In the Still of the Night Page 5

  A phone book, opened to the yellow airline pages, still sat in the master bathroom near the phone there. Ronda had surely made reservations to fly somewhere from one airport or another, but the investigators would have to check with Alaska Airlines before they knew for sure what her travel plans had been.

  Cheryl Gilbert was baffled and said she had no idea that Ronda had decided to fly out from Seattle; she was positive Ronda was leaving from Portland. She appeared harried at finding the situation in the Reynolds home, but not terribly upset.

  Ron Reynolds was stoic, apparently determined to keep from giving in to emotion. It seemed that he hadn't yet accepted that Ronda was gone.

  Even rookie police officers soon learn that human beings react in many different ways to tragedies and sudden death; some go all to pieces, sobbing and shaking, while others may seem calm when they are really in deep shock.

  Although it hadn't even begun to get light on this morning only five days from the shortest day of the year in Washington state, the death scene was crowded and becoming more so. Ideally, the fewer people allowed at the site of an unexplained death, the better. Two investigators are enough to take photographs, hold opposite ends of a measuring tape, and gather, preserve, and label evidence. Usually the first to arrive are patrol deputies or police patrolmen who keep the scene secure until detectives can respond. The presence of family, friends, neighbors--and even police supervisors--raises the risk of contamination of physical evidence.

  Jerry Berry, the detective who would soon take over the investigation of Ronda Reynolds's death, calls them "Looky-Loos," and he includes members of the sheriff's department and "the brass" who invade a crime scene.

  To begin with, there were just two deputies--Bob Bishop and Gary Holt--along with the paramedics. Deputy Bishop had arrived only three minutes after Holt did. When Bishop observed Ronda's body, he saw that she lay on her left side, was covered with an electric blanket--which was turned on--and had her head on a pillow.

  "I didn't see any weapon," Bishop wrote in his report.

  AS THE AID CREW gathered up their gear, ready to clear the premises, Gary Holt asked Ron Reynolds to step into the kitchen. He wanted to tape an interview of Reynolds's recall of events while they were still fresh in his mind. The three boys were gone, but at least Ron was still there.

  Ron told him that he had come home the night before at about 8:30. He and Ronda had had a prolonged argument; they were in the process of separating. He said he was worried when she began talking about suicide. He had told her to stop talking about killing herself, to stay with him and not leave him.

  "I'd found the empty holster for my gun," he continued, "and I asked her where the gun was. She told me she'd given it to Dave Bell--a friend of hers--for safekeeping, so I wasn't as concerned then because I knew it wasn't in the house."

  (When Jerry Berry read Bishop's follow-up report, he shook his head slightly. He'd learned that Reynolds was a black powder expert and a hunter, and it was rare for men interested in guns and ballistics to allow their weapons to be given away. Especially to his wife's old boyfriend. His intuition told him that Ron would have been angry if he thought Ronda had given his father's handgun to anyone.)

  When Reynolds spoke to Deputy Gary Holt that first morning at 7:13, he said he'd done his best to stay awake all night so he could watch over Ronda in her depressed state, but by about five in the morning he became so exhausted, he figured he must have fallen asleep. The last thing he remembered was that he sensed his wife was in bed next to him. When he was awakened by his alarm clock at six, she wasn't there. He hadn't heard any unusual noises during the hour since he dropped off to sleep.

  "I began to look for her, and I found her in the bathroom closet on the floor," Reynolds said.

  "I took her pulse," he told Holt once more.

  He had seen the terrible injury just below her right temple, and called 911.

  This was only the second statement the school principal had made. There would be many more as some investigators dug deeper and others were ready to mark Ronda's case "Closed. Death by suicide."

  Something bothered Deputy Bob Bishop. Ron Reynolds said that he hadn't heard a gunshot because both the bathroom and closet doors were closed. And yet Ronda died only about twelve to fifteen feet from the bed where he slept. Bishop walked to the closet door, did a double take, and looked in again. Ronda's feet were exposed and extended over the door's sill. Ron had said the door was closed and he had opened it to find his wife. But Bishop realized that it would have been impossible to shut the closet door because Ronda's lower legs extending over the sill would have blocked it.

