In the Still of the Night

by Rule, Ann

  Royce Ferguson, Marty Hayes, and Jerry Berry, who had all been dead serious throughout the hearing, joined arms and grinned widely. I'm not positive but I think they did a quick jig, too.

  To have "suicide" be ruled inaccurate was a tremendous boost for Barb.

  TERRY WILSON HAD TEN DAYS to appeal the jury's verdicts, but no one expected him to do that.

  Judge Hicks had denied Ferguson's motion to poll the jurors to determine if they believed Ronda was a murder victim. So although there were a number of "likely suspects," more than in most homicide cases, officials and lawmen in Lewis County weren't rushing out to find the killer--or killers.

  With every year that had passed, memories of possible witnesses to a murder had surely grown dimmer. People had moved away or perhaps convinced themselves not to get involved if they did know something about the case. Or they had died.

  But Ronda was still dead--robbed of the precious years of a young woman's life. She would be forty-four now, probably married to someone who loved her, and possibly the mother of young children.

  TWO WEEKS AFTER the hearing ended, Barb Thompson and I returned to Lewis County. We had become good friends over the years--first through emails and letters, and then as we sat a foot or two apart at the hearing in Chehalis. We both stayed at the Best Western Inn during the hearing--almost everyone involved who lived outside Lewis County did.

  But Barb was always up and gone early in the morning, while I showed up in the Law and Justice Center just before Judge Hicks walked in. Evenings, Barb conferred with her team, and then dropped into bed, exhausted. On a few occasions, we had a screwdriver together after court and relaxed a little. But in Barb's case, it was only a little. The hearing demanded every ounce of strength she had.

  From the beginning, back in 1998, when I first heard the news about the former female state trooper who died mysteriously, I doubted that Ronda Reynolds committed suicide. Everything I'd learned about physical evidence in thirty years of writing about murder warred with that.

  I freely admit that I went to Chehalis in the cold November of 2009 with prejudice: in my head and heart, I believed Ronda had been murdered.

  Still, I had no idea who her killer might be. I knew the forensic science and facts of the case but was unfamiliar with the personalities of those who passed through Ronda's life.

  Now, Barb Thompson and I set out on a journey that we devoutly hoped might result in information that would narrow down suspects. As we headed west, the weather seemed to promise good news ahead; the sun shone as brightly as the gray clouds were dim in Lewis and Grays Harbor counties only two weeks earlier. We had both had a chance to catch up on sleep, and, strange as it might sound, this trip seemed almost like a short vacation. She and I each tended to be workaholics, never taking any real vacations.

  Before the hearing began in the first week of November, Judge Richard Hicks had told the jurors that they could not talk to anyone about what they heard in court. Now that it was over, they could discuss their thoughts with anyone they wanted. A half dozen of them had supper with Barb and me, all women--although a male juror had wanted to come and was prevented by a storm in the foothills.

  They were as eager to talk with us as we were to talk to them. Out of respect for their privacy, I choose not to give their surnames.

  One of the jurors said she had been a little stunned to see that the diagram of the house on Twin Peaks Drive showed a floor plan almost identical to her own. "The master bedroom, the bathroom, and the closet were just like mine, so I had no trouble following the scene description."

  All of the jurors we spoke with said they had no trouble reaching a verdict in a relatively short time.

  They had been puzzled when Terry Wilson didn't testify. One juror summed it up: "If you're not guilty," she said firmly, "you defend yourself."

  Wilson's decision not to take the stand was clearly the wrong one. As was his attending so little of the trial.

  "He disrespected the judge--and the jury, too," one said.

  "Who were the best witnesses, in your opinion?" I asked.

  They picked Marty Hayes as one of their first choices. His demonstrations and dramatic flair had caught their attention. Most of the jurors hadn't been to a trial before, and some of them expected the hearing to be similar to how television shows depicted trials. Hayes was a natural.

  David Bell's obvious grief as he took the stand had touched them deeply, and so did Jerry Berry's refusal to give up on solving Ronda's death, and his analytical mind.

