The alleged bite mark match was the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case, shored up by the claims about the pubic hair resemblance. In closing, Prosecutor Noel Levy twice stated, the pubic hairs found on the victim “could not be excluded from Ray Krone” and were among “the many items that link Ray Krone to the horrible, horrible murder.” “Bite marks are…as reliable as fingerprints,” Levi proclaimed (a false assessment which forensic science refutes). Ray Krone’s dentition “was a match,” Levi insisted, “What does match mean? It’s a hundred percent, far beyond a reasonable doubt.”1

The court held only half-day sessions during the trial, so in effect, while the trial had lasted seven days, the jurors heard only three and a half days of testimony, three days from the prosecution and a mere half day of testimony from the defense.
When the jurors retired to deliberate, they requested that the video equipment be brought to the jury room so they could view Dr. Rawson’s video again. They returned to the courtroom in just over three hours, announcing that they found Ray Krone guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder. Because there was no evidence of semen, they found him not guilty of sexual assault.2

The prosecution had argued that rape was the motive for the murder—that Ray Krone’s horror over what he had done and fear of being found out were what prompted him to kill Kim Ancona.3
When the verdict was read, Ray stood stoically silent, shaking his head in disbelief.4

By the tenets of Arizona law in 1992, the punishment was the prerogative of the judge, who could concur with or override the recommendation of the county attorney. If the prosecution intended to recommend a penalty of death, they were required to make a formal request within thirty days of the indictment.5

The jury in Ray’s trial had been death qualified, that is, during the jury selection process the prospective jurors had been asked if they objected to capital punishment, with an answer in the affirmative resulting in automatic dismissal. The prosecution, however, had never announced they would seek the death penalty in the event of a guilty verdict.

At Ray’s pre-sentencing hearing in October, Prosecutor Noel Levy recommended that Ray be sentenced to death, and Defense Attorney Jones objected that no formal declaration of intent had been filed prior to the trial, but Judge Hotham countered that Jones should have been aware of the possibility since the jury had been death qualified.

To demonstrate that there were aggravating circumstances sufficient to justify a punishment of death, Prosecutor Levy called the doctor who performed the autopsy to testify and displayed the gory crime scene photographs to refresh Judge Hotham’s memory.

At his own request, Ray had no mitigating witnesses to speak out on his behalf and ask the judge to spare his life. Ray’s mother had not returned to Arizona for the trial, trusting in Ray’s reassurance that there was nothing to worry about. Nor was she present at the sentencing, but not by her choice. “Jones wanted to put my mom and friends on the stand,” Ray explains, “but I said, no, absolutely not, you’re not going to subject them to that man that just cross examined me and my roommate, calling us a liar. You’re not putting my family and friends through that. No way you’re putting anybody on the stand but me. You’re not subjecting them to that man. He’s a monster.”

Ray testified, but he acknowledges the futility of the exercise. “How do you mitigate something you didn’t do? I’m supposed to show remorse, regret, apologize, beg for my life, for something I said all along I didn’t do. I had no remorse. I didn’t do this thing. So the only mitigation I had was my background—my work history, my education, the fact that I was going to college at the time, my air force and post office careers.”

On November 20, 1992, Judge Hotham delivered his decision. Calling the crime “heinous and depraved,” he sentenced Ray to death.6

Death Row
“Every day violence is a threat waiting to happen. The land mines are all over the place. You’re going to step in one sooner or later. It’s inevitable.”
Immediately upon being sentenced, Ray was placed in solitary confinement. Three days later, he left the Maricopa County Jail for the Arizona State Prison in Florence.7

“They shackled me up, put me in a van, and drove me straight to death row. When you get there, one of the sergeants reads the riot act to you, searches you for tattoos, warns you about gang affiliation, scares you—‘This is my place, this is how we run things here.’

“My cell was the size of a small bathroom, six feet by eight feet, with cinderblock walls and in front steel panels and a steel door, with three or four bars in between, and a little slot they fed you through. There was a toilet, a sink, a cement slab for a bed, for a table—and that was where you stayed.”

At night the guards would distribute toothbrushes, at random, and after ten minutes or so collect them.8 Ray soon learned why—“Guys would take tooth brushes or soda bottles, roll a piece of paper into a cone shape, and melt the plastic down in there—now you’ve got a pointed weapon. You couldn’t cut somebody with it, but they’d use it to stick you in the neck, or in the kidneys.”

The third day after Ray’s arrival, the man in the cell next to him was stabbed. Accepting his fate, he never cried out or called for help. When the guards made their rounds, they noticed the blood on the floor and came and took him away.9

“You never left your cell without first having to strip down in front of the officer and pass your clothes out. Then once you stepped out of your cell and dressed again, they would pat you down, put ankle chains on you and your hands would be handcuffed to your waist. You got out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for recreation for two hours in a ten by ten wire cage. It was great, though, because you got to be outside. And there were sixteen cages near each other, so you could talk to the guys in the other cages. Those were the only days you got a shower.

“Sometimes they would bring youth groups through on a tour of the prison. We’d be in our cage—,” he pauses, correcting himself, “our cell, and they would point us out like we were animals in a zoo, ‘See that, that’s where you’ll end up if you don’t straighten out.’

“I realized before long that if I was gonna fight the system, I had to know the system, so I started going to the law library. You were allowed two hours, three times a week. There was a sign up sheet, but with 120 guys on death row, it was tough to get your full amount of time.

“I’d been going to college, so I was used to studying. I started working on my own case, and I became a legal representative helping other inmates with their cases. One of the guys working in the law library I knew from the county jail. He put in a good word for me, and I got a job working there, too. It got me out of my cell for six hours a day, and once I was inside the library, I could walk around without handcuffs and shackles.”

The inmates who came to do research were locked in phone-booth like cages, and Ray and his co-worker would pass the requested text out to them through a slot. A guard sat in the room where the books were shelved overseeing the process. Working in the law library was the only job available to death row inmates,10 and Ray counted himself extremely fortunate, not only because of the added liberty.

“You could talk to the inmates who came to do research and you could actually shake the hand of the guy you worked with. You could even ask for a legal visit where you were put in the visitation room with another inmate and could essentially have a private conversation. I was able to help other people. That gave me a sense of purpose, of being a person instead of the animal they were trying to portray me as.

“You got to know some of the inmates, and some of the officers got to know you, too. I had an incident, where if the officer hadn’t agreed with me, I might have been in disciplinary trouble, but the officer took my side, said I wasn’t a liar.

“You never want to get too close to an officer, though,” Ray cautions, “because if the inmates think you’re a rat, think you’re a snitch, the inmates are gonna kill you.

“You better know the rules and be real careful about how you speak and act. Everyday violence is a threat waiting to happen. The landmines are all over the place. You’re going to step in one sooner or later. It’s inevitable.”

Eventually Ray found himself welcoming the worst—“When you’re on death row at a certain point you make peace with death. You take the attitude, ‘Kill me, do me a favor, because it can’t be worse than living like this.’ You’re not afraid to die anymore.” When a condemned man’s execution date was set, the state of Arizona offered him the choice of death by lethal injection or poison gas.11 He also had a choice about what he would eat for his last meal. “We all had our last meal planned,” Ray says, “We’d talk about it—what we’d like to have. You could actually see some finality in that. If you get sentenced to life, that’s a living hell in there. In some ways it’s worse than a death sentence.”

Not only inmates’ bodies, but their minds were chained to their date with death. Occasionally, though, they managed to transcend the chronic fatalism for as much as thirty minutes or even an hour, if they were lucky—“We were allowed to have a little boom box stereo and a small TV. You had to use headphones for both. There was no music or TV played out loud. If you plugged one set of headphones into an auxiliary jack on your stereo and another set into the headphone jack, you could talk into one pair of headphones and listen on the other pair of headphones. We stretched the cords from one cell to the next. We had a four-way intercom, and we played Dungeons and Dragons.

“It was a way to get out of that prison environment, to indulge in fantasy and role-playing.
“Every time the guards would walk by, though, we had to reel the cords in quick.”

Having a four-way intercom between cells was, of course, not allowed. CDs were not allowed because the inmates would melt down the plastic cases to make weapons. When Ray first came to death row, he was allowed to have a small electric hot pot, but the hot pots were banned, when inmates began throwing boiling water on the guards.

Not particularly fond of watching TV, Ray more often passed the time working crossword puzzles and reading.12 During the course of his ten-year incarceration, he would read the Bible three-and-a-half times.

Ray’s Family Takes Up the Fight for His Life
Carolyn Krone and Jim Leming learned the outcome of Ray’s trial in a phone call.13

“The lawyer Jones called us balling on the phone saying Ray got convicted,” Jim Leming recalls.