  Strange.

  It was a grim puzzle with different detectives apparently observing different aspects that jolted them in this sad and sudden death.

  Deputy Gary Holt wrote in his report that he had seen the .32-caliber Rossi revolver (Ron's gun) in Ronda's left hand. David Bell hadn't taken it out of the house after all. But Bishop's memory was that the blanket covered her left hand and "the gun was in the blanket."

  In fact the blanket was clutched so tightly in her left hand that it took some effort to loosen it.

  Ronda was right-handed. Ron was left-handed.

  Deputy Holt's first statement said that Ronda was lying on her left side and the pistol was resting "next to her forehead."

  But a police photograph of Ronda showed her in the classic fetal position. She lay on her left arm and her right arm was tucked under her right breast--not a position consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the right side of her head. Could she have somehow shot herself in the head--and then clutched the blanket with her left hand and moved her right arm until it was tightly caught beneath her right breast before she died?

  It seemed unlikely.

  It would take a neurologist or forensic pathologist to say what deliberate actions a person suffering a gunshot wound into the brain could execute.

  Nevertheless, Holt tended to believe Ron Reynolds, who assured him Ronda had killed herself. Her manner of death appeared to have been set in stone from that first 911 call. Nothing, perhaps, is more devastating to an efficient and thorough death investigation than deciding too soon what has happened. Once minds are closed, it becomes extremely difficult to consider other possibilities.

  Ronda Reynolds appeared to have taken her own life. Her husband had said so in his first call for help. Thus far, every lawman--save, perhaps, Deputy Bob Bishop--accepted that out of whole cloth. Still, it was difficult to understand why she had made so many plans for the immediate and distant future if she intended to commit suicide in the darkest hours before dawn.

  It was apparent that Ronda had planned a trip; her three suitcases were nearby and neatly packed, and her makeup and personal items were in her red Suzuki Tracker parked in the driveway. The rear plastic window was partially unzipped.

  Holt walked down the hall to a bedroom near the front of the house. He could smell the strong odor of incense coming from what they learned later was Jonathan's room. It was heavy enough that it had to have been snuffed out very recently.

  Why was Jonathan burning incense at six in the morning?

  Homicide Detective David Neiser arrived at the house on Twin Peaks Drive at eight minutes to eight. Chief Criminal Deputy Joe Doench was already there. Although Doench would not write a report about his reason for being there, he observed the scene and put out a call for Detective Jerry Berry to respond and give his take on what had been found so far in the Reynoldses' house.

  Neiser said later that he had removed the handgun after observing that it "was between her two hands," although when he peeled back the pillow that had been over her head, he noted the horizontal imprint of the gun barrel etched deeply into her skin from her right temple across her forehead. He agreed that the wound was just above and to the right of Ronda's right ear, and the blanket was grasped in her left hand.

  Neiser tried later to explain to his sergeant--Glade Austin--why he had moved the gun ev
en before photos were taken of its original position. He said he didn't know why--it had been an automatic reaction, his wanting to get a loaded gun into a safer place.

  Jerry Berry, whose name suggests more of a cartoon character than a dedicated homicide detective, was initially the other half of the investigating duo. Berry, of the Lewis County Sheriff's Office at that time, is a shrewd and dogged detective, and he was assigned to work the crime scene, looking for evidence, while Dave Neiser would interview any witnesses who might show up.

  Berry took photographs of the home's interior, and found a number of perplexing aspects of the so-called suicide. Ronda's hair was swept up and back, as if someone had run their fingers through it, possibly to check her bullet wound. Or she could have been dragged--but there wasn't room for that in the closet, and, more telling, there was no blood trail there or in the bedroom. Or in the entire house, for that matter.

  Someone had used lipstick to write on the bathroom mirror:

  I Love You!

