the story behiind submerged

HOW I LEARNED ABOUT THE CASE

Back in 2006, when I was researching In With the Devil about serial killer Larry Hall, I heard that he was suspected of the 1993 murder of Rayna Rison in La Porte, Indiana. The date of her homicide was during Hall’s murder spree. However, none of the details matched his modus operandi, and I didn’t see how he could have done it on his own. To my knowledge, no one helped him in any of his alleged crimes. As I suspected, when I called the La Porte County prosecuting attorney’s office, someone picked up the phone and told me that “everyone knew” who killed Rayna—her brother-in-law Raymond McCarty. He had been indicted in 1998, but charges were dropped a year later for reasons that were more political than legal. Imagine my surprise seven years later, in 2013, when I learned someone else had been arrested for Rayna’s murder—Jason Tibbs, her middle-school boyfriend. Then, even more surprising, he was convicted a year later.

WHY IT LOOKED SUSPICIOUS

There was something that didn’t smell right about Jason’s conviction. After I looked further into newspaper clips, my suspicions only grew. When Ray was indicted in 1998, a grand jury heard from 70 witnesses. The critical testimony against Jason came from two people—one who was granted immunity, and the other was a jailhouse snitch, no doubt looking to have his own murder sentence reduced. Then, more than two years ago, I reached out to Jason through the prison communication system. Unlike other wrongful convictions I’ve reported on, he had not been forced into a confession. He still professed his innocence to me and claimed he had several witnesses who told police he was in a trailer park on the other side of the City of La Porte when Rayna was abducted after she left her job at a veterinary clinic. He then had his lawyer give me all the evidence associated with the McCarty investigation and his own.

AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER'S DREAM

These files offered me an exceptional opportunity. So often, when we report on notorious crimes, it’s in real-time. First, there can be idle speculation and rumor. Then, the drip-drip-drip, as stray pieces of evidence emerge and congeal over time. Some important revelations don’t emerge until you’ve left the story. With Rayna’s case, I got the chance to see the entire investigation develop from the time she was first reported as a missing person to the moments when her body was pulled from the pond, and she officially became the victim of a homicide, and then the investigation that went from a gallop to a crawl in the years that followed. My guides were the hundreds of police reports generated by detectives and patrolmen. Most were written by detectives from the state, county, and City of La Porte assigned to the case. However, due to the publicity involved, other officers were also drawn in, and I found some of their reports had been overlooked even though they contained the most tantalizing leads.

THE OBVIOUS SUSPECT

McCarty was the obvious suspect because he had been convicted of molesting Rayna three years before. At that time, he admitted to impregnating her, too. Their child was aborted a few months after she turned thirteen. In 1993, multiple witnesses reported seeing McCarty’s distinctively rusted Datsun near the animal hospital shortly before Rayna was abducted and later near the spot where her car was abandoned. Only a few miles away was the pond where her body had been submerged under a cross of tree limbs. Meanwhile, McCarty raised police suspicions further by continually changing his alibi. None of the stories he gave them about his whereabouts on the night of the abduction ever checked out.

WHY PROSECUTORS HESITATED TO CHARGE

But there was much that was strange about the first investigation, too. The forensic pathologist who conducted Rayna’s autopsy could not explain how she died. Although her body had been submerged in water for a month, her tissue was still intact enough to show no signs of physical trauma. Witnesses who saw Ray’s car got, at best, a fleeting glimpse of him. Some got closer looks at his accomplice, who police were never able to identify. Stranger still, despite his molestation conviction, the Rison family banded together to defend Ray, led by his wife Lori, but with strong support from Wendy, the youngest sister, and the parents, too, even though Rayna’s father had hired two different private investigators who quickly concluded that Ray was the killer.

