Fourth Sunday from Jingle Jangle

Cousin Ray (excerpt from Chapter 1 of 
Jingle Jangle)

By Jim Rix

[Editor’s Note: Today we inaugurate a new monthly column featuring selections from the author's 2007 true crime book, Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out. We lead off with a blurb from the dust jacket: “A must for readers of true crime and anyone wondering why so many innocent people are convicted in America. The book satisfies from start to finish, from the opening of Ray Krone’s horror story, through the compelling analysis of what went wrong, and on to the startling conclusion....”
                –Sister Helen Prejean, author of
                  Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents]

I first learned of his predicament during a phone conversation with my mother. In her eighties, my mother was still one of the brightest people I knew and we often talked about current events. In this particular conversation I asked her if she had watched the TV program the night before about an innocent man released from Death Row. I don’t remember now which network magazine show it was or who was profiled. My mother replied that she hadn’t seen the show, then added casually, “You have a cousin on Death Row, and he’s innocent.”
    “What?” I thought I’d misheard.
    She went on to say that Ray Krone, the son of her niece, Carolyn, had been convicted of a murder in Phoenix. Carolyn had told her that a bite mark found on the victim supposedly matched Ray’s teeth. The crime was dubbed “the snaggletooth murder.”
    I had never met Ray Krone. Mom grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania near Harrisburg. After attending high school in York, twenty-five miles south of Harrisburg, she began to move west. She received a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University in 1937, then moved the same year to Pueblo, Colorado to accept a nursing position. There she met and married the man who would be my father. In 1945, when I was two years old, we moved to San Francisco. When I remember family, it’s my father’s side I recall, because four of dad’s siblings resided in the San Francisco Bay area. Mom’s relatives remained in the east, where Ray grew up. I visited there only once, when I was seven, and that was seven years before Ray Krone was born.
    Since I knew absolutely nothing about Ray’s life, I was skeptical of his innocence. Mom was only telling me what Ray’s mother had told her. What mother would believe that her son is guilty of murder? I thought. After all, Ray was convicted by a jury. It’s not impossible to have a murderer in the family. So, more out of curiosity than anything else, I wrote Ray a letter introducing myself.
    In June 1993 I received Ray’s response. First, he talked about his recollection of “Aunt Dorothy,” my mother, and her son, who “came one year and helped Grandpa tear down an old chicken coop in front of the house. I was very young then and can barely remember.” He thought it might have been me, but in reality it was my younger brother. I was away at college at the time.
    Then he outlined his predicament:

