Lewis County Sirens.com

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – The autopsy results show 40-year-old Tina Thode died from exposure, even though it was a warm summer night when she called for help getting off the banks of the Skookumchuck River in late July.

The body of the Chehalis native who lived nearby in Centralia at the time was discovered partially in the water two days later by kids floating down the river.

Tina A. Thode

“The findings don’t really surprise me, it was dark, she was in the water and she was comfortable in the water,” her father Roger Thode said.

Tina Thode had phoned 911 about 10:30 p.m. on July 27 saying she was lost near the river and couldn’t get out because it was dark. At one point as she talked on her cell phone to the 911 operator, she said she was sitting with her legs in the water.

An intense but unsuccessful search was abandoned after more than three hours, with responders figuring once it got light she could see her way out.

Roger Thode said he got the word from the coroner yesterday or the day before who explained she may have fallen asleep as her body temperature dropped, and that having methamphetamine in her system would have compounded the lowering of her body temperature.

He said he suspects it happened that night, even though the coroner can’t tell him the hour or even the day his daughter passed away.

“We don’t know, I’ve been asked that and I always give the same answer,” Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod said this afternoon. “People need to stop watching CSI, there’s no way to pinpoint the time of death.”

There are just too many variables, according to McLeod. The death certificate will reflect the time and day her body was discovered, he said.

McLeod said the forensic pathologist noted that being under the influence of methamphetamine was a contributing factor as Tina Thode became unable to – in the words of the pathologist – find shelter from a cold, watery environment.

Tina Thode lived alone about a quarter mile from the tree-lined river and was active in a court-related drug and alcohol treatment program, but had recently relapsed.

Her father said he knows that in hindsight, police and fire personnel wish they’d have looked for his daughter longer that night or returned the next day to resume their search.

“It’s such a waste, it is what it is,” Roger Thode said. “You can’t go back and change it.”

“She made a lot of bone-headed decisions, and this one bit her,” he said.

•••

For background, read “What happened to Tina Thode?” from Tuesday September 3, 2013, here

John Dennis Hadaller, who goes by Dennis or Denny, answers questions from Lewis County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Will Halstead.

Updated at 9:31 p.m.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Retired Lewis County logging business owner Denny Hadaller spoke yesterday of the promise he made himself before leaving his slain parents funeral at the St. Francis Catholic Church in Toledo more than a quarter of a century ago.

“I layed my hand on my mother’s casket and I said, ‘Mom, I’ll find out who done this, and I will till the day I die,” he said.

Hadaller was testifying in the murder trial of Ricky A. Riffe, the longtime suspect in the December 1985 abduction and shooting deaths of Ethel residents, Ed and Wilhelmina Maurin. They were in their early 80s when their bodies were found dumped off a logging road.

Hadaller, now 85 years old, took the witness stand yesterday in Lewis County Superior Court. He spoke before a jury which is now four men and eight women, as one took ill.

Lewis County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Will Halstead took Hadaller back in time through questioning, asking about the day his mother and step-father disappeared, and the years which followed in which the businessman hired a pair of private investigators to solve the case.

Hadaller said he was involved with the sheriff’s office investigation into the late 1980s and then somewhere around 2001 sought outside help.

“I did get very frustrated, because we weren’t getting anywhere with this” Hadaller testified.

Under questioning, he spoke of seeking out photographs of suspects Ricky and John Gregory Riffe from a cousin of theirs, wanting to know what they looked like out of fear for his own and his family’s safety.

“I slept with a gun under my pillow every night, I had one at my easy chair, because I didn’t know …” Hadaller said.

Yesterday was the second day of testimony for a trial that is expected to last at least through the month. Judge Richard Brosey is presiding over the case in Lewis County Superior Court.

A witness who took up the remainder of the day, told of seeing a pair of headlights in the fog across the street from her home at the Maurin’s driveway on Dec. 19, 1985, a few hours before the couple were discovered missing.

It was somewhere around 9 a.m. and the headlights were pointing kind of west, Nona Pierce said.

Pierce said she was standing at the end of her driveway and heard both a woman and a man’s voice, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. When the vehicle moved down the Maurin’s driveway, she thought she saw the outline of a second car before she went back into her house, she said.

Most of Pierce’s time on the witness stand was spent with lawyers wrangling over her picking out a photo of Ricky Riffe last year that she believes to be the same man who she saw acting strangely in the neighborhood.

Pierce described a pickup truck which stopped along U.S. Highway 12 and a man who got out and looked at three surrounding houses, including the Maurins and hers, before walking to her doorstep and saying he needed gasoline.

But when she told him no, he got back in his truck and drove away, she testified.

Under questioning from Deputy Prosecutor Halstead, Pierce said it occurred the day before and she was absolutely certain  that the photo she selected from a montage when she met with detective Bruce Kimsey in June 2012 was the man on her porch 27 years ago. The one she picked was Ricky Riffe.

However, under questioning by defense attorney Crowley it became apparent the event may have taken place as much as two weeks prior and that during the identification process at the sheriff’s office, Pierce was far less certain when she chose Riffe’s picture.

Three times out of the presence of the jury, the lawyers and judge discussed certain prohibited and allowed practices relating to the way the defense lawyer could cross examine Pierce.

Judge Brosey noted the witness seemed evasive and hostile and directed prosecutors to make sure she knew she was was not excused from possibly having to return to the stand.