truepenny | UBC: Rule, In the Still of the Night

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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This case. This bizarre, baffling, infuriating case.

Ronda Reynolds was shot sometime in the early morning hours of December 16, 1998. Somebody made a very clumsy effort to make it look like suicide. And the first police officers on the scene--let's be brutally honest--fucked up. They moved the gun. They let the victim's three teenage stepsons leave the house without being questioned. They decided that the victim's soon-to-be-ex-husband's story (a story which makes NO SENSE) was true, and that Ronda had committed suicide. Because they decided that (when the rule of thumb in death investigations is, prove it's NOT homicide, THEN consider suicide), they didn't follow basic procedures to secure evidence (and much of the evidence they did collect would be "lost"). The history of this case thereafter, from 1998 until Rule's book was published in 2010, is at least 75% the history of Lewis County law enforcement trying to make their fuck-up go away. They drove one of their best homicide detectives to resign because, in refusing to let go of the case, he made them look bad. So they punished him instead of punishing the detectives who fucked up.

Or, y'know, choosing a less dysfunctional alternative than punishment.

By and large, Rule is pro-cop. She makes no bones about it. She was a cop herself, she made an effort as a reporter to maintain good relationships with the cops she wrote about, she admired--and I, too, admire--the homicide detectives who work cases like bulldogs. I don't think I can really imagine how hard it must have been for her to write this book, in which officers she knew and liked come across as men who are corrupt, who don't care, who are vastly more invested in their egos than they are in the truth. That's a harsh judgment, and it's my judgment, based on the evidence Rule presents. I don't think Ronda Reynolds' death was an insoluble homicide when it was committed; I think it may very well be insoluble now, unless somebody talks. And it seems less and less likely--with the complete lack of interest demonstrated over and over again by Lewis County law enforcement--that anybody ever will.

The trial in this book is not actually a murder trial. It's a judicial review of the (criminally incompetent) Lewis County coroner and his handling of Ronda Reynolds' death. The triumph of this book is the jury deciding that (a) the coroner mishandled the case dreadfully and (b) that the manner of Ronda Reynolds' death was homicide. Ronda's mother's website Justice for Ronda has not been updated since 2010, and the only evidence of activity on the case is Ron Reynolds (the soon-to-be-ex-husband who told such a flimsy and ridiculous story) and his son suing Lewis County for violation of their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Note that the coroner who convened this inquest in 2011 was not the coroner who made such a botch of the case originally. Also note that: "The jury unanimously ruled that Ronda Reynolds’ manner of death was homicide and identified Ron Reynolds and his son Jonathan Reynolds as responsible for her death. After the inquest, McLeod issued arrest warrants for Reynolds and his son. The Lewis County Prosecutor’s Office declined to press charges."

I'm gonna be honest: I did not enjoy this book. I hate reading about botched investigations and I hate even more reading about the kind of stonewalling that Lewis County law enforcement has continued and continued to practice, defeating efforts to find the truth simply by inertia. Even when individuals, like Coroner McLeod, try to rectify the glaring failure, they are met again with "declined to press charges." (I know that there can be very good reasons for a county prosecutor or district attorney to decline to press charges, and in this case I imagine that it was actually that they didn't think they could win the case rather than any lack of desire to see justice done, but it's just so fucking emblematic of the whole damn thing.) It makes me angry, and because there's no constructive outlet for my anger--there's nothing I can do--it makes me frustrated ("seething" is probably the correct word), and that leads to a kind of unpleasant reading experience. But that's not a judgment of the quality of the book, just of the nature of its subject.

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