In the Still of the Night Page 8

  After the Lewis County Sheriff's Office did a background check on him and found him clean, Mayor Roberts hired Berry and sent him to the academy.

  He had no trouble with the curriculum or the physical strength and agility tests at the state Criminal Justice Training Center, but he was teased unmercifully; the last candidate from Mossyrock (not Rufe) had proved to be both dishonest and bizarre, and his background was all fake.

  Jerry Berry was in good shape at forty, and even though the other trainees were only half his age and called him "the Old Man," he kept up just fine.

  Disaster struck the day before the final fitness test required for graduation from the academy. He severely injured his left ankle, and even walking lightly on that foot brought pain. His teammates wanted to tell the academy staff and take him to the hospital, but he knew if he went he'd be barred from the next day's tests.

  "I wanted to graduate with my class," he recalls. "I made them promise not to say anything."

  The next morning, Berry wrapped his swollen ankle as tight as he could with Ace bandages, so it would move as little as possible. If he noticed that anyone was looking at him, he forced himself by sheer will to walk without a limp. The test required that each candidate take a quarter-mile lap around the track--as fast as he could go. Halfway down the back side of the track, he had to scale a six-foot wooden obstacle and keep running. Next there was a culvert to belly-crawl through, more running, and finally a ten-foot chain-link fence to scale and drop to the other side, with a final sprint to the finish line.

  Berry did all right over the wooden wall, managing to land on his good foot, and it felt great to drop to his belly as he crawled through the culvert. But as he emerged, he made the mistake of starting to run on his left foot instead of his right.

  "My ankle was on fire as I ran," he remembers. "The pain was like a burning rod being shoved into my ankle."

  He was running as well as he could, but anyone watching could see that he was limping badly. The ten-foot fence rose between him and the finish line, and it seemed insurmountable. But he grabbed on and pulled himself hand over hand until he could swing his left leg over the top. Halfway down, he let go, managing to land on his right foot.

  He hobbled, but he made it across the finish line before he collapsed. He graduated with his class and brought a modicum of respect back to Mossyrock. The town finally had someone who had beaten the Police Academy.

  Berry hired one man--a twenty-one-year-old who had been in his graduating class: Erick Hendrickson. Erick was blond, six feet, two inches tall, and weighed 220. His nickname was "Baby Huey," which wasn't much better than "the Old Man." Maybe it was worse.

  Berry was old enough to be Erick's father, but they made a great team. Together they set out to bring real law enforcement to Mossyrock. They began by staking out the town's two taverns, where most of the trouble began. Driving under the influence (DUI) was a regular pastime for a number of Mossyrock citizens. Arrests in that category rose 400 percent in the first year of the Berry-Hendrickson police force.

  Berry had promised to stay for a year as marshal/police chief of Mossyrock. He knew it would be a self-limiting position, but he worked at it as hard as he had on any job in his life. He stayed there for nineteen months. During that time, he discovered that law enforcement was a perfect fit for him, and he wanted to learn more about it. When he was offered a job as a patrol deputy by Lewis County in 1991, he took it.

  It seemed like a great opportunity, and he was enthusiastic about the future. Even as he drove out in the "tules" on foggy nights, ticketing speeders, more drunks, and writing citations for drivers without seat belts, Jerry Berry loved his job. He made a point of working just a little harder than he had to, and that didn't always sit well with some of the other officers in the sheriff's office. Berry tried to shrug off remarks about his age, although he was annoyed when a lieutenant, who was clearly as old--or older--than he was, asked him if he thought his age would hamper him on the job.

  Jerry Berry had a goal: he wanted one day to be a detective, and the sooner the better. Berry was twenty years behind, and although he was only in his early forties, younger officers kept reminding him of it. He was always running to catch up with the two decades of experience he had missed when he was a construction worker.

  With that in mind, he signed up for every training course he could, most of them useful in investigating homicides. John McCroskey, the Lewis County sheriff, agreed to fund some of Berry's tuition and he spent weeks studying interviewing and interrogation at FBI classes taught in Seattle. He also took an eleven-week Advanced Homicide Investigation class taught by Robert Keppel, one of the prime members of the Ted Bundy task force.

