14. Mr. Reynolds stated that he had checked for a pulse behind Ronda's ear with his fingers, yet the blood pattern behind her ear showed no signs of interruption or disturbance.
15. Witnesses' and his own statements indicate Mr. Reynolds is a very light sleeper--yet he didn't hear the gunshot less than twelve feet away.
16. A gunshot residue test on Ronda's hands could not determine conclusively that the gun had been in her hands.
17. There were no prints on the gun.
18. The three boys did not see Dave Bell hand Ronda a gun. Ronda gave the gun to Bell, which he unloaded and placed in a location indicated by Ronda--a location where Mr. Reynolds routinely kept the gun.
19. I checked the drawer beneath the waterbed where Dave Bell placed the gun. Due to the difficulty of getting to that drawer under Mr. Reynolds's side of the bed, I don't believe she could have removed the gun without waking him up.
20. I was never able to locate the "brown holster" the gun was reported to have been in.
21. The very evident lack of remorse during his call to 911, and during the investigation, makes Mr. Reynolds suspect.
All twenty-one red flags were as true in 2001 as they were in December 1998, and Berry had other questions he didn't note.
But he would as the months and years passed.
Life Goes On
in Lewis County
RON REYNOLDS DIDN'T LIVE with his ex-wife Katie for good. Although she moved into the Twin Peaks Drive house only hours after Ronda died there, he seemed to consider her an interim person--someone who would care for their younger boys and do the housework. Katie stayed through May 1999, but they couldn't revive their marriage.
Ron had become a hot commodity on the market in a small town--a widower, tall, and not bad to look at, and who earned close to $60,000 a year as a school principal. Any suspicions that he hadn't told the whole truth about Ronda's death were soft-pedaled in the community. He was much beloved by the students in his school, who found him funny and appreciated that he knew all their names--even long after they moved on to high school and beyond.
Many people felt sorry for him in the tragic loss of his bride.
One of the women in town who was attracted to Ron was Blair Connery*. Her younger son attended Toledo Elementary School and spoke highly of "Mr. Reynolds." Recently divorced and raising two boys on her own, Blair attended most school functions, including sports events. In the fall of 1999, about nine months after Ronda died, Blair noticed Ron Reynolds standing alone at the sidelines of a football game. "I went up to him and introduced myself," she remembers. "I acted on impulse."
If opposites attract, they did. Blair is a striking woman, full-bosomed with masses of blond hair, sparkling eyes, and a lively sense of humor. She chatted with Reynolds for a short time, explaining that her son was one of his students.
"I didn't expect anything from that meeting," she says, "but he called me up a few days later and asked me for a date. I said 'Yes,' and that was the beginning of my almost three years with him."
Blair believed completely in Ron's innocence regarding Ronda's suspicious death, and she felt sorry for his boys--Jonathan, David, and Josh--who had been left virtually without a mother. Their birth mother, Katie Huttula, loved all her five sons devotedly, but events in her scattered life often made it impossible for her to care for them. Sometimes she would disappear and no one knew where she was. Blair knew she hadn't been living with Ron and the boys for several months.
If her family knew where Katie was, they weren't telling anyone.
Blair vowed to step in and make it easier for both Ron and his three younger boys. She knew he had two older sons, and at least one ex-wife in his past, but he seemed somehow lost. She even had visions of their respective sons becoming close friends. At first, that seemed possible as the boys were all close in age.
"We did all the family things together," Blair recalled. "There were events at school, holidays, sports--where it was good to have a father figure and at least a substitute mom. It wasn't long before I found myself falling in love with Ron."
When Blair began spending time at Ron's house, she confirmed that Katie Huttula Reynolds had moved out--but she had left many of her possessions there, as if she might move back in at any moment.
That didn't bother Blair, especially as the months passed and there was no sign of Katie. Blair had always felt Ron was honest with her. He'd told her on their very first date that he "couldn't make love," and as it worked with Ronda--although Blair knew nothing of that--it was akin to throwing down the gauntlet. She figured he had been through such a traumatic period that his impotency was to be expected.
