US/Missoula/MT – By the time the dogs led Deputy Mark Smith to the back of the rest stop in the summer of 2000, the Arkansas heat had taken its toll.Smith discovered the partially decomposed body of 25-year-old Kristin Laurite naked and face down near a pond, her sundress discarded nearby. She had been stabbed more than three times in the neck.
“It’s a case that’s been very personal to me. It didn’t leave my desk for five years,” Smith, now the Conway County sheriff, said in a phone interview.

Had Laurite’s two dogs not led Smith to her body, it might have looked like a kidnapping.

Laurite’s yellow Volkswagen bus had been at the rest area with its doors open for a full day when a truck driver called police to report two abandoned dogs.

Though the suspect’s DNA sample later came from semen, Laurite’s body was too decomposed to determine if her assailant had raped her.

As Smith called for backup on what would be his first homicide case, he never guessed a match of that sample would lead him to the Montana State Prison nearly five years later.

“I was dumbfounded that there were people out there that could do this to a woman. She was in pretty bad shape,” Smith said.

Although Laurite’s was the last murder solved, she was the first victim in a serial killing streak that authorities now know crossed the country with former drifter and Montana State Prison inmate Ronald James Ward, now 40.

Last week, a court in Conway County attached another lifetime onto Ward’s sentence for the murder of Laurite, to which he pleaded no contest.

When DNA samples led the Arkansas sheriff to Ward, he was already serving a life sentence in Montana for the shooting death of Hamilton resident Craig Sheldon Petrich, 43, in October of 2000. He had also been linked to the murders of two California women in December of the same year.

Tom Tatum Jr. was Ward’s prosecutor in the Laurite murder case. Tatum said only time will tell if Ward is responsible for other deaths.

“I feel like he didn’t come out here from West Virginia and just start killing,” Tatum said. “To me, I feel like there are others out there.”

Late August 2000

At the time of her death, Laurite was driving from her home in Scotch Plains, N.J., to Eureka, Calif., with her two dogs. She was driving mostly at night because of the heat, police records say.

Meanwhile, Ward quit a job on a garbage truck in Charleston and left West Virginia in August 2000. He later told his attorney in Arkansas he was going to Montana because he caught his girlfriend, Hattie Ann Baker, with another man.

Ward told police he avoided Arkansas on his drive west because of an auto theft offense from 1998 and that he drove primarily on Interstate 95 for the duration of the trip.

But a vehicle check revealed that Ward was given a gas voucher by a ministerial alliance in Blackwell, Okla., 28 hours after phone records said Laurite called her mother from the Conway County rest stop on Interstate 40.

Police realized that neither Blackwell nor Arkansas are located anywhere near Interstate 95. They later found that Ward sold his Dodge pickup in Laurel on Aug. 31.

Reunited with Baker in Montana that fall, Ward began living in a trailer park near Hamilton.

October 2000

Hattie Ann Baker knew something was wrong when Ward came home from a drive in the Sapphire Mountains without their neighbor, Craig Sheldon Petrich.

Baker told the Ravalli County Sheriff’s Office that Ward returned and told her they were leaving Montana and he had shot Petrich.

Leaving many of their personal items behind, the two abandoned their trailer Oct. 8 and sold their Toyota truck in Missoula’s Caras Park the next day.

A pair of hikers spotted Petrich’s body wedged in a rock crevice near Corvallis nine days later.

The autopsy painted the picture of some sort of dispute.

Ward, picking up a nearby rock, struck Petrich in the head repeatedly.

Petrich had been shot three times. The rifle Ward borrowed from a teenage neighbor a few days prior matched the bullets and shells found at the scene and in Petrich’s body.

It was a single-shot rifle, which meant that Ward would have had to reload twice before leaving Petrich’s body in the crevice.

The same rifle was pawned in Billings on Oct. 13.

But by that time, Baker was already on her way to California with Ward, unsure of what she had left behind – and even more unsure of what she was getting into.

December 2000

In Modesto, Calif., Ronald James Ward might have been the man who got away with murder.