The Pennsylvania papers had not covered the trial. Carolyn and Jim kept the news of Ray’s arrest and conviction to themselves for a long time. Only the immediate family knew—Ray’s father, his brother Dale, and his sister Amy.

Ray had always been close to his grandparents, especially Carolyn’s father. He had begun to wonder why Ray never replied to his letters anymore. On Thanksgiving 1992, following Ray’s sentencing earlier that month, Carolyn told her parents. Her father was in poor health, and the devastating news was incomprehensible to him. “He just didn’t want to accept it,” Carolyn says sadly. He never asked for any more details and stopped talking about his beloved grandson altogether. A few months later he died.

Ray was only allowed to make two ten-minute phone calls a month, always collect, and only on alternating Sundays.14 He could not receive calls, except from his attorney. His father and siblings wrote frequently, and Carolyn and Jim managed to visit every six months or so. In conjunction with her job, Carolyn attended periodic conferences in the southwest, and always arranged to stay a few extra days, so she could see Ray. Jim had family in the Denver area, and they would couple visits to Jim’s children and with visits to Ray on death row.

When Carolyn’s divorce was final, she and Jim married. Every month they deposited $100 in Ray’s prison account, the maxim allowed, except at Christmas, when the limit was increased to $300. Ray would stock up on food from the commissary, to supplement the meager prison rations. The Lemings also sent money to Ray’s friends in Phoenix, who would buy things Ray needed and take them to him when they visited.

For a while, Ray’s roommate Steve Junkin made payments on Ray’s house from Ray’s savings and Steve’s share of the rent. When Steve married and moved out, he arranged for a new tenant, but not long afterwards the house was vandalized. Steve put Ray’s few remaining possessions in a storage unit—family keepsakes mostly and his record album collection. The bank reposed Ray’s home.

The court appointed Ray an appellate attorney. Ray never met him or even spoke with him by phone, but Carolyn and Jim contacted him. He had filed an appeal that raised several issues, most significantly that the prosecution violated the rules of discovery by not providing Defense Attorney Jones with Rawson’s video until the Friday before the trial began and that the prosecution failed to give notice of intent that they would seek the death penalty.

If the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the prosecution was in error for failing to give notice of intent, there was a strong possibility Ray’s death sentence would be exchanged for a sentence of life imprisonment. For Ray, it was a grim prospect. His law studies had taught him much about the capital justice process. There were more avenues of appeal open to capital defendants and more avenues for investigation. Appellate attorneys, the good ones, were busy devoting their time and energy to inmates facing death.

Early in the summer of 1993 Ray received a letter from his second cousin Jim Rix. The two men had never met.15

Jim Rix lived in the Lake Tahoe area. His mother was Carolyn’s aunt. Rix had been raised on the west coast and had very little contact with his mother’s birth family in the east.16

In a telephone conversation with his mother Jim Rix had mentioned a television program about an innocent individual who just been released from death row. He was stunned by her reply—“You have a cousin on death row who’s innocent.”17

His mother’s information came from her niece. Rix believed that this cousin of his was likely guilty. What mother wouldn’t insist that her son could never commit such a senseless and brutal crime? Still, his curiosity was piqued, and Rix wrote to Ray introducing himself. A few weeks later he received a reply. Ray talked openly about the circumstances that led to his conviction—the police’s accusations that he had lied about his alleged romantic involvement with the victim and the dental expert who testified his teeth matched a bite mark on the victim’s breast. The letter ended with a Biblical reference to Luke 8: 17: “for nothing is hidden that shall not become evident, nor anything secret that shall not come to light.”18

Rix was far from convinced of Ray’s innocence, but he contacted an attorney friend in Phoenix and got a copy of the trial transcript and Rawson’s video. Everything seemed to hinge on the bite mark, and Rix decided to do some investigating of his own. Rix owned a small business that sold dental computer software, and through a connection in the dental world, he arranged to meet with Dr. Homer Campbell—the dental expert for the defense who never got an opportunity to testify at the trial.19

Campbell thumbed through the stack of police evidence photographs Rix brought with him to the meeting, pausing at a selection in which individual abrasions on the breast were numbered and labeled to correspond with the tooth that made each abrasion. “Who marked this?” Campbell asked, annoyed, “This is bullshit!” He went on to explain why: the two abrasions attributed to the two front teeth were actually made by a right front tooth and the smaller tooth next to it, one abrasion was illogically assigned to two teeth, and a dimple at the edge of the areola was marked as a tooth abrasion.20

