In the Still of the Night

by Rule, Ann

  He told the jurors how he had driven to Toledo at Ronda's request on December 15, a distance of about eighty-five miles. He had arrived about 7:30 P.M. to help her move out of the home she had shared with Ron Reynolds. "I was there to help her get out of there."

  Ronda had tried to get him to take a handgun--which he recalled was a PPK Walther. But he refused when he learned it was Ron's, one of his late father's guns.

  "I asked her 'Why?' and I was met with a shrug."

  Bell testified that he had ejected six rounds of ammunition from the gun. "I automatically do that when I know there are children in the house."

  Moving Ronda's things was slow. She was most worried about her dogs and they loaded dog crates and her VCR into her car.

  "Was anyone else in the house at that time?" Royce Ferguson asked.

  "The boys--Ron's sons."

  Ferguson wondered if the two teenagers and the grade school student had seen the gun exchange between Bell and Ronda.

  "They could have."

  If they had seen Ronda give him the gun, it was likely one or more of them had seen him scatter the bullets--either on the bed or the floor--and then place the weapon in the drawer under their father's side of the waterbed.

  Bell said he and Ronda had gone for a drive, just to talk on neutral ground--without Ron's sons listening in. Ronda was trying to decide what she should do. She had thought about staying with her friend, Cheryl Gilbert, but she changed her mind. She asked Dave Bell to take her there; no one was home, and Ronda unlocked the door, tossed the keys in, and relocked it.

  They stopped at Mary's Corner to get gas. "Ronda borrowed my cell phone and called Ron's mother. Then she called Ron. It was about ten or ten-thirty then. She also called her friend Dan at Macy's to change her shifts [while she was in Spokane]."

  "She wasn't resigning?" Ferguson asked.

  "No. She had no plans to quit her job." Bell added that Ronda intended to come back to Lewis County in time to work during the last-minute Christmas rush. She just wasn't sure where she would be staying.

  Ronda and Ron's mother, Laura, liked each other and Ronda wanted to tell the older woman personally that she and Ron were breaking up. Dave Bell didn't hear much of her conversations on his cell phone because he was pumping gas and then paying for it.

  Still, Bell recalled that Ronda had vacillated over where she would stay that night. It would be only a matter of hours until he picked her up to catch her flight to Spokane. She didn't want to stay with Cheryl Gilbert, or her old friend and work partner, Dan Pearson. When she called him that night of December 15, Pearson had told her that she was welcome to stay with him and his wife.

  She and Bell had already agreed that this wasn't the time for her to meet his sons, or for her dogs to meet his cats--so his home was out. Over the years, both of them had put Bell's sons first, and they didn't want to upset them now.

  "I know I don't want to stay in a motel," Ronda said.

  Ronda finally wondered if she should stay at the Toledo house--for just one more night. Virtually everything she owned was in that house--her furniture, paintings, family photos and treasures, and, of course her three dogs. If she left without some sort of an agreement with Ron, it could be considered legal desertion.

  She no longer believed he would share the equity in the house with her as he'd promised. She would be left with nothing.

  When they pulled into the driveway of Ronda's home, Ron's car was there. Bell didn't know what to expect, but there was no angry confrontation; it was all remarkably civil. Ron didn't seem angry or jealous that his wife had been driving around with another man, or that David Bell was helping her move out.

  "It was all very matter-of-fact," Bell told Royce Ferguson. "Reynolds and his sons stayed in another part of the house."

  "No sign of danger for Ronda?

  "No. No!" Bell said emphatically. "I would have dragged her out of there kicking and screaming if there was."

  David Bell had to leave at that point to drive back to Des Moines and finish his shift. "Sometime after midnight, I called Ronda to check on her. She said she had gotten a little sleep and she felt better. She planned to fly out of Portland to Spokane in the morning. I explained to her that that would be hard for me--to drive her almost a hundred miles south to Portland, and then I'd have to drive all the way back to Des Moines. I asked her if she could change her reservations and fly out of SeaTac instead. That's only ten minutes from my police station.

