Lewis County Sirens.com

Defense lawyer John Crowley gives his closing arguments in Ricky Riffe’s murder trial.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Ricky A. Riffe’s lawyer gave his closing arguments yesterday telling the jury hearing the 1985 double-murder case that if they followed the rules given to them, they would see there was no real evidence against his client and they would acquit him.

John Crowley pointed to the fear that gripped the community nearly 30 years ago when the elderly couple vanished from their home in Ethel and turned up shot to death off a logging road outside Adna.

It caused folks to sleep with guns and warn their children, Crowley said. As professional as they were, even the police were affected by it, he said.

“Fear is illogical, it knows nothing about time,” Crowley said.

The key instructions the jury must look at, he said, are the presumption of innocence and reasonable doubt.

Checking the ‘guilty’ box requires that jurors can, with conviction, walk out of the courthouse and say his client did it, he said.

The Seattle-based attorney spoke for about four hours in Lewis County Superior Court after five weeks of testimony and more than 600 items were presented as physical evidence.

He repeatedly offered the phrase, “false evidence appearing real.”

What prosecutors presented did not connect his client to it, Crowley said, although there were many appearances it did.

“Thirty years plus six weeks of trial, it is obvious nobody knows what happened,” he said. “Nobody.”

Riffe, 55, is charged with numerous offenses in connection with December 1985 deaths of Ed and Minnie Maurin. He and his now-deceased younger brother have been the prime suspects since the early 1990s but he was only arrested last year.

Crowley spoke in partial sentences and run-on sentences, from his podium he placed next to his client.

He moved from topic to topic and back again in a courtroom in which eight family and friends sat behind the defense table while about 30 spectators crowded onto the benches behind prosecutors.

Crowley laced his recitation with phrases including the words “friendly”, “hostile”, “scammer” and “invader” in apparent reference to whomever took the Maurins. He spoke of witnesses who have been “cued” for nearly 30 years.

Why do they keep saying sawed off shotgun, he asked. What witness actually saw the sawed off shotgun?

Government is a structure run by people with resources and personalities, he told the jury.

“When it says a sawed off shotgun was used, you believe it, it’s human nature,” Crowley said.

He pointed out witnesses who saw a man around Yard Birds – where the Maurin’s bloody car was found – who spoke of a long gun.

“Make them prove it, make them do something they cannot do, which is prove beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. “Because at the end, Rick is entitled to an acquittal.”

Prosecutors made it sound as though his client was kind of a freeloader, he said, but he was a logger who was hurt on the job, he told the jury.

“He also consumed some amount of drugs, but we don’t know how much,” he said.

Crowley said his client’s friend Les George seemed like a hardworking guy, and it sounded as though he was a suspect at one point, he noted.

Why would Riffe rip the page out of the registration book at Sunbirds when George bought his gun there, and how much did it even mean if it happened 14 months before the homicides, he asked. If it even happened, he added.

As for the burglary at the Maurin’s home, there’s no evidence how entry was made, he said.

“There was real evidence,” he said. “There was the purse between the couch and that wall, but it doesn’t take you down any path.”

Crowley re-characterized his client’s answers to law enforcement as similar to anyone else who is asked about events from perhaps six years earlier from a day that had no significance.

His client did ask his brother-in-law if shotgun shells could be traced, he said. But they were also talking about goose hunting, and he had a felony conviction which meant he shouldn’t handle firearms, he said.

Crowley showed the jury pictures of his client taken during that summer, and on Christmas Day, claiming his beard couldn’t match up with the few days growth of facial hair described by witnesses.

He listed the various purchases prosecutors implied the Riffe brothers made with the proceeds of the crime, suggesting $8,500 couldn’t be stretched that far.

“They nailed Rick at White Pass on Dec. 19 doing a drug deal,” he said. “But remember, (Jeff) McKenzie had him at the AM/PM that night.”

He pointed out no physical evidence linked Riffe to the crimes. No DNA, no hair, no fiber, no trace evidence, nothing, he said.

And where is the registration or any sales document for a supposed white car Riffe owned, he asked.

Early in the investigation, when photos were shown and nobody was picked, the detectives didn’t record it, he told the jury. So nobody knows how many people looked at his client’s face and didn’t choose it, he said, when their memories were fresher.

Crowley kept speaking of how unreliable people’s memories are, noting that witnesses who picked Riffe from a montage made their choice 9,835 days after the homicide.

