“I get a sick feeling in my gut knowing they're calling me a serial killer,” Ward said from behind glass in the dimly lit, pink cinderblock visitation room of the prison's maximum security compound. “It's even hard for me to believe that I could have had sex with three women who are now dead and say that those incidents didn't happen, but I don't remember.”
Ward is one of 84 prisoners in “max,” as the staff calls it, who spend roughly three hours a day out of their cells, can make a maximum of five phone calls a month and have absolutely no physical contact with visitors.
Already serving two life sentences for murders in Montana and Arkansas, the 41-year-old Ward is now the prime suspect in two more murders in Modesto and Merced, Calif.
But internal bickering among law enforcement in Modesto may keep Ward and others connected with the case waiting for charges to be filed.
Modesto Detective Jon Buehler has been working on Ward's case since December of 2000. Buehler says case overload and bureaucracy have kept Ward's case open for too long.
“We finally have a DNA match on Ward, but the (district attorney) wants us to go back and confirm other evidence,” Buehler said. “It's like comparing a footprint and a smudge; we don't need it.”
Shela Polly, 32, was a divorced, homeless mother of three down on her luck.
But in the weeks leading up to her death in December 2000, Polly took exams in Las Vegas to become a nursing assistant. Things were looking up.
Polly had planned to return to her home in Modesto to raise her two sons and share custody of her 3-year-old daughter with her ex-husband, Tim Polly.
“She had no history of drugs or criminal behavior,” Buehler said. “She was just a gal who got divorced and couldn't afford things at that time.”
A man walking his dog along Dry Creek in Modesto found Polly's nearly naked body covered with leaves that Dec. 30.
Although details are guarded, police found she had been beaten, stabbed and sexually assaulted before her body was dumped near the creek. Witnesses told police they had seen Polly with Ward earlier in the day.
Authorities in Modesto arrested Ward on a Montana warrant and, rather than release him on lack of evidence, extradited him back to Ravalli County, where Ward was convicted of killing a Hamilton man in October of 2000.
A big part of the problem in getting Ward's case going, Buehler said, was the fact that he and others investigating Polly's death waited two years and three months for test results proving that DNA other than Polly's was at the scene.
And just when the case was heating up again, Modesto was overwhelmed by the now-famous Laci Peterson case. Ward's case was transferred to another district attorney who is approaching the case much more cautiously.
“The (district attorney) is saying he wants us to compile the lesser evidence as an excuse not to try the case,” Buehler said. “If I could get a reasonable DA, we could have this case wrapped up in a couple of months, but he's more concerned about losing a case.”
The district attorney's office in Modesto declined to comment specifically about Ward's case, except to say it is still under review.
“Even though the defendant is currently under a life sentence in Montana and Arkansas, we still require as complete a police investigation as possible before Mr. Ward may be prosecuted in our jurisdiction,” John Goold, chief deputy attorney with the Stanislaus County District Attorney's Office said in an e-mail to the Missoulian.
In the meantime, police in Merced, Calif., are positive Ward is the man responsible for yet another woman's murder - this one in their jurisdiction.
Detective Ray Sterling of the Merced Police Department keeps Ward's case in what he calls a “murder book,” or a file of open cases in the area. Jackie Travis, 49, has been in the book for almost seven years. Sterling has no doubt Ronald James Ward also killed Travis in December of 2000.
“We did the math after we got the DNA match back from Arkansas,” Sterling said, consulting the murder book. “The odds that someone else killed Jackie is one in more than the population of Earth.”
At the time of Polly's death in Modesto, police in Merced were already matching DNA samples from the body of Jackie Travis to Ward, using samples taken from a murder scene in Arkansas.
Travis, an Arkansas native, was a cocaine addict who had broken a stint of homelessness by getting a small apartment in Merced. Soon, Travis' apartment became a drug den, most likely frequented by Ward.
“She had gotten some financial aid from the state to get that apartment,” Sterling said. “She had been there less than a month when she was found.”
Travis was found beaten to death in her apartment on Dec. 7 in a fashion similar to the murders in Arkansas and Modesto. Sterling said Travis' murder was a Ron Ward “trademark.”
“All the murders except the one in Montana fit Ward's M.O.,” Sterling said. “All three were women, all three were beaten, stabbed and raped.”
DNA samples from blood and semen were taken from inside the prosthetic leg worn by Travis. (She had lost her leg in a car accident as a young woman.)
Sterling said it wouldn't surprise him to find more murders connected to Ward.
“We know he was in Reno, Nevada, before he came to California,” Sterling said. “But the heat can destroy DNA evidence so quickly. We were lucky our murders happened in the winter.”
By the time Modesto and Merced figured out their cases were linked, Ward had been in the Montana State Prison for a Ravalli County murder for nearly a year.
Ward readily admits to killing Craig Sheldon Petrich, 43, of Corvallis.
“I wound up shooting him,” Ward said. “But that was over Hattie.”
Ward met Petrich in the fall of 2000 while living at an RV park near Corvallis with his girlfriend, Hattie Ann Baker.
Ward said after a night of drinking in the trailer, Petrich assaulted the woman.
