Lewis County Sirens.com

For those who visit Lewis County Sirens before it’s launched, we’ve posted one news story you’re sure to find interesting.

The following is a comprehensive account, previously unpublished, of last November’s unprecedented judicial review of a county coroner’s decision in Washington state.

It’s the case involving the suspicious death of former trooper Ronda Reynolds in Toledo in 1998.

I have been following the case since I first broke the story in The (Centralia) Chronicle in early 2002. I covered last autumn’s  proceedings in Lewis County Superior Court for The (Longview) Daily News.

The story below was written in November, at the conclusion of the proceedings in Chehalis, which took place over several days.

In the future, you’re unlikely to find stories at Lewis County Sirens as lengthy as this. However, enjoy reading about this still unresolved case while you wait for us to begin covering news daily and when it happens of crime, police, fire and courts in greater Lewis County, Washington.

–Lewis County Sirens reporter Sharyn Decker

Sunday Nov. 15, 2009

By Sharyn L. Decker

CHEHALIS — Ronda Reynolds, a former state trooper, was preparing to leave her marriage of less than a year to Ron Reynolds, principal of Toledo Elementary School, when she was found fatally shot in the head, on the floor of their walk-in closet, with a turned-on electric blanket covering her.

He told authorities he did not hear the gunshot and said he did not know if his 33-year-old wife was right or left handed.

A badly torn fingernail on otherwise neatly manicured hands and a message written with lipstick on the master bathroom mirror, which read, “I love you, please call me,” followed by her grandmother’s phone number in Spokane, were among the “oddities” that moved the lead investigator Jerry Berry to work the case vigorously for five months.

The Dec. 16, 1998 death was closed as suicide despite protests from Lewis County Sheriff’s Office detective Berry, and within a week after Ron Reynolds’ attorney had threatened to file a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office if they didn’t cease the investigation.

Lewis County Coroner Terry Wilson changed his determination three times between 1998 and 2002 as the sheriff’s office case was reopened and then closed — to suicide from undetermined, then back to undetermined, and finally suicide.

The sheriff’s office had reopened the case to have it reviewed, by a nationally known investigator who concluded it was likely a homicide, and by a division of the Washington State Attorney Generals Office, which indicated it ought to remain designated a suicide.

More than a decade after her daughter’s demise in Toledo – a small town billed as the gateway to Mount St. Helens – Barb Thompson of Spokane was granted an unprecedented judicial review of the coroner’s decision.

Thompson has worked tirelessly since that December morning to persuade authorities it was either a homicide, or at the least, should be labeled undetermined.

Nearly everyone involved, including then-Sheriff John McCroskey, has acknowledged mistakes were made. Deputies didn’t check Ron Reynolds hands for gun powder residue, something his attorney said would have cleared him; and his three sons were allowed to leave the Toledo house without being interviewed.

McCroskey wrote Thompson early on, in mid-2001, “Unfortunately, the only suspect in this case has invoked his rights and has an attorney. We are precluded from speaking with him any further.”

The first-time use of a so-called judicial review of a coroner’s determination in Washington state opens up “big questions,” according to Cowlitz County Coroner Timothy Davidson.

Davidson has been observing what he called a landmark case and will report back to a special meeting of the Washington Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners. He is vice president and a board member of the group.

The attorneys and even the judge have called the hearings a venture into uncharted territory. Thurston County Superior Court Judge Richard Hicks, who has presided, called it “a different animal that’s ever been seen in the jungle.”

The proceedings are based on a 1987 state statute.

The law says a county coroner or medical examiner is immune to civil liability for determining cause and manner of death. However, it then ends with one short sentence which says the accuracy of the determinations is subject to judicial review.

A coroner has five options when choosing the manner of death: homicide, suicide, accidental, natural or undetermined.

The Lewis County Prosecutor’s Office, which represents Coroner Wilson, fought vigorously since Thompson’s civil suit was first filed in 2006, focusing on the independence of the coroner, “the nature of whose duties have not changed in centuries,” they argued.

Thompson initially was denied her bid for review, but a unanimous decision of the Washington Court of Appeals in January 2008 gave her a green light to proceed.

The review began Nov. 2 in Lewis County Superior Court in Chehalis, and was heard by 12 jurors and two alternate jurors.
Thompson’s attorney, Royce Ferguson of Everett, was blunt.