“I should say this,” he said. “Those witnesses are not lying, they are gripped with fear.”

Adna resident William Reisinger testified the Maurin’s sedan was speeding down Bunker Creek Road at 11:35 a.m. on Dec. 19, 1985, he said.

And former Lewis County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Billy Forth – who testified he saw the same car and identified both Riffe and his brother as the lone driver – was already back at the courthouse looking at his watch at 11:10 a.m., he said.

“He’s not lying,” Crowley said. “He’s a mistaken witness that blamed himself.”

Crowley reminded the jury of the long list of witnesses at or passing through Ethel that morning who told of how foggy it was and of the ones who saw the Maurins in their green car with another person.

The one person who said they saw a fourth person in the vehicle was adamant that happened on a clear day, he said.

Jason Shriver was 17 years old and on the way with his mother to a dental appointment, and the “split second” look he got at the Riffe brothers in a car probably occurred, Crowley said.

Crowley suggested Shriver’s memories were jumbled by time and emotion, and the narcotics he was given after his oral surgery.

“Whatever day this was, it undoubtedly was not Dec. 19,” he said.

According to the defense attorney, Frank Perkin’s testimony was preposterous. Marty Smeltzer’s was nonsense. Witness Gordon Campbell is like Erwin Bartlett in that he knew he wasn’t telling the truth, he said.

Campbell is the kind of person who thinks if someone is charged they must be guilty, he claimed. Bartlett committed perjury, he said.

Why is the prosecution even offering witnesses like that, Crowley asked the jury.

“Because fear knows no bounds, it has caught them,” he said.

His client had nothing to do with it, he concluded.

“Rick did not do this, there’s no real evidence he did this,” Crowley  said, raising his voice. “He’s entitled to an acquittal based on real evidence, not perjury.”

The jury of eight women and four men was sent to begin deliberating shortly before 5 p.m., but chose to go home at 5:30 p.m. and return this morning to continue.

Lewis County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Will Halstead gives his closing arguments with an early 1980s mug shot of Ricky Riffe as a back drop.

Updated at 7:27 p.m.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – Jurors in the Maurin murder trial listened all day yesterday to a prosecutor explain how Ricky A. Riffe is responsible for the December 1985 slaying of the elderly Ethel couple.

Lewis County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Will Halstead asked almost as many questions during his closing as he gave answers to.

“The state’s not going to stand up and tell you we know what happened in this case,” Halstead said. “We do not.”

His hours-long recitation of weeks of testimony left it clear that Ed, 81, and Minnie, 83, Maurin were shot in the backs with double-ought buck inside their car which was then parked and empty at Yard Birds Shopping Center in Chehalis on Dec. 19, 1985.

Ed Maurin had withdrawn $8,500 cash in $100 bills from his bank at about the same hour that day the couple was expecting guests to begin arriving to their home for an annual Christmas party.

Prosecutors believe the couple was forced from their home to drive to the Chehalis bank and had numerous witnesses who believe they saw the 1969 Chrysler Newport at various key places, mostly with the couple in the front seat and a man in the backseat.

But Jason Shriver saw the Maurins as well as Ricky Riffe and his now-deceased brother in the car driving west on U.S. Highway 12, Halstead reminded jurors.

“I want you to ask yourself, what motive does a 17-year-old high school boy have to make up a story?” Halstead asked. “To  make this up?”

Shriver knows the Maurins, he knows the Riffe brothers, he said.

“Jason looks over, he sees Rick in the front passenger street facing straight ahead,” he said. “He sees all of them, recognizes them, IDs them.”

Halstead pondered what the Riffe brothers might have done.

“At this point, there’s no turning back, they are accomplices,” he said. “At this point, a burglary and kidnapping have occurred.”

Halstead reminded jurors of the white car seen leaving the Maurin’s driveway that same morning and to ask themselves who might have been driving it and if it were perhaps waiting on the side of the road.

“The question is, what happened to the other person in the back of the car?” he said.

Numerous witnesses have picked out both Ricky and John Gregory Riffe from photos, seen at various places. They’re brothers, they look alike, he said.

The deputy prosecutor pointed out at the bank, Ed Maurin told Pat Hull something like the kids were going to help them buy a car.

“If this is true, why don’t any of the kids know it?” Halstead asked. “He’s under duress, he’s being told what to do.”

Ed Maurin also said his wife didn’t feel good, he said.

“Why would they go to Seattle or Tacoma to buy a car if Minnie doesn’t feel good?” he said. “These people are 80 years old.”