“I come home the next night and there's a gun on the bed,” Ward said. “Hattie said, ‘You'd better kill him or I'm going to.' ”
Ward said he killed Petrich and later pled guilty to protect Baker. Ravalli County court documents contend the two men left the RV park in the afternoon and headed into the Sapphire Mountains near Corvallis.
Ward and Petrich began to fight and Ward beat Petrich with a rock, shot him three times in the chest, then hid the body in a rock crevice.
Hikers found Petrich's body about a week later.
Ravalli County Attorney George Corn prosecuted the Ward case.
“It was such a horrible thing,” Corn said. “Nobody just starts killing when they're 38.”
When authorities in Ravalli County located and arrested Ward for Petrich's murder - after learning of his arrest in California - little was known about Ward's past. Initial reports in the Associated Press described Ward as a drifter.
Born in Hood River, Ore., and raised in the Eugene and Springfield areas, Ward said his life was turbulent from a young age.
“My father was ... worthless,” Ward said in a recent interview with the Missoulian. “Put more knots on my head than anything else.”
Ward said his father, Ron Ward Sr., was an abusive womanizer who eventually gave Ward's mother syphilis before divorcing her when Ward was 19.
“I had eight stepmoms,” Ward said.
Ward said he eventually quit school in the sixth grade. When he was 19, he married his now-estranged wife, Donna, and adopted her six children.
“I miss them,” Ward said of his stepchildren. “I tried to do things with them my father never did with me, just taking them out and doing stuff.”
Ward said at one time that included coaching seventh- and eighth-grade football in Coos Bay, Ore.
But married life didn't sit well with either Ward or Donna for long.
“We were both fooling around a lot, and I was doing a lot of drugs in those days,” Ward said. “She moved to Arkansas.”
Ward has had no contact with Donna or her children for decades.
Ward said his drug habit eventually led to his not being able to hold a regular job - the result of a head injury he sustained during a fight in Oregon. So he wound up working odd jobs as a truck driver, homebuilder and commercial fisherman, all fine by Ward.
“I loved that work,” Ward said. “I loved the feeling of a boat under me.”
It was after a season on a fishing boat in Alaska that Ward met Baker and her three children at Missoula's Poverello Center in 1999.
Ward had $75 to his name and was struggling, but not as much as Baker, whose husband had left her in Missoula to fend for herself. Ward began a relationship with Baker when she left her husband, Henry.
“We moved to West Virginia (in 1999) to be with her people and I started driving a garbage truck,” Ward said. “One night, I waited and waited for Hattie to show up. The drunker I got, the madder I got. When she finally came home, I told her I was going to Montana to find my mom.”
Ward said that was the beginning of the destructive side of his relationship with Baker.
“When I left West Virginia, I had five jugs of moonshine, cocaine and methamphetamine,” Ward said. “I have no idea how I ever made it to Montana.”
It was on the way to Montana that authorities believe Ward beat, strangled, raped and stabbed 25-year-old Kristin Laurite.
Laurite was traveling by night in August of 2000, driving her Volkswagen bus cross-country with her two dogs. Her parents told police she was going to Eureka, Calif., from her home in Scotch Plains, N.J.
The dogs led Arkansas Highway Patrol to her naked body, where it had been dumped behind a rest stop near Morrilton, Ark. Her sundress had been tossed aside and she had been stabbed in the neck more than 10 times.
In June of 2007, Ward was given a life sentence in Arkansas when DNA taken from semen linked him to the murder.
While Ward denies any memory of the murders in Arkansas or California, he doesn't deny he was responsible.
“It's hard for me to deny it when they got DNA, but I have no recollection whatsoever,” Ward said. “I put the blame on me, because apparently I'm the one that done it, but Hattie's just as much to blame as I am for twisting my head all up.”
Ward said his memory loss during the time he would have committed the murders is precisely why he pled guilty to the Petrich murder and no contest to Laurite's murder.
“If there's DNA and they have proof I've done it, the best I can do is plead guilty,” Ward said. “But it don't make no sense.”
While it is true that the four murders Ward is convicted of or suspected of all occurred between August and December of 2000 - when he was with Baker, California and Montana authorities do not suspect her involvement in any of the killings.
When Ward was extradited back to Ravalli County in January of 2001, Baker gave extensive incriminating testimony against Ward to police, specifically that Ward admitted to killing Petrich the night before they fled Montana. While she claimed no knowledge of the women's deaths, she did say that she was not with Ward on the nights the women died.
Ward has heard nothing from Baker since his sentencing in Montana. He has no idea of her whereabouts.
“When I look in the mirror every day, I see Hattie's face right next to mine,” Ward said. “And I think, ‘Why'd you ever have to meet Hattie?' ”
While California gets their cases together, Ward will continue waiting in Deer Lodge, hoping for a different twist of fate from his two prior convictions.
“If they charge me, I'm going to fight it and I'd be fine if I got the death penalty,” Ward said. “I'd rather be on death row than sit here for the rest of my life not knowing what I done.”
Chandra Johnson is an intern for the Missoulian. She can be reached at 523-5302 or at chandra.johnson@missoulian.com
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