“We’re not here to say Ron Reynolds killed her, but we’re going to see that he is a super excellent suspect,” Ferguson told the jury, according to one published account.

Ron Reynolds didn’t attend the proceedings and didn’t return a phone call made to the elementary school where he works seeking comment.

Ferguson said he would have like to call Ron Reynolds to the stand, but the Toledo resident “invoked the fifth,” his right not to testify, Ferguson said.

Coroner Wilson, a physician’s assistant in Centralia who is serving his seventh four-year term in the elected part-time position, was present only on the first and last day.

Attorney John Justice, enlisted to help represent Wilson, explained why he didn’t ask the coroner, or anyone else, to testify.

“There’s really nothing more a witness can add, or should add,” Justice said outside the courtroom last week. “The jury is going to review what the coroner had.”

Justice, whose Tumwater law firm specializes in representing government agencies in civil cases, also said he proceeded differently than if there were monetary damages involved. There were not in this case.

Had there been, he would have taken depositions from several individuals and perhaps called witnesses, he said.

Thompson’s attorney didn’t ask Wilson to testify, he said, because he didn’t want to give him a forum, and it wouldn’t necessarily have helped Thompson’s case.

“He could have if he wanted to, we didn’t prevent him,” Ferguson said.

Carmen Brunton, the chief deputy coroner for Wilson, who responded to the Ronda Reynolds death scene, attended the autopsy and signed the death certificate, sat next to Wilson’s attorney in court throughout the proceedings. The coroner’s wife, Donna Wilson, was in the audience.

Both lawyers have said they don’t really know what it would mean if the review concluded the coroner was wrong.

Among the first witnesses was a close friend of Ronda Reynolds who testified he spent a few hours with her the night before she was found dead and that she was not suicidal.

David Bell – then and now a police officer in Des Moines, Wash. – told of helping Ronda Reynolds at her home the evening of Friday Dec. 15, 1998, as she prepared to leave her marriage.

The 53-year-old said he’d known her 10 years, and she had moved into retail security work. They spoke again by telephone, sometime after midnight, he said, and she’d made arrangements to fly to Spokane the following morning.

In response to an attorney’s question if anything in Ronda Reynolds’ demeanor led him to believe she was suicidal, Bell answered: “Absolutely not.”

Robert Bishop, a Lewis County reserve deputy 10 years ago, testified that at the house that morning he was skeptical about Ron Reynolds’ statements that the closet door could have been closed, based on the position of the body on the floor.

Former Lewis County sheriff’s detective Berry testified at length about his list of 21 “discrepancies” in Ron Reynolds’ and others’ account of events, what he called a cluster of oddities he felt needed to be answered. Ron Reynolds, for example, said his wife had two shots of whiskey the night before her death, but the autopsy showed no alcohol in her system.

“A real red flag is there were no (finger) prints on the gun,” Berry said.

Berry said his initial observations of the body suggested Ronda Reynolds had been dead longer than her husband had indicated.

Ron Reynolds had told deputies he stayed awake in bed with his wife from about 10 p.m. trying to talk her out of suicide until about 5 a.m. when he fell asleep, according to sheriff’s office reports Berry said.

The first deputy was dispatched at 6:21 a.m. after Ron Reynolds’s call to 911 saying his wife had committed suicide.

Berry said he arrived about 8:30 a.m. the morning of Dec. 16, 1998, and viewed the scene. She was laying on her left side on the floor, he said.

“The blanket was partially grasped in her left hand and completely covered her right hand,” Berry said from the witness stand. “I moved her fingers and there seemed to be a little more rigor mortis than I would have expected.”

Berry said Brunton, the chief deputy coroner who responded to the scene, also commented to him there appeared to be more lividity – skin discoloration caused by the settling of blood – than if a person died around 5 a.m. or 5:30 a.m., he told the jury in Lewis County Superior Court.

It was the large number of unanswered questions that made him skeptical, he said.

Berry, who eventually left the sheriff’s office in part because of his disagreement with his supervisors about their closure of the case, acknowledged he was demoted and criticized heavily by the sheriff’s administration.

“I went from a praised, stellar employee, to an employee who couldn’t do anything right, overnight,” he said.