  "She said she would," Bell testified, "and she asked me to give her a wake-up call in the morning if I hadn't heard from her by the time I was in Lewis County."

  But there was no call from Ronda to Dave Bell the next morning. As he cruised into Lewis County, he said he had called Ronda, expecting to hear her sleepy voice. But an unfamiliar male voice answered.

  "It was a Lewis County detective or deputy who handed the phone to Ron. He told me Ronda was dead. I couldn't grasp that," Bell remembered. "I was shocked. I didn't know what could have happened, so I just kept on driving to her house."

  Dave Bell found Ronda's widower "very calm."

  Because he was a police officer, Bell was allowed to walk beyond the "Crime Scene: Do Not Enter" tape. He remained in shock. He should be driving Ronda to the airport--getting her safely on board a jet on her way to her family. But she lay dead inside--apparently of a gunshot wound to the head.

  Bell testified that he was eventually interviewed by Sergeant Glade Austin once, and by Detective Jerry Berry twice, both of whom wanted him to remember every detail he could about his last hours with Ronda.

  But on that day, December 16, 1998, one question asked of him stood out in his memory more than any other. It came from Carmen Brunton.

  "She looked me right in the eye and asked 'Did he kill her?' "

  He knew she was talking about Ron Reynolds, but Dave Bell scarcely knew the man. He didn't know the answer to that on December 16, but he intended to find out everything he could about Ronda's shocking death.

  "You have stayed close to Barbara Thompson?" Ferguson asked.

  "For the last ten years."

  It was time for John Justice to begin his cross-examination.

  "How long was it between Ronda Reynolds's marriages?" Justice began.

  "I'm not sure--maybe one and a half to two months," Bell answered. "We didn't have much contact since about December 1997--she was going to marry Ron in January. I know she was very disappointed when her second marriage didn't work out."

  "Did you know much about her finances?"

  "To a limited extent. Ronda had little access to money. Even if she wanted to go to the ATM, Ron had to go with her. She told me that she had fifteen thousand dollars invested in their home."

  Judge Hicks occasionally asked questions of the witnesses. Now he asked Bell why he threw the bullets on the floor or the bed instead of in a drawer, but he couldn't answer why he'd done that. Bell remembered putting the empty gun itself back in its holster and placing it in a drawer under the waterbed, a squeaky drawer that was hard to open.

  "What happened to the items you put in the truck?" Hicks asked as follow-up.

  "We returned them to the house."

  Like all the people who had known Ronda well--except, perhaps for Cheryl Gilbert--Dave Bell could not imagine that she would have considered suicide. She was pulled in many directions the last night of her life and she'd gone back and forth about what would be the wisest thing for her to do. She'd wanted so much to get to her family but she was afraid something bad might happen to her three dogs.

  But kill herself? Absolutely not. She would have worked things out. It was obvious she didn't love Reynolds any longer. Still, she was ready to cut her losses and start over. She had plans and David Bell was positive they never included killing herself.

  In time, they might well have been together. But a single bullet ended that hope.

  BARB THOMPSON WAS SUFFERING not only emotional pain as Ronda's life and violent death were presented to th
e jurors; she was also suffering physical pain. She had a completely torn rotator cuff in one shoulder and it was agonizing, but she didn't tell anyone. She had vowed to see the hearing through before she had the surgery she needed so badly. Barb carried heavy court records and the huge white binder she had put together on Ronda's case, but she made sure no one caught her wincing as she lifted them. She had driven herself once more across the mountains, and that hurt, too.

  She was used to hurting--she'd been stomped on by cattle and horses, and she had never quit before. She wasn't about to now.

  Barb worried constantly about her mother. In her late eighties, Virginia had a bad heart and a handful of other ailments. She was failing rapidly. Several times a day, Barb called the caregiver to check on Virginia. And every day or so, there were emergency calls from home. Virginia had been taken to the hospital, or she wasn't able to eat. Barb had long since begun sleeping in a recliner next to her mother's bed, and it was wrenching for her to be so far away. Every time her cell phone rang, she was afraid the caregiver or Freeman would tell her mother had died.

