Tales from a Law Office--Violence

Rhonda Reynolds

The Sampson family is known to argue politics, loudly. A former boyfriend of mine, Fred, and Mark’s ex, Dr. Sue, each told me that when the noise level rose, they expect somebody to get clobbered with a catsup bottle. They didn’t understand that we were just being vociferous. Andre, who was a colleague in the Seattle City Attorney’s office, was horrified at the police report about a man’s beating his wife, but his horror was mitigated when he learned that the wife had thrown a pot of scalding hot beans at him, first.  My friend JoAnne, who had become the director of the Family Violence Project within the Seattle City Attorney’s office,  told me how rare my experience was in being free of violence. She recounted seeing a man walk down the hall to his estranged wife’s apartment, punching out every window along the way, then throwing a punch at her. A client told me to speak to her right ear—she had lost her hearing in her left ear when her former husband had tried to murder her, and shot her point blank in the head.

When we set up the ground rules for our law firm, Duncan Wilson and I knew that we would not be defending felons. We completely agreed that an accused is entitled to a zealous defense. But for one thing, to take on a capital case without experience and mentoring would be incompetent. But closer to us, we knew of a colleague who had handled a case of manslaughter.  The victim had died of a gunshot wound in an apparent hunting accident. A young lawyer handled the case, and won, but afterwards, an intimate friend of the accused told the lawyer, “He did it, you know. He thought the guy was molesting his daughter.”

We didn’t do felonies, but some of our misdemeanor cases were bad enough. We represented a drunk driver who had offended over, and over, and over again. I wasn’t involved in most of our criminal defense cases, but when I had to cover a court appearance one day, the client taught me the ropes:  “First we go here. Now over here….” he taught me. He had been a good Marine, but they wouldn’t let him re-up because of his alcoholism. He was a gifted auto mechanic, but when it was time to test his cars on the road, somebody else had to do it, because he wasn’t licensed to drive. Even after a year of home detention, which he obeyed, on his first day out, he drove drunk and got arrested. To us, he seemed as dangerous to others as many a felon with a gun. We decided that morally, we could not try to prevent his further convictions, and sent him to new counsel.

Clients frightened me only twice. The first was a woman stockbroker who had a concern about sex harassment, but it was clear to me that she was not telling me the whole story. I told her that, and she jumped from her chair. “This isn’t working!” she said, and ran from my office.  She slammed the door so hard behind her that my staff came running, because they thought they had heard a gunshot.  I realized that in a case of actual violence, in no way would I have time enough to respond. A contemporary, James Gooding, had been gunned down in his office just that way, by an unhappy renter.

     Eric will remember the second incidence. I was representing an Asian woman in a sex discrimination case, and she had become infatuated with me. My friend Chris, the police detective, had dropped in at the office one day. and when I saw him before I saw her (neither had appointments) had warned me, “I don’t know who that woman in your lobby is, but you need to watch out. She thinks she’s involved with you, and she’s jealous.”

Problems developed in the case. She told me that she had been assaulted by a co-worker in a fish-packing plant. But when we got copies of the medical records, they said that she had cut herself over disappointment in a relationship with another woman.

When I cancelled an appointment one day because our building was on fire (roofers ignited their tar, and we had to evacuate), she said “I went home and I saw my reflection in the knife.”

 When she refused to talk to me about a very good settlement offer we had received in her case, because she wanted to prolong our contact, I knew I had to get out of the case. (Yeah, it took me a while, didn’t it?) Luckily, new counsel was willing to take over. But the client knew where I lived, because she was a King County employee with expertise in land ownership and use. One day I came home from work and found a knife stuck in the side of the house. I telephoned a psychologist I knew, and he said, “That’s no accident.” 

The case settled, and the judge gave me my attorney’s fees for work to date, but dinged me a few dollars for “Too much time on the phone with the client.” That irked me a bit—she’s the one who placed the calls. But after the falling out, Chris warned me to be on the alert, so Eric escorted me out of the building every day after work. One evening, we saw a young Asian woman in a pickup truck parked outside of our office, and we looked long and hard before we decided it wasn’t she. Some time later, I met an attorney at a conference. He told me, "Did you know that I ended up with that case? And I have just one thing to say. I'm glad that woman doesn't know where I live!"

The worst case resulted in a death, but I was long out of the case before then. My client was Rhonda Thompson Liburdi Reynolds. I met her when she was a Washington State Trooper married to a fellow officer named “Liburdi.” She had a complaint of sex harassment. At the time, she had a stout build and a short haircut, and her bullet-proof vest that had a neckline like a man’s undershirt,  so she looked “butch.” She had a handful of complaints against her sergeant, such as inappropriate comments about her haircut, inappropriately measuring her bust for the vest, and unfairly denying her credits on arrest she had made. We wrote a letter of complaint to the State Patrol. They assigned Annette Sandberg to investigate. Sandberg had been the president of the Union, so certainly understood the officers’ points of view, but she had been appointed to internal investigation, that requires neutrality, not advocacy. However, Sandberg documented that there were witnesses to every incident, and not one supported Rhonda’s version. We could not sustain the case. Rhonda left the patrol and last I heard from her, took a job as a security officer at a shopping mall. (Sandberg went on to be the Chief of the State Patrol.)

Then one morning on the radio news, I heard that a former Trooper named Rhonda Reynolds had died of a gunshot wound to the head. I knew at once that it must be she—how many troopers could there be named “Rhonda” ? From newspaper accounts, it appeared that she had married a school principal, and had died from a pistol wound to the head in their bedroom closet while he slept nearby, and hadn’t heard a thing. There were complications: They were in the process of a divorce, even though they had slept together that night. The husband was still involved with his ex, and Rhonda had a male best friend scheduled to drive her to the airport in the morning.  The pistol did not appear to be in a position in which she could have used it. A lipstick message scrawled on her bathroom mirror didn’t match her handwriting. Her husband’s three teenage sons were hustled out of the house at once, before they could be questioned. And her fingernail was torn, something her mother said that Rhonda would never have allowed. Never the less, the local coroner decided that it was a suicide.

Rhonda’s mother Barbara Thompson was insistent that the investigation was inadequate, and she was right. By all accounts, it had been botched.

By happenstance, some years later, I met a former Long Beach, CA, homicide detective, George Fox, who had gone to work for the Attorney General’s office. He had been assigned to reassess Rhonda’s case. He came across like a TV detective—laid back, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, mind like a steel trap, never missing a hint.  He told me that Rhonda’s case was a suicide, clearly, in his opinion, undoubtedly.

Never the less, Rhonda’s mother Barbara found an attorney who was able to help. He had the case reopened, and at  the end of trial, the judge ruled that the coroner’s opinion of “suicide” should be changed to “Undetermined.” The coroner appealed, but was replaced at the next election, and the new coroner changed the death certificate to say “Undetermined.”

Crime writer Ann Rule wrote a book about the case, called In the Still of the the Night. She revealed a lot about Rhonda that I didn’t know. The butch Rhonda I knew had been a feminine rodeo queen. Rhonda’s medical records, so sterile and objective, indicated that she had undergone abortions during her marriage, and made we wonder if she had just an unsettled personality and had simply changed her mind about pregnancy. But the author recited a horrific tale of Rhonda undergoing spontaneous,  incomplete miscarriage and struggling down the hall in an Aberdeen, WA hospital, seeking help. 

Whatever happened, it was a sad end to the life of Rhonda Reynolds, at age 33.