In the Still of the Night Page 9

  The writer unwittingly made his own grammatical mistakes as he castigated hers. Her superior went on to accuse Ronda of everything from handing in late reports to blaming everyone else for mistakes attributed to her. "You must be responsible for your own actions," the reprimand stated in conclusion.

  Some might say they were piling it on. Although she had made mistakes, she was basically a most competent and courageous trooper. The report did not reflect Ronda's style.

  Another reprimand accused her of damaging the undercarriage of her patrol unit when she crossed the I-5 median. Her superior officers declared that "preventable."

  She once caught a murderer who had escaped from California, and arrested him all by herself, but that didn't seem to matter compared to her writing a report allegedly dotted with errors in grammar.

  One of Ronda's supervising sergeants continually made inappropriate sexual comments to her. Like her mother, Ronda developed early and she had very full breasts. Her sergeant never looked into her eyes, but instead stared pointedly at her chest. When he asked her to strip down to the waist so he could check her bulletproof vest, she refused.

  A major had actually squeezed her breast, and it was such a deliberate move that Ronda was angry. She had put up with "accidental" touching and pats that were too familiar for a long time, but she had had enough.

  Her view of the Washington State Patrol as a bright, shining example of law enforcement where the "good guys" worked was rapidly growing tarnished, although she had many friends among the rank and file. As a starry-eyed teenage cadet, she had never imagined that senior male officers would be so blatant as they made comments about her breasts in front of her.

  Ronda had missed a few court dates, or arrived late. Her sergeant went out of his way once to deliberately keep her from getting to a preliminary hearing. On another occasion, she got stuck on a traffic stop after an accident, and she simply could not leave. It happens when you're working in a job fraught with unexpected emergencies. But Ronda suspected that she had been set up deliberately and that she would be written up.

  She grew tired of fighting, and, as much as she hated to consider it, she realized she might have to leave the Patrol. Only a small percentage of senior officers tormented her, and she knew that the vast majority of the Patrol officers were honest and decent--but the few who hounded Ronda were enough.

  Several of Ronda's fellow troopers promised to stand up for her if she filed a sexual harassment complaint. That made her feel stronger. But there are others who won't even know about the harassment she endured until they read this.

  Ronda expected to have some "backup" of her own when she filed a complaint. But when her supporters realized it might mean their jobs, they backed down--and she was left to fight alone.

  She didn't win.

  MARK AND RONDA continued to argue--mostly over finances. In truth, she was abysmal when it came to balancing a budget. She was almost foolishly generous, and she kept terrible records. That irritated Mark, who was much more organized. They weren't the first couple who fought over money, and they surely weren't the last--but it was a sure argument starter for them when it came up.

  When they fought, she often grabbed a blanket and pillow and found a spot on the floor where she could sleep alone. "But, more often," Mark said, "I was the one who had to sleep on the couch or somewhere else."

  One thing they'd both agreed upon, and it happened to have great impact on the investigation of her death. Neither of them liked electric blankets, and they wouldn't sleep under one. They had none in their home, and if they were visiting relatives and found electric blankets on their bed, they would either unplug them or ask for some other covers. It was the idea of electricity running all over them while they slept that gave them pause.

  Why then would Ronda have chosen an electric blanket when she left her waterbed to sleep in the closet? There were plenty of regular blankets available.

  Although the Liburdis had been deeply in love when they married, their problems worsened as the years passed. Sometimes Mark felt as if Ronda had a double life--but that was only about money. She didn't cheat on him, but he discovered she used a private post office box under another name for some of her bank mail.

  And that was true, but there was nothing sinister about it. Ronda sold one of the horses she kept on her mother's ranch for a considerable sum. Many of Barb and Ronda's colts and yearlings sold for $10,000 to $20,000. Ronda opened a bank account with that money, but she didn't tell Mark about it; she wanted to have some money available to her without having to explain what it was for or have to beg for it. Still, she either signed her own name and her husband's on the account, or added Mark later so it would be in both their names.