  One member of the jury had hoped that something leading to Ronda's killer would have emerged at this hearing. "They wasted all this money for a hearing and nothing really came out of it."

  Barb didn't feel that way. She had just won a major battle and if it took another eleven years, she would find the person who had destroyed her daughter. Still, it felt good to know that twelve complete strangers had come to the same conclusion she had.

  The jury foreman was named Angel. Barb considered them all angels.

  THE NEXT MORNING, we drove down country roads and located places where Ronda had once been happy. In McCleary, Barb directed me to the ranch where Ronda and Mark Liburdi had lived. It was a welcoming spread with a rambler built toward the back, horse stalls, and a wide pasture where their horses could run. There was a brook in back of the house, a tumble of blackberries, and tall evergreen trees.

  I could almost feel Ronda's relief and joy when she came home to this place after a long night on patrol.

  There was a dirt road on the left of the pasture, leading back to a chained-off area.

  "That's Mark's," Barb said. "It was his secret place. You can't see it--but there's a really small cabin back in there. I think he still owns it."

  We crossed over into Grays Harbor County and came to Glenda and Steve Larson's ranch. Glenda, who had been Ronda's matron of honor at her wedding to Ron Reynolds, opened her kitchen door with a huge smile, delighted to see Barb. Glenda poured coffee and told us about her friendship with Ronda and the comfort they both felt in the Larsons' barn in a hard rainstorm, and about the many good times the two women shared.

  Glenda called her husband, Steve--a Grays Harbor County sheriff's deputy currently on patrol on the day shift--to tell him we were visiting. He came right home and regaled us with the story of the boys on the bridge who dropped rocks on Ronda's windshield--and how the two of them tracked down "the criminals."

  One of the things I had learned since the hearing began was how many people had loved Ronda--and how many loved Barb, too. Almost everywhere we went that day, we were welcome.

  Well, there was one stop where that wasn't true.

  We were headed toward Aberdeen, Washington, which seemed to be the most likely place to find Katie Huttula. Barb had visited Katie months before with reporter Tracy Vedder. She hadn't been particularly forthcoming then, but she had let them into her mobile home and talked with them. Katie had always seemed to be fond of Barb. Five years earlier, it was Katie who had written to Barb, telling her that she knew that Ronda hadn't killed herself. Barb wanted so much to finally ask Katie what she meant by that--and perhaps this was the day.

  As we neared Aberdeen, Barb and I were both eager to talk with Ron's second wife. Maybe she would feel more at ease to talk now that the hearing was over.

  Neither Katie nor Ron Reynolds had been seen anywhere near the Law and Justice Center, and no one was surprised. Ron was given time off by the school district and was reportedly staying at home, and Katie's whereabouts were unknown.

  We rolled into Aberdeen, a once-booming logging and fishing town that had been hit hard by the recession. Many store windows were blank except for closed signs, and there were blocks even in the center of the city that were a little shabby. It looked as if the town had almost given up after so many years of rising unemployment.

  After driving about ten blocks, Barb turned left. She was fairly certain she could find the mobile home park, although she couldn't recall the exact ad
dress.

  "Katie's father is such a nice man," Barb told me. "He's retired from his drugstore now, and he's done his best to help Katie. He lost his son Carl to Vietnam and Katie's younger sister Mary to suicide, and I heard he took a terrible fall recently and may have fractured his skull."

  And still Blake Huttula had purchased the mobile home we were looking for, hoping that Katie would do better if she had safe place to live.

  "I know Mary killed herself in a trailer," Barb continued. "But I don't know if it's the same trailer Katie has been living in. Mary died six years ago."

  Barb told me to watch for a mobile home park on the left side of the street and a block ahead it came into view. It was a neat, well-groomed park with mature plantings and trees, now bare of leaves. There looked to be about three or four rows of trailer lots, each with a handkerchief-sized lawn.

  "She lives at Nine Meander Way," Barb said. "And it's pretty close to the front of the park."

