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

Summary

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. Ronda's second marriage was dissolving after less than a year and her career as a pioneering female Washington State Trooper had ended, but she was optimistic about starting over again.

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 hadn't heard the gunshot and he didn't know if she had a pulse. EMTs arrived, detectives arrived, the coroner'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 Ronda's death as "undetermined."

But Barb Thompson never for one moment believed her daughter committed suicide. 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 daughter's death certificate.