Lewis County Sirens.com

Updated 11:30 a.m.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

A woman in her 20s died after apparently jumping out of a moving vehicle on Interstate 5 in Centralia last night.

Troopers and aid were called about 7:50 p.m. to the southbound lanes south of the Mellen Street interchange, but the female died at the scene from massive head trauma, according to the Washington State Patrol.

Trooper Ryan Tanner said the van was traveling in the outside lane and she landed on the shoulder next to the guard rail.

The woman had opened the right front passenger door and jumped out near Salzer Creek at milepost 80, according to the state patrol.

Tanner said he didn’t know why.

“It’s obviously not cut and dry in this one, it’s going to take a lot of investigation on our part to try to figure out what happened,” he said.

Her hometown and age are not being released. She did not have any identification on her, he said.

“We’re still trying to figure out a positive ID on the deceased,” Tanner said. “That’s the big thing right now.”

The driver of the van is 49-year-old Robert B. Hicks of Chehalis, according to the patrol. There were no other passengers in the van.

Tanner said the two did not know each other, that Hicks was leaving from a location in Centralia heading to Chehalis and she asked for a ride.

No foul play is suspected, he said.

Troopers were interviewing Hicks as well as other witnesses that saw her prior to the incident when Tanner was briefed last night.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – An 18-year-old Mossyrock resident jailed after six firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition were stolen from a Mossyrock house in July pleaded guilty today.

Anthony S. Depuisaye-Greene was sentenced to almost 10 years in prison in exchange for giving information to law enforcement to help them recover the pistols, according to the plea agreement

Depuisaye-Greene went before Lewis County Superior Court  Judge James Lawler this afternoon and pleaded guilty to 14 counts instead of 20; they included first-degree burglary, possession of stolen firearms and theft.

Defense attorney Don Blair and Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer told the judge they both recommended Depuisaye-Greene should be sentenced to 116 months. Lawler agreed.

Depuisaye-Greene’s criminal history included only crimes as a juvenile.

Two females were also arrested in connection with the repeated burglaries over an entire weekend.

Depuisaye-Greene and his girlfriend, Dezarai B. Johnson, 18, had fled in a stolen Toyota RAVE to Sequim, where Johnson lives, according to charging documents. They were picked up there by police and one of the guns was recovered at that time.

Prosecutor Meyer said he expects a plea agreement for Johnson. He didn’t say today what was the status of the case against the 17-year-old Mossyrock girl.
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Read “Ammo, half dozen guns stolen in Mossyrock break-ins” from Monday July 25, 2011, here

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Greenwood Cemetery owner John Baker pleaded not guilty yesterday to a multitude of charges related to him not staying away from the cemetery while under a court order that is set to expire the end of this month, the latest of which involved him allegedly hiding in the bushes trying to make sure photos were taken when temporary caretaker Jennifer Duncan was served with papers.

John Baker

Centralia police were called late last week when Duncan said she was working in the memorial park north of Reynolds Road and spotted the 68-year-old about 200 feet away from her in the brush.

An anti-harassment protection order prevents Baker from being within 500 feet of Duncan or on the cemetery property until Sept. 30.

According to charging documents, a man and a woman came to give her paperwork revoking her power of attorney over Baker, and Duncan ripped up the paper, told them to leave her alone and walked away. Then she saw Baker, who was directing the woman to take pictures of her, according to Duncan.

She told police she already had a copy of the letter and felt he was just harassing her, according to charging documents.

Baker was subsequently arrested at the Chevron station on Harrison Avenue, for violation of a protection order.

The Lewis County Prosecutor’s Office however charged Baker with stalking for that incident, plus five counts of violating the anti-harassment protection order in connection with previous episodes going back to the beginning of July.

Baker’s bail was set on Monday at $50,000.

Baker and Duncan, longtime friends, were in court last month and partially resolved a dispute that grew out of an agreement she would operate the cemetery last year while Baker was incarcerated for assault.

After Baker was released, relations between the two deteriorated but she still had the power of attorney and held the license to operate the cemetery.

Duncan told Lewis County Superior Court Commissioner Tracy Mitchell  late last month if she couldn’t get a permanent order banning Baker from the property, she would walk away from care-taking of the cemetery.

The commissioner extended the order just long enough for Duncan to wrap up obligations she’s made to cemetery clients and ordered Baker to file a formal revocation of the power of attorney.

