In the Still of the Night

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

By Ann Rule

2010

First Published

3.88

Average Rating

Number of Pages

0H01M

Audio Length

From true-crime legend Ann Rule comes this riveting story of a young woman whose life ended too soon and a determined mother's eleven-year crusade to clear her daughter'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. Ronda'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. Barb Thompson, Ronda's mother—who had met her daughter'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 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". Over the next eleven years, Coroner Wilson would change that manner of death to "suicide", back to "undetermined", 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 Ronda'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 daughter's death certificate.

Avg Rating

3.88

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

18%

4 STARS

53%

3 STARS

29%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Ann Rule

Author · 44 books

Ann Rule was a popular American true crime writer. Raised in a law enforcement and criminal justice system environment, she grew up wanting to work in law enforcement herself. She was a former Seattle Policewoman and was well educated in psychology and criminology. She came to prominence with her first book, The Stranger Beside Me, about the Ted Bundy murders. At the time she started researching the book, the murders were still unsolved. In the course of time, it became clear that the killer was Bundy, her friend and her colleague as a trained volunteer on the suicide hotline at the Seattle, Washington Crisis Clinic, giving her a unique distinction among true crime writers. Rule won two Anthony Awards from Bouchercon, the mystery fans' organization. She was nominated three times for the Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. She is highly regarded for creating the true crime genre as it exists today. Ann Rule also wrote under the name Andy Stack . Her daughter is Goodreads author Leslie Rule.