  Berry drove once a week to Bellevue, Washington--a 160-mile round trip--to take classes that enhanced his skills as a homicide investigator. He learned about the secrets inherent in blood spatter from former Multnomah County sheriff's detective Rod Englert--who had become one of the top "blood pattern experts" in America. Berry also attended a class taught by Vernon Geberth, a genius in homicide investigation who had retired as commander of the homicide unit of the New York City Police Department's Bronx Division.

  When the sheriff's office had no money to pay tuition for advanced criminal investigation classes, Berry was happy to pay for them himself.

  Berry had no illusions about working in a big-city department; he wanted only to be the best investigator he could be right where he was.

  Working with the U.S. Forest Service and the FBI, Berry helped break up a methamphetamine ring and recovered $150,000 in illicit drug money.

  Sheriff McCroskey wrote him a letter of commendation, and he was named Officer of the Year.

  Early on, Berry applied to be assigned to Lewis County's five-man detective unit. After two years, he got his wish. Between 1995--when he became a homicide detective--and 2001, he participated in twenty-three death investigations.

  But Jerry Berry had never encountered a case like that of Ronda Reynolds. It would change his life and the lives of so many people in Lewis County, Washington. He refused to give up looking for the truth inherent in the mystery of Ronda's sudden, strange death.

  As the years passed, Berry's dogged reluctance to go along with Coroner Terry Wilson's ever-changing opinions on the manner of Ronda's death, and his stubbornness about approving all the decisions made by his own department, made him enemies and annoyed his sergeant and others in high positions.

  Maybe he was a little cocky. He prided himself on being thorough; he had never been a man to do things halfway and he expected as much from his fellow officers.

  Berry would gradually become the "kicking boy" in a case that refused to go away. Many of his superiors felt he hindered their progress and procedures in investigating what a number of cops and laypersons felt was outright murder.

  He was the one who encouraged Ronda's mother not to give up her continual criticisms of the Lewis County Sheriff's Office, and he supported her in her search for answers. But Barb Thompson would have done that with or without Jerry Berry.

  Infighting behind the walls of any law enforcement agency is common, particularly when they are dealing with high-profile life-and-death crimes. Many departments refuse to exchange information with other agencies. In the Charles Manson cult murders, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office and the Los Angeles Police Department each guarded their secrets carefully, stubbornly refusing to share everything they knew. In a sense, a police department is much like a competitive business. The salesmen who make the most sales pit themselves against each other in the company. In law enforcement, he who brings in the most evidence against an infamous suspect wins.

  His critics said Jerry Berry was a self-aggrandizer who was determined to solve the Ronda Reynolds case all by himself. More likely, he was a truly dedicated detective who was showing compassion for a dead woman's mother. Detectives try to keep themselves emotionally separated from grieving families--but sometimes it isn't easy. The most sensitive humans m
ake superior investigators, and that very sensitivity tends to make them let down their guards from time to time.

  Barb Thompson was unaware of any of the backbiting and rustlings of suspicion and discontent in the sheriff's office. So far, Berry was playing by the book, and keeping whatever information he had sacrosanct within the Lewis County office.

  Ronda Reynolds had been dead less than forty-eight hours, and the majority of the Lewis County sheriff's staff had already begun to believe Ron Reynold's emotionless statement that his wife had died a suicide.

  Even so, there were endless avenues where the investigators might learn who Ronda really was.

  DECEMBER 17 WAS A GRAY DAY, and it fit Barb Thompson's and Dave Bell's mood as they left the sheriff's office and their first meeting with Jerry Berry.

  The last of the deciduous leaves had torn away from tree branches when the winds blew north from the Pacific Ocean and the Columbia River and only the fir, cedar, and pine trees added a muted green color as they bent toward the ground in the fierce wind. They drove in silence to what had once been Ronda's dream home. Barb realized she had never seen it outside of the snapshots Ronda had sent her.

