth about her daughter's death, to remove that word suicide from Ronda's death certificate.
But nothing ever fit. Nothing ever matched. There are a number of suspects in Ronda's death, and as many motives. The main players each have their own theories--their particular script of what went on on that frigid night in December 1998.
And some of them know more than they have told.
THE LEWIS COUNTY SHERIFF'S COMMUNICATIONS dispatcher had received a call on the 911 line at 6:20 on the cold morning of December 16, 1998. The man calling in identified himself as Ron Reynolds and asked that an emergency vehicle respond as soon as possible to his home on Twin Peaks Drive. When asked what the situation was, Reynolds said that his wife had committed suicide with a pistol.
He spoke in a flat, oddly calm voice as he explained that he wasn't sure just what had happened because he himself had been asleep for the past "few hours." "I didn't hear the shot," he said. "She must have muffled it with a pillow or something."
"Does your wife have a pulse?" the dispatcher asked.
"I don't know--I can go check."
The dispatcher heard him set the phone down and return a few minutes later.
"I can't find any pulse," Reynolds said.
Lewis County deputy sheriff Gary Holt was dispatched to the Reynolds home just a minute after the school administrator called 911.
The Lewis County road deputies were spread thin in the county at that time of day, patrolling many miles from one another. It took Holt twenty-one minutes to arrive at the ranch-style home in Toledo. He wasn't quite sure what to expect, although, from the dispatcher's instructions, it sounded like a cut-and-dried suicide. At any rate, something was terribly wrong at Ronda and Ron Reynolds's house. When Holt walked up to the residence, he was directed to the master bedroom at the end of a hall to the left of the front entrance. Emergency medical technicians were working over a woman who lay on her left side on the floor of a closet that was just off the bedroom. There was a bathroom adjacent to the closet.
Holt noted a pistol lying across her forehead. She appeared to have suffered a head wound, and had bled profusely.
Ron Reynolds was quite well-known in Lewis County because of both his teaching career and his leadership in the Jehovah's Witnesses. But he was no longer connected with the church; when he left his wife, Katie, and moved in with Ronda, he left the Witnesses.
He spent a lot of money on Christmas gifts for his sons in December 1998--it was to be his sons' first Christmas with presents since they were very young. Josh hadn't even been born until his parents spent fifteen years in the Jehovah's Witnesses.
As the first deputy on the death scene, Gary Holt, surveyed Ronda's body, he noted that Ron seemed unnaturally calm, perhaps in shock. Ron told Holt that he had fallen asleep about 5 A.M. He was exhausted, he said, from trying to keep Ronda awake all night because she had been "thinking about suicide."
When his alarm clock jolted him awake at 6 A.M., she wasn't in bed beside him, and Ron said he'd searched their home and couldn't find her. He told one officer that he'd checked the living room couch, and another officer who arrived shortly after that he had gone to the kitchen, thinking Ronda might be in there feeding her dogs.
Only when he returned to their bedroom had he thought to push open the door of the walk-in closet off the master bathroom and look inside. He recalled moving a pillow from over his wife's head to check for a pulse. When he detected none, he called 911. (This was his second version of events; earlier he'd told the emergency dispatcher that he had not tried to find a pulse in his wife's wrist or neck arteries.)
The EMTs who were now kneeling beside the shooting victim in the closet found her body was still warm--but that could be accounted for by the electric blanket that covered her. It was turned on, powered by an extension cord stretching across the bathroom.
Ronda Reynolds wore white flannel pajamas with a pink rosebud pattern. The paramedics checked for lividity--the livor mortis that occurs when the heart stops beating and blood sinks to the lowest part of the body, eventually leaving fixed purplish-red stains or striated marks there. Where the weight of the deceased rests on a hard surface, the skin blanches white. If a body is moved before lividity is complete, there will be secondary (or dual) lividity, a lighter shade of pink than the first. Ronda's blood had settled to the left-front portion of her body first. (Later at the morgue, there was a shifting of bloodstains to her back, indicating that while lividity was almost complete, some of her blood had seeped through to the lower portion of her back when she was placed on a gurney to be transported to the funeral home.)
The EMTs also checked for signs of rigor mortis, a stiffening of the joints that begins soon after death. The jaw itself is usually the first area to begin to harden. They were surprised to hear that her husband said he had seen her alive at 5 A.M. Rigor seemed far more progressed than it normally would be within an hour and a half of death. Both the degree of lividity and rigor mortis would tend to place Ronda Reynolds's death at about 2 A.M.--four hours earlier than the time that her husband discovered her.
There might be more injuries on Ronda's body, but the wound that was instantly apparent when the medics pulled down the electric blanket had surely resulted from a fatal shot; it was just in front and slightly above Ronda's right e
ar, but they wouldn't be able to tell if it was an entrance or an exit wound until the massive amount of blood was washed from her face, throat, and hair.
Ron Reynolds's younger three sons who were living with him and Ronda had apparently been wakened from their sleep by strange voices and lights going on. Jonathan was seventeen, David fifteen, and Joshua ten. Apparently concerned that the boys would be distressed by the police activity, Ron had told them all to get up and to dress quickly. Then he had instructed Jonathan to drive himself and his two younger brothers to their mother's home. Katie Huttala lived some twenty miles away.
Deputy Holt, who had only a glimpse of the boys in the front hallway who were fully dressed and carrying extra clothes, agreed, thinking--erroneously--that the detectives could just as well talk to them later at Katie's house. Perhaps they could, but the probe was damaged when three of the main witnesses to Ronda's death left. Their initial emotions, impressions, memories would never be quite as fresh again. Other people might talk to them, and tend to confuse them. Detectives had no opportunity to take any statements from them or even to ask any questions. Indeed, the boys were hustled out of the house before most of the sheriff's team realized they were gone.
At the very least, the investigators would have asked Jonathan why there was such a heavy cloud of incense coming from his room.
Ron Reynolds called Tom Lahmann, the superintendent of the Toledo School District, and Bill Waag, the principal of the Toledo Middle School, and they hurried over to offer him emotional support.
The crowd in the Reynoldses' house grew larger. David Bell, who was a sergeant with the Des Moines, Washington, Police Department and Ronda's longtime friend, arrived. He said he was keeping his promise to drive her to SeaTac Airport to catch her flight to Spokane.
Oddly, Cheryl Gilbert showed up minutes later, saying that she was Ronda's very best friend and had come to pick her up and drive her to Portland to catch a Spokane flight from there. The distance to the Portland airport and the SeaTac Airport just south of Seattle was approximately the same, as was the flight time to Spokane from each.
