Bizarre Crime of the Week : Investigation Discovery: Serial Killer Ronald James Ward, Jr. Sentenced for Murders in Three States

October 08, 2008

The string of killings that were eventually attributed to self-professed racist Ronald James Ward, Jr. began more than eight years ago in Arkansas. Known as a drifter, as many serial killers are known, Ward crossed paths with 25-year-old Kristin Laurite on August 25, 2000 in the vicinity of Morrilton, Arkansas, just off Interstate 40 between Plumerville and Kenwood in the northwestern part of the state. Laurite was traveling cross-country from Scotch Plains, New Jersey to California to begin a new teaching job. She was driving a 1972 Volkswagen bus, and was traveling with her two dogs when she stopped at a rest area to call home with a progress report of her trip and to exercise her two dogs. The rest area was the last time that anyone saw her alive.

The following day a man who stopped at the same rest area saw Laurite's dogs running around without any apparent supervision. He called them over to him and, after noting that they were a long way from home from the information that was on their collars, called the number listed on their tags. He had reached Kristin Laurite's mother. A few hours later, after Laurite's frantic mother had notified law enforcement authorities, Laurite's two dogs led the cops to a pond located a few hundred yards from the rest area where they found Laurite's nude body. Her body was bloody, particularly her upper body near her neck, and the officers could see apparent stab wounds in the area of her neck. It was later determined that she had been sexually assaulted and had sustained 10 stab wounds to her neck.

Although Laurite's family placed billboards along several highways in Arkansas that depicted Laurite's smiling photograph and the question, "Do you know who killed me," the effort had not produced the desired results. In the meantime Ward, along with his girlfriend, had fled to Corvallis, Montana, south of Missoula in the western part of the state, where they stayed at an RV park. It was at the RV park where Ward met Craig Sheldon Petrich, 43. Petrich, from nearby Hamilton, Montana, a small town located in the Bitterroot Valley, would become Ward's next victim.

According to official documents, Petrich was last seen on October 5, 2000, exiting the RV park with Ward. According to The Missoulian newspaper, Ward purportedly admitted during an interview with a reporter for the newspaper that he and Petrich had been involved in a fight in which Ward had struck him with a rock. He also allegedly admitted that he had shot Petrich three times with a single shot rifle. Such a rifle only holds one round of ammunition, and must be reloaded for each shot fired-giving the shooter, it would seem, sufficient time to think about his actions before delivering the next shot and served to add a more chilling dimension to the case. Petrich's body was found by hikers on October 15, 2000 in the Sapphire Mountains. Before authorities could arrest Ward for Petrich's murder, Ward had fled the state. Unbeknownst to Montana authorities, Ward ended up first in Merced, California, and later in Merced.

Ward bounced around between motels for a while, and was known to have resided at times at locations in Stanislaus County, where Modesto is located, and Merced County. He eventually met 49-year-old Jackie Travis, a one-legged woman with a drug problem who had been living in a homeless shelter and reportedly was making progress with her addiction. Travis had lost her leg in a traffic accident when she was much younger-it had been amputated below the knee, and had been replaced with a prosthetic limb. Of course, the police in Merced and Merced County had no idea-yet-of Travis's killer's identity, and it would be years before they did. Much later, in putting together Ward's timeline, police eventually believed that it was sometime during the transition that Travis had made between living in a homeless shelter and moving into an apartment in East Merced that Ward had appeared in her life, and that one of the common denominators that brought them into each other's lives had been drugs.

Barely two months after Ward left Montana, Jackie Travis ended up dead. Travis's roommate found her body when she came home after noticing blood in several locations of the apartment. It was lying on the bedroom floor, beneath a comforter. Police later determined that she had been sexually assaulted, beaten, strangled and stabbed, and various symbols had been carved into her skin. Detectives found Travis's prosthetic leg nearby on a mattress, and were able to obtain blood samples from it. The artificial leg also had semen on it, causing some people to initially wonder whether Ward had masturbated on it during a sexual fantasy.

Ward claimed his next victim a few weeks later in Modesto, California, on December 30, 2000, in Stanislaus County, north of Merced, soon after meeting 32-year-old Shela Polly at an employment agency. Polly, mother of a three-year-old daughter, had fallen on hard times following a divorce, and had been staying at the Modesto Gospel Mission. One of her goals had been to get back on her feet financially so that she could adequately provide care for her daughter, and that meant finding a job. Part of her routine was to check in with Labor Ready, an employment agency not far from the mission. She had shown up at the agency on that fateful day at 7:30 a.m., and employees would later tell the police that she had been seen speaking with a man between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., a man that police would eventually determine had been none other than Ronald Ward.