  Please call me

  (509-555-0202)

  It was Ronda's grandmother's number in Spokane. Was it Ronda's hand that had written the lipstick message? Berry noted that Ronda would have had to get on a stool or really stretch to reach that high a spot on the vanity mirror. And a handwriting expert would have to be called in to see if Ronda had written it, or if someone else had.

  Berry caught his own image in the mirror as he photographed the bright red message. The words could not possibly be construed to be a permanent goodbye note.

  Even when he examined the puzzling note on the mirror, the handwriting expert could not determine who had written it. However, he doubted it had been Ronda Reynolds.

  "Most people write on a blackboard or a mirror at their own eye level," he commented. "This is far above where Ronda's eye level would have been."

  Again, if she had been suicidal, why would she have left such a message? It sure wasn't a suicide note; was she so organized that she had tried to make her suicide look like murder? And when was it written there?

  The bathroom and the bathroom closet were immaculate, just like the rest of the house. Ronda's shoes were wrapped in tissue paper, stacked in their original boxes and lined up neatly, clothes hung on hangers that all faced the same way, and other items were stored in plastic bins with covers. Ron's dress shirts were carefully starched and ironed.

  The only out-of-place object was a gift box of cheeses, smoked meats, jellies, and crackers just to the right of Ronda's body. Berry figured it might have been used to prop up the dead woman's arm.

  Jerry Berry found a prescription container for Ronda for Zoloft, an anti-anxiety medication, but the date on the bottle was May 1998, and there were still a number of pills in it. If she had been taking too many Zoloft pills, or even if she had taken them as prescribed, they would have been gone months earlier.

  The queen-size waterbed with its blue sheets and blue-and-white quilt in a "wedding ring" pattern appeared to have been slept in on only one side. If an observer stood at the foot of the bed facing straight ahead, the rumpled area was on the left.

  That turned out to be Ron's side.

  Ronda's usual spot was on the right, and it was barely rumpled. The pillows still on the bed matched the one placed over Ronda's head.

  There was an empty half-gallon bottle of Black Velvet whiskey on the bed stand on Ronda's side of the bed. When dusted for fingerprints, the bottle had none at all! The detectives would learn that Ronda didn't drink hard liquor--preferring wine coolers, or Zima, or a beer on a hot day, and those only on occasion. Ron said that the last time he looked at the bottle, it was approximately a quarter full.

  He hadn't drunk any of it, he said.

  A DEATH INVESTIGATION is such a delicate procedure. The best detectives must always view it first as a homicide, second as suicide, third as accidental, and finally as a natural death. They begin with a jumbled scene, items that may or may not be essential physical evidence, witness statements, forensic science aspects such as blood spatter, DNA, hair and fiber comparisons, forensic odontology, autopsy findings, ballistics, and all manner of possible evidence that will help to either convict or clear suspects. This is particularly important when the victim dies in his or her home, and if the suspect(s) also had reason to be there. For instance, unknown fingerprints are far more telling than those of people whose usual place of residence has become a death scene.

  The only absolute way to connect a fingerprint with a killer is to find it pressed into a victim's wet blood, dried there as a silent, irrefutable statement.

  There were dozens of possibilities for significant finds in the small house on Twin Peaks Drive. In the icy predawn hours ten days before Christmas, the Lewis County sheriff's staff had just begun to open puzzle after puzzle, peeling off layers like the brightly colored Russian dolls that fit one inside the other until the last, tiniest doll is revealed.

  But most of those Lewis County deputies and detectives at the death scene believed Ron Reynolds's declaration that his wife had died a suicide, and their minds were virtually made up that that was the true manner of death.

  Jerry Berry wasn't nearly ready to declare a category into which Ronda's death fit. He was a man who approached any death scene with a jaundiced eye, and he had any number of questions in his mind, even as the case was only a few hours old. He noted things that disturbed him, and expected that the investigation would continue for days--even weeks.

  It's not at all unusual for detectives to spend twenty-four hours or even more at a death scene, working alongside bodies of victims until the time is right to remove them. That wasn't true of Ronda's death. Lewis County didn't have a medical examiner, but instead operated with a coroner, as do many small counties in Washington and other states. Some coroners aren't even medical doctors, much less forensic specialists.