Halstead recounted to the jury that William Reisinger who saw the green car speeding down Bunker Creek Road – near the logging road where the couple’s bodies were found five days later – remembered seeing the male driver’s two hands on the steering wheel, wearing gloves.

Remember how one witness said he saw the Riffe brothers standing next to the green car in the Yard Birds parking lot and detective Richard Herrington said he thought he’d find more finger prints on the car? he asked.

“But not if you’re wearing gloves. Not if you’ve wiped it down,” he said.

Numerous witnesses described seeing a man carrying a gun who could have been one of the Riffes at multiple places around the shopping center that day.

“My question is, are all these witnesses seeing the same person?” he said. “Or are there possibly two men walking around there with green jackets?”

Halstead spent the next several hours yesterday in Lewis County Superior Court recounting witness testimony that pointed to the Riffe brothers.

Rick and Robin Riffe had little money before the homicides but seemed to have money to spend afterward. His friend, long haul trucker Les George, testified Riffe has possession of his shot gun during that period, as he was cutting it down for him to use as a truck gun.

Halstead offered that the burglary could have been as as simple as someone knocking on the Maurin’s front door that morning, or walking through their back door with a gun. And that prosecutors believe Minnie was shot first while the car was still moving, having partially opened her door leaving a trail of her blood on the logging road.

As he concluded, he told the jury they were allowed to use their common sense to make inferences. In Washington, circumstantial and direct evidence can be weighed equally, he said.

“So, was it Rick or John? Who was the shooter?” Halstead asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

Both were selected from the montages.

“They’re both accomplices, it does not matter who was the shooter,” he said. “They’re both equally liable for all these crimes.”

“Could there be someone else out there who had a part in it? Absolutely,” he said.

Judge Richard Brosey sent the jury home before 5 p.m. with the same reminders not to read or listen to news about the case, and to return this morning when they would heard the defense closing.

“You’ve only heard half the closing arguments, so don’t jump to any conclusions,” Brosey said. “Remember what I told you, there’s always two sides to every story.”

Sherry Tibbetts, the woman Riffe has been with for 24 years in Alaska, waits to make sure he sees her before leaving the courtroom this afternoon; with her son Jeremy Kern. Tibbetts was kept out of the courtroom until now because she was listed as a witness.

Updated at 8:21 p.m.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – After arguments, motions and rulings this morning without the jury, murder defendant Ricky Riffe’s lawyer told the jury his client instructed him not to put on any defense witnesses.

Prosecutors rested their case just before 11 a.m., and Seattle-based attorney John Crowley stood up and announced to the courtroom:

“Mr. Riffe has directed the defense to call no witnesses and rest our case,” Crowley said. “On behalf of Rick Riffe, we rest our case.”

Then Crowley sat down.

The abrupt conclusion of the weeks-long witness testimony portion of the trial set the stage for closing arguments to begin tomorrow morning.

Ricky Allen Riffe

Riffe, 55, is charged in Lewis County Superior Court with numerous offenses in connection with the December 1985 shotgun deaths of Ed and Minnie Maurin, an elderly couple from Ethel. He and his now-deceased younger brother have been the prime suspects since the early 1990s but he was only arrested last year.

Based on conversation by the court about scheduling, Lewis County prosecutors will take several hours tomorrow for closing, summarizing what they think the evidence has shown.

Then the following morning, Crowley will offer his closing arguments. Prosecutors get the last word with counter arguments and then the jury can be sent to begin deliberations.

The jury was given a long break until after lunch.

Outside the presence of the jury this morning, the judge heard arguments on the previously filed defense motion for prosecutorial conduct, regarding the jailhouse snitch who denied on the witness stand he got anything in exchange for his testimony against Riffe.

The judge had harsh words for both Lewis County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Will Halstead and Crowley

Crowley argued it should lead to a mistrial or dismissal and to disqualify Halstead.

He told the judge the incident deprived his client of a fair trial and that also prosecutors had concealed from him there was a plea deal in place with Erwin Bartlett by not sharing the documentation during the discovery process.

“He was perjuring himself and the prosecutor knew he was perjuring himself at that point, and what the prosecutor didn’t know is we knew,” Crowley said.

Judge Richard Brosey said he could only dismiss if there was no other recourse, but that in the case of Bartlett, by the time the jury heard Crowley’s cross examination and Bartlett’s attorney was put on the stand to verify what occurred, it should have been very clear to the jury there was a deal.

