In the Still of the Night Read online

  "Ronda put on this veneer that she was rough and gruff, when, inside, she was soft and tender," Claudia recalled. "She never swore, but she gave as good as she got. She would change tires and take on other challenges that weren't that easy for her--because she felt she had to keep proving herself. She was sometimes rebellious because she had to be, but she was really a very vulnerable woman who just wanted to be loved."

  "She was religious, too," Claudia said, although she admitted that Ronda was sometimes a "drama queen" when she let her emotions get away from her. "One of the male troopers teased her once when she got her hair cut very short. He said, 'If somebody didn't know you, Ronda, they'd think you were a dyke.' She got so mad at him!"

  Her husband, Mark, let Ronda fight her own battles to prove she was as capable as any male on the Patrol. He knew she could handle herself.

  Like most of her friends, Claudia found Ronda's sense of humor hilarious, and her fearlessness rather daunting. On a moonless winter night Claudia rode along with Ronda on back roads surrounding Ocean Shores, a community once touted as a resort town. Old-time big-band stars bandleader Kay Kyser and singer Ginny Simms had invested heavily in Ocean Shores some sixty-five or so years ago, but it had never lived up to their entrepreneurial expectations.

  Off season, in the darkest part of the night, Claudia found it scary. As they drove slowly through pockets of fog that clung like smoke to the road, something or someone suddenly jumped from the thicket of trees and scotch broom directly into the path of their patrol car. Ronda just missed hitting the figure, and Claudia's heart thumped in her chest.

  It was a person, a youngish-looking man who came up to the driver's window. He evidently hadn't noticed that it was a police unit; Ronda was driving the sergeant's patrol car that night, and it had no cage separating the front seat from the back. The stranger had been drinking; the odor of alcohol permeated their car.

  "He looked like a kid," Claudia said. "Sixteen--seventeen, maybe. That might have been the reason Ronda didn't frisk him for a weapon. She gave him a ticket for 'Minor in Possession of Alcohol' and drove him to where he wanted to go."

  There was something about him that gave Claudia Self a creepy feeling, and she didn't relax until he was out of the squad car. She asked Ronda why she hadn't searched him, and Ronda shrugged and said, 'Oh, he's just a kid.' "

  Several weeks later, Claudia heard a bulletin about a twenty-year-old man named Raymond Baca who had just been arrested for murdering a woman on the beach. He had stabbed her many times with a screwdriver.

  Claudia called Ronda and asked her if she recognized the name Baca. Ronda couldn't place him.

  "That's that guy that jumped in front of our car that night in Ocean Shores," Claudia said. "I guess we were lucky. What he did to that poor woman was awful."

  And they were lucky. Maybe they'd survived because there were two of them. Maybe it was because he realized he'd jumped in front of a police unit.

  Baca had a record in California for violent attacks, too. Ronda was chagrined at herself because she hadn't searched him at the time--or handcuffed him--but she took the valuable lesson to heart. She wasn't superwoman. Still, she stuck with her motto, "No fear."

  Asked if Ronda might be likely to take her own life, Claudia scoffed, just as the rest of Ronda's family and friends had. "I would say she was kind of dramatic, but she would never kill herself--especially shoot herself in the head.

  "For one thing, she was very, very, vain about her appearance," Claudia Self said. "That's not meant as a criticism--it didn't bother me. She always dressed perfectly, her uniform was spotless, her nails were just so, and she was careful about her makeup. I can't even imagine Ronda shooting herself in the head. She wouldn't have wanted anyone to find her like that."

  More than that, it simply wasn't in Ronda's psychological profile to take that way out. If she suffered disappointment in love or anything else, Claudia felt, Ronda would simply change her life and move on.

  "I remember Ronda the last time I saw her. She was working security at Macy's in Olympia on the weekend of--or maybe after--Thanksgiving. I asked her how things were going with her new husband, Ron Reynolds, and she said she 'had her issues with him,' but it didn't seem serious.

  "The last time I saw her she had a smile on her face."

