In the Still of the Night

IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT

 Lewis County has had its share of homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths, many of them connected either to the I-5 freeway or to the trains that rumble through almost every hour.
 Coroner Terry Wilson has ruled on the “manner of death” for most of them.  Wilson is neither a medical doctor nor a forensic pathologist.  He is a “PA,” a physician’s assistant. He earns $35,000 a year as coroner, and works in a local clinic as a PA, too.  That isn’t particularly unusual, because many of the outlying and smaller counties in Washington employ the coroners’ system, while Pierce, King, Snohomish, Spokane, and larger counties have medical examiners who are medical doctors or forensic pathologists.  The latter are the best educated, most skilled, and most experienced in detecting time, cause and manner of death.
 Either medical examiners or coroners can make or break the successful solution to a sudden and violent death.
 Ronda Reynolds was thirty-three, healthy, and beautiful when she died on December 16, 1998. She was still what would be considered a bride—though on the verge of divorce—when her brain was destroyed by a bullet just beside her right temple.
 But why and how? Almost a dozen years later, both those who had known and loved her and those who had only read about her were still asking questions.

 On November 2, 2009, in the Lewis County Law and Justice Center, a precedent-setting hearing began.  It was a civil hearing, one long sought by Barbara Thompson, Ronda Reynolds’s mother.  Although Ronda, a former Washington State Patrol trooper, had been dead nearly eleven years, there were questions about what really happened to her and what led to the tragedy just before a long-ago Christmas. There had been few solid answers, only massive speculation that seemed to grow every year.
 The hearing in the Chehalis courtroom was not to decide on who—if anyone—had killed Ronda; it was to evaluate Coroner Terry Wilson and his staff’s handling of Ronda’s case. Had Wilson been irresponsible on December 16, 1998, and thereafter?  Under orders, his staff had done a perfunctory investigation of her death. Had it been enough? Or had her dying been swept under the rug and dismissed?
 Barb Thompson believed fervently that it had.

 It was still dark at 6:20 on the morning Ronda’s husband of less than a year—Ron Reynolds—called 911.  He told the sheriff’s dispatcher that his wife had committed suicide.  It appeared to be “an open-and-shut case.”
 But was it?

From IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT by Ann Rule. Copyright © 2010 by Ann Rule. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.