by Ann Rule
"I arranged that," he remembered. "Then she asked if she could come and stay with me and my then wife when she got back. She sounded a little upset--but not as if she was seriously worried. She told me she was leaving Ron and didn't want to go back to their house. Of course, I told her she could stay with us."
The next day, Pearson's boss came to his front door to break the unbelievable news that Ronda had been shot to death.
"I started to cry," Pearson said, tearing up again at the memory of that day. "All of us who worked with her were broken up. So many people from the Bon Marche went to her funeral that the store rented buses to carry them all."
SADLY, WHAT SHOULD HAVE CLICKED into place perfectly in Ronda's life was out of synch again in December 1998. She was divorced from Mark Liburdi, and she soon would be divorced from Ron Reynolds.
And the man who had loved her all along was Dave Bell. Although she hadn't been in touch with him for months, he was finally free and his sons lived with him. He still loved Ronda, but she hadn't been aware of that as she leaned on Ron Reynolds for emotional and spiritual support.
If it wasn't so heartbreaking, it would have been like some Shakespearean comedy of errors: Ronda should have married David Bell and not Ron Reynolds. At the very least, she should have waited longer to even consider marrying either man so soon after her divorce.
But she was unable to see how strong and smart she was, or that she didn't need any man in her life to take care of her and make her feel whole and successful.
Barb Thompson saw that, and she too knew that Dave was the man who truly loved Ronda.
"It was as if God had opened a door to a life that Ronda only thought possible in her dreams," her mother said. "But that was a life she would never experience. Neither would Dave. It was too late for them."
NOW, ON DECEMBER 17, 1998, Dave Bell and Barb Thompson turned onto Twin Peaks Drive. Barb saw Dave's face turn pale as the brick and siding one-story house came into view. The fascia board's bright blue trim looked cheerful. That was Ronda's idea--she'd told her mother about it, and it was just right. With its multipaned and fan-shaped windows, it was an attractive medium-size home on a large lot.
On this day, an invisible pall seemed to hang over it. This was the second day in thirty-three years that Ronda wasn't alive.
Barb saw that the grass was yellow and flattened. She recalled a photo of the wave of pink annuals Ronda had planted between Pfitzer junipers and low barberry shrubs. The pink flowers were gone, leaving only brown stems. There were some large plants that had never left their nursery containers. They looked like chrysanthemums, bedraggled, rootbound, and probably frozen now.
Ronda had found out that Ron was betraying her with his ex-wife as far back as the prior spring, and she'd discussed her concerns with her mother by September. She wasn't ready to leave him then, because their finances were so intermingled--with Ronda turning over her paychecks to Ron. He said he was paying her bills and her share of any communal bills. She hoped he really was.
Ronda had still hoped to save her marriage--until she discovered in late fall that Ron hadn't paid her bills at all. He had been lying to her about so many things. Barb's heart bled for her daughter when Ronda told her.
Maybe that's when Ronda just gave up caring about her lawn and garden. The neglected mums symbolized the time when Ronda knew her marriage was probably over.
Ronda's little cement statues of bunnies and wild creatures were right where they had been, frozen in concrete along the path to the front porch, and just inside the porch itself. Ronda had loved them, and the sight of them made Barb want to cry. She knew that Detective Berry wanted her to talk with Ron alone, although she wondered if she had the strength to do that.
But then she looked at Dave Bell. His eyes were filled with tears and his hands were shaking. Here was a man with over twenty years as a police sergeant, who was close to breaking down. He was doing his best, but his pain was obvious.
"I think I really do need to wait out here," Dave said.
She couldn't ask him to go inside the house. She couldn't begin to imagine what he was going through. Grief, of course, but she wondered if he was feeling guilt because he hadn't saved Ronda. It would be natural for a man like Dave to regret that he hadn't insisted that Ronda leave with him on the night before she died. Barb felt guilt, too, wondering if there wasn't something she should have seen, something she could have done.