  At some point, they would have to talk in depth, but they each felt too much grief to begin. Barb had no doubt that Dave had been deeply in love with Ronda; the two of them had come in and out of each other's lives for years. If only they had managed to make their reunions last. Years ago, when Ronda was still a state trooper, she had made Barb promise that if anything ever happened to her, her mother would get in touch with Dave first--before she informed anyone else.

  Barb had always suspected that Ronda had never really fallen out of love with Dave, even while she was married to two other men. She just thought Ronda had never acted on it. Dave wasn't available to her for most of the ten years they were apart. He was entrenched in an unhappy marriage, and even when he finally did divorce, the child custody battle between him and his ex-wife continued. He loved his boys, and he couldn't face the possibility of losing them. If he'd married Ronda back then, he was quite sure his ex-wife would have kept the boys away from him--not because he lacked anything as a father, but out of resentment. They meant too much to him to risk that.

  By the time Dave was given custody of his sons, and was free to marry Ronda, they had maintained a close friendship for all the years in between. But it was too late. Ronda and Dave were like two trains on different tracks, never meeting at the same place and time.

  IN THE INTERIM, Ronda had begun to date Mark Liburdi, thirty-two, a fellow Washington state trooper. Mark had reddish blond hair and a mustache, and he was very tall. He was an attractive man, especially in uniform, and Ronda quickly fell in love with him. Mark was eight years older than Ronda--and he had been married before. He had custody of his three children, two boys and a girl, but that was no obstacle to Ronda. She loved children and was happy to become a stepmother. They married in Spokane in June 1989.

  Ronda wore a wedding gown reminiscent of the 1920s, with a ruffled hat to match; she had designed it and Gramma Virginia had sewed it. Mark wore his full dress uniform.

  Ronda's deepest hope was to have children of her own with Mark and build a large, blended family. The newlyweds and his children lived in Renton for a while, but they both wanted to move to a more rural locale.

  Nine months later, Ronda and Mark were transferred to the Hoquiam WSP office on the Pacific Ocean coast in Grays Harbor County. The economy in that county had been hurting long before the rest of the country, and home prices reflected that. They bought a house on Stilson Road in McCleary with plenty of room for Mark's children and the children Ronda hoped to have with him.

  It was the answer to Ronda's dreams. The gray rambler was surrounded by five acres of horse pasture, and they fenced their acreage in with electric wires topping the fences. There were stables for Ronda's horses. A creek burbled cheerfully behind the house, and there were plenty of blackberry bushes back there, too.

  Mark fell in love with some adjoining property with a cabin hidden deep in the evergreen woods, and Ronda agreed that they should buy that, too.

  Ronda was probably as happy as she had ever been in her life when she stepped outside her house to breathe the fresh air, and listen to the wind in the treetops. Her favorite shift in the Washington State Patrol was during the night and early morning watch, and her heart sang as she came home in the morning to this small ranch she loved so much.

  She had other property, too, thanks to her mother's careful planning. Barb Thompson had owned thirty acres west of Dallas, which she sold to buy her horse ranch in Spokane. In her divorce from Hal Thompson, Freeman's father, it was decreed that Barb would put the Spokane acreage in Ronda's and Freeman's names. She did that, giving them joint ownership with rights of survivorship. Either could have borrowed money on the property at any time if they needed to.

  "Ronda was always on my checking account," Barb recalls, "ever since she was fourteen, and she never took advantage of that."

  Ronda loved Mark's three children, even though she and his thirteen-year-old daughter wrangled a bit, something to be expected with teenage girls and stepmothers. Although it was Ronda who took physical care of her and listened to her adolescent problems, Laurita* felt that her birth mother--a noncustodial parent--could do no wrong. Ronda understood that; she had no wish to speak badly of Mark's first wife.

  Once, one of Mark's two sons stole something from a local store. Its value was negligible, but Ronda wanted the boy to learn a lesson. She "arrested" him and took him to jail. He stayed behind bars just long enough to understand the seriousness of what he had done, and she was happy to let him out and take him home.