  Still, she knew what Ronda's beloved Gramma wanted her to do: stay at this hard-fought-for hearing that might open the doors to the truth about Ronda's death.

  ROBERT BISHOP was the next witness Royce Ferguson called. He was the second deputy on the scene of Ronda Reynolds's death, following Deputy Gary Holt's arrival only three minutes later.

  Bob Bishop had spent thirteen years in law enforcement, although he was no longer a cop. He was a tall, beefy, dark-haired man in his early thirties with a calm voice. He stated that he was currently a production manager for a local manufacturer. When asked why he had resigned from being a Lewis County deputy sheriff, he said it was for "personal reasons."

  While Holt had tended to believe Ron Reynolds's conclusion that his wife had killed herself, Bishop wasn't so sure. The three Reynolds boys had already left the house when he got there; Holt had given them permission to drive to their mother's house. No one knew what they might have seen or heard during the night and predawn hours.

  Holt was interviewing Ron in the kitchen, and the widower was explaining that he and Ronda had both been in bed at 4:30 A.M. They were awake and he'd been trying to keep her from harming herself. Overwhelmed with exhaustion, he hadn't been able to keep his eyes open. When he woke at six, she was gone.

  He had searched all over the house for Ronda, checking the kitchen because he thought she might be feeding her dogs. Finally he located her body in the "closed closet."

  "I didn't hear the shot," Ron Reynolds told Holt--a statement he would repeat scores of times over the years. "That's because the doors to the closet and the bathroom were both shut."

  Bishop testified that he'd studied Ronda's body. "She was on her left side, with her right hand under a blanket. I didn't see the pillow--and I didn't note where her left hand was."

  But something was "hinky," at least in Bishop's opinion. Ron Reynolds had appeared to be "calm, intelligent, and without any emotion."

  Why didn't he hear the shot? Bishop testified that he saw the white strip on the widower's third finger, left hand, and it was he who found Ron's wedding ring in a soap dish in the master bathroom. He also had had the sense that someone had taken a shower in the bathroom within the previous hour.

  "Did you form an opinion on what happened to Ronda Reynolds?" Royce Ferguson asked him.

  "I didn't believe this was a suicide."

  AT 11:43 A.M. on the second day of the hearing, Jerry Berry was called to the witness stand by Royce Ferguson. In a sport jacket and slacks, starched shirt and tie, and cowboy boots, he looked like a country lawman dressed up for court--which was what he was. All he needed to complete the look was a ten-gallon hat.

  Berry has a good face, a kind face, and it was easy to see why Barb Thompson had trusted him from the first time she met him.

  Jerry Berry testified about his years in law enforcement. He held nothing back; he had experienced a meteoric rise in the sheriff's office after he switched careers in midlife. By 1995 he was a homicide detective, and he participated in twenty-three death investigations between then and 2001. But he fell from his place as the fair-haired boy in the department when he didn't agree with his superiors and fellow detectives, and plunged into being constantly criticized just as rapidly.

  "After I recommended Vernon Geberth to our chief criminal investigator--Joe Doench--everything fell apart," Berry told the jurors. "Joe was very upset when Geberth pointed out errors in the investigation of Ronda Reynolds's death. He said Geberth made the department look like Keystone Kops."

  "What happened after that?" Ferguson asked.

  "I was forbidden to work on the case--and if anyone in our department mentioned it to me, I was supposed to report it to Doench immediately. I was demoted to road deputy. I was ordered to undergo counseling," Berry answered. "This all happened on the same day."

  He had abided by all the reassignments and conditions Joe Doench had specified, but things just got worse for him.

  "Finally, I just came in and quit."

  Jerry Berry had resigned from the sheriff's office, but he hadn't quit the case. He was clearly a stubborn--perhaps even obsessed--man who had never let go of what he considered a miscarriage of justice, even though it cost him his career.

  Berry testified that he arrived at the Reynoldses' house at 8:30 A.M. on December 16 after Detective Neiser called him and asked for a second opinion. Even Joe Doench said there were "things" that didn't look right to him. "He told me the husband seemed 'too composed,' and that there were other things too--but he didn't tell me what they were."