They pulled into the driveway and noted which cars were parked there. The new pickup truck belonged to Ron, and the Suzuki Tracker was Ronda's. The Ford Taurus parked there had belonged to Ron's father, and when he died the previous May, Ron had inherited it. Neither of them knew who owned the fourth vehicle.
Ronda's dogs began to bark from their pen on the right side of the house. Ronda would never have left them to fend for themselves, and that was a very strong argument against her killing herself.
Her feisty little Jack Russell terrier was in a section of the pen by himself, and her two Rottweilers were together in another pen--Jewel--one of the big dogs, was Barb's dog's sister, and the other Rottweiler, Old Daisy, was the crippled stray that had been hit by a car or beaten. Somehow the old dog had made her way to Ronda's door. Of course, she took in, tended to her wounds, and loved her. The cold of a mid-December day was hard on the elderly dog. But Barb knew that Ron never let the dogs in the house.
When Ronda adopted Old Daisy, it made him angry.
Ronda had tried her best to keep her dogs from bothering her new husband. She'd changed their feeding schedule and fed them at night so that they wouldn't get restless and make any noise that might wake Ron.
NOW BARB PROGRAMMED herself to keep her mind as open as possible--even to the point where she wondered if there was something horrible that happened to Ronda that might have driven her to suicide. At the same time, as she walked to the front door of what had been her daughter's house, she thought of herself as "The Mighty Avenger."
If someone had shot Ronda in the head, Barb felt herself capable of grabbing his throat (she pictured the killer as male) and "ripping the life out of his body. I could see his little round pig eyes bulging with fear as the life drained out of him."
Her rage and her grief warred with each other in her brain. She fought them both down as she tried to remain composed.
Barb knocked on the front door with her fist, and the sound echoed in her ears. She knocked again--harder.
Finally the door was flung open and she was looking at her son-in-law. He wore a T-shirt and sweat pants, and even though it was early afternoon, it was obvious that she'd dragged him out of bed. He looked surprised to see her, and confused.
"I need to talk with you, Ron," Barb said.
He invited her in and excused himself. She stepped into the hallway that led to the living room. A few feet beyond, another hallway angled off to the left and back to the bedrooms. There was a counter on the right that divided the kitchen and dining area from the living room. She looked around and felt a pang when she spotted one of Ronda's treasured western saddles.
All of the furniture in the living room was Ronda's--her couch, love seat, entertainment center with a large television set, end tables, lamps--everything. At first Barb was puzzled, but then she remembered that Ron's ex-wife, Katie, had gotten their house and all of their furniture when they divorced after more than twenty years. As Barb understood it, Katie Reynolds had also received a very large financial settlement, almost a hundred thousand dollars. And Ron had been furious. But two decades and five sons put the legal weight on Katie's side.
Barb peered into the dining room and saw Ronda's huge and impressive china cabinet in the far corner. It was virtually empty. She wondered where Ronda's precious things were, and where were the photographs that had hung on the walls? There were only faint outlines now that marked where they had been.
Of course, she thought. Ronda must have packed them up, preparing to move.
She heard footsteps and Ron walked into the room,
buttoning his shirt. He offered to make coffee, and Barb said nothing.
"I need to know what happened, Ron," she began. "How could this terrible thing have come about?"
Her daughter's widower never looked up from filling the machine with water, filters, and freshly ground coffee, but, oddly, he began to talk. His thoughts burst from his mouth as if he had preprogrammed them into his brain, ready to spew forth when he was ready. He spoke almost in a robotic monotone.
"Ronda was a very troubled girl, you know," he began. "She was not a nice person. She had a lot of problems. She had no self-confidence. I had to counsel her constantly and build up her esteem enough to even go apply for a job. She would always say, 'I'm not good enough.' And there was a dark side to Ronda--a dark, ugly side that no one ever saw. But it was there. She was bad. She was a cruel, mean, manipulating person--a chronic liar and a manic depressive. She drove herself to this. She had no other way out."