  Ronda continued to buy new brand-name clothes and toys for Mark's three children. She knew he would object to that and say they had enough already. But really they didn't. Mark bought expensive "toys" for himself--a new truck for hunting, guns, and other hunting gear. Ronda didn't want him to know how much she had salted away; she wanted to be able to buy Mark surprise presents, too.

  With Cheryl Gilbert's urging, Ronda agreed to have her bank statements and checks sent to Cheryl's post office box. The more Cheryl could entwine herself in Ronda's life, the happier she was. She--and only she--still considered herself Ronda's "very best friend."

  Following Cheryl's suggestion was a mistake. Before much time had passed, Cheryl got behind on her own bills. Without permission, she used the checks in Ronda's account--overdrawing it. By that time, Mark knew about the account, and he soon found out about the overdrafts.

  Ronda didn't want to sue Cheryl or have her arrested, so she bartered with Cheryl instead. Cheryl agreed to clean Ronda's house, and Ronda would deduct her hours from the debt.

  Barb Thompson tried to tell her daughter that that would take forever, but she knew it was useless to argue; Ronda would bend over backward to help almost anyone, and even though Cheryl continually tried to wriggle deeper into Ronda's life, Ronda felt sorry for her. She felt Cheryl was lonely and didn't want to just drop her.

  Ronda had many close women friends, but if she had a real best friend, it was Glenda Larson, a fellow horse woman who was married to Steve Larson, a deputy with the Grays Harbor Sheriff's Office.

  Ronda met Steve Larson first when she was on duty and someone threw a rock through her windshield. She called for backup and he arrived within minutes.

  "I know some bad boys who live near here," Steve had said with a grin. "They're full of mischief. Let's just go knock on their door."

  The rock throwers were there and quickly confessed. They were hauled off to juvenile detention, and Steve and Ronda started talking. His eyes lit up when she told him about her love for horses. He told her his wife was just as enthusiastic about her horses. From the time Glenda and Ronda met, they formed a tight bond, talking almost every day.

  They lived close to one another in McCleary, and the Larsons had a big spread of land, stables, and, of course, several prize horses. Ronda and Glenda never ran out of things to talk about.

  "We used to love being in my barn when it was raining," Glenda remembered a dozen years later. "We'd take care of the horses and listen to rain pattering on the tin roof."

  DESPITE HER FEELINGS for Mark and his children, and her bliss living on their ranch in McCleary, Ronda couldn't deny the problems that kept cropping up. The time finally came when she knew she could no longer stay on as a trooper for the Washington State Patrol. Sometimes Ronda thought ruefully that it might have been better if she'd been flat-chested. Or homely as a mud fence. But she knew she couldn't take any more sexual harassment. And now the Patrol was asking her to pay back the shifts she had to take off when she miscarried and when she hurt her back in a high-speed chase. She had also collected money for her "injury on the job" from the state of Washington. As she made a U-turn at seventy miles an hour, the radar had flown off the dashboard of her police cruiser and hit her in the back.

  Whether Ronda understood
that she couldn't collect her regular salary and sick pay at the same time is now a moot question. Technically she had been double-dipping, and the Patrol wanted its money back.

  On October 18, 1994, Ronda wrote her letter of resignation to WSP Chief Roger W. Bruett:

  I can remember back to when I was sixteen and all I ever wanted to do was be a Washington State Trooper. This resignation is more painful than anything I can remember being faced with. The only other thing that comes close is the sexual harassment and discrimination that I have had to endure through my career with the department.

  The retaliatory investigation initiated against me in response to my claims of harassment and discrimination, the denial of necessary training, i.e.: first aid/pr24/DUI and cultural diversity, premature removal of my mail receptacle, and locker, contents, and absence of transfer orders for an authorized transfer, are all evidence of the department's intent.