  After her disappointing resignation from the Patrol, with eight years as a trooper, Ronda had started working in store security for Walmart and then for Macy's. In the past few years, Ronda's life seemed to crash down around her like boulders breaking free of unstable cliffs in the mountain passes. Her first marriage--to fellow trooper Mark Liburdi--had ended in divorce, and her second marriage of less than a year's duration was almost over. She was far from giving up; she was too strong for that, but she needed to go home to be with her family while she decided what to do next.

  Ronda never spent much time weeping about her misfortunes in life. Rather, she got mad, and she had always managed to come back wiser--but not more bitter. In that, she was like her mother. The two of them would talk, and weigh different options.

  Everyone who knew her was convinced that Ronda would rise like a phoenix from the ashes of her marriage to Ron Reynolds.

  ALTHOUGH BARB THOMPSON kept her mouth shut, she never understood Ronda's attraction to Ronald Reynolds. He was forty-six, fourteen years older than Ronda was, a grade school teacher, and a presiding overseer in the Jehovah's Witnesses religion. He was tall, with graying light brown hair, wore glasses, and had a thick brush of a mustache. Reynolds wasn't nearly as handsome as Mark Liburdi, the trooper who was her first husband.

  But he listened to Ronda when she turned to the Jehovah's Witnesses for counseling, and he always seemed to know just what to say to make her feel happy and serene.

  Mark and Ronda had met Reynolds when they went to Kingdom Hall services and learned that Ron and his wife of more than twenty years, Catherine "Katie" Huttula, lived several houses down the street from the Liburdis' home in McCleary. The Reynoldses had five sons, three of them still living at home.

  They were quite open with Mark and Ronda, and Mark recalled that Ron had confided that he and Katie had had a problem with drugs when they were much younger. Katie was still struggling with her own addictive personality and often stumbled.

  At that point, the Liburdis' union was in trouble, and it looked as if Ron and Katie weren't holding together very strongly, either. Ronda had never expected to get divorced, but it appeared that she was headed for that and she felt like a failure.

  When Ronda was grieving for the loss of her first marriage, the career she had loved, and her failure to carry any of her pregnancies to term, Ron Reynolds had offered himself as her spiritual counselor, and her concerned advisor. Ron was in the process of divorcing Katie.

  At first, Ron might have seemed only a safe place to jump to, but Ronda soon found it easy to fall in love with him. She was very vulnerable in 1997, and Ron made her believe in herself, and he seemed solid. She didn't really know what his financial situation was, but his job as an elementary school teacher paid well. Before his father's death, Ron had moved Leslie Reynolds into a trailer in McCleary behind his own house and cared for him. It wasn't much of a move; prior to the older man's illness, he had lived right next door. Ron had inherited that house.

  The thought of taking on care of the elderly man and three pubescent boys who resented her because they sided with their mother in the divorce was a bit challenging, but Ronda thought they could grow to be a family--in time. Mark had brought three children into their marriage.

  Ronda was confident she could come to love the Reynolds boys. She already found Ron's dad endearing.

  BARB THOMPSON HAD NEVER MET Ron Reynolds, and she had no chance to form an opinion on his suitability to marry Ronda. She was a little concerned that he was so much older than Ronda, and that he already had five sons and an ex-wife he'd been married to for over twenty years. She would have hoped that Ronda would wait longer to marry him, and give herself eno
ugh time to truly know him--but Ronda was adamant. She loved him, and she believed in him.

  Reynolds had used a "reverse seduction" ploy with Ronda, and that troubled her mother. The two women had always talked about problems in their lives--even intimate ones. But this was a strange courting technique to Barb.

  Ron had confessed to Ronda that he was impotent, and felt it wouldn't be fair to her for them to fall in love. He had, in fact, attempted to make love to her, with negative results, proving what he'd told her was true. She hurt for him and his male pride, but it didn't make her love him less. When they tried intercourse again, Ron was miraculously able to achieve an erection and he thanked Ronda profusely for making him feel alive again.

  Barb never believed that for a second, but Ronda was so happy to hear that she was capable of bringing Ron's sexual potency back to life. Ronda had always been a one-man woman, and as strong as she was, she seemed to feel incomplete without a significant male in her life. Ron seemed like the answer.