Barb could barely breathe. Even if there was a fraction of truth in what he was saying, how could he be so cruel? He said Ronda was cruel, but he seemed to be enjoying listing dreadful things he believed--or purported to believe--about the daughter she had just lost. What could be crueler than that?
Barb forced herself to remember that Jerry Berry had told her not to get angry, not to ask too many questions, but to remember everything.
"How did you find her?" she asked, trying to sound calm. She wanted to scream obscenities at him. She wanted to physically attack him. How dare he say such ugly things about her dead daughter?
But she didn't change expression.
"I kept her awake until about five A.M.," Ron Reynolds said. "I didn't want to leave her alone. I was worried she might do something to herself. Then I must have fallen asleep. The alarm woke me at six A.M., but she wasn't beside me in bed. I went looking for her. I thought she might be in the kitchen feeding the dogs."
But Barb knew Ronda routinely fed the dogs at night. There was always the possibility that she would feed them just before she left for Spokane, afraid Ron wouldn't feed them. No--Ronda would have asked one of her friends to feed the dogs. Barb said nothing.
Detective Berry had told her that Ron hadn't called 911 until twenty minutes after six. This house wasn't big enough to require someone to search for twenty minutes. And Ronda had been right there in the closet off the bathroom all along. Why hadn't he looked there first? Barb had also been told that Ronda's feet had made it impossible to close the closet door. How could Ron have missed her?
Barb had been staring at him, willing him to look at her, but Ron was definitely avoiding her eyes. He would not look at her. He focused on places in the room that were below his eye level: the kitchen counter, the wall, the couch, and even the floor.
But never at her.
She was practically burning holes in the side of his face, but he refused to meet her eyes.
Amazed at how calm her voice sounded, Barb Thompson asked, "Why would she do this? Had you been arguing?"
Ron seized another opportunity to damn Ronda's name. "Um," he mumbled. "We were talking about a separation. Um . . . we . . . she had lied to me, destroyed my trust. She had run up a huge number of charges on credit cards in my name. We had a discussion about it and I told her I couldn't trust her. I confronted her and told her it was a felony and she could go to jail."
"Did she give you any indication before that she was going to kill herself?" Barb asked. "Did she give you any indication that she was going to do this?"
"Ronda was going to leave," he replied. "We were going to separate for a while. I had been at a doctor's appointment in Olympia, and she called me on my cell phone on my way home and talked about forty-five minutes, telling me she was going to kill herself."
This was startling information. Had Ron been unaware that there was a witness--Dave Bell--to that phone conversation? Possibly not. Maybe there had been more than one phone call--a call before Dave got to Toledo on Tuesday. Phone records could straighten that out.
According to Dave, Ronda had called her husband from her cell phone while they drove around Lewis County on Tuesday afternoon. Dave had heard every word of her side of the conversation, and there'd been no mention of suicide. Nor had the call taken forty-five minutes. It had been a very brief call where she calmly discussed some details of their separation. Ron's version was diametrically opposed to Dave's recollection.
"If she was threatening suicide," Barb probed, "why didn't you call 911?"
His answer shocked her. "I thought about calling 911. I guess I should have called them. But I decided if Ronda didn't kill herself then, she would only do it later. So I went and got a hamburger and went on to my school for the school Christmas play."
As Barb fought to absorb his words, she became aware of the sound of young voices someplace in the house--possibly some of Ron's sons. He and Katie had five sons as she understood it, two of them who were out on their own. The three younger sons had been living most of the time with Ron and Ronda. She thought they were at their mother's house.
Ron hastened to explain that after he came home from the school's Christmas play, he was with Ronda constantly. His lack of compassion for the inevitability of her suicide had apparently changed. "I stayed with her the rest of the night, and kept her right next to me," he said. "I held her all night and told her we would talk about it in the morning."