Three hours later, at 11:30 a.m., a man walking his dog discovered Polly's partially-clad body beneath a tree in an area known as Dry Creek. It was determined later that she had been strangled and stabbed to death.

Although the police had not made an immediate connection between Ward and the three women that had been murdered in two states, the cops in the various jurisdictions had been amassing DNA evidence found at each of the crime scenes. However, it would be years before the evidence found at all of the various crime scenes involving the murders of Kristin Laurite, Jackie Travis, and Shela Polly was linked to Ward.

As it turned out, it had been the Modesto police that had gotten the lucky break that would solve the case when they arrested Ward a short time after Polly's murder on an unrelated matter. Investigators soon learned that Ward was wanted on an arrest warrant from Montana for Petrich's murder. Although he was extradited to face the charges in Montana, Modesto police believed that he was the prime suspect in Polly's murder. He was convicted of Petrovich's murder in January 2001 and was sentenced to life in prison plus 10 years. Ward was serving his sentence at the Montana State Prison, located just outside of Deer Lodge, when a crime lab in California made another break in the case a year later.

California DNA experts linked DNA evidence found on Travis's body and inside her apartment to DNA evidence found at the crime scene where Kristin Laurite's body was found. A year after that, in 2003, saliva evidence recovered from Shela Polly's body was also linked to the Laurite DNA evidence. The missing link that would connect Ward to the murders of the three women, and thus provide his identity to the investigating police agencies, was not found until 2005 when Montana prison officials entered samples of Ward's DNA into a national criminal database and matches were made connecting him to the earlier murders.

After being confronted with the evidence against him, Ward pled guilty to Kristin Laurite's murder in 2007. According to official documents, Ward claimed to have been high on heroin and cocaine when Laurite was killed. He also claimed to have been drinking moonshine at the time, and said that he did not remember killing her. He was sentenced to life in prison for Laurite's murder, and the Arkansas judge ordered that the sentence run concurrently with that of the Montana sentence.

In their attempts to work up a background on Ward's history prior to his arrest, investigators learned that he had been born in Oregon. His mother had been a prostitute, and his father a drug addict. He failed to finish the sixth grade, and one of the various jobs that he had held had been that of a truck driver. Because his work as a truck driver had taken him to a number of states, investigators naturally began to wonder whether there were any other unsolved murders that could be attributed to Ward.

Following the Arkansas guilty plea, Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager and Merced County District Attorney Larry Morse II paid a visit to Ward at the Montana State Prison in October 2007 with the intent of convincing him to also plead guilty to Travis's and Polly's murders.

"We knew (by that time) that Ward was responsible for both murders and hoped there might be some shred of conscience left in him that we could appeal to and spare the families of Jackie and Shela the heartache of long, protracted jury trials," Fladager told a reporter for the Turlock Journal.

"It was chilling to be in the same small room with a man we knew had committed four incredibly brutal murders," Morse added. "But both Birgit and I believed it was worth the gamble to resolve these cases and bring some closure to the families without the emotional pain of jury trials."

According to the Journal, Ward agreed to waive extradition to California and plead guilty to both cases. However, he made the agreement only on the condition that the California prosecutors could guarantee that he would promptly be returned to Montana following the pleas, purportedly because he did not want to be in a California prison for very long due to his racist beliefs.

It took nearly a year before Ward was transported from Montana to California, but he arrived and was lodged in the Merced County Jail on September 10, 2008. After making the agreed upon guilty pleas, Ward was sent back to Montana a week later, on Tuesday, September 16, 2008. Ward had shown no outward signs of remorse inside the Merced County courtroom where he was sentenced to two life sentences without possibility of parole in the presence of several of the Travis's and Polly's relatives. The judge ordered that the two life sentences run concurrently with each other, but that they run consecutively to the sentences he had received in Montana and Arkansas.

"This ensures that this depraved individual will never see the light of day as a free man," Fladager said.

Morse and Fladager indicated that they would be contacting law enforcement agencies around the country to encourage them to look at some of their older, unsolved cases to determine if any connections to Ward can be made.

"We believe it highly unlikely that Ronald Ward started and stopped killing in 2000," Morse said. "We are afraid there might be more victims out there and are going to work with national DNA databases to see if Ward might be linked to other murders."