One of the seven current charges against Baker is trespassing, as on Sept. 14, he was found inside his home – adjacent to the cemetery – which now has no electricity and is unfit for habitation, according to charging documents.

He said he had nowhere else to sleep.

Baker’s trial was set for the week of Oct. 31.
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For background, read “Conflict: Who will bury the dead in Greenwood Cemetery?” from Friday Sept. 2, 2011, here

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Detectives today are working on a new lead in their attempts to solve the mystery of the skeletal remains found near Morton this past spring.

They are checking into a missing person from Pierce County, the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office said today.

A motorist who pulled off U.S. Highway 12 near Morton to take a break discovered the remains off the side of a logging road on April 7.

An examination by a specialist at the King County Medical Examiner’s Office concluded they belonged to a younger adult female of small stature, according to the sheriff’s office.

However, a cause of death could not be determined, according to Chief Civil Deputy Stacy Brown.

It’s unknown who she is, but three missing females whose cases have been highly publicized have been ruled out; Kayla Croft-Payne of Lewis County, Nancy Moyer from Tenino and Lindsey Baum of McCleary, Brown said.

The sheriff’s office has released little information about the find, but have said it was doubtful the remains had been where they were found for very long, because it was a well-used logging road.

The sheriff’s office won’t say what they were told by the expert for an estimate of how long ago the person had died.

The sheriff’s detective sergeant last night was doing some research and came up with a new possibility out of Pierce County, Brown said today.

There are similarities, such as the “time frames and some of the things we found,” Brown said.

Dental records do exist for the missing Pierce County person, so they can be checked against the teeth belonging to the dead woman, according to Brown.

Dental records and DNA from the deceased have been entered into databases.

Just yesterday, Brown said no matches had been found and they really had no idea who she could be.

“We ran the information through systems we can run through that does automatic checks, with no results,” she said yesterday.

That left the sheriff’s office thinking the deceased was likely to be someone who hadn’t been in trouble previously (in order for their DNA to be taken such as in a criminal case) and may have never been reported missing, she said.

At this point, detectives are relying on “hand checks” for example when asked by another agency, according to Brown.

However, detective Sgt. Dusty Breen was up late last night and came upon this new potential missing person. It will likely take days to compare the dental work, Brown said.

Still missing:

Nancy Moyer, 36, was last seen by a co-worker on March 6, 2009. The 5-foot tall mother of two was reported missing when her husband returned their children to her Tenino home two days later. She was not there, but her purse and vehicle were.

Lindsey Baum, 10, was last seen June 26, 2009, when she left a friend’s house in McCleary to walk home. The walk should have taken 10 minutes, but she never arrived home.

Kayla Croft-Payne was 18 and living outside Chehalis on April 28, 2010 when she last logged onto her MySpace internet account. She was reported missing on May 5 by a friend who hadn’t seen or heard from her for several days.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Whether Toledo Elementary School Principal Ron Reynolds and his sons will be required to appear and give testimony at next month’s coroner’s inquest into Ronda Reynolds 1998 death remains an open question.

Ron Reynolds

Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod has indicated he won’t challenge the written motions each has made invoking their fifth amendment rights not to incriminate themselves.

They’ve asked that their subpoenas be quashed so they don’t have to attend the inquest, according to McLeod. The attorney representing Ronda Reynolds’ mother, Barb Thompson, has taken issue with the coroner’s position on the matter.

“If they say I’d like to plead the fifth, I’m certainly going to honor that,” McLeod told news reporters on Friday.

McLeod indicated the public, his inquest jury and members of the news media probably shouldn’t expect to see or hear the four at the inquest.

Not so fast, attorney Royce Ferguson said in essence with his filing over the weekend. There are several reasons the Reynolds family ought to and can be compelled to take the stand at the inquest, according to Ferguson.

Ronda Reynolds

McLeod, elected last November as the first new Lewis County coroner in decades, is moving through ambiguously charted territory as he convenes the October coroner’s inquest.

He said on Friday he thinks the last one held in the county was in 1961, but that’s all he knows about it, he said.

Coroner’s inquests in Washington state are rare, and McLeod, with assistance from Lewis County Deputy Prosecutor David Fine, has created and adopted a set of rules to guide the proceedings.

One of McLeod’s first acts after he took office in January was to change the death certificate from suicide to undetermined in the case of the former trooper whose death has been the subject of near continuous controversy for almost 13 years.