The judge suggested the proper channel for the complaint was not through himself, but through the bar association.

On the matter of Crowley emailing prosecutors that he would not file the motion if they would stipulate to certain other matters, Brosey was equally blunt.

“It sure looks to me like that’s extortion Mr. Crowley,” Brosey said. “How do you explain that any other way?”

“All we were trying to do is get them to stipulate to the truth of the matter,” Crowley said.

Before the jury was brought back in, Crowley made a separate oral motion for dismissal of all charges, stating there hadn’t been enough evidence presented.

The judge denied the motion.

Riffe is charged with two counts each of first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping and first-degree robbery, as well as one count of burglary; all either as the principal player or as an accomplice.

Numerous aggravating circumstances are alleged including particularly vulnerable victims and deliberate cruelty.

Prosecutors are leaving room for a variety of possible scenarios.

Halstead told the judge that since there were no eyewitnesses, and nobody knows exactly what occurred, it was possible the jury could conclude whoever drove the Maurins up Stearns Hill Road and shot them, whether it was Greg Riffe or Ricky Riffe, that the killing was not premeditated.

He asked for a jury instruction which would allow jurors to find Riffe guilty of second-degree murder instead of first-degree.

The judge said he would allow the so-called lesser included offense to be contemplated by the jury, noting it was unusual for the state to be proposing it, as such an instruction usually it would be sought by the defense and the state would oppose it.

Judge Brosey read to the jury the lengthy list of jury instructions.

The jury was also read a list of stipulations, facts agreed to by both sides to be placed in the record for jury consideration in lieu of live testimony.

The following are among them:

• Rick Riffe and Robin Giddings married in Reno, Nevada on Jan. 5, 1985

• They two divorced in 1991.

• Robin Riffe died of natural causes in 1994 in Washington state.

• Rick Riffe was convicted of a felony in 1981, and could not legally possess firearms until at least 1986.

Closing statements are expected to begin at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow.

The trial is open to the public. The courtroom is on the fourth floor of the Lewis County Law and Justice Center at Main Street and Chehalis Avenue in Chehalis.

Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer defends his senior deputy prosecutor to the judge in court this morning.

Ricky Riffe’s lawyer, far right, and his assistant talk with Riffe’s supporters, the family of his longtime live-in girlfriend Sherry Tibbetts, after court recessed for the three-day weekend.

By Sharyn  L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter

CHEHALIS – When the sixth week of testimony begins tomorrow in the 1985 Maurin murder case, it should finally be witnesses for the defense who take the stand.

Prosecutors seem to have called all the witnesses they are going to, but have not yet rested.

Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer has said he hasn’t revealed to the defense or to he judge throughout the trial who his next witnesses would be.

Defense attorney John Crowley over the past weeks has cross examined state’s witnesses extensively, and only has a handful of his own to call.

His client, former Mossyrock resident Ricky A. Riffe, is charged with murder, kidnapping, robbery and burglary in connection with the December 1985 shotgun deaths of Ed, 81, and Minnie, 83, Maurin of Ethel.

Following are a few pieces of information which have come out during the past weeks in Lewis County Superior Court but not previously included in news stories.

• Of the more than 800 people Lewis County Sheriff’s Office detective Bruce Kimsey has spoken to in the Maurin murder case, no one has ever asked about claiming any of the reward money, including the $10,000 offered in newspaper ads after Denny Hadaller hired private investigators in 2003.

• A Winston cigarette butt that turned up among items in the evidence locker last year, and came from a trash can inside the Maurin’s home, was tested for DNA and came back to a partial profile of an unknown male. The Maurins didn’t smoke.

• Of the 19 cigarette butts recovered from the Maurin’s 1969 Chrysler found abandoned in the parking lot at Yard Birds Shopping Center and tested for DNA, one was found to have come from a daughter-in-law of Minnie Maurin, and another came back to an unknown female.

• Ricky and John Gregory Riffe lived in a small trailer park in Adna for about a year in 1981, according to an early witness. William Reisinger who resides on the 400 block on Bunker Creek Road said they were his neighbors he knew from talking to them to say they could have access to the river and from seeing them out and about. “I just seen ’em go up and down the road, running around. They were young guys, I seen ’em alot.” he testified.

• Kimsey calculated the distance between Rick and Robin Riffe’s home in Silver Creek in 1985 to the Maurin’s house in Ethel was 4.7 miles, or a five minute drive along U.S. Highway 12.