The victim was a bartender at a neighborhood bar where I went to practice darts. Her name was Kim. Sometimes, when she wasn’t busy, she would join in and shoot darts. To even the teams she was usually on my side because she wasn’t a very good player. Dart leagues are very popular in Phoenix. I competed regularly and often in local tournaments.
    She was attractive and friendly and showed a real interest in me.
    On Christmas, three days before her murder, I was in the lounge playing darts with some friends when Trish, the manager, decided to close early and go drinking and dancing at another bar. My roommate Steve and I drove together in his car and met the group there. When that bar closed Trish invited everyone to continue the party at her apartment. I didn’t have to work the next day but Steve did so it was necessary for him to take me home to get my car. Kim rode along. She said she liked convertibles and asked to ride in my Corvette. I think she really wanted to make sure I would go to the party. She rode with us to my house where I switched my truck for the Corvette.
    At the party we sat on the floor near Trish’s caged iguana and talked. We only stayed an hour or so because Trish and her girlfriend Lu began to engage in some activity that made us uncomfortable.
    On the way back to her car Kim told me that she was planning to move out of her boyfriend’s house. Trish’s husband had left her and she invited Kim to move in with her and Lu. Kim told me that she’d changed her mind now that she’d found out at this party that they were lesbians. Anyway, I dropped Kim off at her car and went home.
    On Friday, two nights later, six of us went to the lounge to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Kim wasn’t working but came in later in the evening and sat at the bar with some friends. At one point she joined us for a game or two of darts. Then she returned to her friends at the bar. That was the last time I saw her. She was murdered the next night.
    The birthday party continued at my house until three in the morning. At 6:30 I got up and went to work. I’m a mail carrier. On my way home after work I stopped into the bar to wait for the pizza I’d ordered from a nearby pizzeria. It was late afternoon. The bartender on duty served me a beer without conversation. When the pizza was ready I took it home and shared it with my friends who remained after the previous night’s party. We ate the pizza and watched a football game together.
    After working all day with just three hours of sleep the night before, I was dead tired. When my friends left I went to bed. It was about 9:30. My roommate, Steve, stayed up until nearly midnight watching TV.
    I learned the details of the murder from my attorney and at trial. Kim was killed in the early morning hours after the bar closed. She was found by the bar’s owner that Sunday morning in the men’s restroom. She had been knifed in the back. There were cuts and bites on her neck. There was also a bite mark on one of her breasts. She was naked and appeared to have been raped, but no semen was found.
    The police came to my house that Sunday afternoon. It was one o’clock. I remember because I was heading out to the Black Bull for an awards banquet where I was to receive a trophy.
    When I identified myself, one of them said, “Your girlfriend’s dead.”
    “What?” I said more than a bit startled. “What are you talking about? I don’t have a girlfriend.”
    “Kim Ancona,” he continued.
    Steve had gone to the supermarket near the bar early that morning for a Sunday newspaper. He told me that the bar had been taped off and that there was much police activity. Something obviously had happened there.
    “You mean Kim from the bar?” I deduced. I didn’t even know her last name then.
    The detective nodded.
    I told this detective that she wasn’t my girlfriend, that I only knew her casually from the bar where we shot darts a few times together. Then he asked me where my dark-rimmed glasses were. I told him I didn’t wear glasses. He looked above one of my eyes for a cut that wasn’t there. All through the questioning he couldn’t take his eyes off my teeth. He checked Steve’s teeth, then he took a close look at mine. Eventually, he asked me to go downtown with him. On the way he stopped into a convenience store and returned with some Styrofoam plates. He asked me to bite into them several times. I did.
    At the police station he proceeded to grill me incessantly about being Kim’s boyfriend, even though I had already told him many times I was not. He took my picture, my fingerprints and impressions of my shoes.
    I cooperated fully and answered everything truthfully. I had nothing to hide. After examining my body for scratches that weren’t there, the detective let me go.
    The next day this same detective showed up at my house waving a search warrant. He made a big deal of some condoms found in my top drawer. They weren’t even mine. My friend Bob tossed them into my room one day as a joke, saying that I should start using them. The detective took some underwear from my dryer, suggesting that they were stained with blood. They appeared at trial, but no blood was found on them. Next, a pair of my socks was found to have some beads on them. These beads were used to lubricate the bar’s shuffleboard. The socks also appeared at trial, along with Kim’s socks, which also contained some shuffleboard beads.
    The police attempted to have Amy, my previous girlfriend, testify that I was a violent person who used knives and had bitten her in the past. She refused, saying it wasn’t true.
