by Rule, Ann
Detective Jerry Berry had inherited the job as lead investigator, simply by default: Dave Neiser was on vacation. At the time, Berry was regarded as a superior investigator by the Lewis County Sheriff's Office. He had gone along with the department's position, but he soon wished he hadn't--not in the Reynolds case. Now he regretted mightily that there were things that should have been done at Ronda's death scene, procedures that could never be accomplished with optimum accuracy weeks later.
Later on December 16--a few hours after Ronda's body was removed--Berry had returned to the house on Twin Peaks Drive. He had needed to take measurements, especially in the closet off the bathroom. He didn't know how much he might find. When Berry had arrived earlier that morning, the scene had already been contaminated, crucial evidence moved, and there were too many people walking through the house--both investigators and laymen.
When he came back for the second time some hours later, Berry found the closet's dimensions quite small, only five feet by six feet. He could see that Ronda's lower legs and feet would have protruded out over the sill so that the door could not possibly be closed.
He shuddered to think what evidence might have vanished already. And most of the Reynoldes' neighbors were not even questioned. Nor would they be.
THE SEMEN FOUND in Ronda's vaginal vault on autopsy, and in the female contraceptive in the bathroom's wastebasket, was gone, and it had apparently never been tested for blood type. Even if the last man who had been with Ronda was a non-secretor, they could have tried to find out who he was.
Dave Bell denied that he and Ronda had been intimate that last day. Ron Reynolds had seemed pleased to say that they had intercourse sometime during the night when he watched Ronda to be sure she wasn't going to kill herself. That seemed suspicious to Berry: a woman as upset as Reynolds described wasn't likely to feel romantic. It seemed more probable that she had been raped.
By someone.
While he was at the Reynoldses' house for the second time, Jerry Berry took more photographs.
"Red flags kept popping up for me," Berry recalled. "The only person who said Ronda was suicidal was her husband, Ron. He told me how he had forced himself to stay awake all night so she wouldn't kill herself. The only person who said she ever drank hard liquor was Ron. The Black Velvet bottle we found in the bedroom was empty--but he said there was enough in it earlier in the evening for two or three drinks. There were two glasses and a Pepsi can next to it."
That became a moot point; on autopsy and through lab tests, Ronda had absolutely no smell of alcohol on her breath or in her blood or urine. Who had emptied the Black Velvet bottle? Ron hadn't been tested for the percentage of alcohol or drugs in his blood.
Nor had his sons.
And then there was the curious condition of the family bathroom in the Reynolds home. When the first responders arrived in answer to Ron Reynold's 911 call, Bob Bishop, one of the deputies had noted that the walls and mirrors in the main bathroom were steamed up--as if someone had taken a shower shortly before deputies and EMTs got there. Ron's wedding ring had still rested on the edge of the sink in the master bathroom off Ron and Ronda's bedroom, and deputies had seen the pale band of skin on his third finger, left hand.
Why on earth would a man who had just found his wife dead of a gunshot wound to the head pause to take a shower? To wash away blood spatter or gunshot residue--or because he was in shock?
Gunshot residue (GSR) found on the hands, skin, or clothing of a suspect was once considered an essential part of an investigation when someone perished by gunshot. Mystery novelists swear by it. But some forensic labs don't even bother to test for it anymore. So many other things can leave traces of gunpowder elements (barium, antimony, and lead). Even using toilet tissue can leave similar amounts.
Reynold's attorney argued that Ronda had traces of possible gunshot residue on her hand. Ron was not tested for gunshot residue. Sergeant Glade Austin said it would be useless anyway--that the court wouldn't allow the results into evidence.
Almost from the beginning, Jerry Berry felt that Ronda's death was "a staged suicide." And he worked the case with that in mind.
That did not sit well with Sheriff John McCroskey and the rest of the brass at the Lewis County Sheriff's Office.
THE WASHINGTON STATE PATROL'S crime lab had worked on the ballistics report of the gun and single bullet that had killed Ronda Reynolds. The gun was a .32 Rossi, Smith & Wesson long revolver, and the cartridges--five of them unfired--were .32 S&W long bullets.
