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

Author:Ann Rule
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Murder, Washington (State), Social Science, True Crime, Crime And Criminals, Murder investigation, Suicide, Psychology, Serial Killers, General, Murder - General, Case studies, Fiction, Chehalis, Espionage, Criminology
ISBN: 9781416544609
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-10-12T07:00:00+00:00

PERHAPS THERE WERE SECRETS in Ron's parents' household, too. When Laura Reynolds gave birth at the age of thirty to their third child on May 30, 1951, Ron was his parents' first boy. He was two and a half months premature and weighed around three pounds. They told stories of having to put him in a warmed oven to keep his body temperature up. This was the son Laura and Leslie had hoped for, someone to carry on the family name. But he was so tiny that he wasn't expected to live. They vowed that he would.

Baby Ronnie was coddled and protected, and he did, of course, live. But he grew up very spoiled because he seldom heard the word no. His parents gave him everything he asked for. He wanted a pony when he was four, and he got one--but his older sister Judy ended up taking care of it. A few years later, it was the same scenario with a horse. Ron lost interest in the things he wanted so rapidly, and he hated chores or responsibility.

"He really never cared about pets," Judy recalled.

Judy, five and a half years older than Ronnie, did most of the outside work at their McCleary home that a son might be expected to do. She didn't mind; she hated housework, and she much preferred carrying in firewood to doing dishes or making beds.

Leslie Reynolds was not a wealthy man. Far from it. He was a millwright for the Simpson Lumber Company in McCleary, and always on call if any of the machines there broke down. But he provided well for his family, possibly because he was a natural-born workaholic. Sometimes it seemed as if he spent more time at the lumber mill than he did at home.

The Reynolds family participated in very few family-oriented activities, mostly because Leslie was always working. Laura Church Reynolds came from a well-known family in Lewis County. She had nine sisters and almost all of them had at least three children. Holidays could have been happy and riotous occasions, but Ron shut his cousins out. When they visited his house, they weren't allowed to play with any of his toys, although on the rare occasions he went to their houses, he played with theirs.

Decades later, they remember that Ronnie was a tattletale. If they didn't want to play what he chose, he ran to his mother to complain. And he usually got his way.

As a boy, Ronnie asked for a lock on the door to his bedroom. None of his cousins or friends were allowed to go in there after that.

It wasn't long before he was unanimously disliked by all the cousins in the family, many of whom who say he is still selfish, inconsiderate, manipulative, and has no interest in other people's feelings.

"One thing," his cousin Julie Colbert said. "He is all about the buck. There was a time when I was eighteen and we drove to Arizona--and took Ronnie along. Somewhere along the way, we stopped in a place that had slot machines.

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