Blair was happy when she was able to make him feel secure enough to succeed in bed. She took it as a personal accomplishment and a sign that he trusted her as much as she believed in him. Indeed, they had intercourse every day, although Blair was disappointed to find he was a selfish lover who seemed to lack concern for her needs. Maybe he just didn't know any better. Their lovemaking was over almost before it began, and he rolled over and went to sleep.
But sex wasn't the most important thing in the world, and they settled into a comfortable relationship over Christmas, 1999. Blair had a good job and some family money, and she went all out buying presents for Ron and his boys. He now spent two or three nights a week at her house. She bought bunk beds so that Josh, his youngest boy, could stay over, too. And she was at the Twin Peaks Drive house every weekend, looking after them all.
"I did Ron's ironing for him," she said with a rueful expression. "And then I cooked dinner for him. I made enough so they could freeze it and have it later in the week. I even bought the groceries. I felt so sorry for those three boys. I did everything I could for them--cooking, cleaning, laundry, pulling weeds, introducing Ron to my friends, and his sons to my own boys."
Somehow, though, Ron and Blair's sons never formed much of a connection; their interests were completely different. Ron had virtually no close friends, and the only people he and Blair visited were Ron's mother, Laura, and her boyfriend, Tom Reed. Laura Reynolds adored her only son and believed everything he told her. He had a way of explaining things that made more sense to her than the rumors that rumbled around Lewis County.
While Laura doted on Ron, Blair sensed that Tom Reed wasn't initially very supportive of him. Sometimes she caught him studying Ron with a strange look on his face. On one occasion when they were alone, Tom asked Blair if she thought Ron had "done it," inferring that he might actually have shot Ronda.
Blair shook her head and answered. "No!"
She was shocked that Tom would even ask such a question.
Because she was obviously a woman with a giving nature, it took months before Blair began to realize that she had become more of a convenience than a lover. She was a very handy--and unpaid--housekeeper. Ron took it for granted that she would make his house run smoothly, just as she did her own.
When the glow of Christmas wore off in January 2000, so did Ron's passion for her. It was like switching off a light.
"He turned completely cold," she recalled, mystified that he could change so quickly. Still, she wanted to keep believing he was an innocent man, and she brushed aside her doubts. He was troubled, and had so much on his mind. And he wasn't well. He saw a cardiologist regularly, and took Coumadin to thin his blood and avoid clots.
Once, he jumped off the tailgate of his pickup truck and cut his leg, and he began to bleed heavily. Blair was there and managed to stop the bleeding with a tourniquet until he was stitched up. She was a woman for all seasons.
Her sons came first with Blair, and Ron's method of child-raising disturbed her. Ron left his two older teenage sons alone when he stayed at her house, and they were allowed to watch pornographic movies whenever they wanted; their rooms were stacked with sex magazines. They gravitated to grunge music, and she sometimes suspected they were into drugs, but Ron didn't seem concerned. She wondered if she coddled her boys, but she needed to be sure they we
re safe and that drugs and alcohol and seamy sex didn't affect them. Lewis County had its problems with drugs like methamphetamines, so she had always been extra cautious.
One night, Blair and Jonathan Reynolds, who was about nineteen, were in the kitchen alone. There was a sudden lull in their conversation, and uncomfortable moment when neither had anything much to say. Jonathan lifted his head and stared straight into her eyes.
Then he said, "I did not kill Ronda!"
She felt a chill run through her body when she heard that. She hadn't even suggested that he had, or started a conversation with him about his late stepmother. She had long known that both Jonathan and David were fascinated with death. David was more overt about it. He spoke of death and of killing animals a lot. She was particularly disturbed when she saw David's room. He had saved the yellow police tape left behind after the sheriff's investigation into Ronda's death, and he draped it all over his room.
