Lewis County Sirens.com

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.

•••

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

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

The cause of the fire that killed a 94-year-old Centralia man over the weekend is likely to remain a mystery, according to authorities.

Robert Richard Zorn was found dead in his home Sunday morning of smoke inhalation, and a good-sized hole had burned through his dining room floor.

It had burned itself out and was cool when firefighters arrived, Riverside Fire Authority Assistant Chief Rick Mack said this morning.

“It just appears to be some tragic accident that we can’t define,” Mack said.

From the outside, the only evidence there had even been a fire at the house on the 1400 block of Johnson Road was the windows were sooted over, according to the fire department. Inside, there was heat and smoke damage to much of the single-story house.

The situation was discovered when one of Zorn’s brothers went to check on him Sunday morning. Investigators determined it had occurred sometime in the previous 24 hours, based on when Zorn was last seen.

Mack said the remains of a chair were found in the approximately 5-foot by 3-foot hole that burned through the carpet, the hardwood floor and the subfloor. It had self-extinguished for lack of oxygen, he said.

Investigators couldn’t find any reason electrical or otherwise for the fire, Mack said, and the cause will be listed as undetermined. Nothing was missing from the home to suggest an intruder or any foul play, he said.

There was evidence Zorn had tried to escape; he was found in a back room, Mack said.

An autopsy yesterday concluded he died from asphyxiation due to inhalation of toxic and combustible materials; the manner is accidental, according to Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod.