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Ronald James Ward Jr. (1966 – April 11, 2014) was an American serial killer who murdered at least three women and one man in the span of several months in 2000. Initially convicted for the murder of Craig Petrich in Montana, he was later linked by DNA evidence to three other murders, which had occurred in Arkansas and California. [1]
Nov 3, 1985 · WEST MEMPHIS, Ark. — Ronald Ward was sitting in his choral music class here at West Junior High School when a messenger summoned him to the principal’s office. He had been there before, guilty...
Feb 24, 2020 · Only a few weeks later, authorities in Modesto, California, arrested a man named Ronald Ward, Jr., in connection with yet another murder — that of Shela Polly. Her nude body had been found in...
- The 1982 Murder of Debbie Sue Carter
- The 1984 Murder of Donna Denice Haraway
- How The Cases Took A Wrong Turn
The body of 21-year-old Debbie Sue Carter was found in her apartment in Ada in December 1982. She had been raped, murdered and left with words written on her body in ketchup. Five years after Carter’s murder, authorities pursued Ron Williamson and his best friend Dennis Fritz in the case. Both men were well-known around Ada, particularly Williamson...
About two years before Williamson and Fritz received their wrongful convictions, two other men in Ada were given life sentences for the murder of Donna Denice Haraway. Haraway, 24, disappeared in April 1984 from her job at a local convenience store. Her body was discovered in 1986 in a town about 30 miles east of Ada. About five months prior to the...
Grisham, who executive-produced The Innocent Manand appears throughout the series, says the events in the story would be unbelievable if he’d written them in a novel because it’s hard to imagine an entire justice system breaking down as it did in these cases. He concludes that the immense pressure put on law enforcement officials in a small town li...
Family members of Shela Polly and Jackie Travis say the letter evoked the only emotion Ronald Ward showed as he received two life sentences for murdering the women in 2000. Polly's body was...
Sep 21, 1985 · Ronald Ward of West Memphis, Ark., who has been in the seventh grade for three years and who will be 16 in October, was sentenced by Circuit Judge David Burnett of Osceola.
Ward said in a 911 call that he shot his wife and that he was sorry, but he later told investigators she killed herself.
