The Victim — Rayna Rison
For almost everyone who knew her in the spring of 1993, the ambitious 16-year-old Rayna Rison had a sunny disposition and an even brighter future. An excellent student at La Porte High School, Rayna planned to turn her aptitude for biology into a career as a veterinarian. She took an afternoon job as the “kennel girl” at a downtown animal hospital to get acquainted with the profession and earn some money for college tuition. She held down another job on weekends at a hamburger stand and devoted one night to tutoring. Meanwhile, she played flute in the award-winning LPHS marching band and oboe in the school’s orchestra—extracurricular activities she hoped would make her application that much more attractive to prestigious schools.
But when Rayna was abducted in front of the animal hospital after work on March 26, a darker side of her life emerged, known only to her family and closest friends.
La Porte, Indiana
Located in the northwest corner of Indiana, La Porte is the second-biggest county in the state and a study in contrasts. It has a gritty urban core with factories and warehouses arrayed along the state highways radiating out from the City of La Porte. But there are also rolling hills, lakes, and forest preserves with ample places for hunting and fishing. Rural areas range from an industrial wasteland where munitions were once made to expansive farms and tony horse ranches. Among the most famous La Porte residents was Oprah Winfrey, whose estate spanned 160 acres during the years when she hosted her syndicated program from Chicago. In previous decades La Porte was known as the home base for Charlie O. Finley, the flamboyant insurance magnate who owned the Oakland A’s baseball team.
On Friday, March 26, 1993, Rayna Rison was abducted from the parking lot of the Pine Lake Animal Hospital (lower left inset) shortly after she left work at 6:00 PM.
Rayna’s body was found submerged under tree limbs in a pond (center inset) nine miles north of her workplace.
The City of La Porte, with a population of 20,000, is the La Porte County seat. The red limestone county courthouse still dominates the skyline.
The schools were demographic melting pots, where future factory workers rubbed shoulders with future executives and future career criminals shared classrooms with their future lawyers and prosecutors.
suspect — Ray Mccarty
Within 24 hours after Rayna’s abduction, her brother-in-law, Raymond C. McCarty, emerged as the prime suspect (his mug shots above in 1998 and 2018). Police learned that he had been convicted of child molestation three years earlier when he admitted impregnating Rayna five months after her thirteenth birthday. Her sister and the rest of her family pleaded with the judge not to imprison Ray. He was sentenced to three years probation instead and required to take individual and group therapy for sex offenders. Although he rejected treatment and was thrown out of two programs, he was permitted to complete probation without incarceration. One therapist even warned he was likely to re-offend, and as he predicted, Ray resumed assaulting Rayna in the weeks before her abduction.
During the next year, police detectives conducted nearly 250 interviews, assembling compelling witness testimony that incriminated Ray and established his motive. But vexing mysteries hung over the investigation. Police and the forensic pathologist could not determine how Rayna died since there were no signs of trauma on her body. Also, detectives could not account for Ray’s whereabouts in the hours after the abduction. While his car was spotted in the animal hospital’s parking lot and a country road a few miles from where Rayna’s body was submerged in a pond, eyewitnesses got the closest look at his accomplice, a man the police never identified. Finally, in 1998, the county prosecutor presented a case against Ray to a county grand jury. After hearing 70 witnesses, they indicted him for murder. But a year later, a new prosecutor dropped the charges, claiming he did not have enough evidence to convict in a jury trial.
Investigative reporter Hillel Levin spent two years examining police records, finding crucial reports and leads that detectives overlooked. In SUBMERGED, Levin reveals how Rayna was killed and how the murder weapon was connected to McCarty. He also identifies Ray’s accomplice and two other surprising helpers.
suspect — Jason Tibbs
As the Rison family continued to defend Ray after Rayna’s murder, they most often mentioned JASON TIBBS as their prime suspect (pictured in his 1992 sophomore yearbook and a 2013 mug shot). Although he had a brief, platonic relationship with Rayna during middle school, they remained good friends after their breakup, even as Rayna grew close with MATT ELSER, another good student who, like her, was a member of the marching band. In their freshman year, when it looked like Rayna was breaking up with Matt, Jason wrote a love letter asking for them to get together again—but only if she wanted to move on from Elser. Rayna chose Matt instead but continued to see Jason and confide in him things she never told anyone else—including that Ray had started “raping” her again.
After Rayna’s abduction, the Risons found Jason’s love letter from two years before and gave it to detectives. Police soon eliminated him as a suspect after confirming his alibi with several witnesses. Although Jason had tangled with the law, his crime had been non-violent theft, for which he served a stint in Indiana’s Boys School, where he discovered an aptitude for auto mechanics and repair. The decade after Rayna’s death saw more scrapes with the police, marriage, divorce, and then reunion with the mother of his three children.
By the time he was arrested for Rayna’s murder in 2013, Jason was head of maintenance for a fast-growing franchise restaurant company with a lucrative auto repair business on the side—fulfilling the potential Rayna once saw in him. But for years, police had been building a case against Tibbs based on the love letter and the questionable testimony of two witnesses, RICKEY HAMMONS and ERIC FREEMAN. His trial showed the perils of Cold Case prosecutions for defendants when his alibi witnesses were challenged over hazy memories of events that occurred two decades earlier. After conviction, he received a 40-year sentence, which he is now serving in an Indiana state prison.
In SUBMERGED, Levin reveals information about the two central prosecution witnesses that jurors did not hear: the despicable lies Hammons told during the investigation of the murder he committed. and the lengthy sessions that detectives had with Freeman—Jason’s alleged accomplice—that were more indoctrination than interrogation and proved he did not know about the most critical details of the crime.