Campbell, however, could not render a judgment on whether Ray’s teeth were responsible for the bite mark injury without comparing the dental casts to the photographs.21

That posed a problem. Because Ray’s case was still in the direct appeal stage, in which the court reviewed the trial proceeding for error and did not consider new evidence, the prosecution was not required to release any files or data, beyond what had been entered into evidence at the trial. The dental casts of Ray’s teeth were not entered into evidence.22

Dr. Campbell referred Jim Rix to San Diego attorney Chris Plourd who specialized in criminal cases that involved DNA and other scientific based evidence. Plourd conferred with Campbell and reviewed the available evidence. He wanted the case. Together, the Lemings and Jim Rix came up with the $25,000 retainer Plourd requested, in June of 1994 hiring Plourd to file an appeal for a new trial based on the new evidence that the bite-mark photographs were inaccurately and incorrectly marked.23

The Arizona Superior Court, however, refused to hear Plourd’s motion for a new trial, arguing that Ray’s case was still on direct appeal, and new evidence was not considered at that level.24

Plourd took his request to the Arizona Supreme Court, in a Special Action motion presenting an in-depth explanation of Dr. Campbell’s assessment of the erroneously labeled bite-mark photographs used to convict Ray.25

In December of 1994, the Arizona Supreme Court held a hearing on Ray’s direct appeal. In considering the argument that the prosecution had violated the rules of discovery by not presenting Rawson’s video to the defense until just before the trial, the five justices asked questions that suggested they were aware of Dr. Campbell’s refutation of the bite-mark evidence, even though they had not yet held a hearing on Plourd’s motion.26

As is usually the case, the Supreme Court deferred rendering a decision pending further deliberation.
Four months later, in March of 1995, the court granted Plourd’s request for an appeal hearing to introduce new evidence, and in June, the court ruled that the prosecution had indeed violated the rules of discovery and ordered that Ray’s conviction be “reversed and remanded,” entitling him to a new trial. The decision was unanimous. Wrote justice Frederick Martone, “The bite marks on the victim were crucial to the state’s case. Without them, there likely would have been no jury-submissible case against Krone.”27

The court’s opinion was delivered on Thursday June 22. Ray’s mother got the news late Thursday night. Excited as she was, though, she couldn’t phone her son to tell him. Word reached Ray early Friday— “I found out about my new trial through the Arizona Republic newspaper that I received that morning. I called out the news in my cellblock when I read it, and everyone cheered. I was so happy…everything was going to get straightened out now.”29

Later that afternoon, Ray received a phone call from Chris Plourd.29

Following the March ruling entitling Ray to file an appeal for a new trial based on new evidence, Plourd had set to work preparing for the hearing. The ruling had opened up a plethora of locked doors. Because he was working on a new-evidence appeal, Plourd now had access to all the police files and data. Some of the information released to Plourd, strongly pointed to a police cover up—Dr. Wahl’s DNA analysis which excluded Ray as the contributor of the saliva and the crime scene photos which showed Converse brand size 9 ½-10 ½ shoe prints in the men’s room surrounding Kim Ancona’s body.30 Plourd had sent the hair samples to an independent lab that conclusively excluded Ray as the donor, suggesting police criminologist Piette was incompetent—or worse—for ignoring the four hairs that clearly were not Ray’s and testifying that the other hairs were “similar” to his.31 And as for Dr. Rawson’s claim that Ray’s teeth matched the bite mark, Plourd had by then shown the dental casts and photos to four certified odontologists, and not only had all four experts ruled out Ray as the source of the bite mark. Plourd had learned that one of them, Skip Sperber had seen the evidence before the trial and had told county forensic dentist Piakis there was no match, “stay away from this case.”32

Plourd had been hired to handle a new evidence appeal, not as a trial attorney, but Plourd wanted the job, and Ray and his family enthusiastically agreed.33

Hurry Up and Wait

Aware of the financial strain on the family, Chris Plourd consented to serve as trial attorney without an additional retainer.34

The original financial arrangement the Lemmings and Jim Rix had struck with Plourd was that they pay for all investigative, testing, and related costs. By the time Ray was granted a new trial in June, the Lemmings and Rix had already spent nearly $50,000 in addition to the $25,000 they had paid Plourd. DNA testing was expensive, they had hired an investigator, and the prosecution was charging them copying fees for every report and photograph. The bill for the crime scene photographs alone was in excess of $1200.35 