  In order to protect my physical and psychological health--which has continued to deteriorate in response to the unfair and unprofessional treatment, ranging from a Major grabbing my breast to a hostile work environment, I resign from the position of trooper, effective immediately.

  Ronda initialed the letter "R.L."

  Her most important goal since she was a child had turned to ashes.

  MARK WAS STILL A TROOPER, and that was often difficult for Ronda. She couldn't remove herself from reminders of the career she longed for and lost. Yet she certainly couldn't ask him to give up his job that he enjoyed so much.

  Glenda Larson got Ronda a job in loss prevention (security) at the Walmart store in Aberdeen in the spring of 1996. Management there thanked Glenda for recommending someone so competent and dedicated to her job. It wasn't like working for the Patrol, but Ronda was a natural at spotting shoplifters, and she was enthusiastic about her new job.

  She worked with Dan Pearson, both at Walmart and later at the Bon Marche. Glenda worked at Walmart, too, and so did Cheryl Gilbert--who often followed Ronda in her career moves. In their first store together, Ronda trained Pearson, who was younger than she was.

  "She was very, very vibrant," Pearson recalled. "I was lucky to work with her."

  By the time Ronda moved to the Bon, Dan had left Walmart and was already there.

  He was glad to be working with her again. Ronda was always there to back him up, and she would tackle any thief without fear. "We fought together at both stores," Pearson said, "against violent shoplifters, and we usually had a fight at least once a week, most often when we were at Walmart.

  "We had one guy," Pearson recalled, "who outweighed me by forty pounds, so you know he must have been a hundred pounds heavier than Ronda. He stole a pair of jeans, and Ronda spotted him. He tried to push her out of the way, and she hopped on his back and rode him like a bronco for forty or fifty yards out into the mall. It took both of us to handcuff the guy."

  The two of them--Ronda and Pearson--played pranks on each other whenever they got a chance. One time at Walmart, Dan Pearson spotted a man wheeling a shopping cart full of cartons of cigarettes toward the doors without stopping at the checkout counter. Pearson took off after him as he carried half of the cartons out the door. The "shoplifter" code for the loss prevention department was "500," and Ronda responded to that announcement on the PA system.

  "I told Ronda to watch the cart because I was sure the guy would be back for the rest of the cigarette cartons," Pearson recalled, "and she stood there watching it while I was out in the parking lot fighting with the shoplifter. She was so mad when I brought him back in and she realized she'd missed the fight. I'd left her there staring at a shopping cart. She said I'd insulted her integrity or intelligence or something, and I knew she was gunning for me."

  Ronda coined her own term for Pearson--since he wasn't fully trained yet. When she needed him, she called for "250" instead of "500," and soon everybody else in security called him that, too. He didn't mind; he thought it was funny. And he assumed Ronda had her revenge.

  He was wrong.

  It didn't happen right away, but just as Pearson was lulled into thinking that Ronda wasn't upset with him any longer, he was sitting in the break room when she dumped a whole Diet Coke with lots of ice into his lap.

  "She did stuff like that," he said with a laugh. "She had a fun sense of humor. She put hand sanitizer on the phones just before I picked up the receiver, but she was a complete professional when she needed to be. Ronda always followed up on the people we caught. She ran the information and researched as far as she could."

  Some of the thieves had long records, while others were amateurs. Ronda was a natural-born investigator, and she made the most out of her loss prevention career. Both she and Dan Pearson moved to the Bon Marche (now Macy's) in 1997. Wearing jeans and sweatshirts or raincoats--if the weather demanded them for shoppers--they faded into the background, expertly imitating actual customers.

  Those trained in loss prevention must avoid many pitfalls, not the least of which is stopping and arresting someone in a minority group. They must decide instantly, and take a chance on repercussions. Ronda spotted a Hispanic man walking through the sports department who grabbed a twenty-dollar baseball cap, put it on his head, and kept going. She stopped him, and he filed a discrimination suit against her. She was moved temporarily to the jewelry department, because the store she was working in at the time wanted to avoid even a whisper of discrimination.