  They quickly became engaged, setting their wedding date for January 2, 1998.

  Barb was taking care of close to twenty prize horses--along with a few cows--on her ranch, making it almost impossible for her to leave Spokane to attend Ronda's wedding--especially since her mother, Virginia, and Ronda's brother, Freeman, really wanted to go. Someone had to stay home and take care of all the animals. Sometimes it seemed as though she always had a pregnant mare, and she needed to be there as "midwife."

  Barbara's brother, Bill Ramsey, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a decorated helicopter rescue pilot during the Vietnam War, flew up from Colorado to take Barb's place. He considered it a great honor, since he adored both Ronda and Freeman; they were like his own children. Bill and Barb were very close; she could think of no one more suited to stand in for her. They had been there for each other all their lives--through both happy times and very difficult periods.

  Barb wasn't avoiding Ronda's second wedding ceremony, and if marrying Ron made Ronda as happy as she sounded, her mother gave the union her blessing. Barb and Ronda agreed they would all get together for Mother's Day in May--if not sooner.

  Ron and Ronda were married on the second day of the new year Friday. The ceremony was held in the Abel House Bed & Breakfast, in the hamlet of Montesano, in Grays Harbor County.

  Ronda wore a white satin dress that gramma Virginia made with a bolero to match, and a string of pearls, and carried a bouquet of tiny roses and lilies of the valley. Ron wore a business suit, a colored shirt, and tie, but he made the street wear more festive with a rose and lily of the valley boutonniere. Both of them smiled widely for their wedding photo.

  Ron didn't care for one of Ronda's friends--Cheryl Gilbert*--and had urged Ronda to avoid her if possible. Mark Liburdi had felt the same way about Cheryl, who was a security guard at the Lucky Eagle Casino and a reserve officer in Elma, Washington.

  Claudia Self described Cheryl as "coarse and crude." "I never understood why Ronda befriended her--unless, typical of Ronda, she felt sorry for Cheryl."

  Ron complained that Cheryl clung to Ronda and had no respect, he felt, for their private time. Possibly he didn't know that Cheryl was working off some bad-check charges she had made on Ronda's account when she was married to Mark Liburdi. Ronda didn't want to turn her in.

  Ron agreed that Cheryl could continue cleaning their house, but he didn't want her at their wedding. Since it was a small affair, Ronda didn't invite Cheryl. But she showed up anyway, and Ronda didn't have the heart to ask her to leave. She even posed for one awkward snapshot with Cheryl.

  Ronda had such high hopes for her second marriage, but she may have wed too soon. There were any number of things the couple didn't know about each other. Ron had seemed so kind, so thoughtful when she was struggling to find her equilibrium, but he changed after they wed. Not a lot at first. Ronda figured that it was just the adjustment that all new couples have to make until they get into the rhythm of living together. She had known him as her spiritual advisor, as another woman's husband, and, briefly, as her lover.

  She had had no idea what he might be like as a husband.

  At first they lived in Ron's house in McCleary, in Grays Harbor County. It is a town of 1,500 people, nestled beside State Highway 12 as it heads southwest toward Aberdeen and the Pacific Ocean. Salmon and bottom fish fisherman pass through McCleary in droves during the season. Like several other small towns in the area, McCleary has its traditions. It draws a modicum of fame for its summer festival--the Bear Festival--where the gourmet treat is, of course, bear stew.

  Shortly thereafter, Ron was hired by the Toledo School District in Lewis County to be an elementary school principal. He'd always been popular with his students, and he had earned his master's degree and was considering going for a doctorate in education.

  The couple bought a house together on Twin Peaks Drive in Toledo. Ronda contributed $15,000 of the down payment. They weren't at all deterred by the violence of the wildly popular television mystery series also called Twin Peaks.

  Because she was in negotiation with the state patrol over just how much her retirement package would be, she borrowed that sum from her mother, promising to pay her back when she got the retirement money owed her. Ronda knew she wouldn't receive her full retirement sum of $12,000 to $15,000 because she owed the Washington State Patrol money for a time period where she had mistakenly taken sick pay as well as state compensation for an on-the-job injury. She also had money coming from the sale of a home and acreage she and Mark Liburdi owned together.