  Katie Huttula's blue and white mobile home was the first one on the left as we drove through the gates of the park. It was a good-size, modern mobile with a living room in the front, then a kitchen, bath, and two bedrooms.

  And there was a FOR SALE sign in the front window.

  Although we saw no signs of life around Katie's mobile, we knocked on the door. And waited. We knocked again and, shading our eyes from the sun with our hands, we peeked in the door's window. There was very little furniture and no personal items visible. The mobile home screamed "abandoned," and there was such a lonely sense about it. It was obvious that nobody lived here anymore.

  We could sense that eyes were watching us--but not from Katie's trailer. Curtains pulled back a little in a neighboring trailer dropped instantly as we turned around. Figuring that people who lived so close to one another were aware of their neighbors' comings and goings, we asked a man walking by if he knew where Catherine Huttula had moved. He shook his head; "Ask up at the office--fourth unit on the right."

  A man who said he was the manager answered our knock. We explained we were looking for Katie.

  "Oh, she moved."

  "Do you know where?" Barb asked.

  "Up on the hill--she's in one of those subsidized apartments up there on Salmon Street."

  He smiled at us as he shut his door.

  Naively, Barb and I headed back the way we had come, looking for a hilly section of town. We had a map, but we couldn't find Salmon Street on it. We drove up several hills, and even a few sloping streets that some might consider "hills," but we never located a Salmon Street or any homes or apartment complexes that looked as if they were subsidized housing.

  We asked for directions at a Safeway store and a fast-food drive-through. Nobody was familiar with the address we'd been given. We ended up at railroad tracks with a view of the backside of buildings.

  "Barb," I finally said, "I think he does know where Katie lives now, but he lied to us."

  "I think you're right," Barb muttered as she turned the steering wheel and made a U-turn. "Let's just go back and see him."

  We drove down Meander Way again, stopping at the manager's office. This time he wasn't there, but a sour-faced woman answered the door.

  When we asked about Katie Huttula, she shrugged and said, "I don't have no idea where she went."

  "Your husband--or the gentleman who was here earlier--said she lived in some Section Eight housing on Salmon Street," I said, "but I guess we misunderstood his directions."

  "I don't know nothing about that."

  "Could you tell us where Salmon Street is?"

  "Nope," she said, and shut the door in our faces.

  So much for our ability as investigators--or even as likable strangers. Both Barb and I were convinced that the people overseeing the mobile home park knew where Katie was but for some reason didn't want to tell us.

  Maybe they thought we were friends of hers and she'd left owing them rent, so they weren't going to do any favors for her. Possibly they thought we were bill collectors or even private detectives and they were protecting her. Perhaps they just enjoyed having a good laugh at our expense as they sent us off on a futile "wild goose chase."

  At any rate, both Barb and I knew they weren't going to tell us anything remotely useful. It was getting dark, and we had a long way to drive, so we headed back to Chehalis.

  Neither of us wanted to contact Katie Huttula's parents--they had been through enough pain and loss in their lives and they were elderly and ill. And there was the possibility that they didn't know where she was, either.

  I MAKE IT A PRACTICE not to interview possible witnesses before a trial or a hearing, so there were many people I had yet to meet personally. Barb invited Blair Connery to have dinner with us at a Chinese restaurant in Chehalis, and to my surprise, she accepted. She was as outgoing and friendly as Barb described her, and was quite willing to talk about the years she spent with Ron Reynolds. She was a little chagrined at herself for not recognizing the part she played in his life. But when she grew tired of being an unpaid maid and cook, she thought seriously about leaving Ron. Their sons had different interests and different rules, and Blair realized they would never mesh. Luckily, she became so involved in one of her sons' wedding that leaving Ron was easy.

  Blair appeared to have suffered no ill effects from what had quickly become a one-way relationship. Her sense of humor was intact. Because they lived in the same area, she said she occasionally caught a glimpse of Ron across the street or in a store, but it was hard for her to believe she had once loved him.

