For the 17 Lewis County citizens who sat in the jury box throughout the cold-case homicide trial against Rick Riffe, the last six weeks have included more than 100 hours of testimony from more than 90 different witnesses, as well as grisly autopsy photos of the gunshot wounds that killed Ed and Minnie Maurin.
Because of the length of the trial, as well as the notoriety of the case, there was a large pool of jurors who went through the jury selection process.
Throughout the day and a half selection process, the 131 potential jurors were whittled down to a total of 12 jurors. Eight alternate jurors were also selected. Cory Gerber, who is the Centralia district circulation manager for The Chronicle, was one of them.
He, like the rest of the jury, had little to no prior knowledge of the case.
Gerber, who was 1-year-old at the time of the homicides, said the only thing he remembered hearing about the homicides was in July 2012, when the defendant was arrested in Alaska, and his supervisor at The Chronicle mentioned that they would distribute extra papers in East Lewis County, which is where the victims and the suspects were from.
At the end of the trial, which ultimately took six full weeks and one additional day, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all seven counts. Riffe faces up to life in prison, and will be sentenced on Dec. 3 at 1 p.m. in Lewis County Superior Court.
Because Gerber was not selected as an actual juror, but rather a back up, he did not take part in the deliberations. He did, however, attend the reading of the verdicts on Monday. He said when the 12 jurors returned back to the courtroom after the day and half of deliberations, they looked extremely tired.
“Everybody looked really exhausted and spent,” he said.
Gerber said though he would have liked to be a part of the deliberations, he was not surprised by their verdicts of guilty.
During the trial, the jurors were forbidden to talk about the testimony at all, even amongst themselves. Despite that, the jurors did bond during the course of the trial, Gerber said. They played cards during the breaks, went out to lunch and talked about other things. Many of the jurors were women who brought food and baked goods for the group every day.
“We were well fed,” he said.
If the other jury members would have been less talkative and not as enjoyable to be around, he said, the experience might be different.
Gerber, who said it was his first time on jury duty, said he recommended others should serve on a jury as well. While he said he would do it again, he doubted that any other case would be as interesting as the Riffe trial.
“I’m sure I will not ever be on a case like that again,” he said.
The trial, he said, was far from boring.
“Most of the witnesses were pretty entertaining,” he said.
In particular, Brenda King, who testified she saw the Riffe brothers and insisted they went by the last name Muzzleman in the Yard Birds parking lot on Dec. 19, 1985, was particularly unforgettable.
King’s testimony was loud and animated and on multiple occasions she attempted to leave the witness stand in order to stand in the middle of the courtroom, which was rather bizarre and a bit unbelievable, he said.
“Her pieces really didn’t fit with the rest of the case,” he said.
The most ridiculous part of the trial, however, was not King but rather the constant objections from the defense and prosecution that would lead to the judge sending the jury out of the courtroom so they could argue outside their presence, he said. There were days of testimony when it seemed the jury spent more time outside the courtroom, or coming in and out of it, than actually listening to testimony.
One of the other jurors nicknamed the process “juroreobics.”
“It became kind of a joke,” Gerber said.
Another detail of the trial that stuck out in Gerber’s mind was the lack of reaction Riffe showed throughout the testimony.
“Rick Riffe’s demeanor didn’t change at all,” he said, adding that he looked disinterested in the whole process. On the flipside, however, his attorney, John Crowley, had very large reactions.
“Mr. Crowley was kind of a character,” he said.
The worst part of the process, he said, was looking at the autopsy photos.
“I don’t ever want to see that,” he said. “Those are images you can’t get out of (your head).”
Gerber said he felt particularly bad for Sherri Tibbets, who was Riffe’s long-term girlfriend who he lived with in Alaska. She obviously loved the defendant, and apparently had no idea he was involved in drugs prior to moving away from Lewis County.
Gerber also felt compassion for Cathy Thola, Riffe’s ex-girlfriend from 1986 and 1987, who testified that she had not heard anything about the Riffe brothers being involved in the Maurin homicides, but said that one time John Riffe threatened her by saying, “We’ve killed before, and we’ll do it again.”
The damage and trauma Riffe inflicted on her life was apparent, he said. Jason Shriver, who saw the Riffe brothers in the vehicle with the Maurins, also had compelling and convincing testimony, Gerber said, and it showed the life-long impact the crimes had on his life.