Raymond Kusumi, a forensic scientist at the WSP lab, test-fired the weapon. The revolver was operational and he noted no malfunctions. The trigger pull took three and a quarter pounds for single action, and approximately eleven pounds double action. The bullet casing from the one shot fired had extractor and ejector marks that were identical to the lab-fired bullet.
There was no question that this was the gun that killed Ronda.
To fire a gun requiring considerable power to pull the trigger would have been impossible for Ronda to do considering the position in which her body was found.
And what could explain the fact that the gun had allegedly landed on Ronda's forehead rather than recoiling and tumbling down and away? Several ballistics experts would be puzzled by this as the investigation stretched out. The wound was next to Ronda's ear, but the gun's position defied the basic rules of impact and motion.
Add to that the fact that both Ronda's hands were beneath the blanket when she was found, and suicide seemed the least likely choice for the manner of her death.
While Lewis County families enjoyed the holiday season with trees and lights and presents, Jerry Berry struggled to explain to himself--if no one else--why the physical aspects of the death scene didn't line up.
Things simply could not have happened the way Ron Reynolds had explained them.
ONE PERSON WHO HAD shown up at Ronda's house early on the morning of December 16 was Cheryl Gilbert, forty-one. Jerry Berry had noticed that she was eager--almost overly eager--to help with the investigation. Despite whatever pain she felt at Ronda's death, she appeared to enjoy being the center of attention when anyone asked her a question.
On December 18, Berry had taped a formal interview with Cheryl.
Berry asked, "Cheryl, can you tell me what your relationship was to Ronda Reynolds?"
Cheryl answered, "We met in November of 1991 at my parents' house at a Thanksgiving dinner, and since then, we've been best friends. We--there's hardly been a day go by that we don't talk."
"When was the last time you talked to her?"
"Ten-thirty at night on Tuesday, the fifteenth. She called me at home. I saw her in person, um, between--I left her house about three-thirty in the afternoon on the fifteenth. I was there probably an hour."
Okay. During that visit, what was her demeanor? Can you tell me what you guys talked about?"
Berry had opened the floodgates, and words rushed out of Cheryl's mouth.
"She was extremely upset," Cheryl began, "and she said on the phone that, preceding my visit, she said her husband had told her that he loved her [and] loved his ex-wife, but he had chosen to go back to his ex-wife and he wanted her out. Um, we talked. I offered my home for her to come stay at and we had lived together prior, um, probably around 1991-1992 down in Elma for a while and she knew she had a place to come to at my house. Um, we discussed--she was extremely upset and she was telling me that she felt like she was in the dark, you know, just so down. And I told her I understood because previous to that, I mean seven years ago, I had gone through a divorce, and she was there to help me through that and knew I understood. I looked at her kind of sideways and she knew that I was concerned that she might do something drastic, and she looked me right in the eyes and said, 'No, I would never do that.' And we both knew that we were talking about suicide and, I mean, it was just a given that she would never do that."
Cheryl had been a reserve officer in the town of Elma and she recalled how she, Ronda, and several ot
her female officers had made their "no suicide" pact. "Whether we saw each other yesterday or ten years ago, just give any of us a call. We would never do that. And Ronda was adamant against it."
Cheryl expanded on her earlier statement that Ronda had emptied the waterbed she and Ron had shared. That had happened when Cheryl visited on December fifteenth.
"I watched her get a hose out of the garage, and she said, 'I'm gonna empty this waterbed. I don't want his ex-wife sleeping in my bed!' "
The two women had proceeded to do just that.
Cheryl Gilbert was animated and dramatic. She said Ronda had asked her if she would drive her to Portland the next morning so she could fly to Spokane and a reunion with her family.
"Had she started packing yet?" Jerry Berry asked Cheryl Gilbert.