  "She just couldn't let him steal that cap and walk away," Pearson said. "She wasn't looking at his color, race, religion or whatever. He was an ordinary thief."

  On their break time, Dan Pearson and Ronda talked over personal problems. Theirs was a completely platonic friendship, and Ronda was happy when Pearson got married.

  He wanted her to be happy, too.

  AND THEN, suddenly, Ronda's marriage to Mark blew all to pieces. After eight years together, Ronda suspected that Mark had another woman waiting in the wings. The woman they had retained as a Realtor to sell Mark's mother's house seemed too familiar with him. Ronda tried to fight back her instinctive suspicions, telling herself that she was just being paranoid. She was sad to say goodbye to the small ranch she loved so much.

  Ronda certainly wasn't cheating on her husband; when she was with a man, she was faithful. Still, she couldn't bear the suspicion that grew stronger and stronger that Mark and their Realtor had become intimate.

  She was right. Women are seldom wrong about matters of the heart or of passion. Cheating was the one thing Ronda could not live with.

  And so their marriage faltered, and then crashed. Their divorce was final in December 1997. It was a bleak Christmas for Ronda. But at least she had her family and a number of longtime friends to turn to. Particularly helpful were Ron Reynolds in her faith--Jehovah's Witnesses--who had counseled her for well over a year. In the latter years of the 1990s, the Liburdis and the Reynolds lived down the road from each other and the two couples were quite friendly. Ron's wife, Katie, recalled that she was a very close friend of Ronda's and tried to give her advice during the time her marriage to Mark was crumbling.

  The Reynoldses were some fifteen years older than Ronda and Mark. As time passed, Ron did a lot more than counsel Ronda. When her marriage ended in divorce, Ron and Katie's union did too. Ron had been an angel when Ronda needed someone to count on. He was always available and she'd often told Pearson how "pleasant" Ron was, especially when she compared him to Mark, who had a tendency to erupt into anger.

  Ronda and her friend Glenda Larson both hated it when voices were raised in anger, and after one session of horseshoeing with Mark, neither woman wanted to endure another. There was no question that Mark and Ronda had loved each other on their wedding day; it was obvious in their wedding pictures. But in the end, their personalities grated on one another, and they each realized their marriage could not be mended.

  Ronda had fallen in love with Ron Reynolds in 1997, and he with her. It seemed sudden to other people--but not to them--when Ron asked Ronda to marry
him. They were engaged and planned to marry in January 1998.

  Ronda was single for only a month; she felt she had found a safe harbor with Ron.

  Dan Pearson was relieved during the first months of Ronda's marriage to Ron Reynolds; she seemed content and upbeat again despite their sudden marriage and their age differences.

  There were some problems that cropped up, of course, but Ronda was confident that they could work those out. When he and Ronda moved out of McCleary in late summer 1998, Ron bought himself a "wedding present": a new candy-apple red Mustang convertible. But he soon totaled it when he ran into a Jersey barrier on the freeway. Undeterred, he bought his new pickup truck next.

  Ronda told Dan Pearson that she was angry when she found out Ron had bailed his ex-wife, Katie, out of jail after she had been locked up on drug charges.

  "Ronda was worried about her own bills," Dan recalled. "She said Ron wasn't paying them, even though she gave him all of her paychecks."

  Ronda had also discovered that Katie Huttula Reynolds was using Ronda's Bon Marche credit card to purchase items she wanted.

  "All Katie needed to know was the number," Pearson said. "And that was easy for her to get. For all I know, she was even taking the employee discount."

  Dan Pearson did his best to back up Ronda in her personal life as he did in the store where they worked. A month before her death, she had called him from the freeway. "She was out of gas," Pearson said. "She said she'd had a fight with Ron and left the house in the middle of the night--so I went and got her."

  Pearson was one of the last people Ronda ever spoke to. She called him on December 15 and asked to take a few days off while she was in Spokane visiting her family.