  Even though she had put up $15,000 toward their new house, Ron explained to his bride that his ex-wife, Katie, had taken everything away from him in their divorce, and he just wasn't comfortable putting half interest in their new house in Ronda's name. It wasn't that he didn't trust her, of course, but he'd just gone through losing everything so he could be with her. He promised to add her name to the house deed later.

  Ronda said she understood. She trusted him completely and knew how devastated he was when many of the possessions and money he'd worked for for years were taken away and given to Katie.

  They moved in in August, seven months after their wedding. Ron didn't have any furniture of his own any longer, so Ronda brought all of her furniture to their new house. Some of it was quite new, and other pieces--like her grandmother's china cabinet and paintings--had great sentimental value for her.

  Ron moved his three youngest sons in with them. Still mourning the recent death of her beloved Rottweiler, Duchess, Ronda brought her new rottie pup, Jewels, an aged stray Rottweiler she'd rescued and named Daisy, and her feisty Jack Russell terrier, Tuffy. If there had only been room, she would have brought Clabber Toe, her beloved horse, too.

  It was 1998. Ronda still hoped for a truly happy marriage, two or three babies, and to be a continued success in her new career in store security and loss prevention.

  Barb Thompson was in no hurry for Ronda to repay the loan she'd extended, but her daughter assured her that that would happen as soon as she received the money that was due to her.

  The last thing anyone expected were dark clouds ahead for Ronda; she had paid her dues and suffered so many painful emotional setbacks in the first three decades of her life. Those days were over, and Ronda didn't envision anything but happiness in her future.

  Ronda would never see 1999.

  * The names of some individuals have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the narrative.

  911:

  Sudden Death in Toledo

  IT WAS 1:40 A.M. IN SPOKANE, Washington, on Wednesday, December 16, 1998. Barb Thompson was jarred from sleep by the sound of her phone ringing. Groggy, she reached across her bed for it, knowing that after it rang five times her answering machine would pick up. She didn't want to wake the man who shared her home--"Skeeter"--as he was ill and often in pain that made it hard for him to sleep.

  Barb grabbed the phone on the third ring, and muttered, "Hel
lo."

  She heard only the buzz of the dial tone.

  She lay awake, wondering if she had been dreaming--but she was sure the phone really had rung. Expecting it to ring again, she waited.

  There was nothing more.

  BARB HAD TALKED TO RONDA only a few hours earlier. Her daughter had been calling from her home in Toledo, a tiny town with a population of under 700. Barb had never been there, although the Reynoldses had lived there for several months. She suspected she would never see Ronda's house; Ronda had called her three days before to tell her that Ron had asked for a divorce.

  Ronda said then that she would be flying to Spokane on that Wednesday, scheduled to arrive at 12:59 P.M. She had considered flying out of Portland but had decided to take an Alaska Airlines flight from SeaTac Airport in Seattle. David Bell, a longtime friend and a police sergeant in Des Moines, Washington, had offered to drive the seventy-five miles to Toledo to pick her up and drive her back north to SeaTac Airport. Dave and Ronda had once been sweethearts and, after a decade, they still remained solid friends who depended on each other.

  Barb and Ronda, mother and daughter, had talked for a long time around eleven on Tuesday night. Her mother was relieved to hear that Ronda was quite upbeat in her attitude when she said she didn't mind walking away from her eleven-month marriage. Still, she was determined to recoup the thousands of dollars she had put into the house, along with all her efforts in painting, decorating, and making it a home.

  "I'm actually looking forward to getting on with my life, Mom," Ronda said. "I just need a few days with you guys to decide a definite course of action."

  "You're sure?" Barb asked. "You don't have to put on a happy face for me. You know that."

  "I'm sure. I'm fine. I can't wait to see you all tomorrow."

  Freeman, Ronda's "little" brother, who was seven inches taller than she was, would take Barb to the airport in Spokane to pick up Ronda. Then they would swing by Gramma Virginia's house--which was right next door to Barb's.