This past spring, Berry released a self-published paperback titled “Where Murders Walk Free”. The collection of stories includes his take on the Reynolds case without using actual names.

Firearms expert, Marty Hayes, testified that tests he conducted didn’t support law enforcement explanations of how Ronda Reynolds could have shot herself.

Hayes, operator of a firearms academy in Onalaska, estimated he’d spent at least 1,000, unpaid, hours assisting Thompson since 2002, when the details of an error-plagued investigation came to light. Because of his law enforcement background, he thought he could make a difference in and help improve investigations in Lewis County, Hayes said.

Twice since he unsucessfully ran for coroner.

Some of Hayes’ testimony consisted of him reading aloud some of the reports – enlarged upon an overhead screen for the jury to see – such as the lab test requested by the sheriff’s office to learn if Ronda Reynolds fired a gun; its finding was inconclusive, Hayes read.

Hayes told the jury he conducted experiments using a gun and ammunition “virtually” identical to the .32 caliber Rossi long revolver described in the reports. He said his tests weren’t intended to be used in court, but to provide Thompson further information in her quest to get authorities to take a harder look at the death.

“It just wasn’t logical the gunshot could go through the pillow and then somehow (the gun) came to rest beneath the pillow on her forehead,” Hayes said.

In repeated firing “recoil” tests, Hayes said he was unable to make the gun fall on Reynolds forehead, as depicted by a sandbag type object marked by an “x”. He showed the jury videotapes of his trials.

Hayes – skeptical of Ron Reynolds report that he did not hear the shot, even though he was asleep in the bedroom outside the closet, about 15 feet away – also put a decibel meter to use.

The sound of a gunshot at that distance, even muffled by a pillow, measured 83 to 91 decibels, Hayes testified.

To put that in perspective, Hayes said he found that a television set at full volume measures 65 decibels, an alarm at full volume hit 62 decibels, and a telephone with the ringer turned up all the way measured 72.

Dr. Jeffrey Reynolds, a forensic pathologist who serves Yakima and nine other counties, was the final person to take the stand.

Dr. Reynolds said he reviewed, at the plaintiff’s request, photographs of the body and authorities reports, including the coroner’s report from Dr. Daniel Selove who performed the autopsy.

He told the jury he concluded it was “highly unlikely, improbable, this was a suicide.”

Dr. Reynolds said among his considerations was it takes a minimum of four hours and probably six hours for lividity. It didn’t make sense for lividity to already be fixed by 7 a.m., he testified.

Under questioning from attorney Justice, he acknowledged he couldn’t point to any record noting lividity was described that way at 7 a.m.

The spectators in the Chehalis courtroom numbered from as few as a dozen to more than 30 during the five days of court.

Some audience members were there, they said, because it gave them hope other cases deemed to be suicide might somehow also get another look.

Among the others were a criminal justice studies student, an Onalaska resident who is editor of a firearms magazine and true crime writer Ann Rule who is authoring a book on the case.

Law enforcement officers and several bailiffs who work in Lewis County courts sat in, as did retired Centralia police officer Bradd Reynolds.

Reynolds is no relation to anyone involved in the case, but said he knew every player, except Ronda Reynolds. His curiosity arose in part because he previously worked for eight and a half years as a deputy coroner under Wilson.

“I want to hear the facts in the courtroom instead of the rumors we hear over coffee,” he said. “The people of this community need to know, was this woman murdered? Or did she commit suicide.”

Judge Hicks told those in the courtroom after the last witness – outside the presence of the jury – he considered the two attorney’s various proposals to modify the jury instructions in such a way as to accommodate a possible appeal, something he suspected might happen.

Because it’s the first case heard under the statute, he said, the lawyers “in a way are like two ships passing in the night; they have different theories about the principles that apply here.”

Hicks also explained why the jury heard evidence that Thompson solicited from outside experts beyond the original investigations of the sheriff’s and coroner’s offices.

“It’s important for the jury to know what the coroner had available,” Hicks said. “Whether he considered it or not.”

The judge also denied Ferguson’s last minute motion to ask the jury to consider labeling the death a homicide, saying there was no legal authority to put that question to the jury.

Ferguson, in closing remarks on Monday of nearly an hour and three-quarters, told the jury why so much of what they heard – while the case was about the coroner’s accuracy – centered on the sheriff’s office investigation.

