By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – Convicted murderer Ricky A. Riffe is back in town, transported from prison where he’s serving a virtual life sentence back to the Lewis County Jail as his lawyer is asking a judge to move his upcoming child sex abuse trial to another locale, citing his inability to receive a fair trial in Lewis County.
Defense attorney John Crowley blames the news media, and prejudicial publicity.
Ricky Riffe
“Ricky Riffe was a defendant in one of Lewis County’s most notorious unsolved murder cases,” Crowley wrote. “Drawing both local and national media purporting the crime was solved as soon as he was apprehended.”
Riffe, now 55, was arrested in mid-2012 and extradited from his longtime home in King Salmon, Alaska to Lewis County where he was charged in the 1985 kidnapping, robbery and shotgun deaths of Ed and Minnie Maurin, an elderly Ethel couple. The former Mossyrock resident was found guilty after a six-week trial late last year.
Not long after he arrived, prosecutors filed separate charges that he raped and molested his 9-year-old step-daughter in the mid-1980s, saying new information came to light during the Maurin investigation.
A court hearing is scheduled for Thursday afternoon, on Crowley’s motion for a change of venue.
The lawyer claims inflammatory headlines and also comments from the public on online stories illustrate how his client would not face an impartial jury in Lewis County, in the filing made earlier this month.
Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer responded in a one-page filing that he disagrees with Crowley’s contentions and stated the request is premature.
The trial was initially set for February, but has been postponed until the week of Sept. 8.
Riffe was booked into the local jail this morning.
Riffe was given nearly 103 years last December, after prosecutors persuaded a jury that he at the very least was an accomplice to their other longtime suspect who was deceased, his younger brother John Gregory Riffe.
With no DNA evidence or fingerprints, but nearly 100 individuals testifying, he was convicted as charged in the case in which the Maurin’s were apparently forced to drive to their Chehalis bank and withdraw a sizable amount of cash before being shot in their backs and dumped on a logging road outside of Adna.
Riffe maintains he’s innocent in both cases. He has appealed his convictions.
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For background, read “Riffe maintains innocence in face of sentence of more than a century for Maurin murders” from Tuesday December 3, 2013, here