"I wondered how he could do that," Blair said. "It had to remind him of what happened to Ronda."
There was no question that the boys were brilliant--just as Ron and Katie were. They got A's in school without really trying, and had inherited much of Katie's exceptional musical talent.
Blair had heard the stories about how much Jonathan and David hated Ronda. One of the boys was the only person present when Ronda's beloved Rottweiler, Duchess, died suddenly at the age of seven. Ronda had evidently been worried whenever her dogs were alone with Ron's sons. When one of her Rottweilers was just a puppy, Jonathan had kicked it across the kitchen.
Blair knew that when Duchess died, Ronda called her mother and said Ron told her that Duchess had died of heatstroke, but when Ronda got home, she could tell Duchess had been viciously beaten. Not long after, Ronda's German shepherd disappeared. Barb asked if Ron's sons had "killed him, too?" but Ronda avoided answering. She didn't want "trouble."
"I even heard that one of the boys threatened to kill Ronda," Blair said, long after she had left Ron. "They just didn't like her bossing them . . ."
Blair hadn't known Ronda, and, at some point Blair Connery realized how little she knew about Ron himself, despite all the time she spent with him. "He never showed emotion," she said. "He never got really happy or angry. The most emotion I ever saw was when he was jealous of an old boyfriend of mine who was dying of cancer. He didn't want me to maintain a friendship with him. He was jealous--which was ridiculous."
But most of all, Ron never talked about his childhood. "He preferred to let the past take care of itself," Blair said.
"You could tell there was a secret in that house," Blair commented, "but I never found out what it was."
PERHAPS THERE WERE SECRETS in Ron's parents' household, too. When Laura Reynolds gave birth at the age of thirty to their third child on May 30, 1951, Ron was his parents' first boy. He was two and a half months premature and weighed around three pounds. They told stories of having to put him in a warmed oven to keep his body temperature up. This was the son Laura and Leslie had hoped for, someone to carry on the family name. But he was so tiny that he wasn't expected to live. They vowed that he would.
Baby Ronnie was coddled and protected, and he did, of course, live. But he grew up very spoiled because he seldom heard the word no. His parents gave him everything he asked for. He wanted a pony when he was four, and he got one--but his older sister Judy ended up taking care of it. A few years later, it was the same scenario with a horse. Ron lost interest in the things he wanted so rapidly, and he hated chores or responsibility.
"He really never cared about pets," Judy recalled.
Judy, five and a half years older than Ronnie, did most of the outside work at their McCleary home that a son might be expected to do. She didn't mind; she hated housework, and she much preferred carrying in firewood to doing dishes or making beds.
Leslie Reynolds was not a wealthy man. Far from it. He was a millwright for the Simpson Lumber Company in McCleary, and always on call if any of the machines there broke down. But he provided well for his family, possibly because he was a natural-born workaholic. Sometimes it seemed as if he spent more time at the lumber mill than he did at home.
The Reynolds family participated in very few family-oriented activities, mostly because Leslie was always working. Laura Church Reynolds came from a well-known family in Lewis County. She had nine sisters and almost all of them had at least three children. Holidays could have been happy and riotous occasions, but Ron shut his cousins out. When they visited his house, they weren't allowed to play with any of his toys, although on the rare occasions he went to their houses, he played with theirs.
Decades later, they remember that Ronnie was a tattletale. If they didn't want to play what he chose, he ran to his mother to complain. And he usually got his way.
As a boy, Ronnie asked for a lock on the door to his bedroom. None of his cousins or friends were allowed to go in there after that.
It wasn't long before he was unanimously disliked by all the cousins in the family, many of whom who say he is still selfish, inconsiderate, manipulative, and has no interest in other people's feelings.
"One thing," his cousin Julie Colbert said. "He is all about the buck. There was a time when I was eighteen and we drove to Arizona--and took Ronnie along. Somewhere along the way, we stopped in a place that had slot machines. Ronnie was putting quarters into it, but he didn't win anything, and he quit. I walked by it on my way to the ladies' room, and put in a quarter, and I hit the jackpot. All those quarters came pouring out."