Coroner Wilson didn’t go to the scene or attend the autopsy, the attorney said. The coroner relied upon the sheriff’s office decisions about the manner of death, he asserted.

“The point being, the blinders were on and the rubber stamping was going,” Ferguson said.

Justice spoke for less than 30 minutes.

“Mr. Ferguson can accuse anyone of murder, and he’s done that,” Justice said. “Mr. Wilson has to look at facts, not suppositions, not red flags.”

Justice said it wasn’t logical a person like Ron Reynolds, a school principal who’s never been known to commit violence, would consider such an act.

The attorney pointed out Ronda Reynolds was depressed, her second marriage was ending.

“Her friend, Laurie Hull, she told Laurie Hull she wished she could just lay down, go to sleep and not wake up,” Justice said.

He said the coroner’s work was not easy. He suggested jurors didn’t hear new evidence, but “opinion testimony.”

“It’s not our job to disprove it, it’s their job to persuade you,” Justice said.

It took the jury about five hours to reach its decision which was announced just after lunch on Tuesday: the Lewis County coroner’s determination that Ronda Reynolds committed suicide in 1998 was inaccurate and “arbitrary and capricious,” the panel said.

The 12-member jury’s verdict was unanimous, though only 10 jurors had to agree in the decision.

Thompson stayed put in her seat at the plaintiff’s table, sobbing with her back to the crowd.

Wilson, the coroner, showed no visible reaction to the ruling. He said he had no comment about the verdict except to say “they told me not to say anything. I have to talk to my lawyer.”

Asked if he would reconsider the manner of death on Ronda Reynolds’ death certificate, Wilson said “no.”

The verdict does not indict anyone in the death and its impact on the case remained unclear Tuesday. However, Lewis County Prosecutor Michael Golden, whose office represented the coroner, said it is not legally binding on the prosecution, police or coroner, who has 60 days to appeal.

Nevertheless, Thompson, 63, called the jury’s decision a “sweet ending.”

“They believed me and they had the courage to do the right thing,” the Spokane horse breeder said outside the courtroom. “And to have it unanimous, I was overwhelmed.”

Her lawyer, Ferguson said the verdict “means the coroner was wrong when he said suicide and he was arbitrary and capricious, which means no reasonable person would have done it that way.”

Ferguson said the verdict sets the stage for a lot more, possibly an attempt to get the death certificate changed to homicide, and “possibly a murder investigation.”

Wilson’s attorney, Justice, left the courthouse shortly after the verdict and did not return phone calls requesting comment.

Jurors were escorted out of the building by sheriff’s deputies. Only one was willing to talk to a news reporter as they departed.

“The poor girl can rest in peace, and the family can have closure,” said juror Josie Fuss of Pe Ell.

Fuss said each one of the jurors — eight women and four men — looked through the evidence and tried mightily to find some indication of suicide, but they just couldn’t see it.

“It’s just sad to know we’ve got elected officials that would let something like this be buried,” Fuss said.

She said there was no conversation in the jury room about murder or homicide, because that wasn’t one of the questions they were directed to address.

Former detective Berry said he felt vindicated.

“The citizens saw what I saw, heard what I heard, and now they know,” the 59-year-old private investigator from Mossyrock said outside the courtroom after the decision.

Golden noted the case “focused on the conduct of the coroner. At this point, there is no referral to this office for prosecution.”

Lewis County Sheriff Steve Mansfield reiterated what he said as the court review began; the hearing’s outcome would not cause him to reopen the investigation.

Only if there was new and substantial information or if the prosecutor decided to charge someone, would he reopen it, Mansfield said.

The sheriff said he was frustrated the people didn’t hear a full accounting from the coroner. There was so much information that wasn’t heard, “good reasons it was ruled a suicide that weren’t brought up,” he said.

Mansfield faulted the strategy used by Coroner Wilson’s attorney.

Mansfield’s deputies have conducted further examination of the death since he took office in 2005 and it remains a suicide, he said.

“I came to some of the same conclusions, some for different reasons and some for the same reasons,” he said.

The Lewis County Sheriff’s Office faces new and different challenges every day, “I can’t go back and correct something I had nothing to do with,” Mansfield said.

“If anyone should be embarrassed, it’s Jerry Berry, and perhaps he should have been supervised a little better,” he said.

Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Top story of the day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.