  Sadly, Ronda's dreams of having her own children were not to be. She miscarried several pregnancies. The losses may have hit her harder then they did Mark. Perhaps they did--he may have simply refused to talk about the lost babies, closing up and drawing inward because miscarriages and Ronda's grief were too painful for him to contemplate. He already had three children, and Ronda had none at all. She felt empty and inadequate as a woman.

  By 1997, the Liburdis' marriage was not going well. They had married full of hope in 1989 but it looked as if their problems might be impossible to resolve. Ronda worried that she would never be able to give birth to a healthy baby. Mark apparently didn't grasp how devastating that was for her.

  One miscarriage--or, rather, the premature birth of a male fetus--took place when she was in her fifth month. She had been so happy when she passed the three-month mark, believing that this was the child she could at last carry safely to term. She delivered at home in the bathroom, but her baby didn't cry and showed no signs of life. The placenta adhered tightly to the uterine wall, and she was in danger of critical hemorrhaging. As Mark drove her to the hospital, she was forced to carry her baby's pale body in her hands just above her knees, praying--but not really believing--that somehow doctors could make him breathe. She wasn't worried about herself; she wanted only to save her baby boy.

  Mark checked her into the hospital's emergency room, and left. She thought he was only going to park his car, but he drove away, headed for his patrol shift. She was all alone.

  Ronda and her best friend, Glenda Larson, never really forgave him for dropping her off at the hospital as if she only had flu or a sprained ankle. Why hadn't he seen how much she needed him during that tragic time? She was all by herself when the baby was declared dead.

  Mark and Ronda fought often and separated frequently. Most of their disagreements were about finances. Ronda wasn't good at handling money; no one who knew her ever argued otherwise. If she forgot to pay a bill she knew Mark would be angry, so she didn't tell him. She realized that he'd find out eventually, but she avoided thinking about it. Once, he gave her the money to pay their property taxes and she forgot to do it. That became a huge bone of contention between Mark and Ronda.

  When Ronda saw that Mark's youngsters needed clothes, she paid for them with her own money, rather than p
urchase them from a secondhand store as he suggested. She nurtured and tutored his two boys and his daughter, and they began to blossom under her care.

  But the loss of her baby left Ronda with deep sorrow and shaky nerves. Where she had been able to brush off sexual harassment and reprimands by her Washington State Patrol superiors before, it was difficult for her now. Memories of the little boy who would never grow and thrive haunted her.

  Ronda's state patrol file shows that she notified her sergeant that she was pregnant in March 1992, with an estimated delivery date of late October. At that time, her obstetrician recommended that she have no road-patrol duties, and shouldn't be lifting anything over twenty-five pounds for the duration of her pregnancy. She had to take several leaves of absence for medical reasons and, of course, again when she lost the baby.

  For the old guard in the state patrol, she was living proof that women brought special problems when they set out to be troopers. Among themselves, they postulated that men were stronger, and they didn't have difficult pregnancies or cramps. Of course, no one said that out loud because it was officially forbidden, and considered prejudicial.

  The one thing that Ronda never expected to happen was the continual sexual harassment and the steps superiors took to undermine her career as a Washington state trooper. She loved the job she had worked toward for half her life, and she planned to stay with the Patrol for many years.

  Ronda had a fistful of commendations and she had captured some dangerous felons on her watch. Deputies from Lewis County and surrounding counties of Grays Harbor and Thurston liked her and trusted her. They knew they could count on her for backup if they ever needed someone in a hurry.

  "She wasn't afraid to leave the freeway," one deputy commented. "If we needed her, she was there--backcountry dark roads or not."

  And then, quite suddenly, Ronda began to feel ostracized in the State Patrol. She received two reprimands in one of her regular evaluations and that shocked her. The first chastised her for mishandling a collision: "The report was incomplete. Driver's statement, diagram, measurements, and witness statement were not taken. Incorrect codes were used. When corrected, you retaliated by making the report unprofessional in appearance . . . There was [sic] conflicting grammar errors . . ."