In the Still of the Night: The Strange Death of Ronda Reynolds

In the Still of the Night: The Strange Death of Ronda Reynolds and Her Mother's Unceasing Quest for the Truth

FROM TRUE-CRIME LEGEND ANN RULE comes this riveting story of a young woman whose life ended too soonâ€”and a determined motherâ€™s eleven-year crusade to clear her daughterâ€™s name.

It was nine days before Christmas 1998, and thirty-two-year-old Ronda Reynolds was getting ready to travel from Seattle to Spokane to visit her mother and brother and grandmother before the holidays. Rondaâ€™s second marriage was dissolving after less than a year, her career as a pioneering female Washington State Trooper had ended, but she was optimistic about starting over again. "Iâ€™m actually looking forward to getting on with my life," she told her mother earlier the night before. "I just need a few days with you guys." Barb Thompson, Rondaâ€™s mother, who had met her daughterâ€™s second husband only once before, was just happy that Ronda was coming home.

At 6:20 that morning, Ron Reynolds called 911 and told the dispatcher his wife was dead. She had committed suicide, he said, although he hadnâ€™t heard the gunshot and he didnâ€™t know if she had a pulse. EMTs arrived, detectives arrived, the coronerâ€™s deputy arrived, and a postmortem was conducted. Lewis County Coroner Terry Wilson, who neither visited the death scene nor attended the autopsy, declared the manner of Rondaâ€™s death as "undetermined." Over the next eleven years, Coroner Wilson would change that manner of death from "undetermined" to "suicide," back to "undetermined"â€”and then back to "suicide" again.

But Barb Thompson never for one moment believed her daughter committed suicide. Neither did Detective Jerry Berry or ballistics expert Marty Hayes or attorney Royce Ferguson or dozens of Rondaâ€™s friends. For eleven grueling years, through the ups and downs of the legal system and its endless delays, these people and others helped Barb Thompson fight to strike that painful word from her daughterâ€™s death certificate.

On November 9, 2009, a precedent-setting hearing was held to determine whether Coroner Wilsonâ€™s office had been derelict in its duty in investigating the death of Ronda Reynolds. Veteran true-crime writer Ann Rule was present at that hearing, hoping to unbraid the tangled strands of conflicting statements and mishandled evidence and present all sides of this haunting case and to determine, perhaps, what happened to Ronda Reynolds, in the chill still of that tragic December night.

Country	USA
Author	Ann Rule
Binding	Mass Market Paperback
Brand	Pocket Books
EAN	9781416544616
Edition	Reprint
Feature	Great product!
ISBN	1416544615
Label	Pocket Books
Manufacturer	Pocket Books
Model	24100334
MPN	24100334
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	464
PartNumber	24100334
PublicationDate	2011-12-27
Publisher	Pocket Books
ReleaseDate	2011-12-27
SKU	APX7688193404068176
Studio	Pocket Books

In the Still of the Night: The Strange Death of Ronda Reynolds and Her Mother's Unceasing Quest for the Truth

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