FROM TRUE-CRIME Story ANN RULE shows up this riveting tale of a woman whose existence ended too soon-and a determined mother’s eleven-year crusade to clear her daughter’s name.

It was 9 days before Xmas 1998, and thirty-two-year-old Ronda Reynolds was on the point of travel from Seattle to Spokane to visit her mother and brother and grandmother before the holidays. Ronda’s second marriage was dissolving after less than a season, her career as a pioneering female Washington State about In the Still of the night time Trooper had finished, but she was optimistic about starting over again. ‘I’m actually looking forward to obtaining on with my entire life,’ she told her mother earlier the night before. ‘I just need a couple of days with you guys.’ Barb Thompson, Ronda’s mother, who had fulfilled her daughter’s second husband only one time before, was simply content that Ronda was coming home.

At 6:20 that morning, Ron Reynolds called 911 and told the dispatcher his wife was useless. She had dedicated suicide, he stated, although he hadn’t noticed the gunshot and he didn’t understand if she had a pulse. EMTs showed up, detectives arrived, the coroner’s deputy showed up, and a postmortem was carried out. Lewis Region Coroner Terry Wilson, who neither been to the death scene nor attended the autopsy, declared the way in which of Ronda’s loss of life as ‘undetermined.’ Over another eleven years, Coroner Wilson would transformation that manner of loss of life from ‘undetermined’ to ‘suicide,’ back again to ‘undetermined’-and then back to ‘suicide’ again.

But Barb Thompson by no means for one minute believed her girl committed suicide. Neither did Detective Jerry Berry or ballistics expert Marty Hayes or attorney Royce Ferguson or a large number of Ronda’s friends. For eleven grueling years, through the fluctuations of the legal program and its endless delays, these folks among others helped Barb Thompson battle to hit that painful phrase from her daughter’s death certificate.

On November 9, 2009, a precedent-setting hearing was held to determine whether Coroner Wilson’s workplace have been derelict in its responsibility in investigating the death of Ronda Reynolds. Veteran true-crime article writer Ann Rule was present at that hearing, expecting to unbraid the tangled strands of conflicting statements and mishandled evidence and present all edges of the haunting case and to determine, probably, what occurred to Ronda Reynolds, in the chill still of that tragic December evening.