  "Dave Neiser led me to the body, and told me he had removed the gun for safety's sake. It was already a suicide in his mind--not a death investigation," Berry said. "It should have been treated as a crime scene unless--and until--proved otherwise."

  Berry was distressed because the gun had been removed. "They had taken some photos--but I never got to take my own photos of where the gun ended up after the single shot."

  "Who did what at the scene?" Royce Ferguson asked.

  "Within the first hour, Neiser did interviews in the living room, and I processed the scene," Berry responded. "The impression of the gun on her--Ronda's--forehead was pronounced. There were red flags accumulating into clusters--so many discrepancies . . ."

  "What kind of 'discrepancies'?"

  "The lipstick message on the bathroom mirror--all her makeup had been packed. Neiser said the gun had been 'near' her left hand, but that hand was grasping the blanket. She could not have held a gun in it."

  "Anything else?" Ferguson pressed.

  "Ron Reynolds said he kept his wife in bed with him until about four thirty A.M.--but only the left side of the bed was slept in--not the right. The Black Velvet was there--empty--but she turned out to have no alcohol in her system. The closet was only about five or six by five. The clothing hanging there and the boxes made it smaller. The door opened inward. It wasn't possible to close the door with her feet and legs there."

  "What was the distance from the body to the left side of the bed?"

  "Ten to twelve feet, maximum."

  "But Ron Reynolds didn't hear the gun fire?"

  "He said he didn't--didn't hear anything until his alarm rang later."

  "Anything else? Did you talk with Terry Wilson about these 'red flags' you saw?"

  "He would never talk to me about that."

  Berry testified that Carmen Brunton, who had come to the death site that first morning, believed that the note on the mirror had been written by a left-handed person.

  "Anything else?"

  "The writing was at my eye level," Berry continued. "And I'm five eleven. People tend to write on a blackboard or a wall at their eye level. Ronda was much shorter than I am."

  Even Brunton, who had come to the death site that first morning, had thought the "goodbye note" had been written by a left-handed person. Ron was left-handed and Ronda had been right-handed--althoug
h Ron couldn't remember which hand she'd favored. But, of course, Brunton had no special expertise in graphology.

  "Where are your photos of the crime scene?" Ferguson asked.

  "I can't tell you. I took lots of pictures but they've disappeared. I thought they would be with the case file in the sheriff's office . . . but they aren't. I don't have them."

  Jerry Berry testified that some time later Barb Thompson had asked the sheriff's office for everything in the case file she had a right to have under the Public Information Act. "She finally got some of them, but when I looked at what were supposed to be the crime scene photos, I said, 'My God, Barb--these aren't the crime scene photos. These were taken a years later.' "

  Berry described the uphill battle he'd fought. Oddly, at first, it hadn't been so negative. "We took a straw vote, and most of our investigators thought Ronda's death was a homicide. Even Joe Doench said he was leaning that way."

  But that changed all too soon. "I remember that Dave Neiser taunted me, saying, 'Leave it to Jerry Berry to make this into a murder.' "

  By then, it was clear that that derogatory opinion of Neiser was shared by others in the Lewis County Sheriff's Office.

  At least unofficially.

  But Barb was determined. Of course, by that time she had found out all the telephone numbers for Jerry--his office, home, cell phone, and she tracked him down.

  He recalled Barb's statement to him that she could have accepted even the suicide verdict if she just had proof. "I would know that was Ronda's choice," she told Berry. "But there is no proof. I don't know what happened to her."

  Soon he was as involved in finding Ronda's killer as her mother was.

  "Did Barbara Thompson pay you for your work on the case?" Ferguson asked.

  "Not a penny. I never asked for anything, either."

  Jerry Berry testified that he still had twenty-one red flags and questions to go with them. "But Ron Reynolds got an attorney and he wouldn't talk to detectives any longer. That door was closed."

  It might not have made a difference anyway. Berry testified that Ron Reynolds had not been consistent in the statements he gave to anyone over the eleven years since Ronda died. "He changed his statements to fit the truth," Berry said.