More exorbitant costs were soon to follow. The police reports alluded to other possible suspect who needed to be investigated and DNA tested, and Plourd wanted to do DNA tests on blood found on the inside of Kim Ancona’s pants on the pocket flap and waist, blood Piette neglected to run a full analysis on even though his preliminary tests showed it did not come from Ray or Kim Ancona.36

When Ray’s graduating class held its twenty-year reunion, they raised $345 with a raffle. To keep friends and family members apace of developments in Ray’s case, the Lemmings and Rix decided to start sending out a newsletter.37 The mailing list for the bi-monthly issues of The Ray Krone Story would eventually include more than 140 names. Donations started to trickle in, sometimes from total strangers. The local newspapers had begun to cover the story. In the York Daily Record updates on the Ray Krone case became a regular feature.38

The mandate granting Ray a new trial was officially entered into the record on July 10. By law he was to be retried in no more than sixty days. Plourd requested a hearing asking that Ray be released on bail.39

On the day before the bail hearing, Ray was transported from the Arizona State Prison in Florence back to Phoenix, normally a one-hour drive. He was taken from his cell at 10:30 in the morning, handcuffed and shackled, and locked in the rear of an armored van. The temperature that day rose to over 115 degrees. For the next seven hours, the van traveled through the desert from prison to prison, with Ray locked in the rear where the temperature reached 150 degrees.  He was not given so much as a drink of water. He remembers thinking, that it was “ironic. After all I’d been through, and now…I was going to die here in a van in the desert.” When Ray finally reached Phoenix, he met briefly with Chris Plourd, and then was put in the holding tank, until it was time for his 9:00 a.m. appearance in court the next morning.40

Presiding Judge James McDougall refused to allow bail, on the grounds that the evidence which convicted Ray—the bite-mark evidence—had not been shown to be in error.41

Ray’s trial was scheduled to begin on September 11. Complaining that the trial date conflicted with his vacation plans and that he needed more time to prepare to review the new evidence introduced by Plourd, Prosecutor Levy requested and was granted a thirty-day extension.42 Over the course of the next five months, Levy would be granted three more extensions to allow him additional time to prepare.43 Chris Plourd objected that the extensions violated Ray’s legal right to a speedy trial, but the Arizona Supreme Court refused to rule on the issue and left the matter up to the discretion of the lower court.44

Ray was incarcerated in the maximum-security wing of the Maricopa County Jail, where there was no outdoor recreational facility and the main fare at mealtime was “green bologna” sandwiches, tainted meat whose shelf-life had expired. When he suffered an abscessed tooth, he endured nearly a week of excruciating pain before finally being given an antibiotic. His meager cache of possessions—his typewriter, his books—were still in Florence. In some respects, the living conditions were even worse than death row. Thirty-two men were confined in an area designed to accommodate sixteen. During a food riot, his cellmate was slashed across the face and fell to the floor. When Ray rushed into the fray to help him, he was pencil stabbed in the head and back.45

Evidence wise, though, things were looking extremely good.
The FBI crime lab analyzed the four hairs found on Kim Ancona’s back and reported that three of them, two pubic hairs and one head hair, were characteristic of persons of Native American descent. (One hair was unsuitable for analysis.) DNA testing of the blood found on the inside of the waistband and pocket flap on Kim Ancona’s pants positively excluded Ray and Ancona. The knife used to kill her had no shield, making way for speculation that when the blade struck her rib, the killer’s hand slipped, and he cut himself. Like the three hairs, the blood was of a genotype common to Native Americans. Unfortunately, DNA fingerprinting which gives a more detailed profile was not possible, because the blood and saliva samples pointing to someone other than Kim Ancona were too small.46

Plourd had zeroed on three suspects: Arnold Lomatewana (the intoxicated Native American man Kim Ancona had refused to serve), Lou Yazzi (the lesbian lover of former CBS manager Pat Chipley), and Michael Ramirez (one of Ancona’s friends who had stayed until shortly after the bar closed on the night she was killed). All three were of Native American descent, and Ramirez’s ex-girlfriend claimed that he had once bitten her on the breast.47

In the bite-mark arena, close examination of the evidence photographs led to a shocking discovery. An alleged tooth abrasion, which appeared in the autopsy photographs, was not present in the crime scene photographs. Speculation as to what caused the late-appearing abrasion followed from an autopsy video that showed a lab technician holding the dental cast against the victim’s breast and pinching the breast, attempting to line it up with the bite mark.48