Barb Thompson saw someone moving in the hall, and she looked up, expecting to see one of Ron's sons. But it wasn't. It was a slender woman wearing a terry cloth robe, coming out of the same bedroom where Ron had gone to change his clothes.
Oh my God. Barb recognized the woman as Katie Huttula Reynolds, Ron's ex-wife and the mother of their five sons.
NEITHER RON REYNOLDS nor his former wife, Katie, seemed at all embarrassed to have Ronda's mother find them together in bed clothes, only thirty-five hours after Ronda died. They had obviously slept in the same bedroom right next to the closet where Ronda had breathed her last breath such a short time ago. Barb Thompson stared at Katie Reynolds, unable to speak. What they had done was akin to sleeping on a grave.
And why hadn't the police kept this house sealed until they were sure they had all the evidence they needed?
Katie Reynolds was a wisp of a woman, who was shockingly emaciated. She had good bone structure in her face, and might have been pretty years before, but now her eyes were hollow and her face stark white. She moved toward Barb Thompson, circling her waist in an awkward hug. She pressed a wrinkled piece of paper into Barb's hand.
"I should have felt sorry for her, I guess," Barb said, "but I couldn't manage that. She seemed to be totally under Ron's control. That was natural--she'd lived with him for more than twenty years, and given him five sons."
"I wrote a poem for Ronda," Katie whispered, "that I want you to have. I loved her, you know."
Barb hadn't been able to believe her eyes, and now she didn't trust her ears. The two people in front of her were "beyond incredible."
She realized that she was gritting her teeth so hard that her jaws ached. Both of them seemed ready to sweep all memory of Ronda under the rug--although Ron wanted to keep her furniture.
"What about funeral arrangements?" Barb asked faintly. "Have you planned anything yet?"
"No," Ronda's widower said. He was irritated, obviously, at the very thought that he would be burdened with such an onerous responsibility.
"I believe that Ronda would want to be cremated," Barb said. "However, if you decide not to do that, may I have her body shipped back home for burial?"
Surely, at some point, he was going to show some humanity, some concern for how she was feeling.
"I don't care what you do with the body," he said with a shrug. "As long as I don't have to pay for it . . ."
And suddenly, despite the pain she felt, Barb felt the comfort of God's presence. She knew she could be strong enough to withstand anything--anything that might come her way as she fought to avenge Ronda. She had many questions to ask, man
y murky places in her daughter's life to learn about and to deal with.
On autopilot now, she pressed on. "What about her belongings? May I have those? Her dogs? Her jewelry?"
"Take her dogs," he said readily. "She would want you to have them. She had a lot of fine, expensive jewelry, you know, and I can't let you have that. I will have to sell it to cover expenses. I'll box up her other things."
What expenses? Barb wondered. He wasn't going to pay for Ronda's burial. He probably would inherit their house. She didn't care, but there were sentimental items she didn't want him to have, and there was the $15,000 she had loaned to Ronda to help pay for it. She suspected there might also be some evidentiary items that would answer some of her questions.
And then Ron Reynolds blurted out something that he probably didn't realize sounded incriminating. "You know," he said, preparing to launch even more criticism of Ronda, "I found out where she had not paid her life insurance premium for December--so I had to make sure I got that paid and in the mail before the mailman picked the mail up at three-thirty yesterday. She lied to me about that, too."
For the first time, there was some emotion in her now ex-son-in-law. Anger. He seemed to want Ronda's insurance money very badly, indeed. Paying the premium after Ronda was dead wasn't remotely legal. But Ron had more grievances.
"She led me to believe that her life insurance was for three hundred thousand dollars, and it was only for fifty thousand. She never even signed the conversion form so it would follow her to her new job."
Actually, Ronda had signed a conversion form changing her policy to "self-pay" rather than having it paid by Walmart. She had also removed her brother, Freeman, as beneficiary, and named Ron instead. She had never, however, raised the pay amount on the policy. And even the third-party administrator for the insurance company looked at the signature on the conversion request and doubted it was Ronda's.