The morning of Dec. 30, 2000, a man walking his dog along Dry Creek in Modesto found the naked body of a woman covered with leaves. She, like Laurite, had been stabbed several times.

Police in Modesto identified her as 32-year-old Shela Polly, a woman who may have met Ward at a temporary labor service the day before.

With a long investigation pending in Modesto, authorities in Ravalli County began proceedings to claim Ward.

“There was such a sense of urgency to have a warrant prepared after the murder, and in retrospect we were glad we carried that urgency with us,” said Ravalli County Attorney George Corn. “If we hadn’t had a warrant out on Ward, California may have had to let him go for lack of evidence.”

Ward was extradited back to Montana for the Petrich murder in January 2001, with Baker in tow.

In her interview with police, Baker grasped her opportunity to compare her own suspicions with police evidence. She testified that Ward had been violent toward her in the past, attempting at one point to strangle her.

Baker also said she had no doubt that Ward had killed Petrich.

Corn said Ravalli County authorities have no reason to believe Baker was ever connected with any of the murders.

Ward later pleaded guilty to the Petrich murder and was sentenced to life in the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge.

What police in Modesto and Ravalli County didn’t know in December 2000 was that before the new year dawned, police in Merced, Calif., would find the body of 49-year-old Arkansas native Jackie Travis beaten and strangled with symbols carved into her skin.

Until a DNA match arose in the database from Kristin Laurite’s murder, police in Merced did not have a name to put to the wounds.

It was the same name Modesto Police had found in January: Ronald James Ward.

December 2005

Conway County Sheriff Mark Smith and Sgt. Mark Hollingsworth decided it was worth the trip to Montana to look Kristin Laurite’s killer in the eyes.

Earlier that winter, Arkansas authorities had written countless letters and e-mails to state crime labs all over the country, requesting that they run tests to match DNA taken from Laurite’s body in August 2000.

A call from Modesto authorities had revealed a drifter and convicted murderer in Montana matched the Arkansas sample. Hollingsworth and Smith traveled to the Montana State Prison in December 2005 to interview the man who was likely Laurite’s killer.

Sgt. Hollingsworth had been assigned to the case that fall. Maybe the strangest thing about Ward, he said, is how ordinary he was.

“Nothing really stood out about him,” Hollingsworth said

In the course of the interview, Smith said Ward was smug and smart in his responses regarding Kristin Laurite.

“There were several moments when I looked at him and thought, ‘This guy killed Kristin,’ ” Smith said. “He’s so cold. He’s just wasted air.”

When Smith asked Ward if he felt he was capable of committing a murder like Laurite’s, he replied, “Well, apparently, I can.”

Upon first meeting officers in Deer Lodge, Ward was haughty.

“He said he’d been studying the law and that he’d let us know if we crossed a line,” Smith said. “He was also asking a lot of questions, fishing to see what we knew. He really felt he was smarter than we were.”

When Smith and Hollingsworth came back to Montana last week to extradite Ward to Arkansas for proceedings in Laurite’s murder, they chose to drive.

“We decided it would give us a lot of time to think about how we wanted to interview him,” Smith said. “When we got back to Arkansas, he would fake tears in the courtroom and they’d be gone by the time we got out to the parking lot. It just made me realize what a coward he really was.”

“On the drive back to Arkansas, he was sort of philosophical, I guess,” Hollingsworth said. “We talked about how if he’d taken different turns, his life would be much different now.”

And for all the work and all the years of wondering who killed Kristin Laurite, Smith and Hollingsworth aren’t sure if Ward’s conviction is enough.

“I don’t know if you ever get closure on matters like this,” Hollingsworth said.

“It is a victory,” Smith said. “It may be an empty victory, but it is still a victory.”

As the Montana State Prison awaits Ward’s return, it is anyone’s guess what turn his case will take next. Ward has remained tight-lipped on whether or not he is responsible for more murders.

“No one thinks this just began in August of 2000,” Corn said.

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