  Mostly she was relieved that Ron was no longer in her life.

  Barb and I stopped in Olympia one day as we retraced Ronda's life. Dan Pearson, who had worked in store security with Ronda for years, invited us in and was eager to tell me about how brave and funny she was as they worked together to catch the "bad guys." As Dan talked, tears filled his eyes and marked his cheeks. Ronda might have been killed yesterday, rather than eleven years before; his memories of her were that clear. Although they had always had a platonic friendship, it was obvious that Dan still grieved for his lost partner.

  I took pages of notes on my yellow legal pad as Dan Pearson recalled a series of incidents with shoplifters in both Walmart and the Bon Marche.

  I met a number of Washington state troopers--both male and female--who remembered Ronda as a superior police officer. I got the same reaction from county deputies who said Ronda was always there to back them up if there was trouble out on lonely country roads in the middle of the night.

  When I gave a seminar on high-profile offenders at the annual convention of the International Association of Women Police, I talked to one of the Washington State Patrol sergeants. I told her I was researching a book about Ronda Reynolds's mysterious death, and her first reaction was "Oh, thank God! Ronda deserves to have someone tell her story."

  Barb introduced me by phone to Judy and Larry Semanko--Ron's sister and brother-in-law--and I talked for hours with them. Since Larry had been a Lewis County deputy and a Lewis County coroner's deputy, he had the experience and knowledge to spot murky areas of the probe into Ronda's death. It was Larry Semanko who went to the house on Twin Peaks Drive the morning Ronda died and found Ron wrapping Christmas presents. Larry had also smelled fresh laundry, and wondered about that. Why would his brother-in-law be doing a load of laundry while his wife still lay dead in their bedroom?

  Larry Semanko's "cop antenna" went up. He's been suspicious ever since, sensing that not everyone connected to Ronda's demise has told the truth.

  WHEN I PUT A REQUEST on my website, asking to hear from anyone who had known Ronda, Ron, or Katie Huttula, I was deluged with calls, letters, and emails from people--now in their fifties--who had grown up with them and gone to Elma High School. They all recalled incidents in earlier years involving the three people whose meeting in the Jehovah's Witnesses congregation had broken two marriages apart and ended in disaster.

  Of course, Ronda wasn't part of Katie and Ron's school life; she wa
s much younger and grew up hundreds of miles away. With Barb's help, I located friends from her younger years, some going way back to elementary school.

  One of their fellow graduates, a woman who worked in a government facility in McCleary, called me. She was one of the forces behind the August 2009 class reunion. Like so many classmates, she was surprised that Ron came to their fortieth anniversary, but said he seemed completely at ease. His first wife was there, and his fourth wife accompanied him to the reunion.

  "Was Katie there?" I asked.

  "No, we didn't really expect her to be. One of the gals in our class went to her mobile home early last summer. We were going to have this section of our reunion program with a lot of photographs of people we graduated with that was called 'Then and Now.' "

  It was after that when a former schoolmate at Elma High School came to her door. When Katie answered, she seemed not to recognize her old friend, and she absolutely refused to have her picture taken.

  "Actually," the woman who called me said, "she acted paranoid and ordered our photographer off her property! After that, we didn't make any more attempts to get her 'Now' picture."

  I couldn't find Katie Huttula. I searched for her on the Internet, and found an email address for her. I wrote to her, asking her to meet with me--either in person or on the phone. Two days later, I received three emails that seemed to be written in some kind of code. I didn't recognize the screen name on these emails, nor could I make out what the writer was talking about.

  I wrote back, asking if I was writing to "Katie." The reply said I had the wrong screen name and the person writing back said he--or she--had no knowledge of anyone named Katie.

  I get a lot of email, and this could easily have been just a mistake.

  Or not.

  Although I knew where Ron Reynolds was, where he lived, where he worked, even his telephone number, that did me no good. I wrote to him by ordinary mail first and I got no direct reply from him--but his attorney Ray Dudenbostel did answer.