Review
"Borris nimbly juggles sharp, at times even jagged humor with genuine poignancy to construct a road trip that rises above the formula. Characters are particularly well limned . . . The book doesn't overdo the stealthy message of hope; sentiment is balanced out with the macabrely humorous lists the group concocts ('Top Ten Celebrity Death Sites') and refreshingly credible transcripts of their online chats."
--The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, January 2010
Product Description
FROM TRUE-CRIME LEGEND ANN RULE comes this riveting story of a young woman whose life ended too soonโand a determined motherโs eleven-year crusade to clear her daughterโs 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. Rondaโs 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. "Iโm 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, Rondaโs mother, who had met her daughterโs 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 hadnโt heard the gunshot and he didnโt know if she had a pulse. EMTs arrived, detectives arrived, the coronerโs 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 Rondaโs death as "undetermined." Over the next eleven years, Coroner Wilson would change that manner of death from "undetermined" to "suicide," back to "undetermined"โand 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 Rondaโs 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 daughterโs death certificate.
On November 9, 2009, a precedent-setting hearing was held to determine whether Coroner Wilsonโs 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.