FINALLY, AN INDICTMENT AND THEN A SHOCKING DECISION

While these issues stopped the prosecuting attorney from bringing charges, five years after the murder, his successor, Cynthia Hedge, believed she had enough witness testimony to provide McCarty’s motive to a grand jury. The State’s case was further bolstered by hair found in Rayna’s car that matched Ray’s and green fibers on her body that corresponded to a blanket McCarty had used to wrap the deer he killed. Although the grand jury issued an indictment against Ray as Hedge hoped, she lost her reelection bid six months later. Her successor, a man she had fired, dropped the charges against Ray, which some saw as an act of revenge against his former boss.

WHY I COULD COMPLETE THE INVESTIGATION

Because of a few experiences in my background, I did not have to dig very deeply to discover how Rayna died. Soon thereafter, I was able to associate the murder weapon with Ray. After reviewing the police reports, I also found other crucial leads that the detectives had overlooked. Some helped me identify McCarty’s accomplice, who had no association with Jason Tibbs. Shortly before he helped Ray abduct Rayna, one witness stood only a few feet from the man, and this witness confirmed the accomplice’s identity with a mug shot I showed him. There is also “unknown male” DNA in the Indiana State Police lab that was taken from Rayna’s purse and her boyfriend’s letterman jacket, which would further corroborate this finding. Ray had other surprising helpers revealed in police reports that slipped through the cracks.

THE PERILS OF COLD CASES FOR INNOCENT DEFENDANTS

After I established Ray’s incontrovertible guilt in Rayna’s murder, I next had to learn how the State of Indiana could convict an innocent man for the same crime. What I found was very disturbing. Cold Case investigations have been glorified in popular culture as the ultimate way to achieve accountability for unsolved crimes, but they can also prove perilous to the defendants they unearth. In their zeal to win a conviction, the chief investigators in Jason’s case put words in the mouths of witnesses and relied on a convicted murderer with a track record of elaborate, despicable lies. They spoon-fed Tibbs’s alleged accomplice with details about the murder that he didn’t know and forced him to adopt others he disputed—as shown in transcripts from recorded sessions that Jason’s lawyers failed to enter as evidence. To make matters worse, throughout the trial, there were questionable rulings by the judge. He had once been hired by the prosecutor who dropped the charges against Ray, and in sidebars with the attorneys, he disparaged the grand jury and prosecutors who indicted McCarty. While he allowed the prosecutor to challenge the testimony of Jason’s alibi witnesses when they honestly admitted to hazy memories about events that occurred 21 years earlier, he prevented the jury from hearing what these people told the police at the time of the crime. Some even had false memories that Jason’s bumbling lawyers were unprepared to dispute. They had intended to prove that McCarty was the killer, but the judge prevented them from even mentioning the words “grand jury” or disclosing that the panel had indicted Ray. Evidence pointing to McCarty’s guilt could only be introduced if it was connected to the fabrications of the prosecution’s key witnesses.

OUTRAGEOUS POLICE AND PROSECUTOR MISCONDUCT

While I have written about police misconduct in the past, for me, there was something particularly outrageous about the behavior of the detectives in Jason’s case and how the La Porte County Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney abetted it. Bad enough that they got an early release for his lying jailhouse snitch. Worse yet, they cleared the reputation of Ray McCarty, a brutal murderer and sexual predator, who nearly killed another in-law three years later. While Jason is the first to admit he was no angel as a young man, he never committed a violent crime. I don’t think anyone would have been more outraged by his conviction than his alleged victim. In the years before his arrest, Jason had fulfilled the potential that Rayna was among the few to see in him. He became the head of maintenance for a rapidly expanding franchise restaurant operation and had a lucrative side business repairing cars and trucks. In the days when she was threatened by Ray, Rayna told a co-worker at the animal hospital that Jason was the one she felt would “protect her” and make sure “nobody would ever hurt her.”

Although an innocence project is now investigating his case, Jason has no expectations that the justice system will finally favor him. But he does hope that SUBMERGED, if nothing else, can restore his good name. You can order the book by clicking here.