Ronnie had been furious, and he sulked. She offered him half the money she had won, but he refused. He thought he deserved it all.
"That was Ronnie," she sighed. "He never had any empathy or any caring about anyone else."
At some point, his cousins and siblings simply shut him out of their lives, and they no longer considered him a relative--or even a friend.
He didn't mind.
Judy always struggled with her weight, and Ron teased her, calling her "Fatty," and worse names, and it hurt her feelings.
As soon as they were able to, Judy and Phyllis had to work to buy their own clothes, but Ron didn't. Judy recalled a time when Ron wanted a jacket that cost a hundred dollars. "My parents bought it for him," she said. "But we girls got nothing unless we earned the money ourselves."
Sister Phyllis was six years Judy's senior and almost a dozen years older than Ron. She married young and moved to South Carolina, and after that, she had little personal interaction with her family in McCleary, Washington.
Ron's sister, Judy, married Larry Semanko--who would serve twenty years with the Lewis County Sheriff's Office and four years as a deputy coroner under Terry Wilson. They were both quite young, but their marriage was a very happy union, destined to last. The Semankos were often asked to "babysit" with Ronnie, as his parents didn't like to leave him alone. Sitting with her little brother was usually a harrowing experience, because Judy's parents forbade them to discipline him.
There were times when the Semankos couldn't resist because Ronnie was incorrigible. One time he kicked Judy with his cowboy boots and left purple bruises but the elder Reynoldses were angry with her--not their precious Ronnie. Judy couldn't even get a word in to tell her parents what Ronnie had done.
When Larry once gave Ronnie a very light spanking, he tattled to his mother about it and both Leslie and Laura were furious.
Still apprehensive because they had almost lost their only son at birth, the Reynolds never really got over worrying about him. They continued to give him everything he asked for, even though he grew to be a robust boy with no sign that hinted at his premature arrival.
It was generally accepted that Ron had an intensely acquisitive nature, even as a child. He wanted things and money and he got them. When he was in high school in Elma, Washington, he and his best friend got drunk, Ron missed a turn, went off the road, and wrecked the car his parents had recently bought him. It wasn't new--but it had been in very good shape.
Leslie
and Laura Reynolds simply could not accept that their son might possibly have been intoxicated enough to cause an accident, so they were all too anxious to believe the lies he told them. He said emphatically that he never drove if he had had anything to drink. For that matter, he assured them that he just didn't drink. Period. They trusted him and Ron got another car right away. This time his mother had a protective "cage" installed in case he ever had another accident.
Other students at Elma High called him "Roll-Bar Ron" after that.
Ron was highly intelligent, and he always got good grades. He had his share of friends in the Class of 1969 of Elma High School, although he was never a jock. Academically, he was in the top ten of his class at graduation. His parents were extremely proud of him. They focused their lives around their son.
In the 1960s, the Elma High Eagles were tightly knit, and they would remain so. For their fortieth reunion in August 2009, more than a hundred graduates showed up.
Ron met Catherine Huttula in high school, and they went to the same church youth group together, but no one is sure if they dated. He was dating Donna Daniels, and Katie was far more sought after than Ron was.
"Katie was very, very popular," a man who went to high school with her remembers. "She was a cheerleader, and very attractive to the boys. She was always a class officer."
Ron appeared in the senior high play He Thinks He's a Rabbit. Some of his fellow students knew that Ron had a wild side, but one boy said, "I always thought of Ron Reynolds as white-bread and pure."
Even then, he had a chameleon-like personality. He could be anything he perceived someone wanted him to be--if he wanted something from them. Otherwise, he ignored them.
Ron married very young, shortly after he graduated from high school. His first wife was Donna Daniels, who was a devout Christian, and very naive. Many of her classmates recall Donna as "the sweetest girl in the world."