  Coroner Terry Wilson had been in his elected post for twenty-seven years, and some of his calls on manner of death had troubled Jerry Berry in the past. Wilson did not come to the house on Twin Peaks Drive, but instead dispatched his deputy Carmen Brunton.

  Carmen had worked in Wilson's office for a long time. She was a middle-aged, stylish woman with thick blond hair that she wore short and swept up. Her usual mien was stern and her face gave few hints about what she was feeling.

  The time Carmen had arrived was never established accurately. Her report says she was notified of Ronda's death at 6 A.M. That could not have been; Ron Reynolds didn't call the sheriff's line until 6:20. Since it had taken most of the deputies twenty minutes to half an hour to reach the Reynolds's home, it was likely Brunton didn't get there until around 7 A.M.--at the earliest. When she did, she wrote that rigor mortis had set into Ronda's lower legs, and later she noted on her report that the reddish-purple stains of lividity had begun on Ronda's back when she was at the funeral home.

  There was no indication that anyone had taken the dead woman's liver temperature with a thermometer probe. That could have further pinpointed her time of death.

  After finding Ronda Reynolds on her left side, the investigators had rolled her onto her back for photos. It was apparent that the blood that flowed from her head wound had soaked her pajama top, hair, and the carpet beneath her. If she had been shot somewhere else, and her body then moved into the closet, there would have been blood in some other area of the house or in one of the couple's vehicles.

  And there was none.

  Carmen Brunton also said that the wound near Ronda's ear looked like an exit wound and that there appeared to be an entrance wound inside her mouth. Both of her opinions--which would suggest suicide--were erroneous.

  Ronda's body was removed to Brown's Funeral Home in Centralia, and Deputy Coroner Brunton signed the first of several death certificates on Christmas Eve. The manner of death was listed as "Undetermined," while the cause of death indicated "a contact gunshot wound to the head." Brunton estimated Ronda had died "within minutes" after being shot.

  That was technically possible. Ro
nda might have been unconscious and/or paralyzed, but she would have had to live for quite some time for her heart to pump out that much blood. The heart of a healthy person may well keep beating, even though all brain activity is gone. As it beats, blood will flow or leak from arteries and veins--even though the victim is already "brain dead."

  There was no question at all that Ronda was deceased, and that she had passed from this life many hours earlier. The question that loomed from the very beginning was, of course, what was the manner of her death?

  AS THE LEWIS COUNTY INVESTIGATORS worked at the scene of Ronda Reynolds's death, her mother Barb was three hundred miles away, happily planning for her daughter's Christmas visit and counting the hours until she and Freeman would pick Ronda up at the airport. Nothing seemed to be amiss; the only odd thing in Barb's Spokane home that morning was her memory of her phone ringing in the wee hours--and the dead silence she heard when she answered it. She had practically forgotten about that.

  She knew that Ronda was sad that her second marriage was failing--just as the first had, but her daughter hadn't seemed truly distressed when they'd talked the night before, sometime between ten and eleven-thirty. Ronda had called her grandmother on Sunday or Monday to tell her that Ron was going back to his first wife, but there had been rumblings of trouble for months--so it wasn't really startling news, and Ronda seemed to be coping with the breakup as well as could be expected.

  Ronda hadn't mentioned suicide. Of course she hadn't. It was unthinkable. "She was upset--she was distraught," Barb Thompson recalled. "She had just been hit with an outright, unmistakable request for a divorce. But she she wasn't giving up. She was wondering, 'What do I do now?' "

  Barb wasn't sure what Ronda's financial situation was, but she assumed it wasn't that great. She was working in loss prevention for the Bon Marche (soon to be absorbed by Macy's department chain) and was still on a probational status, although that would end soon. She had told Barb earlier that she gave her paychecks to Ron and he handled all their money and paid the bills. He insisted on it, which wasn't shocking on the surface; Ronda wasn't good with budgeting.