Reynolds, 33, was found with a bullet in her head and covered by a turned-on electric blanket on the floor of a closet in the Toledo home she shared with her husband of less than a year, Ron Reynolds. He and his three sons – then 18, 17 and 10 – were present when the first sheriff’s deputy arrived the morning of Dec. 16, 1998.

Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod

McLeod says he would like a final resolution on the death.

While a judicial review, with an advisory panel of jurors, was held two years ago seeking answers about the manner of Ronda Reynolds’ death, the coroner’s inquest is an entirely different kind of proceeding and more details can be expected to be aired during the inquest.

For the judicial review, then-Lewis County Coroner Terry Wilson and his attorney chose to not call any witnesses to defend Wilson’s reasoning for choosing suicide. The panel, the judge and the audience heard days of testimony from the opposite side, Thompson’s witnesses who offered many reasons to show it was likely not a suicide. Even Thompson’s lawyer chose not to call upon those who presumably believed it to be suicide.

For the coroner’s inquest, a big difference is the elected coroner says he is striving to call upon all individuals who have first-hand or expert information about the death, and he has subpoena power.

Under McLeod’s inquest rules, Thompson as the decedent’s mother is deemed one of several “persons especially interested in the matter”. As such, Thompson is allowed by McLeod’s rules to submit a “brief” in opposition to the motions requesting quashing of the subpoenas.

Barb Thompson

Her lawyer’s brief claims Ron, David, Jonathan and Joshua Reynolds do not have the right under the terms of the subpoenas to refuse to appear at the coroner’s inquest.

Since the corner’s inquest is not a criminal proceeding, there is no prejudice to the witnesses and they should not be excused from appearing, even if they invoke the privilege against self-incrimination in front of the jurors, Ferguson writes.

Further, attorney Ferguson claims, whether they may properly invoke the privilege must be determined by an inquiry; Ferguson suggests, for example, “… not all of the Reynolds witnesses are suspects of homicide (for which there is no statute of limitations), but they may only be suspects of having rendered criminal assistance or committed perjury (crimes for which the statute of limitations has run) and so there is no jeopardy upon which to base the exercise of the privilege.”

McLeod’s rules say his decisions on subpoena quash requests will “ordinarily” be made without oral argument; he said on Friday he expects to decide by Sept. 27.

Thompson’s lawyer Ferguson also notes in his filing he objects to leaving suicide on the table as one of the choices the inquest jury may choose from. His reasoning is the 2009 judicial review already concluded the label of suicide was incorrect, arbitrary and capricious.

Ferguson suggests not enforcing the subpoenas or keeping suicide as an option could result in another judicial review proceeding.

McLeod last month released a list of 36 witnesses he expects for the inquest, and on Friday said he sent out two more subpoenas, to Dr. John Demakas and Dr. Jeffrey Reynolds.

There’s one witness he wouldn’t name to whom he’s sent subpoenas to four addresses and still can’t locate, he said.

McLeod, when he held a press conference on Friday at the Lewis County Law and Justice Center, said he’s been asked if he intends to call former Lewis County Sheriff John McCroskey and former Lewis County Coroner Wilson to testify.

He won’t, McLeod said, as neither man was at the scene, and what they know is only what others told them or is their opinion.

The coroner’s inquest is set to begin on Oct. 10, and could last a week or could go on for six weeks, McLeod said.

“This will take as long as it takes,” he said.

McLeod said the jurors determination will be the verdict, as long as it doesn’t seem unreasonable to him.

It will be held in a Lewis County District Court room and begin at 9 a.m. each week day, according to his schedule. However, today he told the Lewis County board of commissioners he’s planning for only half days during the second week.

The courtroom is expected to have seating for 60 persons. Twenty are reserved for the news media and another 20 will be available to the public on a first come, first served basis each day.

Members of the public who want a seating pass may line up outside the courthouse no earlier than 6 a.m. each day, according to the coroner.

How long those lines will be can only be imagined: When true crime writer Ann Rule traveled to Centralia College in November to speak about and sign her book on the controversial death, more than 500 individuals filled the auditorium, and more were turned away.

McLeod expects a courtroom audio tape of the proceedings to be made and a transcript from it will be placed in a file available to the public.

On Friday, he estimated the cost of the coroners inquest to be somewhere around $35,000.

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See the rules governing the procedures for McLeod’s coroner’s inquest, here

Read most recent news story, “Breaking news: Witnesses subpoenaed for Reynolds’ coroner’s inquest” from Wednesday August 31, 2011, here

For more background, read “Jury finds coroner erred in ruling former trooper’s death a suicide”, here