    After the search, the detective took me downtown again. He produced a court order for hair, blood, saliva and teeth impressions. Again I cooperated. Afterwards, he interrogated me over and over about being Kim’s boyfriend. The more I denied it the more he accused me of lying to him. When he said he had a witness who told him that I had been dating her and that I had taken her to a party, I told him what happened Christmas night but he acted as if I had something to hide.
    He brought out a tape recorder and turned it on. After two hours of being grilled, poked, pulled, jabbed and called a liar, I was seriously stressed. When he put a mic in front of me, I demanded to see an attorney and stopped talking. He slammed off the recorder and said, “There are other ways to go about this.”
    As I was being released, I told him what I thought of his attitude and suggested he check out whoever was saying I was Kim’s boyfriend.
    After work the next day the detective arrested me. It was the last day of 1991. He claimed that my bite mark had been found on Kim’s body.
    He would not question me again. The booking procedure put me into a state of shock.
    I remember yelling, “What about DNA?”
    “It will be awhile for those results,” were his final words to me.
    I sat in jail for weeks expecting to be released as soon as the DNA results were known. But it never happened.
    At trial, Kate, the bartender who served me the beer as I waited for the pizza, testified that Kim had told her she wouldn’t need help closing the bar because she expected me to help her.
    When Kim talked to me Friday night, she had mentioned that Trish was no longer the manager and she would be working the next night. Kim wanted to do a good job, hoping she would be named the new manager.
    She said, “If you’re not doing anything, why don’t you stop in tomorrow night?”
    I didn’t want to be impolite, so I said, “Okay.”
    When Kim returned to her friend at the bar, Steve said, “You know, she’s got a thing for you?”
    “Yeah,” I answered, “but she’s living with some guy. I don’t need that!”
    Kate ended her testimony by adding that Kim was looking forward to spending the night with me.
    I don’t know where “helping Kim” or “spending the night” came from. If I were going to help her close the bar, I would have been there at closing time, but I wasn’t. No witnesses saw me there that night. Several testified that Kim was alone in the bar when it closed.
    My friends verified that I was up all Friday night and with little sleep went to work early the next morning. Steve testified that I went to bed dead tired the night of the murder. He’s a light sleeper and said that he didn’t hear me leave that night. But the police claimed that I sneaked out and returned without waking Steve. No proof was established to support this theory except for a next-door neighbor who testified that my Corvette was not covered that night or the next morning. He claimed that I always covered it at night—real convincing, huh?
    More shuffleboard beads were found in my car. The prosecutor made a big deal about them. But the shuffleboard was right next to the dart board.
    None of my fingerprints were found. The footprints found in the kitchen near where the knife was taken were not mine. But this evidence was passed over quickly. DNA from my hair, blood and saliva was not linked to the crime—also quickly passed over.
    The main case against me was the bite mark. The prosecutor hired an expert from Las Vegas who testified that my teeth pattern matched the bite found on the victim. This expert showed the jury a videotape which demonstrated how my teeth fit the injury.
    While the prosecutor called many experts, my attorney did not call a single one. The local bite mark expert he lined up was somehow on vacation. The judge would not delay the trial until this expert was available.
    My attorney kept telling me that the case against me was very weak. I didn’t have the $25,000 necessary to retain a good one, so this one was appointed for me.
    I didn’t think there was any way I would be convicted since I was innocent. I learned a very hard lesson there!
    I was the main defense witness and was on the stand for a long and brutal cross-examination. I think I did well—telling the truth is easy. Obviously, it didn’t help.
    For closing argument, the prosecutor argued that by denying I was Kim’s boyfriend, I was covering up my involvement. His idea of a motive was that I raped her because I was denied sex and then killed her to silence her. He held up the bag of condoms for the jury to see while painting me as a cold-blooded killer with the presence of mind to don a condom before committing the rape. That’s how he explained the absence of semen.
    The jury deliberated only two hours. They asked to see the videotape just before returning with their verdict. They must have believed the bite mark expert, because they convicted me of murder and kidnapping. They acquitted me of sexual assault—figure that out!
    My attorney made a motion for a new trial based upon the affidavit of another bite mark expert from Albuquerque. This expert had reviewed the videotape and contested the findings of the Las Vegas expert, but the judge denied this motion.
    A few weeks later, the judge allowed the death penalty and after a hearing sentenced me to death.

Ray ended his letter with a quote from the Bible, “Luke 8:17 says, ‘For nothing is hidden that shall not become evident, nor anything secret that shall not come to light.’”

The author (L) with his cousin

[Editor’s Note: Jingle Jangle is still in print and can be ordered through Amazon. (The author’s Amazon vendor’s name is “The Book Abides.”) Autographed copies can be arranged. Let us know.]

Copyright © 2015 by Jim Rix