"Kind of. She was gathering things together, yeah. But she told me on the phone that night, um, she asked me to go to the school and talk to Ron and try to talk him out of it, I guess. I said, 'Well, do you want me to come over after I'm done at the school?' and she said, 'Yeah that would be fine--you can help me pack and we'll go to the airport.' "
With every question from Berry, Cheryl was becoming more important in Ronda's life--at least in her own mind. She spoke of two of Ron's younger sons, and said she had seen them in the house during her afternoon visit.
"Did she call you or did you call her--during your conversation at ten-thirty Tuesday night?"
"She'd called me [earlier] and I wasn't home. She asked my daughter if it was okay if she moved in with us and my daughter said she always had a place with us. Ronda was making plans to get a single bed and, um, get it moved up to my house 'cause I have four bedrooms and she was just gonna take the fourth bedroom. And then she called me back at ten-thirty P.M. I asked her where she was. She said she was in bed . . . she had refilled the waterbed."
Cheryl said she'd asked where Ron was, and Ronda said he was in the other room. "I assumed it was the living room 'cause that's usually where he was. They were watching two different TV shows most of the time."
Cheryl said she'd repeated her offer to pick up Ronda and take her to the Portland airport the next morning, and Ronda said she'd take her up on it.
She wasn't sure why Ronda had changed her plans to stay at her house that night. "She just left my keys up there and then went back home."
Cheryl didn't say why she hadn't mentioned that to Ronda in the ten-thirty call.
Ever the peacemaker, Cheryl said she'd taken her children to school and then swung by the elementary school in Toledo to talk to Ron. But his truck wasn't in the teachers' parking lot.
"So I headed up toward their house and I saw all the county cars, um, sitting in the driveway, and I didn't knock--I walked right in. One of the deputies was standing there and I said, 'Is Ronda here?' He just looked at me and he said, 'No.' And then Ron came around the corner . . . and he told me Ronda had shot herself."
"When was the last time you talked to Ron?" Berry asked her.
"I talked to him, um, Thursday morning, the, uh, seventeenth. He called me."
"He called you?" Berry asked, surprise in his voice. "Why did he call you? Do you know?"
"He called to find out if I had talked to her mom and grandma in Spokane, and he wanted her mom's phone number. He said he hadn't contacted them because he didn't know if they had been informed or not."
"Did he ask you any questions . . . about what the family said?"
"Yeah, I said I talked to them Wednesday night and he said, 'Are they blaming me?' and I said, 'I don't know,' which wasn't really the truth."
"Did Ron, at any time, say anything to you about his financial situation?"
"He did," Cheryl responded. "I said, 'Ron, what happened? I know that you told her yesterday morning that you wanted to go back to your ex-wife,' and he said, 'Well, that's not the whole story.' He said she [Ronda] had charged on his credit cards . . . to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars. I can't--I mean there weren't that many new things in the house. I know thirteen hundred dollars fixed her car, and they bought a new dining room set. Other than that, she didn't--there was no new jewelry. There was not a lot of clothing. She worked at the Bon and she had to weary baggy sweaters and sweatshirts--she had a couple of the Bon Marche brand sweatshirts--but there wasn't anything elaborate that showed up at the house."
(At this juncture, no one but the collection agency knew of the $1,800 in groceries that Katie Huttula had written rubber checks to buy.)
Cheryl Gilbert said that Ron told her he was looking all over for Ronda's life insurance policy. When she told him that Virginia Ramsey would like to have Ronda's jewelry back, and also the china cabinet Virginia had given her, he said, "I'm not letting go of the jewelry until I sell it to pay off some of these bills."
Jerry Berry was about at the end of his questions. "Did Ron Reynolds ever show any remorse to you or say anything about how much he was gonna miss her or anything?"
Cheryl shook her head. "I told him on the phone, 'She really did love you, Ron.' And he goes, 'I know that.' And when I was out at their house, as I was leaving, I hugged him, and he just said he was 'sorry,' and that was it."
"Okay. Cheryl, is there anything you can think of that I might need to be aware of?"
"Not that I can think of right now, but it just doesn't feel right. I just can't imagine Ronda killing herself."
Nor could Barb Thompson. As close as Cheryl Gilbert claimed to be to Ronda, it was her mother who knew her best. Not everything. Nobody knows everything about someone else. Not even mothers.
"No parent, whether they will admit it or not, knows her child in every explicit way," Barb Thompson allowed. "A parent knows her child in a way that only a parent can know--but only in certain areas of their lives. Their mate knows them in another area, a very special, very intimate, private way. Close friends know that person in a different--similar--way."
Barb tried to deal with the gossip that Ronda had killed herself, and with Coroner Terry Wilson's validation of that, but she could not equate the Ronda she knew with someone who would take her own life. As far back as Barb could remember, Ronda's motto had been "No fear!" Both on the job as a state cop and in her daily life, Ronda had waded in with all flags flying.
"I believe I could go on with my life if Ronda had been killed in an accident. It would have been final and I could have accepted it. I could even have accepted suicide if I knew she had chosen to take her own life, I could have accepted that. There would have been a finality to that, too. But I needed to know the truth, and I wasn't finding it. I was finding just the opposite."
As kind as Cheryl had been to Barb Thompson during the week before Ronda's funeral, Barb was puzzled when she learned of Cheryl Gilbert's statements to Jerry Berry about Ronda's last few days. She doubted that Ronda would have asked Cheryl to intercede with Ron. "Ronda took care of her own problems," she told Berry, "and Ron didn't even like Cheryl. Why on earth would Ronda have asked Cheryl to go to his school and plead for Ronda's marriage?"
Barb Thompson returned to Spokane, but she commuted between there and Lewis County regularly, believing still that it would be only a matter of months before the truth about Ronda's death would come out.
Barb found a home with Cheryl for Tuffy, the Jack Russell terrier, but she took Jewels and Old Daisy home with her. The Rottweiler that Ronda had nursed back to health seemed inconsolable without her and paced back and forth looking for her.
"Finally, Old Daisy found one of the bags of Ronda's old clothes," Barb said, "and she pulled out one of her nightgowns and carried it back to her dog bed. After that, she could sleep."
The loss of Ronda had left so many creatures with empty places in their hearts: humans, and even dogs and horses.
JERRY BERRY'S WORK ENVIRONMENT became more and more difficult. He had become far from the fair-haired boy in the detective division. His superiors and the investigators he worked beside were treating him like a pariah. Nevertheless, he kept working, trying to unravel the m
ystery of Ronda Reynolds's death.
On February 11, 1999, Berry was driving his sheriff's car northbound on I-5 shortly before 4 P.M. when he spotted Katie Huttula just ahead of him. He touched his siren lightly, and she recognized him and pulled over. She smiled at him, and agreed readily to do an interview with him. They pulled off a safe distance from the freeway, and Berry asked if she minded if he taped their conversation.
"That's okay," she said.
"We were talking about an incident--a death investigation--involving Ronda Reynolds. Can you tell me what your relationship was to Ronda and how you knew her?"
"Before she married Ron, I was real close friends with her--had been for several years. Then she married Ron--who is my ex-husband of twenty-four years, who I have five children with. We were very close friends, and even to the time when they were married, we maintained a fairly good relationship."
"You mentioned that Ron called you on the fifteenth from school?"
"Yes."
"Do you remember the gist of that conversation?"
"Yes, sure. Over the last four months, Ron and Ronda had been having marital problems, and they evidently had been talking about a divorce for quite some time. Last summer, Ron called me and asked if I would consider reconciliation. We started having some verbal communication over the phone over the last few months about our reconciling if and when they ever were divorced. I encouraged him to try to work out his marriage--if possible."
Katie said Ron had called her from school on Tuesday, December 15, and told her Ronda was leaving him and going to Spokane and they were getting a divorce.
"He asked me if after the Christmas music concert--it was going to be over at nine or nine-thirty--if I would come to Toledo from Tumwater, where I was residing, and talk with him about possibly starting some counseling, with the possibility of reconciliation of our prior marriage and the future."
